Archive of Our Own

--

There is no future until we settle the past.

--

_. One

Riddick wakes up.

Usually, this would not be a thing of note, even if more often than not it happens in the midst of a precarious situation. That’s his normal. There’s a part of his brain that never really goes quiet, never shuts down, no matter how many doses of animal-grade tranquillizer he’s been shot with, and that keeps him relatively aware, even if not safe.

Usually.

Today, his brain is quiet. The world behind his eyelids is black, and he makes himself keep still. Makes himself listen. No sounds. No breathing. No wind, or wildlife, or company. Nothing but the disorientation of a true blackout, and the whirring of his own brain as he tries to figure out what’s sending his instincts haywire.

He keeps listening.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

He opens his eyes, only to close them again. Instinct, of course. It’s a painful thing. Usually.

Because the world is bright.

Bright, and foreign, he thinks, as he opens them again, as he pushes himself past the screaming in his head telling him to look away, that the light burns, that there will be nothing but agony in looking into anything lighter than twilight. In the planets he’s visited, the galaxies he’s run through, there have been plenty of strange sights - near-invisible fauna, gravity-defying constructions, rainfall of diamonds or glass - but the strangeness does not come from things unusual.

No. It looks familiar. Familiar, in the way of a forgotten dream, or a hallucinated vision when fever or poison hits and things are at their worst. Familiar in a way that tells him this is not a place he’s ever been in.

“Might as well get walking,” he tells himself.

So he does.

--

This world goes away. Reshapes itself.

He tries to make sense of it, in all the ways he knows how. Keeps track of landmarks, scratches a map on the softer skin of his inner arm. Draws tracks in the grey sand below his feet, coating his boots. But the landmarks change in the corner of his eyes. Entire mountain ranges, skeleton trees, rock formations: there one moment, gone the next. The landscape melts and reforms itself every time he turns, every time he closes his eyes. The sand changes colours. Changes to grit, to loam, to clay, and back again.

He runs out of space in one arm, and then the other.

But nothing to do but keep walking.

The priority, as always, is water. Even if he’s not thirsty yet, it’s only a matter of time. Shelter too, maybe, if he were feeling anything but unmoved by the trek so far, by the non-existent sun or wind. He can walk for a very long time, in these conditions. No wildlife, yet.

No predators but himself.

Riddick keeps walking.

And walking.

And walking.

Long enough that he starts wishing for a nice little predator, after all. Maybe the shitheads that got him stranded here, if he could even remember who they are. Anything, anything at all to break the endless shifting of the landscape, the endless walking, the endless thoughts telling him that he should be feeling thirsty by now, even if not tired.

Long enough that he remembers his body should hurt: at the very least, the ache of old wounds. Newer ones too, maybe, if he could remember how he got here. His shoulders and knees aren’t the greatest, after so many dislocations and hard landings; there’s a scar of an old knife wound near his gut that always twinges depending on the weather, good or bad, and yet it’s conspicuously silent.

Maybe that’s because here’s no fucking weather in this place.

It messes him up, a little. How the sky doesn’t change, despite the land bending and twisting like the coils of a Cygnusian Death Worm. It’s this-- strange, endless thing. A too-bright thing, pouring liquid lightning down to the earth in colossal, endless plasma columns - columns that he tries to use as landmarks, all the way until he figures out that they never get any nearer, no matter how much he walks in their direction. Everything above him is an indescribable colour, even if his eyes were still used to telling them apart so many years after the surgery. It doesn’t hurt to look at it, not exactly - Riddick knows pain, deals it and lives with it, knows the taste of it better than any lover - but there’s a pressure that comes with it, heavy like a relentless waterfall, and he finds he cannot stare up for too long.

He has not discarded the thought that this is a hallucination, the kind with a lot less dead people than usual. A simulation, perhaps. A fucked up new little prison to trap his mind in, since no physical slam’s managed it so far.

Would be a new one.

So. Assuming that’s it. His mind, splintering more than usual, making up a fun little dream world for him to live out his days in.

“Could at least have dreamed up a beach,” he says to a rock that was not a rock a second ago. He picks it up, weighting it in his hand. The weight of it changes in the moment it takes for him to toss it up and snatch it from the air again. “Really make use of all the sand. Add a couple man-eating creatures in the water, just for fun. Maybe one of those cocktails with the little umbrellas.”

“Would you even know what to do with a normal persons’ idea of fun?” someone asks dryly.

And that-- that’s when he knows his mind is truly gone.

Because behind him, sitting on a rock-that-isn’t with a hand shielding her eyes from the non-existent sun, sits Carolyn Fry.

--

No scream, Riddick thought numbly. No cry. No final words. Nothing but the rain — and a pitch black universe.

--

_. Two

He looks at her for a second. Two. Long enough for the image to burn into his eyelids, for once her appearance unbloodied and whole. Long enough for her near-forgotten scent to reach him, in an one-two punch that he had not prepared for. That he had not expected.

Then, he turns. Keeps walking.

Hears her follow.

“Are you seriously going to ignore me, Riddick?” she asks. He can’t tell what her tone is supposed to be, whether she’s mad or disbelieving or amused or sarcastic, through the buzzing in his ears. He does not want to hear it, to study it, to drink up every word from her mouth. He should not be hearing it.

One does not feed their hallucinations, if they don’t have to. He’s got plenty of practice at it.

The sand shifts back to solid rock beneath their footsteps: hers are nearly twice as fast as his, trying to keep up with his longer stride - a detail he hadn’t expected his brain to come up with. He supposes it’s accurate enough. He wishes it were not. Would make it easier, to pretend her away.

Then, his feet hit metal.

It’s surprising enough, after the endless monotony of sand-stone-rock, to draw him to a stop, to let not-Fry run against his back at the suddenness of it. She’s not warm, exactly. Ambient temperature. More solid than he expected. About as much as the structure below, when he kicks his foot into it to test the give.

He ignores her huff of frustration, trading his awareness of her for a handrail jutting out of the soil. There’s something buried here, in the middle of this endlessly shifting landscape, and he for one cannot wait to get the fuck away from that particular brainfuck.

