The Sound and The furyan II
Dedicated to Rose, Kendra, Sita, Gymp, ???, PSL and all those who couldn't stand the wait.
The Saga Continues….
Disclaimer: Don't own Riddick, cause if I did, well you know me, as a Jack, I'd be in like Flynn…
Talos 4:
The storm clouds, swirling angrily in the sky, threatened to douse the beach with a cold penetrative rain. The temperature, dropping several degrees since she sat down on the cold stone wall, left her wondering how hard it would rain once the clouds could hold no more moisture.
Inhaling deeply, she ran her fingers through her newly cropped black hair enjoying the cooling breeze as it caressed her skin and calmed the animal inside her. She removed her shades and blinked allowing the salty spray to soothe her tired irritated eyes and listened to the sounds of the sea.
Booming peels of thunder crackled in the distance as a darkened figure crept silently towards her carrying something glinting in the deepening sky.
She scrunched up her nose and rolled her eyes disapprovingly as she scoffed at the attempt at stealth. "You should know better than that Layne."
The tall figure dressed in black stopped dead in his tracks and began to laugh, a deep low chuckle that caused her to smile. "Had to try little sister."
She rolled her eyes and shook her head as she held her sunglasses in her hand, "I may be blind, but my other senses work just fine."
Wrinkling her nose he said with a lopsided grin, "Apparently."
"You need a shower. Did you just get back from Baba Salim's?"
"Yes." He answered coming up to sit beside her. He watched as her sightless gray eyes stared out into the surf.
Next to her beside her mechanic's boots and socks was a collapsible white cane and when he sat she was playing with the hem of her shirt. "Did you want something Layne?"
"Just wondering if you're OK." He told her plainly. It was a bad day all around for everyone and she was always the most affected by the ominous anniversary. He scooted towards her, his broad shoulders nearly as big as her father's and his face as gentle and loving as their mother's. She inhaled again and let deep vibrations his voice caused in her eardrums to calm her.
Inside she was a torrent of rage. She wanted nothing more than to explode. Hate and fear ran through her bloodstream and she hated those feelings more than anything except what she got from everyone else that day, pity.
"I'm okay." She said sighing sadly. "It happened a long time ago. You can't change the past."
He placed his hand on hers and sighed as well both looking into the surf trying to cope with the loss…
The school bell rang as Rafe and her sister Yasmine were standing in their uniforms waiting to go to science lab. Among the fifteen other students Yasmine was always the center of attention. Even at nine she was beautiful. Looking nothing like her sister Raphaella, she had the eyes of all the others and captivated them with her laugh and outgoing personality.
Rafe, stood in line, her long black hair braided down her back, her backpack perched on her right arm while her twin laughed at a joke one of her friends had made.
Letting her mind drift, Rafe felt a sudden change in the air, something wasn't right. She looked up just in time to see a dozen armed guards come running down the hallway pulse weapons at the ready.
"Up against the fucken wall." A deep voiced man said shooting both teachers and four students in the hallway running towards her and her sister.
She couldn't stop staring. She remembered the way he moved his head, the smell of his body and the sound of his voice. His arms had tattoos on them and she memorized every detail, just like her father had taught her to do.
"Get down." she said grabbing her sister by the hand.
Students began running which Rafe knew from the daily lessons with her father, was a big mistake. Stay down when the dying starts Rafe, you'll live longer kid. He had told her… The gunman who had frightened her so much looked at her for a second and smiled, a smug knowing smile and she vowed if she lived he would feel the shiv she'd make deep in his back.
His gun went up and shot towards them and her eyes instinctively closed as she pulled Yasmine towards her and grimaced when she felt the sudden wetness and smelled blood.
"NO!" she choked but no sound came out. She gasped realizing the worst. Terrified she felt the hand in hers go limp and her heart began to pound knowing her sister had gotten hit. When she opened her eyes she saw Yasmine slumped against the wall….
Rafe's throat burned as the tears threatened to fall. Her eyes continued to stare into the murderer's as he blew her a kiss. She was covered in sticky blood and her hands fisted at her sides gave him a terrifying picture. "What are you looking at?" he growled staring back at her.
