58. Riddick: Scylia

Riddick was afraid.

Twenty-four hours had passed since Jack had begun reviewing the Charybdis Project files, and his dread was building with every passing moment. He was afraid of what she might say, what she might do. He was afraid of the look he might see in her eyes.

She'd fallen asleep studying the files the night before, and he'd very carefully not looked at the screen while he shut the system down. Her face had been tear-stained, he'd noticed, as he gathered her into his arms for the night. That was when a part of him had truly begun to fear what she would tell him.

He began to wonder if he would lose her, if the horrors concealed in the files would break down her steadfast declarations of love. He wondered if she'd been looking at pictures of his many victims as she cried, finally realizing the true depravity of the monster that lurked within him. He wondered if, when she looked at him now, he would finally see fear in her eyes. Thus he was almost afraid to meet them when she came to the breakfast table.

But there was no fear at all within them. She looked tired and sad, but her wan smile was as loving as ever.

"Pineapple. Wow, you think of everything, don't you?"

"Try to," he replied. "You looked like you could use it."

He busied himself pouring juice for both of them, trying to think of things to say that would be innocuous, and so was taken by surprise when he looked up. She was watching him with a soft, musing, almost wistful expression.

"What?"

Another wan smile. "I was just thinking about how probably nobody else in the galaxy would peg you for understanding something like comfort food."

He couldn't stop himself. Rising, he moved around the table to sit beside her. It wasn't like he was hungry, anyway... He was almost afraid to touch her, though. Was the comfort she needed something he could even give her? Or was its need his fault? He contented himself with sitting beside her and watching her eat, both surprised and gratified when she shifted her position to bring her hip and leg into contact with his.

The silence wasn't precisely uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to say, what to ask. He waited, watching as she quietly ate her omelet and the bowl of pineapple chunks. She glanced at him periodically, the wan smile flitting back across her features each time.

Finally she set her fork aside and turned to him.

"I'm ready to show you what's in the files, Riddick..." She stared down at her fingers, toying with them for a moment before looking back up at him. "If you're ready to see it."

Shit, here we go. He nodded, reaching for her fidgeting hands. When she stood he rose with her and followed.

They left the table and went back into the bedroom, sitting down on the bed. Jack didn't let go of his hand and he silently thanked God for that. Whatever was coming, whatever she had to tell him, was more than a little frightening already.

Jack stared down at her hands, the fingers laced with his, for a long moment before drawing a deep breath. Finally she spoke.

"There's no good place to begin, so I'm just going to tell you." She looked up, at last, and locked eyes with him. "Riddick, the Scylla Project and the Charybdis Project are the same thing."

Cold jetted through his veins even before he consciously understood what she was telling him. Across from him, Jack took another deep breath and continued, eyes still locked on his.

"They'd already started Phase II of the Scylla Project when the Homestead Massacre happened. I guess they felt they had too much invested in the Project to just stop... so they hid the subjects away and... just put a new name on their files." Yet another deep breath. "Riddick, you're a Scylla Child."

His body felt weightless, hollow. Numb. It all opened up to him with her words; it all made sense. The clues had been in his face for years but...

...but he hadn't wanted to see them.

Somewhere deep inside, he was screaming. It couldn't be true... he didn't want it to be true... God, you fucking bastard, you never let up, do you?

Maybe that was it. It flitted through his head in an instant, the uproar that had followed the births of the first cloned and genetically engineered children in the early twenty-first century... there had been a stormy legal battle when the Catholic church refused to baptize one, calling its conception an abomination before the eyes of God...

And that's me. That's what I am. An abomination--

"Riddick?" Jack's soft voice and the touch of her hand on his knee drew him back. He opened his eyes, only now aware that he'd closed them. The worry on her face, the empathy, closed his throat. He swallowed hard and finally managed to speak through the constriction.

"Jack."

"You okay?" He could hear her fear for him in her voice, see it in the liquid glitter of her eyes.

"I'm okay," he whispered. He covered her hand with his own. "You can keep going."

