The door of the darkened room opened, forming a wide bar of light over the bare concrete floor. Across the floor the huge distorted shadow of the figure in the door paused, as if drawing in the feel of the room before entering. The figure stiffened, an unconscious feral gesture like an animal who has caught the scent of danger, and there was an almost inaudible gasp of a man caught off guard by trouble. Something was wrong.

The door was not the only source of light in the room. Propped on a balled-up blanket at the head of the sheetless mattress was a vid-screen, giving off just enough glow to make it clear that the bed was otherwise empty. She was gone.

Gone! Riddick began to panic. He walked closer to the empty bed, not even aware of what he was doing. His mind was running elsewhere, practically scurrying for the possibilities of what had happened and what to do now. He had thought of her coming to harm while he was gone, of course he had, but not that she would simply disappear. How or why could someone have taken her? There were no signs of it, the room was actually more ordered than when he had left. Had she walked out on him herself, after being given time to think had decided that he wasn’t worth the risk? Christ, he had been gone forever, she could be anywhere, he’d never find her. This planet was huge and the cities sprawled in confusing, unplanned webs of roads. What if she was lost, what if she was in trouble, what if he found her and she laughed at him and told him to go away? But all of her stuff was still here, what is going on?

“did you know that there’s a fire escape outside that window? -C”

Riddick had come close enough to read the typed words across the top of the screen. His heart kept pounding panic into his bloodstream, but the semi-cryptic message slowly sunk in. She was on the roof.

Riddick went for the only window, along the wall opposite the door. It was shut, but there was no other explanation. Riddick let out a visible sigh of relief; it was okay, there were the stairs outside, and there were the clean smudges of her slim white hands. Riddick made to rip the window open and find her, but forcibly stopped himself. He needed to calm down. He slowed his breathing and his mind, assuring himself that things don’t always go wrong. And there was no reason to freak her out with his paranoia. When he had himself under control, Riddick quietly opened the window and squeezed himself through.

It was on the second flight up that Riddick’s control began to slip. For a second staring at the empty bed, thoughtfully straightened and no longer surrounded by discarded beer cans, Riddick could see her very clearly: alone under a flickering streetlight, lying very still against the wall in the all too familiar semi-fetal position of someone kicked hard in the stomach. And a second is long enough for ideas like that to set in. Riddick began to run up the stairs, his mind going on to imagine her dirty scraped fingers broken under boot heels and the tear tracks that cut through the city dust on her face, the echoes of her unanswered pleas for help. And that wasn’t the worst that could happen, no, not at all… With a deep-throated cry of exertion and fury, Riddick simply slammed his shoulder full force into the access door and-

And there she was, bundled in a blanket on the bare concrete roof. It looked like the sound had startled her awake, she had been laying on her side, but one arm was now pushing her upper body upright and into the wall behind her. For a second Riddick didn’t take breath while sheer relief washed over him like warm water. But in that second, as the adrenalin drained from his body, Riddick discovered that his shoulder hurt, and he was exhausted.

“Where’ve you been?” Riddick looked up from his shoes to find that Carrie had recovered from her fright. He couldn’t help but note, she woke fast. He shrugged his shoulders and broke eye contact; he didn’t want to think of a lie, but could think of nothing else to say.

“You haven’t slept, have you.” He shrugged again, but not in an avoiding way. It was as if he had shrugged off the idea of sleep, not the question itself. He watched her as she sat up and adjusted the blanket round her shoulders.

“’you here all night?” He asked. Already smiling at her imitation, Carrie shrugged. Riddick couldn’t decide whether insomnia or sleeping on a roof was stranger behavior, but she had accepted his non-answer, he had to accept hers.

Not precisely thinking on a conscious level, Carrie reached her hand out to him, palm down, in silent invitation and the universal, childlike gesture of ‘I want’. Riddick was more than happy to break the awkward moment and oblige.

Feeling rather unsure of himself once there, Riddick reached out and brushed her skin from the smooth depression of her palm to the tips of her fingers. It was apparently the wrong answer, and Carrie took it as some kind of rejection. She drew her arm back into the folds of blanket and bundled it in closer around her, already shivering from the lost heat.

What her invitation hadn’t managed to draw out of him, that small shiver compelled beyond any resistance. Riddick lowered himself to sit at her side, turning his upper body for her to back to lean against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her to pull her closer and eliminate the cold air between them, but she twitched away almost unconsciously. Immediately Riddick could have kicked himself. Hard. Two seconds after freaking out he had managed to forget why he had rushed back to her in the first place. But anger at his own tactlessness was soon dwarfed by remembered rage over what he had figured out.

“Who did it?” Riddick rumbled, fury evident in every word. “Who hurt you?” He tried to meet her eyes from over her shoulder, but Carrie only looked at the floor.

“No…” In Riddick’s forward-tumbling fighting mindset, he almost snapped back with ‘No who’ before he registered that No is not, in fact, a name. She stopped him in his tracks; of all possible answers in the world, that had to be the one he never expected back.

“‘No’?” It was more than a mental stumble, it was as if she had answered ‘blue fish’. How could you just say no?

“No,” she answered with a little more conviction, taking one of his hands in both of her own, exploring it with her fingers. His knuckles had been broken open so often that the scars were indiscernible from each other, and Riddick felt her fingers blindly find the deep scar that ran straight across his palm. She turned his hand over to look, and found the corresponding scars across his fingers. It had been his first hand-to-knife fight, and he had inexpertly grabbed the blade to wrench it away. It had worked, but he would carry the mark of it all his life. “It’s over, and I don’t want to talk about it. You didn’t tell me about your past.” He considered reminding her that he would have if she hadn’t’ve mind-read him first, but thought maybe this was not the time to argue. “Anyway, it’s today now…” She said out into the skyline. And he realized it was day, a silver dawn was creeping slowly up the sky.

“…and you’d probably want to go back there and hurt him back” she added with a restored smile in her voice.

“Exactly..” He growled darkly, and Carrie laughed. She lifted Riddick’s cold, harsh hand to her face and kissed the palm, and as she lowered it back to her lap, Riddick curled his fingers around the gift, as if the cold of the silver dawn would steal it from him if given half a chance. Riddick had always believed in fate as he believed in God; grudgingly, proudly, and only after being faced with an overabundance of proof. But to be taken from the chaos and rage of prison and so suddenly given this beautiful peace and purpose was incomprehensible. And for probably the first time in the young man’s life, he thanked fate and God and the world. This is enough, he thought, just one perfect morning. This is enough.

If only nobody had heard him. God, if only.

-

Sadly, guys, this story is officially abandoned. Although I know the ending I had wanted, I’ve lost the sense of how to get there. But I am working on a new Riddick Jack fic, and it should refer back to the untold segments of this story later. But I’m sorry, I guess this story sat too long in my head, and kinda died off.

-J