Chapter Forty-three: Riddick - The End of Summer

The sun had risen for a third time over New Paris following the space battle when Riddick left the ship, now known as the Audrey II, in search of fuel and supplies.

In theory Jack would be handling those transactions, in her capacity as the ship's official Captain, but the military presence really did have the locals on the run. Riddick figured he'd have an easier time of it than she would, especially since she found the troops much more intimidating than he did.

With curly hair, a mustache and beard, and spectrum contacts making his eyes look blue, Riddick looked enough unlike himself that he wasn't worried about being identified, even in the current climate of hysteria. And the hysteria was definitely there. Rumors abounded everywhere he went. Every recent death was now being rehashed by the gossip-mongers, who could find some piece of evidence that let them claim "Richard B. Riddick did it." To hear them talk, he'd killed more than one thousand people during his stay on the planet.

Sorry, folks, I only killed two. He had to admit it was amusing. Aside from his earliest killings, when he was completely out of his mind, he had never gone after "just plain folks." The only other attack on an innocent they could pin on him was Jack's own carefully-staged death. Nonetheless, the rumors had him slaughtering women and raping babies.

As if there weren't enough real things for them to be afraid of.

For any woman in New Paris, for instance, Pete the late and unlamented Perv had been a much greater threat. They'd never believe it, though.

'Specially with Jarvis and his cronies hiding away Pete's crimes, he thought sourly. He'd thought better of Reggie. Not much better, but still...

Fuel was easy enough to arrange for; he just had to sit through half an hour of Riddick gossip and speculation along the way. Decades of hiding his emotions behind a bland, noncommittal facade gave him the advantage, although occasionally he had to struggle to contain his laughter. Jack was going to love some of the rumors he'd heard.

Jack.

He indulged himself for a moment and let her come to him, filling his mind. The amazing part was that she really could do it. Riddick had spent almost his entire life in a state of mental multitasking; there was almost never just one thought going through his brain. But sometimes, when he was with Jack, his perceptions narrowed down until she was their sole focus, until every part of his unruly psyche was centered on her alone. She would become his universe. It was the most exhilarating -- and also the most frightening -- thing he'd ever experienced.

He realized that he'd been standing at the side of the avenue, lost in thought. That had never happened to him before. It was incredibly odd to him. It was also incredibly dangerous, even if the locals did think he'd left their planet and was light-years away already. Jarvis, after all, was somewhere in New Paris, playing at being a bloodhound.

Riddick gave himself a little shake and continued toward the Shipping Markets.

Montmartre was a much nicer part of town than the Orleans district, but it had the disadvantage of being a lot further away from the action. That made it a long walk for him. He grimaced as the fake beard itched him a little.

Jack hadn't wanted to kiss him after he'd donned his disguise, which had been both gratifying and disappointing. She'd claimed it felt like she was kissing a stranger, telling him that the mouth tasted right but the beard kept throwing her off. She'd absolutely refused to have sex with him while he was in his costume. She'd even threatened to freeze her face in its most innocent expression if he tried to take her anyway.

Point to Jack, he thought with amusement as he turned into the first of the markets. I can't handle that look on her face any better than she can handle the beard. At least, not while we're fucking...

Nobody should be able to look that pure and sweet and still do the things she managed to do to him.

The space traffic controller hadn't exaggerated. Military personnel were everywhere, prying into everything. They weren't interfering, but the locals were unnerved anyway. Two thirds of the planet's merchants had dealings with the galaxy's underworlds; ordinarily the markets hummed with intrigue. Not today. As a result, it took him several hours to find a cargo worth taking on, and even longer to acquire the electronic devices he badly needed.

He was concluding his business when he spotted a pair of faces he'd been trying not to see, but secretly hoping for.

Well, well. Uncle Reg. And Martina.

They were exiting one of the shipping consignment houses, talking quietly. It was the house he'd been making arrangements with right before he was forced to abandon the "Porter" alias and blast off-planet. They'd traced him there.

Good thing I didn't wear a disguise as Porter, he thought with amusement. He didn't think Jarvis had any idea about the disguises, or how close Riddick had come to him on numerous occasions.

Now, once again, he found himself following his "Uncle."

Am I seeing things or seeing things? he asked himself after a few moments. Jarvis and Dr. Aspen, he decided, were more than just colleagues, and rapidly becoming more than mere friends. Huh. Got a little bit of a heart left in there, Uncle Reg? And now she's grabbing onto it? Motherfucker.

He knew that "Aunt Mel" had left Jarvis, and not the reverse, but it still struck him as a betrayal. The lack of logic behind his anger didn't make it go away.

