HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Author: xxxevilgrinxxx
Title: Rider
Fandom: Pitch Black/ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
Rating: NC17

Disclaimer: I do not own Pitch Black or any of its characters. Rider is a person/concept from Jon Anderson’s 1976 concept album “Olias of Sunhillow”, as is the ship the “Moorglade”.
Archive: for your own personal reading only.
Feedback: In this thread only. No shreds please.
Copyright © august 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx
…
Ch 1

“…Quiet is good for the soul, it clarifies; and shows us things we would not otherwise see. He was a prophet, and a man from the city; but he had to travel to the desert, where there was quiet, to hear the words of god…”
***

Riddick reclined back in the pilot’s seat and watched Shazza as she slept. He had thought that he would get tired of it, but was surprised to learn that this was not so. His mind wandered as he watched the stars wash over her hair and skin in the reflection of the forward shield. She had hardly slept at all; her nerves were too frayed after the stresses of the last few days. So he had sent Jack to sit at the front, after he had told her what she needed to do with the front console if there was an alert, and laid behind Shazza and held her until she fell asleep.

She tossed and turned at first, she had said she didn’t like to be confined to small spaces, and all the nervous energy she had held in over the past few days made it hard for her to lie still. So he had pulled her close into the hollow curve of his body and stroked her side until sleep finally took her. They hadn’t been able to touch or hold each other much, not with Jack nearby. Jack hadn’t told them much about her life, but she didn’t really need to elaborate. A young girl on the run, dressed as a boy. They chose to wait until a better time, but it hadn’t been easy for either of them, not since they were first together. It was more hurried than he would have liked, but he couldn’t get sex with Shazza out of his head. So he watched her sleep, and he wanted her.

Jack had talked to him for about half an hour. He hadn’t ignored her; Jack wasn’t a person that was easy to ignore, but he had let her voice slip into his mind until the rhythms of it soothed him. Jack would have a beautiful voice when she was a little older, she didn’t squeak or squeal or whine, like some young women did. Her voice had deepened, partly by her own efforts, and partly because she had seen so much that it had aged her voice; her eyes too. She talked about the planet, and what they did when he had left to go after Johns and Fry.

She had sat quietly for a few moments, and they listened to the nothingness together; the skiff ran nearly silent, compared to the noise of the Hunter-Gratzner. When she spoke again, it made what she said stand out, because of the silence that came before it. “Imam said, ‘Quiet is good for the soul, it clarifies; and shows us things we would not otherwise see. He was a prophet, and a man from the city; but he had to travel to the desert, where there was quiet, to hear the words of god.’ He had said that about the Prophet he believed in, but when he said it, the first person I thought of was you, Riddick.”

Riddick looked over at Jack as she sat and stared out into space. She had her knees pulled into her chest and looked completely comfortable where she was; he wondered when she last felt so safe. Her shaved head gave her an air of strength and vulnerability at the same time; she couldn’t hide behind her hair, and couldn’t distract from the features of her face in any other way, every tiny smile or flicker of sadness showed. He watched her, and thought of Imam, and felt an incredible surge of protectiveness and possession that he was at a loss to explain. Imam had sacrificed himself for Riddick, but he had also done it because he knew that Riddick would protect the two women; that he had risked so much to come back to them.

‘Quiet is good for the soul, it clarifies.’ Riddick had very few moments when he had real quiet, the quiet where there was no noise, but he did have other kinds of quiet, a quiet he could never explain to Jack, in case he gave her nightmares. There was a quiet when he killed, when he hunted; that also clarified. As for the rest, that would take more time for him to understand.

Jack rested her head back into the seat and looked out at the stars of the Soltrek shipping lanes that passed through the Tangiers system. They had been here, ‘sticking out a thumb’ for about three days now. Riddick had no idea how long the skiff could stay up here, but when he and Shazza had spoken, they had placed it at maybe a week. They had both sat quietly afterwards and their hands had reached out for each other. He had suggested that if it got close, they could set the skiff back down on the planet, but there was no guarantee that it would ever get off the ground again. They had both looked at Jack, curled up peacefully asleep at the time, and never said another word; they would never send her back down there. Shazza had tinkered with the electrical system, they would get another few days of flight. Jack didn’t know, and neither Riddick nor Shazza would tell her, but if they didn’t get picked up soon, they would die out here. Together. He thought of Imam, and quiet and clarity and let his eyes close.

“Riddick? Look…..is that a ship?” Jack’s hand was cool on his arm and he realized that he hadn’t even heard her move; a thought that made him proud for some reason he couldn’t place.

“Get in the back and wake Shazza…NOW Jack…” Riddick growled under his breath as he looked out at the ship in the distance, his hand played over the button for the beacon as he debated whether they should just shut it off and hope they hadn’t been spotted. Fuck it, he thought, less than one week from death and a slim chance was better than no chance. He and Shazza had talked about this scenario too. If Jack woke her in a hurry she would know what to do.

“Fuckin mercs….”

copyright © august 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx