A/N: Jack is Carolyn and Riddick's oldest son. And this is his chapter. Welcome to Jack is / was / had always been... in close to 4000 words. God, I hate my brain.

DISCLAIMER: No profit. Just pain.

Jack

He was taught to be observant so he observed.

Five chutes that would land in his vicinity.

Three single drops and two cages floating down to the jungle below.

First thing first. Don't get dead landing this shit, Jack thought trying to manoeuvre the chute to his advantage. Chances were he'd be landing smack in the middle of the fight. He'd be damned if he missed on any of it now that he was here. But that depended on how well he was on the rebound once he hit the ground.

Jack Riddick had woken up in free fall. Not that he'd been surprised. It had been the suddenly too warm to breath air in his mother's yard and his father's tense shoulders. Richie. B.'s soft curse and his brothers' s silence. Yeah. Finally, the Hunt he'd been prepped for all his life was on.

Inanely, right before he touched warm jungle ground, he thought it took them damn well long enough.

Jack was a tidy man.

Always had been, to the mortification of his younger sister, who was notoriously messy.

You're such a girl, Jackie Boy! Zoey had ridiculed him almost since she could walk and talk.

And what are you, Zoey Bug? He'd ask, eyeing the chaos neatly confined to Zoey's half of the room she shared with Richie B.

Superior.

Well, superior was what Jack needed to be now. As he folded the chute and hid it underneath a patch of foliage, ever mindful of his surroundings, he did a quick mental check of what he had going for him. The ulaks his Father had given him on a long ago birthday were strapped on a belt around his waist. Curious. He hadn't been wearing them when he'd been taken. The belt was new and sparsely furnished. A rope loop and a couple of compartments he'd check later.

Right now, tuning in to the rough breathing and loud voices nearby, a blade and a prayer was all he needed.

I pray you all fucking die, you ugly motherfuckers!

Jack had been an all around good guy for most of his life.

Don't hit girls, unless they're your sister and have a murderous intent.

Take care of your Mom.

Watch over your brothers.

That last one had been a laugh though. Most of the time, he didn't want to be watching Marcus doing the things he did, and Richie B. could smile his way out of trouble with a skill he sometimes envied.

Careful what you wish for, his Father had once said to him. You are your own man but wishing for things too strongly may lead you to doing some awfully uncivilised stuff.

Carrie had broken up with him then and the rage he'd felt towards the devil with the dark eyes and winning smile who'd stolen his girl away had had him lusting for blood. Wanting to rip the other man to pieces and fit his head on a pole for all the world - and Carrie - to see he was lord and master and you did not take things away from him.

But he hadn't, although the need - deep and dark - had nestled cozily inside him.

Did you see that? With your fucked up vision and weird visors, did you see it, motherfuckers? The monster inside me?

They had. Because all wrapped up in guns and gore, bashing another man's skull with a rock, Jesse Romero, Del's brother, was making quite a racket in the clearing up ahead.

One chute down, one to go, Jack grinned from the shadows.

Jack had always liked his desserts a bit too much.

He'd lap up his Mother's pies, fruit salads and protein milk shakes like a man savouring his last meal. And savour was what he did. The anticipation, the fulfilment of a craving - for sweets, for women, for a bit of a brawl with his sister - meant nothing to him if he wasn't given time to enjoy it.

You're an ass, Carrie used to tell him when he'd hold on to her pleasure, doling it out in small increments that made her angry.

I'm not an ass. I let Jesse live. But I hate to disappoint.

Jesse Romero was catching his breath, crunched over his kill, looking for a dead man's loot, as Romeros were want to do, when Jack made his presence known.

"Looking good there, Jess! See you scored your first hit."

At the sound of Jack's words, Jesse sprung up, the bloody rock clutched in his hand. His dark devil eyes looked a bit wild. His face was a study in blood spatter, and the guns he had strapped around him clacked sadly.

He was wearing an arsenal to go and he killed the other guy with a rock.

How awfully uncivilised, Jack thought unmercifully.

When he recognised Jack, leaning casually against a giant tree trunk, Jesse broke out in a toothy grin.

"Hold up, would you? Fucker tried to take my gear."

Jesse unclipped a Walter and with a hateful Final de partida, amigo! shot the dead man in the face.

The jungle rattled around them, the sound echoing in every vine, leaf and twig.

"So, I guess the gear said no."

"Yeah, man, can you believe it..." Jesse nodded absently, a little shaken by the noise he'd made.

Yeah, man. You just keep on making mistakes. Make this easier for me.

"You alright there, Jess?"

"Yeah, man, yeah…"

He wasn't. Jess kept looking around for something to hang on to now that the kill rush was fading: a patch of jungle he recognised, a path he could take and go back, except there was no going back anywhere. Ever.