“I think this place might be yours,” she says idly as he jumps down, bypassing the semi-broken staircase. Riddick can’t help but glance at her blue-clad legs as she makes her way down after him - not quite following the stairs, but not quite jumping like he had, either. A little clumsy on the half-light, but with all of the self-possessed confidence he’d liked on her, back then.

He turns his eyes away before her entire shape makes it down under: no point in dwelling. By instinct, he reaches to take off his goggles to face the dark, but they aren’t there and they are not needed. His vision’s already adjusting, changing to a halfway point between his usual night-vision and a strange rendition of the sight he’d had before getting himself stuck on Slam City. He walks forward without thinking twice about it, mapping out the walls, the doorways, the way sound echoes with every movement.

“Cozy,” he drawls.

Not-Fry peers into an empty doorway. “Not a lot of furniture in here.”

“Not supposed to be,” he answers, before he can convince himself not to. Maybe talking it through - even if it’s only to himself - will help him figure something out. “Company military barracks. Not much function other than shower and sleep, and even that’s up for discussion.”

“You seem to know it well.”

He ducks through a hallway, footsteps secure, counted. Riddick knows this layout like the back of his hand. Could walk it in the dark, with all his senses gone. “Spent a while in these,” he says. “That’s all.”

Before it all went to shit, he doesn’t say. Doesn’t like relieving the times when, fresh out of several foster homes and juvie, he actually thought there was a way out of that kind of life, a way to get his shit luck to actually go good for once. Before Sigma-3. Sigma-3, with work partners he actually liked enough to trust they’d watch his back, with assholes who had made him pick up pretty quickly how to cheat at dice, with the six-cot dorms where he’d stuck a peeling schematic for the Axtion-Yutani R-52 Interceptor he’d dreamed of piloting one day next to his bed. Sigma-3, where he’d risked his life drawing out spitfires from the mines time and time again and called it a good day’s work. Sigma-3, where he’d returned after the Academy and it had turned out to be a fucking slave camp all along, and where his attempts at making it known had gotten his evidence destroyed and himself branded as a traitor and a killer.

Last he’d known, some army or another had burned the base down to ashes.

Good fucking riddance.

“Huh,” Not-Fry says. Not-Carolyn. Riddick should not be looking twice at her; his ears should not be trained on how she taps her fingernails against the metal walls, presumably to test them. He should not think of how he hadn’t known she was blonde, before, not with his shined eyes and self-inflicted fucked up colour vision. “These are older than standard Company fare. They haven’t used Aluminex Pre-Fab in--”

Her voice falters.

He keeps moving.

Not-Fry clears her throat. “How many years has it been? Since-- since then. That planet.”

My death, she doesn’t say. He thinks, if he looks back, that she’ll be covered in blood again, a hole through her stomach. Limbs tearing like flimsy. Beastly mouths, devouring her, bit by bit.

His most persistent ghost.

“Long enough,” he says gruffly, “that you should stop fucking haunting me.”

He can hear her frowning. “Look, Riddick,” she says, the no-nonsense tone she’d used while playing captain. While being captain. “I don’t know what your issue is or how you ended up like this, but you can’t be here.”

Riddick snorts, curving down another hallway. “Thought you said the place was mine.”

“The look of it is,” she says. She’s relentless, hounding his footsteps. He can smell her scent, her sweat. Fire-resistant coating on her flight suit, standard issue. Grease under her fingernails. Ash and sand from the wreckage. “The outer shell of it. Like a ship’s hull. You see the shape of your thoughts. But the world surrounding it is not yours, and you can’t be here long.”

“Been walking for days,” he tells her, drawing out the words. There’s an opening to the side, and he takes it, just so he can avoid the sight of her. “Haven’t seen shit.”

“Because you’re not looking at what you should, and you haven’t since you arrived.” Small, rough hands pull at the back of his shirt, pinch at the bulk of his arm. “Damn it, Riddick, look at me!”

He--

does.

Weakness. A moment of weakness. He’d already been rolling with the turn to make himself big, to make himself intimidating, to crowd into her space like he’d done a lifetime ago, so she’d be the one to look away first-- but. But.

She’s there.

Alive. Not alive. But something close enough to it that it fools his senses, for a second, like she could have been, like the intensity of her eyes is not just his brain trying to trick him into believing in a miracle, like the determined jut to her brow does not send his insides aching, like there isn’t something aching and animal-like in his very core that recognizes her as kindred, as it had once so long ago.

Carolyn Fry.

“I’m looking,” he rumbles, eyes fixed on hers. As if he could bring himself to look away. Fuck.

She-- presses her lips together. Swallows. So close he can hear it. So close he should be hearing the pounding of her heart, a drumbeat playing in her carotid artery, if it was there at all. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“So you’ve said.”

“No,” she says, and fixes him with the hard blue gaze he’d found so fascinating, before. “You don’t understand. You can’t be here, Riddick. Because I’m dead, and you’re not.”

--

Threshold! Take us to the Threshold!

--

_. Three

He laughs. Loud.

The sound resonates within the walls of the small dorm, multiplying until there’s a multitude of Riddick ghosts joining in, tinny and scornful.

“So this is what,” he mocks, “the afterlife? I’ve not been a good enough boy to be sent to a place so boring.”

Even as he says it, there’s a thought niggling at the back of his head. A forgotten thread, unspooling, unravelling, dangling in front of him like a string in front of an Old Earth cat.

Something he ought to pick at and study, but does not want to.

“ Yes,” she tells him, furious. Her eyes are sparking; he’s fascinated beyond words. “Yes, Riddick, the fucking afterlife. Purgatory, the Underverse, the kingdom of the dead, whatever the hell you want to call it. We need to get you out, before whatever got you in here takes.”

“Nothing got me in here,” he tells her. And then, with an inkling of remembrance, “I walked in on my own.”

“Well,” she says. “That was damn fucking stupid. Shit. Shit!”