Jack sighed. "That whole thing about you being found in a dumpster? It never happened. Well, I mean, it did, but it was staged. You and the other Phase II subjects were scattered across America. There were only twenty-four of you, so they could make it look like you were just... random orphans. You all had cover stories, explanations of where you'd come from and stuff. Yours was one of the most sensational. Most of the others were passed off as unwanted babies voluntarily surrendered by unwed mothers, things like that."

He'd never been abandoned?

Since he'd been small, he'd believed that lie. He'd imagined that somewhere, out in the world, there was a woman who'd given birth to him and somehow seen the horror that lay dormant within him, and had tried to destroy it. As a small child he'd wept over her imagined hatred of him. Later, when that horror began to manifest itself, he'd found himself forgiving her and wishing she'd succeeded in her aim.

But it had never happened. The most drastic moment of his early childhood, one that had shaped his entire sense of self... had been nothing more than a cover story.

"Riddick?"

"I'm listening." His voice sounded -- hell, it felt -- hoarse and scratched to pieces.

"The Tribunal ordered it. They decided it had been a mistake to keep all the Phase I Scylla Children together, so they wanted to raise the next group -- your group -- isolated from each other. They thought maybe if you were raised only around ordinary humans--"

"I'm not human."

It came to him, then, with the intensity of a crippling blow, exactly what all of this meant. He wasn't even a human being...

"Of course you're human!" Jack protested.

"Jack. The Scylla Children weren't classified as Homo sapiens. They had another name altogether--"

"Homo scylliensis. Yes, I know. But you're still human, Riddick! Don't believe them -- they're the ones who said your mother left you in a dumpster with your own umbilical cord wrapped around your neck!"

For a moment he could almost feel that phantom cord strangling him. "No, what really happened is I killed her, just like all the Scylla Children killed their 'host mothers--'"

"You didn't."

He glanced up, surprised by the sudden firmness in her voice.

"Only two of the Phase II surrogate mothers died, and so did the babies they were carrying. All of the other women survived, even the ones who miscarried. Your host mother didn't just live, she woke up from her coma a year after you were born."

His heart lurched at that. "You know who my mother is? Where she is?"

The sadness in Jack's eyes stopped him. "Riddick, she carried you but she's not your mother. You were engineered out of about a dozen genetic sources. All of you were. A lot of the genetic material comes from people who've been dead for decades, or even centuries. I think they listed Jim Lovell, the twentieth century astronaut, as one of your gene sources. There were some other names I recognized... Colin Powell and Jonas Salk. But your 'mother...' doesn't even know she carried you."

Another dream lost... crumbled to ashes in his hands. No family. He'd never had a family. He had no kin to speak of, anywhere in the galaxy... no kin except for a virulent spore that infested a distant planet and killed everything it touched.

"So I don't have a family." It was a statement, not a question.

"Well, not the traditional kind... but there are the other Phase II children. You never met any of them, well, except for Ruth Baker--"

"Ruth Baker was a Scylla Child?"

He could see her again in his eyes... the cool blonde entering the bar accompanied by her two toy-boys. Two nights of the most intense sexual passion he'd ever experienced until Jack, and then--

"Yeah. She was supposed to capture you." Jack shrugged at his questioning look. "It got fucked up because her, uh... partner... got jealous over the tactics she was using..." She blushed a little.

Fuck. The file probably says I had sex with Ruth... shit, I'm sorry Jack... wait a second...

"So she didn't poison me? It was her boyfriend?"

Jack nodded and gave him a sheepish grin as her blush faded.

"No wonder Jarvis wants me dead."

"He doesn't." Jack sat back and watched him with calm eyes. At his incredulous look, she slowly shook her head. "The only time he ever wanted you dead was when he thought you'd killed me."

"Jack, I told you about what I found in the Nereid system files. They were getting ready to stage a prison riot so they could take me out--"

"They were preparing another cover story. So they could make you disappear. You'd already have been spirited off of Nereid by the time that riot began. They knew you'd stabilized." She gave him a wry smile. "They were about to recruit you."

"Recruit me? Into what?"

"Special Forces, like the rest of the 'Charybdis Operatives.'"

He couldn't help it; he found himself shaking his head in confusion. Okay, the part about what he was made sense; entirely more sense than he liked. But...

"So what do the rest of the 'Charybdis Operatives' do, Jack?"

She shrugged. A slight look of distaste appeared in her expression. "A lot of things, really, but it comes down to infiltration and assassination. They do the Tribunal's dirtiest and most dangerous dirty work."

"A hired killer." He felt himself wanting to collapse. Slowly he lay down on the bed, face down, putting his head in Jack's lap. It was the only safe place left. "All this time..."

Jarvis had wanted him to be a killer? The pain and disappointment he'd assumed his "uncle" felt over him was as imaginary as the umbilical cord? He actually was exactly what Reg wanted him to be?

Impossible. Unfathomable.

What he heard himself saying surprised him. Both the words, and the lost helplessness that had infected his voice.

"I don't know what to do."

"I do," Jack told him calmly, her hand stroking his head, neck and back.

Of course she does, he thought to himself. He closed his eyes, contemplating how the balance of power between them had shifted. No wonder I couldn't keep her as a child in my head. She didn't just grow up, she grew stronger than me.

And he'd thought she needed his strength? He wondered, suddenly, exactly when the tables had turned. The image of her came to him, naked, straddling him, glaring down at him as she denounced his final attempts to control the nature of their relationship. That was the moment the balance of power had irrevocably shifted.

He waited for her to tell him what they would do.

"First we're gonna go to Daedalus Station, just like you said. We'll get rid of the scar and get ourselves some more supplies. Then we're going to New Mecca." She chuckled softly, her hands still caressing him. "It's time to see Imam, and I'm gonna hold you to your promise."

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. "You still want to marry me?"

"Of course I do!" She put as much reassurance as she could into those words, he noticed, but the next ones out of her mouth were in a surprisingly belligerent tone. "You'd damn well better not be backing out on me!"

The almost-normal laugh that escaped him was unexpected. He rolled over, keeping his head in her lap, and gazed up at her, struck anew by exactly how strong she was, and how giving. She'd have made a wonderful mother... pain lanced through him at that.

She frowned above him in response to his wince, uncertainty flickering over her features. "You're not, are you?"

"Never." Now he was hastening to reassure her. "I love you, Jack. But..."

"But?"

He sighed heavily. "I wanted to give you something like a normal life. You know, kids... that kind of thing. Remember how I was talking about having plans for your old room? I was thinking 'nursery.' But I'm not even human, I can't give you that, and I don't want you to miss out--"

"What makes you think we can't have kids?"

She didn't get it. Shit. How could she not know?

"Well, leaving aside the whole thing of you getting infected by the Scylla Spore and dying, we're probably not even genetically compatible--"

"We are. And I wouldn't die." She sounded staunch, certain.

"You're whistling in the dark there, Jack."

"No, I've read the files. Remember? They're getting ready to start Phase III of the Project. They already know you guys are genetically compatible with ordinary humans; they have a whole bunch of frozen embryos created using sperm from the other Phase II subjects."

A little flutter of exultation stirred within him and he quashed it. "Yeah, but that's embryo implantation, not genuine conception. It'd still probably kill you."

"I don't think so. I told you, your host mother's alive. Whatever they did, it looks like they got it right." Her smile was calm but it didn't allay the anxiety bubbling within him.

"Got it right? They took a bunch of genetically-engineered embryos, implanted them, and then infected them with the Scylla spore!"

"No," Jack contradicted him. "That's what they did in Phase I."

"So what'd they do in Phase II? What'd they do to me?"

"The infection occurred prior to implantation. After your embryo hit the 21-day mark they did something -- I couldn't figure out exactly what but I'll show you in the file -- they did something that rendered the Spore inert. Then they did the implantation. At that stage the genes in your cellular nuclei and organelles had already been altered and stabilized by the Spore, and it was going dormant anyway."