"You knew him?" Jack asked, his eyes fixed on Jesse's kill. He didn't recognise his mark.

But now that he'd ghosted the poor sucker, Jesse wasn't keen on hashing out the details. It sometimes happened.

"Por Dios, cabron! Enough with the fucking questions already! I just fell out of the goddamn fucking sky!"

Jack smiled and said nothing.

Jesse fingered his guns absently, lovingly, seeking comfort.

Jack wondered and managed to imagine in vivid detail the same hands touching Carrie, absently, lovingly, seeking the comfort of a warm youthful body. A warm and youthful body that had belonged to him since forever.

People change, Jack. They wake up one day and want other things. Not better things, just different, Carrie had told him.

She was wrong. People didn't change. They just woke up one day and did what was in their nature to do.

Jack straightened and came forward. There was death all around him, there was death watching him and there was death inside him.

Jesse looked Jack in the eye and asked him in his little lost devil voice:

"What's going to happen, man? I mean, fuck, this is not funny anymore, man!"

Had it ever been? Probably. Playing survival games in the jungles near their home was just playing, after all. It had been real for their parents – for his parents at least, because he doubted Jesse's old man had ever seen a hunting Pred. The Vargases and the Romeros had been more of a social experiment.

A mistake. A big mistake.

Like the one Jack was about to make now.

But he just couldn't help himself.

"I think", Jack said carefully, "it's going to rain."

That made Jesse laugh.

"In the fucking jungle?"

"Yeah", Jack nodded as he drew closer.

Jack was not much taller, but for a moment the other man looked hopelessly small.

"Yeah, Jess. I think it's gonna rain blood", Jack said as, in a lightning fast move, his ulak painted a gushing red ribbon across Jesse's throat.

This is called an ulak, son. A blade forged in defense of honour.

What about his honour? What about Carrie's honour?

Let it go, bro. She's made her choice. Marcus had sounded oddly resigned when they'd talked about the breakup.

What Jack felt now was a deep sense of satisfaction, so he didn't let go. Not even when Jesse, who didn't have the common sense to know he was dying, scrambled for his guns. But the hand with the finger on the trigger didn't stand a chance against Jack's quick reflexes and vise grip.

Good. Fight me. I'd hate to ghost a defenseless man.

There were little red blood bubbles forming on Jesse's lips that Jack assumed were a death curse the Romero kid was trying to cast on him, and the steel in his arms trying to point the nozzle towards Jack was a dead man's stiffness and still he put up a fight.

Until Jack, flexing all those muscles Carrie had loved and kissed and caressed, brought the gun in Jesse's hand to Jesse's head and did him the same courtesy the Romero kid had done to his kill earlier.

And the sound was just as loud.

Dad, did you really kill people, like… like before?

We all killed people. That's why we're here.

Even Mom?

Even Mom.

But is it true what they say? That…that you did it for…fun?

No. But that doesn't make them any less dead.

What are you , Jack?

Superior.

Jack knew this wasn't the right answer, but somehow he knew it was the answer the Preds had wanted to see.

What nailed it for him, though, was the fact that the ammo for Jesse's AA-12 and semi-automatic fit perfectly in his utility belt.

He would have laughed, but it wasn't all that funny and he'd made all the noise he could afford.

Jack was planning to booby trap the dead bodies and make a clean getaway when he realised he was being watched. Earlier, he had thought the biggest mistake was killing Jess. But that wasn't so. The biggest mistake was sharply turning to his watcher and his gun and the pop-pop-pop of live rounds lodging in his chest.

Before what Jack thought was death settled in, he stared numbly into a pair of silver, shinning eyes.

Jack had an exceptionally good nose.

Like your Dad.

If this was hell, it smelled of boots, leather and pissed off female.

"Wake up. If three darts didn't kill you, I ain't wasting ammo to find out what does."

"You. You should've killed me." Jack groaned. The voice had a face, he was sure of it. He just couldn't get a very good lock on it. "Now, will you sit still, please!"

"I am. Here, drink this."

He caught the offering with remarkable ease given he was seeing triple.

It smelled flowery, but he drank it without a second thought.

"Clear up any?"

It did. It also gave the voice an uncompromising looking face and eyes as silver as his Father's.

A blade on her left, a crystal as red as her hair glaring at him from the hilt.

A mechanical shoulder strap on her right, circuits running down her arm to the shotgun in her hand.

Foreign, but not quite alien.

Hurting, if the deep gash on her left cheek was any indication.

"You should see to that. It's gonna get infected."

"It'll heal."

"If you say so."

Newcomers always had their moments of stupid.

The alien woman swallowed hard and geared herself for the inevitable question.

There was a set of them really and Jack had all the answers ready.

"Wherever you come from, this is not-there."

He staggered to his feet and was surprised to see he could stand easily.

"But whatever you did there that earned you your ticket here, it's best you keep on doing it. Don't get dead. That's all you need to know."

"There were…there was a … ahhh…thing…"

"Did you kill it?"

"Yes."

"Good. That's one less thing you gotta worry about."

"Me? What about you?"

Jack was feeling better. They were cocooned in a tanglement of trees, a natural little hideout you usually found in these jungles. She was strong to have dragged a man of his height and weight all the way there, but there were three neat holes in his shirt that were beginning to aggravate him.

"Me?" he mimicked her tone. "You owe me a shirt, but other than that I'm gonna go and do my worrying that way."

"Why?"

"You shot me!"

"No, I mean why that way?"

Jack was speechless for a moment. Truthfully, he had been cruising for a match, a little verbal sparring, but there was so much earnestness in her voice he faltered. There was no trickeration, no guile, she was serious in her need to know.

"Because that's where the other cage landed", Jack answered slowly.

"Good. Then we should get a move on. It's been a while. I killed that…bug before I ran into you and that was narns ago."

"Hours?"

Not a smart thing to ask, Jack realised when the woman narrowed her silver eyes at him. Foreign things are scary things and she was packing the superior gear.

"You saw any other chutes?"

Another suspicious once over.

"Things falling from the sky?"

"No. Just us." There was a flash of something in her eyes, a certain loss, but Jack wasn't about to commiserate. She wouldn't have been his first choice for a hunting buddy either.

"There's gonna be more, though", Jack tried to warn her.

The woman nodded.

"Is it going to be night soon?"

"Not for a couple of…errr…narns."

She didn't seem to appreciate that.

"We stick to the shadow way, then. No sound. Until darkness comes."

"And then?"

She touched her wounded cheek and winced.

"And then you give me a reason to keep you around."

Jack was a master of social pleasantries.

That's how he learned her name was Grace. A good name. She was sure footed and silent as she led the way into the shadows of the jungle. The shadow way.

"What is not-there?" she asked in a tight little whisper.

Jack wondered how much pride it cost her to finally come out and admit she wasn't quite sure what was going on.

"My home."

That stopped her in her tracks. Made her reassess. Made her clutch her gun a little tighter.

"You hunt?" Jack brushed past her just in time to see her curt nod. "Well, so do they."

"Skinners."

"Whatever you want to call them. This is a game planet. Hunting grounds. We're being hunted."

"The thing I killed back there. It wasn't a skinner."

"No. It's like a competition. A contest. Survival of the fittest. You're good enough to be here. You've gotta be good enough to make it out of here. And you can only do that if you kill one of them." If you kill more of them, if you kill all of them, but he wasn't going to tell her that. "And you get the chance to do that once you've cleared away the competition."

"Are you competition?"

"I live here. I'm just your local tour guide."

"You killed the other men."

"I killed one other man."

Just one.

"A kill is a kill."

"No. A kill is a choice. We all make choices". Hadn't Carrie chosen someone else? "Some of them bad." And yet he didn't feel sorry about Jess, though, intellectually, he knew he probably should.

But Grace took his words to mean something else.

"I don't regret not killing you, if that's what you're digging at."

Jack suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned to her.

"Yeah, I've been wondering about that. Why did you let me live?"

Grace smirked:

"'Cause you make a bigger target than me."

Huh.

He should've seen it coming and some part of him - the animal part - was ready for it, but when Grace melted into the shadows of the jungle and the night time darkness that had crept upon them, Jack called himself a fool and hit hard and hit fast.

But the serrated blade of the ulak could do only so much damage and the giant bug like creature that unwound its heavy body from the foliage charged ahead. It was sheer dumb luck that Jack managed to dodge in time. He flipped and fired a hail of bullets from Jesse's AA-12, but the creature didn't budge. It just made it angrier.

"Stop running!"

Grace. That rotten…

"It can't see you. But it can smell you. It can smell your anger!"

Jack barked a laughter in response. It was just that stupid.

"It can smell this!"

All big bugs, Jack had learned, had a soft sweet spot, some on their belly, some around the head. He took a shot and stuck his ulak underneath the creature's massive jaw. It screeched and flailed its limbs around, but Jack just wasn't fast enough this time. He got pinned by a stinger to a tree trunk and it hurt like seven types of hell.

But the final blow to his ego wasn't the pain in his shoulder and the threat of imminent death, but Grace's swift, lean body climbing on the creature's back and stabbing the creature's head with a long thin silvery sword.

