7. Riddick: Remembering

He'd held her hand for the first time shortly after they'd left that desolate, unnamed planet. She'd come up into the cockpit and taken the seat next to his, he remembered. He'd been impressed by how brave she was.

At the time, he'd been trying to figure out what to do with the two of them, and not liking any of the options. He'd been at war, internally. There was a pitched battle between his old, hard, ruthless instincts honed by years on the run, and this new _thing_ that Carolyn had left inside him.

It was a piece of her. She'd gotten inside him somehow and had left a sharp fragment of herself embedded in him when she was torn out of his grasp. It was like the bit of his shiv that had been left in Johns' back. He could feel it, pressing against his sleeping moral center, jolting it at odd moments.

He knew he should just ghost both of them and move on, but every time his mind began to turn in that direction, the shiv-that- was-Carolyn sliced at him again. So he was surprised when this crazy-brave little chit, with more guts than sense, sat down next to him and gave voice to some of his very own thoughts.

"Lotta questions, whoever we run into," she told him. "Could even be a merc ship."

She paused, watching his face to see his response. He made his expression stay deadpan. No point in intimidating her until he'd heard what she wanted.

After a few seconds she shrugged. "So what the hell do we tell them about you?" she asked expectantly.

No pleas. No demands. No attempts to fuck with him. It took him by surprise and silenced the voice of the predator inside him. The kid was telling him it was his call, that she'd follow his lead.

"Tell 'em Riddick's dead," he suggested. She nodded, fixing the thought in her mind. "He died somewhere on that planet," he mused.

It wasn't the complete truth, of course, but it _felt_ like truth. The man who'd taken off from the planet was definitely not the same one who'd kicked his way out of his cryo-tube after the crash.

That's when he'd reached out and taken her small hand in his. They'd fallen asleep soon after, side by side in the cockpit, hand in hand, while Imam caught up on his prayers behind them. He'd had the funny feeling that she belonged to him even then. Not just to him, but _with_ him. Part of a matched set.

He'd ended up telling them about how he'd almost left them behind, and had been surprised by the equanimity with which they took it. He'd expected histrionics from Jack, at least, but she'd shrugged philosophically, commenting that Fry had almost done something similar, but that both of them had come back in the end.

"'Almost did' doesn't count," she'd said with a funny smile. Imam later remarked, while Jack slept, that the girl had managed to take centuries of ethical expounding and condense it into a single, simple phrase.

She'd been the one to come up with his cover story, too. He'd already planned to claim that he was Johns, but she'd embellished it, proposing a back-story that would give them protection if he was ever caught in his lie.

They'd never met Johns, she suggested. Riddick had killed him and assumed his identity immediately after the crash. If anyone ever tried to accuse them of aiding and abetting a known felon, they could claim that they'd been under the impression that they were helping a cop. It was a brilliant idea, he'd reflected. No jury on any planet would send a mild-mannered cleric or a cute teenage girl to jail for being scammed, after all. Even Imam had agreed to be party to the lie.

By the time a prospecting ship picked them up, he'd heard her life story and knew that she'd be better off staying with him than Imam. She was deeply fond of the holy man, but he figured it wouldn't be more than a month before she bailed on him to continue her nomadic life among the stars. She had a surprising amount of wanderlust in her for one so young.

She was a nice kid, though, and he realized that he worried about her. On her own it was only a matter of time before she got herself eaten alive and for some reason he couldn't let that happen. Not unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life with a shiv-that-was-Jack slicing him alongside the shiv-that-was- Carolyn.

He'd taken her with him and kept her as safe as possible, until the day she'd been snatched out of his hands by Lieutenant Fucking Jarvis and his Elite Special Forces shock troops. That last moment was indelibly burned in his mind. He would never forget the sight of her on her knees, clutching desperately at the gory wound in her abdomen, eyes glazing over with shock as the airlock door closed in his face.

He'd been completely numb for more than a month until he learned she'd survived. Taking her back had been his mission ever since.

Now, finally, he had her.

He held onto her tightly until her tears subsided. He didn't bother saying a word. What he felt coming off of her wasn't pain but the cessation of it and he knew that he was already giving her exactly what she needed.

When the tears finally ebbed and he felt her relax in his arms, he spoke at last. "Hungry?"

He felt her nod against his chest.

"You up for breakfast?"

She sat back, wiping her face. There was growing joy in the smile she gave him. "Hell, yeah. I've missed our breakfasts."

He grinned back at her, pleased. "Me too."