“So you said,” Riddick drawls, but his attention is not in their argument. He’s still trying to figure out if she’s radiating any sort of body heat on her own, or if her neutral temperature is just another facet of the world, and he wants to loom closer and find out for himself. Wants to mock her, a little. Piss her off, just enough to see her react - until her eyes go icy and blade-sharp and she crowds him right back, throws him to the ground. In his guiltiest moments, guiltiest dreams, he dreams of when she did just that under the hellish rain of M6-117 - there’s a thought-sense of them tussling in the wet dark, of the skiff’s ramp hard against his back, of the tips of her practical haircut dripping into his eyes. A glimpse of an almost-good memory, before the closeness of her body is replaced by the remembrance of a razor-sharp tail piercing between them both.

Before she’s torn away again, soundless and silent, into the pitch black night.

“I don’t just say, I know.” She runs a hand through her hair, somehow giving it the appearance of being sweaty in the way the strands cling and shift. “You need to get out, now. ”

He tilts his head. Studies her. “You didn’t give me the impression that it was this urgent, before.” Didn’t even try to convince him very hard, either. He still wonders if he did not make her up. If this is not one of those half-remembered dreams, before they turn back into nightmares.

“You didn’t tell me you walked in here, before!” she snaps. “Shit, Riddick, that was so stupid. So fucking stupid! Why would you walk into the land of the dead? ”

“Not looking for the dead,” he drawls. His memory is returning, bit by bit, prompted by the argument. Maybe this hasn’t all been a hallucination, after all. He remembers Vaako, kind of; remembers looking for something greater than himself, a throbbing silver claim on his chest. “Followed someone. Needed to know what they know.”

“And that’s important enough to get yourself killed?” she seethes. Her pointer finger digs into his chest, short-nailed, sharp. “Because I didn’t die for you just so you could go on another fucking suicide mission. You were supposed to get out!”

“Well, that’s just great, Carolyn.” It’s rare that he feels this angry, this unchained, everything he’s feeling bubbling right under his skin, threatening to tear it apart. As if he could become living magma. Molten steel. A terrible walking creature of nothing but fire and fury and animal instinct. “Because I did not want you to die for me! ”

Silence. His own words echo once, twice, reflected by the metal walls.

He did not mean to say that.

He did not mean to say that.

Riddick turns, sharp. His fists are clenched; he wishes for, needs, his goggles and then they’re there, waiting in his hand. The world disappears briefly while he puts them on, the six-bed Company dorm with the peeling posters and his old knife-cleaning kit growing softer at the edges.

“Riddick.”

“Don’t.”

“Riddick.” Her voice is sharp. No-nonsense. He has always liked that tone on her. “I did not want to die. Not there. Definitely not like that. But - if it got you, all of you out, then I don’t regret it. I did what I had to do.”

“You could have flown out,” he tells the walls. Tells her, Carolyn Fry, dead and for once listening. Coulda left me there. I was already dead, anyway. Wounded. There was no point in going back for me.”

“Like there was no point in going back for Jack?” she asks softly, “or the Imam?”

“They’re dead.” He scoffs, as if a verbal dismissal can make that knowledge ache any less. “Though I guess you’d know that better than me.”

“The afterlife is a less social place than you’d think,” she says, voice subdued.

“Yeah, I kinda gathered.” He misses having his knives in his holsters, a shiv in his hand. He wants to fiddle with them, draw his mind into a focus that is not this conversation. “Shouldn’t they be here, too?”

Haunting me as the people I got killed most recently, he thinks.

“I don’t know,” she tells him. He hears her move to stand at his side, sees the tips of her short hair brushing the side of her neck. “It’s not the same for everyone, I think. Most of what I know is-- instinct.”

It’s not an accusation for making her death be in vain. He doesn’t know if he’s glad or disappointed. “Instinct,” he repeats.

Riddick knows instinct. He knows instinct very well.

“This world--” Fry hesitates. “--I’m not sure it exists, most of the time. It comes and goes, and changes, kind of like a dream. And even the dead-- us-- we don’t stick around forever. Only as long as there’s someone out there, remembering us. But sometimes, people near death slip inside, or someone stumbles across the Threshold, and we’re conscious again. The world shows them what they were looking for, what they want or need to see. The things that could convince them to stay.”

“An endless walking holiday is not the most convincing thing in the world,” he says. He does not touch on the fact of her being there; on how her presence fits into her theory of how this world works. He doesn’t bring up how it doesn’t explain how Jack or Imam Abu or any of the people in the worst of his past are not there, regret after regret hounding at his footsteps.

She is, perhaps, his worst regret. But not his only.

“No,” Fry says, and this time it’s her studying him in turn. “I suppose it’s not.”

He picks up the grinding stone on the grey cover of his old cot, and runs a finger against it, testing the grit.

“The Necromongers--” he says. Slowly. Honing in on memories that are still returning, not all there quite yet. “Their leaders make a pilgrimage to this world, when they rise. But the first was only looking for a place to bury his family.”

Fry watches him intently. She’s leaning against the threshold of the room, not following him further in. “Were they buried?”

“You know,” he says, “I don’t think they ever said. Or cared to pass that bit on.”

“Seems a bit pointless, when that was his goal.”

“Yeah.” Riddick taps his goggles. ”What the legend does say is that he saw them again past the Threshold, walking and talking like they were living again. Stayed here, a while. Saw some shit. Enough to make a religion out of. The kind that kills everyone who won’t convert.”

“Makes sense.”

“Does it?” He can vaguely recall the path that led him here, now. Seeking Furya, his home planet, with all the pain and focus of the silvered mark burning on his chest. He wonders if it’s still visible there, while he’s in this dream-hazy world. He cannot bring himself to look.

“This world is hungry, Riddick,” Fry says, tired and grim and solemn. It’s an expression too familiar on her; he wishes it weren’t. “If it ever lets anyone go, then you better be sure it’ll get something else out of it.”

“Sounds like everyone I’ve ever met,” he tells her, as honest as he ever gets.

And that is when the screaming begins.

--

Tell them Riddick's dead. He died somewhere on that planet.

--

_. Four

If the goggles allowed him to see colour, he thinks he’d see it drained from her face. Which would be funny, kind of, if dread wasn’t also drawing his muscles tight. Do ghosts have flowing blood? Do illusions? Dreams? Nightmares?

But he’s too well-trained to spare more than half a thought on it. He’s already moving, going for a knife that isn’t there and then is, putting Fry behind himself in the doorway. “People?”

“More like native life,” she bites out, “if they could be said to be living. They’re soul eaters.”

That shouldn’t surprise him. He remembers, faintly, the Lord Marshal ripping a soul from its body, stealing it into the void. Remembers, with greater and greater definition, battling that very man, how he’d split himself and drawn back together again, body and soul separate things. It would make sense that the world which had taught him to do so would deal in souls.

He just hadn’t considered there would be things that ate them.

Rookie mistake.

“We need to get moving,” she tells him, instead of elaborating. He’s in motion already, dusting off his knowledge of the layout to figure out the most defensible spots. “Mind palaces won’t keep them out for long.”

“Better than open ground that I can’t fucking keep track of,” he grunts. “Unless you got a better option?”

“Trap them inside,” Fry says. “Lose them in the soul rivers. Run for the exit as fast as you can.”

He grimaces. Been a while since his last death run.

Can’t say he misses it. “Can you find it?”

Her face could have been carved from stone. “What else do you think I’m here for?”

Riddick doesn’t bother with a nod. He signals her silently, and they move.

It’s been a while, he thinks, as they pause to hear heavy thumps hit the metal, still far away. A good, long while since he’s worked like this with anyone, and it’s for a good reason.

His crew on Sigma 3. Waiz and Hopper, back on the Wailing Wars. Carolyn. Imam Abu. Jack. He’s long since decided to stop washing the blood off his hands, since the red will never go away.

At least this time Fry’s already gotten the “dead” part over and done with.

“Door behind you,” Riddick tells her. “Maintenance room. Get the tool bag and as many compressed Glaucam cans as you can carry. Fast.”

He pulls his goggles up as he keeps watch, despite the minimal difference in sight in this ‘verse, and lets his ears scan for what his vision cannot see. The torn-open access to the outside they’d jumped through is right at the junction of the main corridors, so the soul eaters will likely come from there, if there aren’t other openings. No following down that way, then. But they can round back to the crew dorms, if they’re quick enough - keep to the corners, move silently, use the time when the creatures will be investigating their surroundings - and there should be an access hatch to the sub-level of the compound. It’s a wide space, with many divisions: easier to cross and dodge, even when being hunted. Several crew-only accesses, which he can rig up to close behind them if they’re not too closely followed.

Then, they’ll gotta climb back up. Hope that their scent was enough to get all the beasts on the sub-level, so that the junction will be empty - or empti er - and they can cross to the loading bay. Then, to the armoury beyond it; or to the hangar, if time is running short. He’d rather take his chances trying to outrun these things, if he can’t study them long enough to know how to X them out.

“Let’s go,” Fry says heavily at his side, and he takes the bag full of cans, tightening the fabric to reduce the noise.

Then, they’re off. The adrenaline filling his veins is as familiar to him as his breathing, as the blood pumping in his ears. The corner to the junction’s coming up, and they slow down - slow enough to hear the pacing of something beyond the walls. Riddick hears the soft press of a padded extremity, and then the click of claws against the metal.

And then, heart-stoppingly--

“Riddick?”

Female voice. Young.

Not Carolyn’s.

“Riddick, help!” A half-sob, a shudder of breath. “Riddick?”

It’s not Jack - not Kyra. Can’t be. Wouldn’t make sense to be, when there’s been no one else around since he got here, other than Fry.

But Fry got here, eventually. After he’d been waiting a while.

He doesn’t realize he’s moving, not until he’s pushing against the tension of his shirt caught by someone else. Someone behind him.

Fry shakes her head when he looks, eyes too wide, too afraid. “Not her,” she mouths, soundlessly - though she wouldn’t know how Jack would sound after growing up, would she? Wouldn’t know who she’s stopping him from finding. “Not her.”

“Riddick?” The voice asks again, hesitant. “Riddick, help.”

Fry’s hand is cool against his chest, when she pushes him back. There’s a shadow shaping against the wall, a faint wash of black on grey. Indistinct. Could be beast. Could be human. The upper part of it twists, turns, as if seeking something, but it does not appear to come closer.

Fry reaches forward, pressing them both against the wall. Takes a can of Glaucam from her pocket and turns it, so that the reflective underside can show them what lies beyond the corner.

He does not get a chance to see. All he feels is her small, rough fingers pressing between his own, and the quick, silent dash forward while the creature is looking away, and an impression of something not humanoid enough cut out against the overhead lights. And then they’re dashing past the dorms, past yet another corner, and he’s straining to force open the security hatch, arms burning and joints aching the way they hadn’t been yet, in this world.

“Go, go, go!” Fry’s telling him, pushing him in first, as if a civilian pilot would stand a fucking chance against whatever the hell that was, as if she hasn’t died for him once already, and then she’s dropping after him, and they’re running again.

There’s no moment of reprieve. No time to think. He hears “Riddick?” sobbed from where they just fell from, coming closer, and grasps Fry’s hand tighter as they race across the sub-level of the compound. They miss one turn, and then another, before darting into one of the med bays and out through the other exit.

He lets go of her hand only long enough to push several cots down to block the entrance, and then takes it again.

He’s not going to fucking lose her, this time.

“Move, move!” Riddick swears under his breath, hearing the click of nails where they shouldn’t be coming from, if there had only been one of them. One of the fuckers is inside, but where? Operation room? Autopsy?

“Riddick?”

No time.

No time to think. They have to move, keep moving, past yet another room, another corner, and he still can’t tell where the noise is coming from, but they need to get past it. Can’t afford not to.

“Riddick, help!”

Riddick pulls them down behind a low cabinet, heart pounding. That fucking voice is making him act like a dumb animal, panicky and flighty, and he can’t afford that. Can’t afford to fuck up here, with the proof of Carolyn’s sacrifice panting with her shoulder rubbing against his, reminding him that his life’s worth is not just his own.

He breathes in the scent of her sweat, imagined as it might be. “How does electricity work here?”

“Surprisingly well,” Fry says under her breath, “considering it doesn’t actually exist. This place is a part of your mind, Riddick. It works like your brain thinks it should.”

He takes a look at the control panel of the door locks. Considers it. “So I can rewire it.”