Jarvis and Aspen took a seat at an outdoor cafe and began discussing something, intently going over their notes. Riddick took a seat across the road from them, facing away from them and watching them in the reflection of a building. He ordered a coffee for himself and sipped it, frowning. He hadn't thought about Aunt Mel in years.

'Course I haven't. I'm no fucking self-flagellator.

Now, however, he couldn't help the memories that surged up to meet him...

Melanie Jarvis had acorn-brown hair and matching eyes in a kind, calming, pixie-ish face. Her skin was cream-colored except for the dusting of freckles across her cheeks and nose. Riddick would always remember the way she smiled and took both his hands in hers.

"Welcome, Bryan," she greeted him, kneeling down to be at eye-level with him. "We're glad you're here." Her smile went all the way into her eyes, crinkling their corners, and that was what told him he really was welcome. Behind her, the two Jarvis daughters watched him with undisguised curiosity.

It was a friendly kind of curiosity and Bryan found he didn't mind at all. He was every bit as interested in them. On the flight down, "Uncle Reg" had bragged about them at length. He knew that these girls were the two prettiest, smartest girls on the planet... after Christina, of course. He felt a small pang, wishing he knew where she was now, wishing she could have come to see him in the hospital.

Melanie -- she would later ask him to call her "Aunt Mel" and it was still how he thought of her -- kept hold of his hand as they left the terminal and walked out to the Jarvis' vehicle. Uncle Reg held his daughters' hands and listened to them as they interrupted each other with their stories of the things they'd been doing. Bryan Riddick felt absorbed, engulfed suddenly. He'd been drawn into something alive and marvelous and completely alien to him -- a family, a real family.

It was the first genuine, normal family he'd ever seen from so close and now he felt like he was observing it from within. He sat between the girls, Patricia and Valerie, on the drive home, not having a clue what to say to them. That was alright, though; they had lots of questions for him and within minutes he was talking freely. Uncle Reg was right about them.

Patricia -- "Patty" -- was three years older than Bryan and almost intimidatingly pretty. Valerie, he soon learned, was a month younger than him. More or less. Cryo-sleep time, they soon told him, had a way of making the years shifty and protean.

"It's like that 'Rip Van Winkle' story in the books," Patty confided. "You go to sleep, and when you wake up the next day, a year's passed for everybody you know. Your best friend is too old and too cool to talk to you anymore, your clothes are out of style, the shows you liked to watch have been cancelled and your favorite rock band split up. Now you have to make friends all over again with kids you barely noticed before, and you know sometime they're suddenly going to be too old and too cool for you, too. It sucks."

Bryan nodded silently. He couldn't imagine what it was like, even with the explanation, but it sounded very lonely. He was glad he was part of the family now and would never be too old and too cool for them. Other than Christina, Patty and Val were the two most amazing girls he'd ever met. They dazzled him and he was thrilled by their easy acceptance of him into their lives.

Enlightenment quickly came to him as he realized how cut off they truly were from the kids around him. They were the only "military brats" in their small town, and they lived there only because it was close to Aunt Mel's parents. On a base, they might have been with other children who spent a lot of time in Cryo-Sleep, but they were the only ones who did it there.

The other kids considered them odd, these girls and their mother who stopped aging now and again, boarding up their house and vanishing for a year or two at a time only to re-emerge exactly as they'd been. Strangers in a strange land, which superficially resembled the one they had left, they were forced to re-establish connections with people whose lives had moved on in their absence, while their own had been frozen. And even when they were in the world, their father was very rarely present, to the point where some of their friends accused them of making his existence up.

They couldn't even tell their friends where their father was or what he did, half the time. Those were frequently big secrets, and often they didn't even know. Val told him, late one night when they were supposed to be sleeping, that Aunt Mel had actually aged eight years without Uncle Reg since their marriage, in those times when he was on incredibly secret assignments. Aunt Mel and the girls wouldn't even know, on those occasions, that Uncle Reg was in Cryo-Sleep, on his way to some planet that needed his mysterious expertise. They'd only know when he came home and was surprised to see how much they'd grown.

"Mama was three years younger than Daddy when they got married," Val told him as they huddled under the tent they'd made out of his covers. "Now she's five years older! I'd just die if that happened to me..."

The summer had sped by, the best of his short life. For two wonderful months, he knew what it was like to have a family. He wasn't sure whether Val and Patty were his sisters or his cousins. Sometimes he didn't want them to be either; he wanted to marry them both when he grew up. But he knew that he belonged to them, and to Aunt Mel and Uncle Reg, and that they belonged just as much to him.