The bug collapsed. Jack's shoulder burned.

Grace sheathed the sword and dismounted.

She grabbed the stinger from where it was poking out of Jack's shoulder and with a vicious pull yanked it out. Smelly black blood oozed out of the wound.

"You immune?"

Jack fell to his knees next to the body of the dead bug.

Be observant. If it goes circling down the drain, those precious few seconds of lucidity can still make a difference.

He was going into shock. He was numb on his left side, but he fumbled with his good hand, feeling for the compartments in his belt. There had to be...

Yeah, there always is.

He held the small syringe gun with trembling fingers, willing himself to remember what he was going to do with it. And then do it.

Grace's touch was cool as she took the gun from his hands and threw it away.

No. No...

But no words were coming out. Just despair.

"Never trust nothing I can't see." Grace said evenly, slapping his hand away.

She then uncapped the canteen he'd drunk from earlier and liberally poured the liquid in his gaping wound.

She took her gun, adjusted some settings and pressed the nozzle against the angry red skin.

Grace smiled sadly at him.

"This is going to hurt."

Be observant. Life always hurts. It's only death that's painless. Can't feel anything if you're dead.

Jack slowly, but surely wrapped his fingers around hers where they were curled around the trigger.

There was a twitch, a catch and Jack lived and died a thousands lives as blue tongues of fire discharged into his body.

Unlike his brothers, Jack had always been a heavy sleeper.

He was particularly cranky upon wakening and nothing short of two healthy cups of his Mom's special brew of what passed for coffee on Sanctuary could make him feel less homicidal.

The sleep he wrenched himself out of now had been sweet. But he wasn't in his bed back home and there was a nasty knot digging into his back. He was clutching an ulak when he finally came to and he remembered he had two, but lost one in his half-assed fight with the bug thingy.

His pride hurt more than his shoulder. It was still throbbing though. He tried moving.

"Sit still. Let it be for a while. You'll be as good as new in the morning."

Grace was sitting across from him, munching on a…

"Is that…the bug?" Jack made a face.

"It's good. Tastes a bit like…well, nothing I can think of, but it's crunchy. Here, have some."

She tossed him…something that looked like…a claw?

Jack made himself take a bite. She was right. It was crunchy. It was also incredibly disgusting.

"You know…" Jack said around a mouthful of bug. "Good choice you made back there."

Grace grinned.

They were sheltered again in one of those natural coves that Grace found so effortlessly in the jungle. Blue flames were dancing along the perimeter she'd set up and the night was deep and strangely restless. Lotsa noises. Animals, insects, nothing like the stillness of the jungles surrounding Sanctuary.

"You told me you were a local, right?" Grace suddenly asked.

"Right."

"Wrong. You are a prisoner here. You've always been a prisoner here."

Jack thought about his mother's yard. About his small little world. And then he looked around to the lush jungle around him, stifling and hot like a leash around his neck. Yeah. He'd been a prisoner all right. And none the wiser for it.

But Grace wasn't finished.

"Well, I ain't nobody's prisoner. I'm getting off this rock and somehow you're going to help me do just that."

Jack laughed. Grace looked a bit insulted, but Jack was quick to reassure her.

"Sorry, sorry. It's just that, right now, you reminded me of my brother."

"You have a brother?"

"I have three."

Grace seemed to mellow a little.

"I'm sorry", she said.

"Don't be." Thinking about his brothers put Jack in a good mood.

"There is no hell in this 'verse like the one my brothers can raise on a good day."

Grace smiled. She had a pleasant smile which transformed her hard set face into something soft and wondrous.

"And on a bad day?"

"On a bad day?" Jack played along. "On a bad day, I just might take my chances with that bug again."

They laughed together. It felt good. Jack wanted to cling to this moment, knowing he'd need it once they'd get their game back on.

"Do you want to see your brothers again, Jack?"

Yes, yes he did.

"I have a brother too. I want to see him again. I need to see him again. I can't fight like this. Ever since we were born, there's been two of us. Always two. A unit. Together we were unbroken."

But she was broken now. The red wound on her cheek, now looking better, but still there, told him everything.

"You need me to fight. Just like you and your brother did."

"Yes. Yes. In return, I will give you your freedom."

Freedom. Jack wondered if that was what he'd always wanted in his life.

It wasn't.

But, in his bones, Jack was a protector. That he could understand. He was the little man of the house. He had a good foundation, strong roots, things his Father didn't quite understand, but learned to accept because they'd been values his Mother had instilled. Looking at Grace now, strong Grace, but broken Grace, he found clarity.

"Don't worry. I'll watch for you out there."

He'd made a buddy.

A/N 2 : Hallelujah, this was long! Review?