“If you can remember well enough what it should look like,” she says. Her hand is sweaty against his. He holds it tighter. “You walked the world out there. If your thoughts aren’t clear enough, that’s what the wires are going to be like. Same with engines, schematics, layouts.”

“Worth a try.”

She nods. Riddick rolls to the side, keeping the furniture as cover, just in case they’re in the line of sight of the creatures. It should be easy enough, he thinks as he tears apart the panel cover with the tools, to lock them in. Lock the beasts out, just long enough for them to run for the upper level again, and give them enough time to regroup.

Unless there’s another one coming in from the loading bay.

“Mr Riddick?” This time, the voice does not belong to a girl.

Fry’s already crawling to the other side of the entrance, giving him the sort of silent, wide-eyed look that says more than words ever could. He’s still wrist-deep in a tangle of wires - half of them shifting, changing colours, but he knows which ones he needs to get a hold of and those remain static - and they have no weapons, nothing but a half-baked plan, and whatever shit his shot-ass brain can conjure up from the good old times at Sigma-3 to outfit this place with.

And, apparently, he’s rewiring the door lock from the wrong side.

--

The soul eater crawls in slowly.

Deliberately.

It knows they cannot run forever.

Its shadow shows up long before it does, a festering growth in the flooring separating him from Fry. Behind them, on the open hallway somewhere and the rooms beyond, there’s another one chasing them down, perhaps just as lazily.

“Keep working on it,” Fry tells him, her voice a too-harsh, too-thin whisper. “Don’t stop, Riddick. Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

So he keeps at it. Every hair on the back of his neck is raising, nerves flaring and teeth gritting at giving his back so openly to an unknown threat. Sweat makes the screwdriver slip slightly in his palm, and the brief distraction is all it takes for it to fucking change shape into a jawbone shiv, which he’d be thankful for if it wasn’t putting them in an even worse situation than before. He grits his teeth. Forces himself to think of a screwdriver again. The sharp tip. The metal length. The non-conductive handle. The thing he fucking needs to fish out that wire.

“Mr Riddick,” the thing says, “My family?”

It sounds so much like a wounded, gasping Imam that Riddick has to force himself not to look. He focuses on the connections in front of him, every inch of his body vibrating with the effort. He preps the right wire.

“Not yet,” Fry breathes towards him. “Hold. Hold.”

But he doesn’t know how close they are, the sounds of the creature’s feet masked by its wheezing, desperate mimicry. He flicks his eyes back to look--

And the thing is looking straight at him.

Or it would be, if it had eyes. If it had any sort of features at all. If all it had for a face wasn’t an open, gaping maw, with fleshy appendages open around its black throat like the petals of a flower, ready to close in.

It takes another step. Another. It’s mapping out a steady, straight line right towards him, on top of human-like appendages with misshapen joints, as if there’s nothing else in the room to draw its attention.

It’s not humanoid at all, except in all the ways it could have been.

“Mr Riddick,” he hears in the Imam’s voice, coming from that bottomless mouth. “My family? My family?”

And then, from the very back of the hallway they just left, “Riddick? Help!”

“Hold,” Fry orders him, near-soundless yet unyielding, as the soul eater keeps closing in.

For a moment, he wonders if she’ll turn out not to have been Fry at all. If she’s like the creatures - something made up. Something to make him obedient, compliant, to lure him in. To make him prey.

And then she puts a hand to her clothed chest, and hits it twice. Fast.

Loud.

The creature’s head snaps to the side, flesh petals flaring, as if it’s trying to sniff her out.

Silence.

It turns to him again.

And Fry gets up, and begins to back out the door. Hits her chest again, twice in a row, and then twice more after a moment. The creature tilts its head. Raises it in her direction.

Follows.

A heartbeat, he realizes, as Fry - fucking Fry - keeps repeating that thumping noise, keeps leading the soul eater away. A fucking heartbeat.

He has half a mind to get the beast’s attention back on him. Get her to stop. He does not want Carolyn Fry’s death on his shoulders again: never did, not then and certainly not now. He will not stand to watch it happen again.

But he has to believe she has a plan.

Her eyes meet his, over the creature’s bony shoulders. Without his eyeshine to muddle out the colours, Carolyn’s gaze burns blue. Burns through him, eats at him, like fire. Like despair. Like death.

“Hold,” she mouths, and over her shoulder a second soul eater approaches.

“Riddick?” it trills curiously in Jack’s voice, as if determining whether she truly is its prey.

She’s not.

And when she stops thumping a moment after, both creatures pause, before turning back to him in eerie synchronization.

“Now!” she shouts, and dives to the side and down the hallway.

He obeys, unthinking. The distance is too long.

She’s not going to make it.

And the soul eaters, as if sensing the closing doors, run.

He snaps forward, shoulder against the door only long enough for her to slip inside, and there’s two hard collisions against the sturdy metal. The door shakes, rattles: the soul eaters ram against it, letting out muffled cries and pleas for help in the voices of the people he lost.

Fry’s already pushing the cabinets to cover the door, an added barricade. “Won’t hold them long,” she curses under her breath. “But it’ll have to do.”

“Leave it,” he barks out, still thinking of her in the hallway, still thinking of Fry with a razor-sharp tail between her ribs, “I’ll finish that. Go!”

“You’re the one we’re trying to save, not me!” But she slings the toolbag across her shoulder, running at his side as they get the hell away from that door. They fly up the crew entrance, and Riddick registers the way the doors are missing, how the edges of them look as if they’re fading back into the dream.

“They can do that?” he asks, grim acceptance already colouring his tone.

Fry grimaces right back. “They can do that.”

“Then it’ll hold them far less than we thought. How smart are these fuckers?”

She shakes her head. “They’ve never come for me before.”

They keep moving, voices low in case there are others. Her footsteps land exactly where his had been, near-silent. “But you knew they’d react to sound. To heartbeats. Instinct?”

Fry hesitates. “I’ve seen them,” she admits after a moment. “In the distance, hunting down souls. Not just the near-dead. Others like me.”

He grunts, looks around a corner. “So much for that Necro family’s happy second life.”

But Fry shakes her head. “I’m sure what that Necromonger saw was true, in some way,” she says, too certain. “At least while he stayed. The soul eaters wouldn’t have come for them if the plan was for the Necromonger to get out all along. To spread the word, start a death cult.”