He knew it with all of the certainty a seven year old boy could possess. But truth has only a passing acquaintance with the knowledge of the heart, as he soon learned.

Patty had taken him out to the lake to meet Marky the Turtle. He'd been astounded at the size of the great reptile, who had lived there for as long as the girls had, and always seemed to remember them no matter how much time had passed since they last saw him. He'd deigned to let Bryan pat him on the top of his head, not even retracting it into his shell when Bryan, greatly daring, touched him under the chin. Patty said that Marky had been around for decades, and that he'd let children play with him for as long as anybody could remember.

They'd returned to the house in a state of deep wonderment and bliss, only to find Val crying in the backyard. Uncle Reg was going to be going away soon. He was going on a long trip, and the family had to start packing up the house. They were "going to the freezers" again. Val had only just acquired a new best friend, Pauline. Now she would lose yet another one again.

Patty tried to comfort her, although she was clearly stricken by the news herself. "It's going to be okay, Val. We can do this again, we'll be alright. You and me and Bry'll always have each other."

Bryan had nodded, holding one of Val's hands and one of Patty's. The three had spent the rest of the evening together, comforting each other and promising an eternal solidarity.

Bryan, of course, felt he had nothing to lose, himself. The other kids had looked at him oddly, not liking his city accent. They'd asked him if he was black or white, a question he found offensive. When he said he didn't know, they asked him what his parents were. They became smug and condescending when he said he didn't know who his parents were. He hadn't bothered to chase after their approval or friendship after that, concentrating his attentions instead on the two marvelous, beautiful Jarvis girls who didn't care about such things and liked him just as he was.

A few nights later the house was packed. They would be leaving it the next day. Bryan couldn't sleep. The idea of going into Cryo-Sleep excited him; it would be a new adventure. Patty and Val had told him that it passed in a flash; you didn't even have dreams. Still... it was a new experience, another wonderful adventure he would take with his new family, another game like the ones Uncle Reg liked to play with him in the evenings, asking him to invert this shape and graph that equation, and pick out the word that was wrong in a sentence.

He left his room after a while and crept out into the hallway. Maybe Val or Patty would be awake and they could talk. But he could hear the steady breathing of both girls behind their doors. He sighed and started back to his room when he heard something else.

Low voices. Angry voices. Uncle Reg and Aunt Mel were fighting. He crept down the stairs and paused at the landing, just out of their line of sight, and listened as they whispered angrily at each other.

"Dammit, Reg, this is wrong. You know it."

"It's not my decision, Mel. And you know that."

Aunt Mel sighed angrily. "It's cruel. It's cruel to us, and it's cruel to him. Can't you talk to the Board? Can't they make an exception? He's been through so much already, Reg, he needs a stable home--"

"I did talk to the Board. There's a lot more at stake here than our convenience, Mel, and you know--"

"Our convenience? He's just a little boy, Reg! I don't care about the rest of it, and I know there's a lot more than you're telling me; I'm used to that. But you can't treat people like that!"

"You know that if there was anything I could do about it--"

"No, Reg, I don't know. I don't know anything about what you do, or who you are half the time. You called me up two months ago and said you were bringing a little boy home with you, and when you told me about the things that had happened to him I said yes. You know I always wanted a boy. So did Patty and Val, they always wanted a baby brother. So I thought, okay, we can adopt this poor little boy. And he's so sweet--"

"But he's not for us, Mel."

"No, he's for your goddamned fucking Project! I can't believe you didn't tell me about that part! You just left that whole aspect out. Why, were you ashamed of it? Because you damned well should be."

"I didn't know how to tell you, sweetheart. I wanted this to work, too--"

"You know, I can't believe I didn't figure it out sooner. All those games? All those tests? Practically every night with your little Rorschach blobs and your lists of questions. I know how smart he is, I just can't believe how stupid I was."

Now it was Uncle Reg's turn to sigh. "Look, I don't want this to happen either. If there was any way to stop it--"

"Have you tried? Really tried? Did you talk to Baldwin about it?" There was a long pause now. Finally, Aunt Mel's voice broke the silence. It sounded different than he'd ever heard it before. "Don't do this, Reg. Please don't do this..."

Uncle Reg sounded like a stranger too, when he spoke. "I have no choice, Melanie. I'm sorry."

"Fuck sorry!" Aunt Mel spat. "You do this to us and this is the last time we'll put our lives on hold for you! I'm tired of this shit, Reg, all of it. Every last bit of it. Now you call General Baldwin and you let him know what's at stake here. In your own home."

He heard Aunt Mel's footsteps approaching and sped up the stairs in silence. He made it back inside his room and back into bed before he heard her reach the top of the steps. He pretended to be asleep when she came into his room.

