saga/title/fandom: The Past Never Dies chapter 8 (Pitch Black/Riddick)

author: Shalimar

rating/genre: (NC-17) - het, angst, drama

warnings: het, sexual content, adult content, drug use, criminal activity, religious fusion

summary: What if Jack had stayed on New Mecca with Imam? What if Riddick had come back for her? (Riddick/Jack, Imam/OFC)

comments/disclaimers: General disclaimers apply.

Riddick wet his lips, uncharacteristically nervous. Fear knifed through Jack’s gut as she awaited his explanation. Glancing towards the little ones, he dropped his deep voice until it was almost inaudible. “You offered me your body if I would take you with me. Threw yourself at me and kissed me for all you were worth. I came so close to doing what you wanted.”

Horribly, his words triggered a memory she had somehow buried.

“You can’t send me away with him!” she raged, near tears. “I belong with you!”

“Jack, you’re too young to go with me,” Riddick countered, frustrated at her refusal to see reason. “My life isn’t safe. People are gonna be hunting me and shooting at me. Even if they aren’t, I have to hide and move all the time. You need to be someplace stable, go to school.”

Desperately, she grabbed his big forearms, imploring. “I can help you with your cover. Nobody knows who I am. Hell, the whole universe thinks I’m a guy.”

“But I know you’re not,” he cautioned, a note of warning.

His words didn’t elicit any fear in her; quite the contrary. “If that’s what you want from me then take me, you can have me. Every night, if you want.”

“You don’t mean that,” he chided, patronizing.

But Jack did mean it. She threw herself into his arms, and pressed her lips to his passionately. To her surprise, Riddick managed not to return her kiss, but apparently couldn’t suppress all his reactions. Feeling his erection against her belly, she smiled up at him triumphantly, with all the winsomeness she could manage.

“Tell me you don’t want me,” she ordered, brazenly.

Jack was stunned when Riddick threw her away from him and bellowed, “IMAM!”

When the alarmed holy man entered the room, Riddick gestured angrily towards her. “Don’t leave her alone with me again, Father, or I swear, what happens won’t be pretty.”

He stormed out, leaving her mortified and disappointed, to find some way to explain to an expectant Imam what had just transpired.

“I tried to seduce you,” Jack’s voice felt strangled, her lips burning with remembrance. “For the love of Allah, I forgot all about that.”

“I haven’t,” Riddick said, with seven years’ worth of understatement.

“My thirteen-year-old bald self made that big an impression?” she snorted in disbelief.

He shook his head, impatiently, and then elaborated. “It wasn’t the sex as much as the fact that you offered it. I knew what you’d been through. You trusted me not to fuck you senseless and dump you someplace, maybe even kill you. No, it was even more than that. You trusted me not to hurt you, when I was the last person you should have trusted.”

“You saved my life,” she justified, softly.

“I did a lot of things on that planet that weren’t me at the time. If I’d taken you with me then, I’d have used you, hurt you. You would hate me now. I did the only thing I could do. I put you away from me; wouldn’t let you near me again.”

Jack felt sharply the pain of that old rejection. “I thought I disgusted you.”

He stared directly into her eyes, as if searching for the lie. “You? Jack, you were already beautiful on the inside. I knew you were going to be beautiful on the outside, too, once you grew up. That was enough to make me forget you were bald, skinny and too young for a minute. You have no idea how close you came to disaster.”

“And that, just that, was enough to make you want to find me after seven years?” she asked, still skeptical.

“Not even close,” Riddick disavowed, almost offended. “You’re the only decent woman I’ve ever known who knew who I was—what I was—and wanted to be with me anyway. If your offer from seven years ago is still good, I’ll take you up on it now. If you want, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Can we go, too, ‘Kila?” Carolyn asked plaintively, clutching her little brother’s hand.

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