“Which would bring in more souls to hunt,” he says slowly. A picture is beginning to form in his mind, one he doesn’t like. “They said the ‘verse welcomed life. Cherished it. Wanted it to prosper.”

She gives him a thin smile. “Any of your Necromonger pilgrims ever saw anyone here they hadn’t met before?”

“Not my Necromongers,” he says, which is only half a lie. It is, strangely, embarrassing to admit to having been their Lord Marshal to her, as short and unwanted as his reign might have been. Riddick hasn’t known embarrassment nearly since his Slam City days.

“That’s how this world works, Riddick.” Her voice is even lower now, as they approach an open door. “You stick around only for two reasons - you either have a bigger purpose, or someone out there still remembers you strongly enough for it to matter. If you’re neither, you’re just another soul for it to devour.”

“You’re saying that the afterlife - or those beasts, or something beyond them - plan out how to get more people to die.” It’s a grim thought.

“I’m saying,” she says, whisper-low, “if there is a god in this world, then it’s a hungry one.”

They fall silent, nearing the loading bay. He raises his hand to halt them, checks their corners.

Nothing.

Yet.

“Might not have time to raid the armoury,” he says grimly. “Might need to, anyway.”

“We still have the Glaucam,” she reminds him. “Whatever the hell you want it for.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Big boom.”

He still needs to rig it, though. Needs supplies from the hangar, assuming his mind is going to play nice and keep it as full as he remembers it being. There’s no time to do anything else, to barricade more than they already have, so they speed past the loading bay and drag shut the hangar doors behind them.

Paradoxically, despite the entire compound seemingly having been under the shifting sands, the hangar opens out to open air. The first taste of hope since they got in this place.

“Load up the Jet Hog,” he commands, already moving to open up a closer skiff. The guts of it swim and shift in his vision, before he works to steady his mind and remember the schematics, to remember where the ignition coil and the plugs are. Wires. Battery. He’s done this too many times to have to think about it too hard, and it pays off.

“Loaded!” he hears Fry shout in the distance. The Hog roars to life, defying gravity through the power of old metal and propulsion.

Just in time.

He loads up the bomb near the entrance. Strains to drag in the smaller skiffs to create a fence of sorts, muscles straining and bulking under the weight.

And then he opens the doors back up.

Just a bit.

“Riddick?”

“Rid-dick?”

“My family--”

“Old boy--”

“Richard?”

The multiplying voices are coming closer, uncomfortably fast. He starts the spark.

Starts running.

The eaters burst through the gates just as he hops over the back jet and behind Fry, the Hog flying forward almost before he can hold on right. And then they’re flying, flying for the outside, for the sands and the hellish world out there, and behind them, the world burns.

--

You keep what you kill.

--

_. Five

Riddick knows, without a doubt, that they are being followed.

With the amount of soul eaters that had been lurking in the compound, expecting that to be the end of it would be stupid. Pointless. Better to be prepared than not.

But it’s good to be out, dislodging shifting sands with the force of the jets. Whipping up a wind that hadn’t existed before, cooling down their bodies and sweat everywhere, except for where they’re joined - his front to her back, his hands at the join of her hips with her thighs, rucking up the fabric of her flight suit.

This Hog is not made to carry two. Fry had made the right choice, picking one without the weapons rack at the back, or perhaps disassembling it, hoping it would compensate for the extra height. Even smarter would have been to prep two, load them up if they’d had the time - but he can’t say he minds.

No, he’d rather keep Fry up close and personal. Within his line of sight. Watching his back, as he watches hers.

Riddick leans in, speaks low and gravelly in her ear, “Couldn’t get close to those, before.”

He can read the grim satisfaction in the lines of her back. “Which is why I’m driving.”

World didn’t expect me to have a guide out, he deduces from that. They’re flying straight out to the big pillars of plasma he’d tried to navigate to before, and for once they’re actually getting closer. Whatever they’re made of is moving, pounding down - upwards? downwards? - with unrelenting pressure, like a waterfall where the water can’t decide in which direction to go. It’s hard to look at for too long.

He puts his goggles back on, and presses his head against the back of Carolyn’s, instead. Focuses on the colour, on the faint dampness leftover from her sweat. He’s never cared about such details, before.

In the distance, the screaming comes again.

Fry holds on tighter to the control arms, hands clenching and unclenching uselessly. They’re already pushing the limits of the Hog’s speed.

Riddick chances a look behind them. In the shade of a budding copse of skeletal trees, many white, bony figures creep, humanoid arms and legs adapted to move on all fours. More than one have moved to the trees, hanging or crawling along them like spiders. And they’re fast. Faster than they had bothered being, before, in the compound. When they had thought the two of them to be trapped prey.

“Guns loaded?” is all he asks, the side of his head still pressing against Fry’s hair. Some of it flies into his mouth, and he shifts to move it back out.

“If you remember them being so,” she shouts back, the wind carrying her words.

Well. Worth a try.

He shifts them both forward, body heavy against hers. There’s a handgun right in the front, locked into its base below the control arms, and Riddick takes it, weights it in his hand. The miniguns in front would be better, he’s sure - but he won’t ask it of her to turn them around, to drive backwards in a speed-losing manoeuvre, all for the sake of weaponry which might not even fire. Which might not even cause damage.

It’s a matter of balance and core strength to get himself up, to swing around so that Fry’s back is now pressing against his, soul eaters in his line of sight. The handgun loads in his hand with a whine he still dreams of, when he bothers to remember his Company days. Used to be standard, before the design leaked out for merc use. The noise was done away with, not long after.

They’re getting closer.

“How are we looking?” he asks grimly. Not close enough to shoot. Not yet.

The tension in her voice is as perceptible as in his. “Getting closer.”

Not close enough here, either.

Riddick steadies his breathing. Holds.

Waits.

The first creature leaps past the others, in a bound greater than he thought they could make with that kind of twisted limbs, and he shoots it out of the air. It drops, rolling across the sand-turned-gravel beneath them, and starts running again.

He hates fighting like this, with no knowledge of his opponent and stakes higher than just his life. Could have been fun if he were on his own. A challenge.