She stood beside his bed for a long time. He slowly let his eyes crack open just the tiniest bit, looking up at her through his lashes. The moonlight from his window caught on the tears tracking down her face, making them gleam. It was the first time he'd seen someone look so anguished. He didn't understand why. He didn't understand half of what they'd been saying.

He was pretty sure that they'd learned they couldn't adopt him. But that was okay, as long as he could stay with them. Maybe it was better if he wasn't Val and Patty's brother anyway; he might want to marry one of them someday, after all. Poor Aunt Mel, wanting to have a little boy so much... of course, he wasn't really a little boy, was he? He was almost grown up, after all, one of the Big Kids...

Aunt Mel sniffled and slowly left the room, wiping at her face. She closed the door behind her gently, making almost no sound at all. Bryan Riddick was awake a long time after she left, contemplating the fact that he would never be Bryan Jarvis... but maybe one day Valerie or Patricia might have his last name, and that was kind of a neat thought...

The next morning there was a deep, painful silence between Mel and Reg. The girls sensed it as well and were anxious. They took their time when it was, at last, time to give their father good-bye kisses. When Uncle Reg reached for Aunt Mel to kiss her good-bye, however, she turned her mouth away and made him kiss her cheek. Both girls looked puzzled by this; their parents had always been demonstratively affectionate with each other, until now.

Until now.

He began to have his suspicions when Aunt Mel came over to him and wrapped her arms around him, kissing his cheeks and forehead. He saw the dawning horror of matching suspicions in Patty and Val's eyes and they raced over to him, hugging him tightly and crying.

No, he thought, pain spearing through him. No...

He held them tightly, too, but didn't cry. If he didn't cry it wouldn't be true. It couldn't be true.

Two cars had pulled up to the house and Bryan noticed, with a pang, that his little suitcase was being loaded into one of them. The girls hadn't bothered to pack their belongings. They would be back in their house the very next day, as far as they were concerned, and didn't need anything. But his suitcase was being loaded in the car... and Aunt Mel and the girls were getting into the other car...

All three of them stared back at him, their faces full of pain. He started forward, wanting to run to them, and felt Uncle Reg's hand on his shoulder, firm and unyielding. He watched, stricken, as the car pulled away. When he glanced up at Uncle Reg, he startled a bleak, broken expression in the man's face.

They walked to the remaining vehicle and got inside it. Their driver wore a military uniform and had saluted Uncle Reg. Now they pulled away from the house. Bryan stared back at it, pain running riot through him. He knew he would never see it again.

He didn't say a word to Uncle Reg as they drove back into Albany. He kept his face empty and still as the stones Marky the Turtle sunned himself on. He would never see Marky again either, he realized.

Finally the car pulled up to a small brownstone house. Uncle Reg -- never again to be truly thought of as anything so familial -- took his suitcase out of the trunk and walked him up to the door. An elderly black woman was waiting eagerly behind the screen door and opened it as they approached.

"You made excellent time, Lieutenant Jarvis! Is this our boy?"

Uncle Reg (Not my uncle, never my uncle again) nodded and gave the woman a tight smile. "Mrs. Skinner, this is Bryan Riddick. Bry, this is Mrs. Velma Skinner. She's your new foster mother."

He knew he had to say something. He managed a quiet "hello."

Mrs. Skinner led them inside and straight to his new room. He began to unpack immediately, doing his best to ignore his former Uncle.

"I have to go now, Bry," Reg finally said, his voice soft.

He paused for a moment, but did not turn around. "Good bye, Lieutenant Jarvis."

There was a long moment of silence.

Just go. Just go, god damn you, he thought.

Finally Lieutenant Jarvis left the room. After a moment he heard the car pull away.

"So," Mrs. Velma Skinner began after a moment. "I'm sure glad to have you with us, Bryan. In a little while you can meet the other kids and--"

"My name's not Bryan," he said quietly.

"Sorry? But Mr. Jarvis said--"

"He was wrong." Richard B. Riddick turned around and fixed Mrs. Skinner with a keen expression that many had seen since, and few had not trembled in front of. "My name is Richard Bryan Riddick. You can call me Richard. Nobody calls me Bryan anymore."

He lived with Mrs. Skinner for three years, but he never let her get close to him. And he never, ever let anyone call him "Bryan" again.

More than two decades had passed since that last day. Now Riddick watched the reflection of the man who had once almost been his father, but who had ultimately betrayed him worse than anyone else in his life ever had, ever could.

"Uncle Reg," he murmured softly, and sipped his coffee.