Damn, she studied the files hard. "So why kill it?"

"To prevent the infection from crossing the placental barrier and flaring up in the host mother." The words tripped off of her lips comfortably. She knew exactly what she was talking about. Mind like a steel trap...

Riddick nodded. "And Phase III?"

"It's about producing viable offspring." Jack shrugged a little. "They want to see the results of normal -- well, okay, relatively normal -- reproduction. Since all the subjects they have left are male, the idea is to cross their sperm with the ova of ordinary women and see what traits are passed on."

"But it's still implantation," he pointed out.

"Well, yeah." Jack shrugged again and tilted her head, watching him with a look that very clearly said and your point is...?

"So normal conception could still be dangerous, Jack. I still have the Spore in me." I can't lose her. I can't...

"Riddick, the Spore inside you is dead. I'm not gonna get sick no matter how many of your babies I carry."

"You sure about that? What if it isn't dead?"

"Your host mother is alive and well and healthier than she was before they implanted you. If it is alive, looks like it's doing good things."

"We can't take that kind of risk."

"It's probably already too late."

"What?"

"Well, hell, Riddick, I've been regened for close to three weeks, now, and I haven't bled yet. I'm probably already pregnant." Her smile was triumphant but the ice was back in his belly.

"Oh shit--"

"Would you relax? Riddick, I'm not afraid. I'm really not." An odd light came into her eyes, along with a smile he hadn't seen in days. She hadn't given him that look since before she'd been shot. "Let me show you exactly how not-afraid I am."

"Jack, we can't, you haven't finished healing up--"

She chuckled quietly, her voice full of mischief. "I'm healed up enough to do this..."

She rose, pulling her legs out from under his head so that he fell back onto the mattress. He began to sit up but stopped as her hand pressed down on his chest.

"What...?"

"Stay still."

Bemused, he obeyed. "Yes, Ma'am."

The low ripple of her laugh thrilled him. "And don't you forget it." She sat beside him, her fingers dancing over the fastenings of his pants.

Oh my God...

They'd never done this. He'd been hesitant to ask her to, mindful of how little experience she actually had... was she really going to do what he thought she was?

She was. Oh God, she was. Her slim hands moved over his cock, startling him into tumescence. He watched in astonished wonder as she bent her head and...

"Oh god, Jack..." The warmth of her breath over his skin sent shivers over his body. And the silky feel of her lips on the head of his member... He shuddered and closed his eyes.

That silk now pursed against his skin as she planted a delicate kiss on the tip of his cock. Riddick stayed silent, unsure if what would emerge would be a laugh or a groan.

Then the warm heat of her tongue touched down and the groan won out. Gooseflesh crawled across his arms and legs as his spine quaked and his breath caught.

Oh god, Jack... This time his oath was silent.

Her tongue moved, leaving cool in its wake as it traced along the edge of his head. Riddick gripped the covers as pleasure lanced through him, struggling not to move, not to intervene. He had to let her set the pace; this was her first time, after all, and her wondrous explorations of his body, maddening as they were, were the most beautiful tortures he'd endured.

Stay still, stay still...

She let out a low, hissing exhalation and he shuddered again as the heat of her breath spread over his moistened flesh and skimmed over the dry skin. Her fingertips were stroking his shaft now, light touches that only increased the growing hunger within him. He wanted to reach down and lace his fingers through her hair, drawing her onto him--

No. Stay still. This is Jack. This is her game and you're gonna play by her rules...

He kept his eyes closed and his body still, waiting.

"Do you like this, Riddick?" Her voice was soft, an intoxicating mixture of innocent curiosity and adult sensuality, devoid of the jaded ploys he'd put up with for years before--

Before Jack.

"Oh god yes, I love it..." He swallowed, trying to restrain the impulse to take over, to accelerate the pace.

As her lips began to envelop the head of his cock he groaned again, amazed by the vivid intensity of the sensations. She drew him in, just a bit, concentrating on only the head for the moment. He shuddered as he felt the tips of her teeth graze his skin subtly, and then shuddered again as her warm tongue undulated against his flesh and she began to suckle in earnest.

"Oh... Jack..." His fists clenched the covers still, the knuckles white as he restrained his baser impulses and let her control the pace. When she drew him in even deeper all that emerged from his throat was a low, ecstatic rumble.

Shit, I am not gonna last long...

Shocks of intense pleasure were already moving through him in time with her ministrations, every time her lips clashed against the edge of his head, building upward toward a level of mindless carnality he rarely ever approached. It only ever happened when he surrendered control like this and that almost never happened at all, but--

I'm safe with Jack. She's my... my...

What exactly she was escaped him for the moment as a sudden crest of pleasure washed over him.

"Oh shit, baby, you'd better stop, I'm gonna--"

Instead she drew him in deeper and began sucking even harder. Riddick opened his eyes in astonishment and managed to catch one brief look at her before--

His nervous system felt like it was exploding. Spears of pleasure lanced through his body while he shuddered and gasped against the sheets like a man holding a live wire. Reality fragmented around him and was gone.

Jack was nestling against him, resting her head on his shoulder, as his awareness returned. He chuckled, knowing without being told exactly what she'd done.

She'd swallowed.

Jack, his crazy-brave soulmate, a fellatio virgin, had swallowed to prove to him exactly how little she feared the virus that might lurk within his seed. And to prove to him how absolute her love and trust was.

We could have a family...

For a moment it was so close he could almost taste it -- the drifting sweetness of a summer twilight, his hand in his foster sister's as he and Christina raced to catch the ice cream truck. Fireflies in the night and Marky the Turtle in the pond near Uncle Reg's house...

It was a world he'd almost forgotten, a world lost to him decades ago. It was a world that Jack was charting a course back to, now, for both of them.

Could she do it?

He had to let her try, at the very least.

"Okay. You win. Marriage, kids, the works. We'll do it all."

"Damn right we will." He loved it when she used that pert tone of voice.

"Gonna be Ward Cleaver with a shine job," he announced mock-grandly.

Beside him, Jack burst out laughing.

"What? You making fun of me, kid?"

"No, no... just remembering a very dirty Leave it to Beaver joke I heard once. Anyway, Ward Cleaver didn't do hatchet jobs for the government."

"You sure about that?" He chuckled at her, but within, enlightenment was striking. Audacious little minx... Jarvis is in for one hell of a surprise...

"Pretty sure."

"Okay, fine. Ward Cleaver with a shine job and a license to kill." Didn't sound too bad, actually. He found himself grinning. "We play this right, we can even have an extended family. I'd love you to meet Christina--"

"Oh God..." Jack's voice was suddenly filled with anguish. He stared over at her, worried, as she pulled herself up into a sitting position. "Riddick, there's one more thing I have to tell you..."

Hours later, staring out into the darkness of deep space, Riddick shook his head in self-disgust.

I still couldn't cry. I couldn't cry over that. God, if I ever needed proof of how human I'm not, there it is...

Christina was dead. His beautiful sister, the sister of his heart, dead.

She'd been dead for twenty-eight years and he'd never guessed, never felt it.

Shouldn't he have felt something? Shouldn't there have been some kind of connection, some awareness that she was gone? There had been no hint of the hollow ache that filled him now.

And yet he still couldn't cry.

Behind him he could hear Jack approaching. Her hand came to rest, feather-light, on his shoulder.

"Riddick?"

He closed his eyes and turned, resting his cheek on the top of her hand. She knelt down beside him and put her arm around his chest in an awkward hug.

"You coming to bed?"

He opened his eyes and met hers, soft, gentle and caring before him. No fear, no distrust... none of the barriers that existed between him and others. She lived inside his armor. And against all of the odds, she continued to survive it. He nodded and rose from the seat, putting his arm around her.

She's my humanity, he thought as he extinguished the lights. Her plan for their future was good enough for him; he'd go where she led him.

But there were still some people who would have to pay... for her pain, and for Christina's... if he couldn't shed tears he'd shed blood in their place.