Could have figured out how to put that sensitive hearing to good use. Could have figured out how they ate through the crew access’ door. Could have figured out the psychic impulse that fed them that particular, specific mimicry, use it against them.

Could have ended up dead and mauled in some corner of this foreign planet, like he’s always thought he’d end up. Maybe it’d even feel fair.

And then they’re coasting past a giant, silvery thing. It’s roaring, or it feels like it should be roaring, with the sheer pressure beating down on his eardrums, on his eyeballs, on the walls of his lungs. His heart feels like it’s going to give out; he grits his teeth tight, and keeps the gun steady.

“There’s got to be a way to cross somewhere,” Fry calls out, past the soundless noise. “The Hog can’t go in. Bridge?”

Riddick forces himself to shout back, “Why the fuck would there be a bridge?”

“We need a way out!”

“And since when,” he grinds out, “has this place been helpful to us?”

“It’s not about the world,” Fry yells. “It’s about you!”

He shoots back another creature, earning a too-human shriek for his troubles.

“Make it simpler,” he grunts.

“You have some control over it,” Fry shouts, “or the compound and the Hog wouldn’t exist. The landscape is shaping itself around you!”

“So what, this place is all blue, blue sky when I’m not around?” he barks. Another soul eater bounds closer, and his arm shakes from the pressure. He aims. Fires. Misses. Fires again. “Thought you said it went away!”

“It does!” She swerves closer to the river, the pressure nearly making him drop the gun. One of the creatures tumbles in, and doesn’t come back out. Fry swerves away again. “That’s why I’m saying! Bridge!”

But they don’t get the time to figure it out.

The pack is too close; Riddick is firing, but it’s clearly beyond whatever the memory of a gun can do. Two of the soul eaters leap forward, and then three after that, and then the Hog is sliding sideways on the bare rock ground with a grinding metal noise.

With Riddick’s leg trapped beneath it.

The world goes white-hot with pain. He yells out, voice lost in the roar of the broken jets, and he’s curling in on himself, instinct making him reach for a gun that isn’t there before he realizes--

“Don’t you touch that handle, Fry!”

They’re not coming for him.

There’s a faint ack-ack-ack- ing noise, like choked animal laughter, and again, “Handle, Fry!”

“Push, push, push!”

“Don’t you touch, Fry!”

“Academy best, Carolyn?”

“Ri-ddick?”

“Don’t you touch that handle!”

The broken Hog must be masking his heartbeats, enough that most of them bothered to find a second target, if they weren’t already chasing her.

That, or--

Or Fry is leading them away.

Again.

He pushes past the pain. Forces himself to bite back a shout, a metallic taste flooding his mouth, as he pushes the Hog’s chassis off his leg.

Don’t you dare, he thinks ferociously, rage burning in his chest. Don’t you fucking dare die for me again, Carolyn.

In the living world, the leg would be broken. Here, he can ignore it - pretend it away, set it down and grit his teeth so hard they creak, get himself to push off the ground to look beyond the Hog.

Where they’re crowding in on Fry.

And another one has caught his scent.

It tilts its petalled head, fleshy, toothy edges flaring. “Ri-ddick?”

Fuck.

“Past the river,” Fry gasps from where she’s crawling backwards, too slow to do her any good. One of them is already nosing at the ground near her feet, macabrely slow. “The entrance is past the river. Go! ”

“Handle, Fry!”

Like hell he is.

He barely catches the one bounding for him, its limbs more flexible than he’s used to on a beast of that size. They roll; Riddick’s side hits the Hog, the still-active boosters burning his ribs, his elbow, his back. He forces the thing back, and back again, unprepared for the way the petals open wide and he can see nothing down its endless throat.

All there is is pitch black.

“Ri-ddick?” it says again, in a childish voice from his juvie days, and then switches, Jack’s voice too defined, “Riddick, help!”

Riddick forces it to take his place near the boosters; hopes it will burn, even if part of his arm burns with it. The creature barely seems to register it, relentless; drops of blue-tinged drool slide past the opening of its throat, down to where one of his hands is holding on.

And it fucking burns.

“Agh!” He punches it by reflex, tries to roll. In the corner of his eye, he spots the gun. Too far.

He’s missing a shiv in his hand. A knife in his holster. He does not feel like Riddick without them; does not feel the terror of planets, the most wanted convict across too many galaxies, fighter and pilot and survivor.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t fucking try.

He punches, punches again. Keeps that open, empty maw the hell away from him. Wraps himself so he’s nearly hugging the beast, fingers digging into its soft flesh.

And starts tearing it apart.

It’s too quiet, when the beast finally falls. Too quiet, as its entrails sizzle fuel-rainbow tracks on the ground, past where he’s trying and failing to bring himself to his feet. The Hog is still roaring aimlessly, all raw engine noise with no thrust - probably a problem with the intake, the engineering side of his mind deduces - but beyond the world is silent.

His heart is in his throat. Carolyn. Carolyn.

She can’t be gone.

Not again.

His hands are also sizzling, he notes faintly as he finally brings himself up. Clear spots eaten through, no swelling, no blood. There’s a small hole on the side of his torso that wasn’t there before. It’s letting the sun through.

It would be concerning, if he could spare a thought to it at all.

“Carolyn,” he gasps out, leaning his weight on the Hog. “Carolyn.”

No response.

The soul eaters are fighting between themselves, more challenging and posturing than actual violence. One has long since separated itself from the conflict, head down. Eating at something.

Riddick bends down. Picks up the gun.

The next moments are blurry. Instinct. Animal side taking over, the way that has saved his life so many times before. He has a vague sense of shooting things away, of them bouncing back, of shooting them again, and again, and again. Of picking up a body much lighter than it should be, of cradling it on one of his arms. Of there being nowhere to go, except into the roaring plasma behind them.

Of slipping into the river of souls.

If that is what it is. It’s hard to think. Hard to form words. Harder, by the moment. Hard to remember his name. Who he is.

All he knows is that he has to hold on tight. Cling to-- something. Not let go. Something that smells like ash. Mechanical grease. Sweat. Fireproofing? There’s no fire here.

It’s getting hard to remember what fire is.

Maybe it’s that thing there, in his chest. Something burning. Hot. Painful. Something screaming, with many voices. Many, many voices, voices like his. It’s crowded in his chest. So many. Screaming. Dying. Unwilling to die this one last time.

The wrath of a people.

The will of a people.

There’s a burst. A light. A glow, blue, brilliant, burning, reminding him he has eyes, he has limbs, he has a body - a strong one, a trained one, one that should listen to him alone. He can move that body, fight the singing, hungry current, swim to a shore-that-isn’t-shore. Keep that something he has to hold on to pressed to himself, never-letting-go tight.

He makes it out. Spills out across that so-called shore, tired beyond tired, loose-limbed but for where he’s still holding on to what’s left of Carolyn Fry’s soul.

“Not for me,” he tells her, tells the air and the sand of this dark world, gossamer-soft and near-silent. “Not for me. Not again.”

An arm holds him back weakly. He does not dare look. Does not dare do anything but press his face against the roughness of short-shorn hair, but bring close and warm that memory-body with the little strength he can muster on his arms. She’s too light. Too light.

"I can’t die again, Riddick,” she breathes against the skin of his neck, voice already too faint. “I’m already dead. I’m just... fading."

“They didn’t go for you before,” he rasps, throat tight. She’s getting lighter in his arms, still. Like the soul eaters, or perhaps the river, are still feeding on her, tearing at all that remains. “Why now? Why-- not me.”

“I told you.” Her hand pats weakly at his chest. He thinks she meant it to be comforting. All it does is show him that she’s too weak for it to feel like anything more than a whisper against his skin. “People don’t stick around long here, if they’re forgotten. You’ve been here too long.”

Riddick’s frozen, unseeing. “You--”

“Never had many people who liked me.” Fry laughs faintly, weakly. “Not enough to remember, or mourn. Didn’t speak with my family, and never got close with my crews. With Jack and the Imam gone, you were the last.”

“The Threshold,” he remembers. “We’re close to the Threshold. Carolyn-- Carolyn, where is it?”

He’s already scrambling, rising on weak knees, holding tight. She’d gotten leached of colour, somewhen before making it out - the straw blonde of her hair, the blue of her eyes and flight suit, the healthy tone of her skin - and become a silvered, fraying thing, like cloth tearing in the wind. Like ice melting under the sun. Already two of her limbs are gone, and in the middle of her abdomen there’s a tearing, opening hole, shaped like the nightmare that never stopped dogging at his footsteps.

“The Threshold,” he snaps, urgent. “Where is it?”

But Fry’s already looking beyond him.

Beyond the Threshold.

It tears into the sky like a bad fracture: a kaleidoscope of colour shifts on its insides, fighting the pitch black spreading across the sky in a reverse black hole. Just like with the river, an immense pressure comes from its proximity - enough to make him want to kneel. Enough to make him want to look away.

In front of the Threshold stands a God.

Riddick knows him. Of course. Those three faces have been watching him for years now, from every corner of the Empire, from every conquest icon in every defeated world he’s journeyed across, from the helmet of the very armour he’s fought against and worn as Lord Marshal. He knows the Necroism creeds very well. One of them says there is a god for every ‘verse.

And this is the Underverse’s.

Fry knows it, too. “Riddick, listen to me,” she whispers urgently, her voice a death-rattle in his ears. “This world hasn’t won you over because you didn’t come in seeking it. You knew what it was, and you didn’t care. That’s your advantage. You don’t want anything it has to offer.”

“Yeah?” Riddick asks. In his hand is a knife-that-wasn’t-there, the Necro one he’d won on his first confrontation against them. His grip is tight. “Funny thing, Carolyn. Then why are you here?”

Her breath is a shallow thing against his neck, fast and shivery. “You didn’t come here for me.”

“See,” he says, head tilted, contemplating the god. “That might have been true when I got here. Now, I’m not so sure.”

“Riddick, what the fuck do you think--”

He’s already raising his voice. “Would’ve thought I paid enough of a toll for you.”

Fry goes quiet against his chest, death-still. The God is looking. The God is facing them with his three stern faces unmoved, and Riddick takes another step towards the Threshold.

“That’s right,” he says. His sight is shifting, changing - becoming more like it is under his eyeshine, as it’s meant to be. As he likes it to be. Like it belongs to himself. “Left a trail of blood across the galaxies, haven’t I? Good little killer, filling up your world. ‘M worth more to you out there.”

“What are you doing--” Fry is beating against his chest, which would have perhaps been more convincing if her arms had any actual hands to do it with. He adjusts his grip, working around a shoulder that’s almost eaten through. She’s fading fast.

He moves faster. Takes another step.

“You’re gonna let me out,” Riddick decides.

The God’s face shifts. Turns inquisitive. Almost angry.

The Threshold is mere steps away. An infinity of galaxies, of life, stretches beyond; Riddick spares a moment to ponder whether Vaako has made it out, or if he’ll have to return to hunt that shit-for-brains down as well.

In his chest, the mark of Furya’s wrath burns, silver and bright.

He came here for them.

He will leave here for them.

And for her.

It’s hard to remember a time he’s felt more like himself. Goggles at his forehead, the world’s colours filtered through his eyeshine, knife in hand. Someone he can still save, holding on tight. And suddenly, he knows the God’s words, and knows how he can use them against him. Riddick’s always liked an opponent he can understand.

And he understands death very, very well.

Riddick loosens his posture, Carolyn Fry's soul still slipping slowly through his hands, long past talking. Puts the knife away. The creature - the thing - the God - does not look away, and he stares right back into Death’s eyes. The three faces shift into a mirror of his own.

Fry’s death wound is open against his hand, wet with blood that is more memory than blood.

And he knows. He knows.

"You keep what you kill," he tells the God. The very foundations of the Necromonger Empire, learned firstly from this world-that-is-not-a-world. And in another life, in another time, in a lonely planet with eternal night, Carolyn Fry’s death had belonged to him.

You keep what you kill.

Carolyn Fry is a bundle of soul and heart, silver mist pressed up against the mark of the dead on his chest. And then, undisturbed, he takes both of them past the Threshold, and into the living universe.

Together.