A dead man. She contended silently.
"Find the Riddick girls. They're worth more to me alive." He shouted looking at the other students. He had no idea he just killed half his payday.
Her face never forgot how his eyes darted towards the dead girls then through the crowd scanning it for his payday or the horror when an hour later after no one gave her up, the explosions by the security forces through the large windows behind him.
Speaking in Arabic, Rafe heard the gunmen harried and disorganized, frantic to find them. Then, as she sat huddled near the window against the body of her dead sister, praying for rescue, she looked up just in time to see a large flash grenade explode just over her head.
Windows above her blew apart and the last image she saw before the brilliant light and the pain in her head was the leader fleeing through a side door.
"Stop blaming yourself for not being there." She told her brother when she sensed his hand tensing in hers as he looked at her. He had been at home nursing his injuries from a more than brutal training session with his father and Baba Salim the day before. "She died quick, that's the way we all should go."
He laughed and told her she sounded just like their father. She smiled and took that as a compliment.
"It was seven years ago. I learned to accept it. Stop treating me like I'm gonna break." She told him keeping to herself the memories that had surfaced giving her the recollection of why the school had been attacked.
Fucken Mercs… she thought.
"It's hard Rafe." He told her looking straight ahead. She turned towards him and touched his cheek, her beautiful face looking at him with white sightless eyes.
"I know big brother. I know." She said putting her glasses back on and grabbing her boots. She walked extending her cane and left him wondering in silence how she got through the day and how he couldn't.
Dr. Raphaella Janis stood in the hallway of Jack and Riddick's beach house looking grave. Not only had she had to confirm the death of one of the twins, but the maiming of the other.
"I'm going to kill those motherfuckers one at a time." Riddick roared. Jack held him back as Kalifa and Salim brought Rafe back bloodied and silent.
His anguished cries of pain echoed throughout the large fortified beach house as her screams of pain abruptly ended causing her father already devastated by the death of one child, to fall to his knees in despair weeping uncontrollably. No one dared call him weak at that moment, Salim especially, knowing that pain all too well.
It took nearly an hour for Janis to rouse their daughter to full consciousness. The shock of her sister's murder and the massacre of the twenty students around her was so traumatic that she just sat silent, a heavy triage bandage covering her face.
It was so hard to be strong and Janis knew that she the only one that could have withstood the rage long enough to identify Yasmine. Choking down bitter tears she walked out of the room wiping her clean hands on a towel and walking to her friends, a sad look on her face.
"Janis give me good news." Jack pleaded her face tear stained as she ran her fingers through her hair.
Riddick stood behind her, holding her in a protective embrace his jaw set in a hard line, silent and grave.
"Good news is that Rafe is mostly unharmed, physically." She said and the relief was instantaneous.
"Mostly?" Riddick snarled speaking up louder than she would have liked to hear. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
He had Jack by the waist and rested his chin on her shoulder feeling as if he was going to die inside. Everyone including Janis felt so acutely ripped apart at the loss, and even with Layne at their side standing silent and grave, having watched his father fall apart and saying nothing, wanted the worst to have spared her.
That was never going to happen, not with the injuries that she sustained.
"Riddick. They used flash grenades, through that window we found her by. It killed three…men… and she bore the brunt of the pyro. The explosion was too close to her."
Jack tensed in Riddick's arms. "What are you saying?"
"The cuts and lacerations I can heal, but her eyes are something else." She said pausing to try and fortify herself for the rage they held so tenuously inside. "She's blind Jack. The grenade's pyro fried her lenses."
Riddick sat in the pilot's chair and rubbed his face in frustration. In the dimness of the bridge he growled remembering that day like it was yesterday. He remembered how strong Jack had been, how strong Layne had been, how he tried to keep it together but after seeing the mess they made of his little girl and what they did to his other little girl, he lost it.
He looked down at his knuckles and remembered how he put his hand through the wall and kept punching it until Kalifa and Salim had to pull him away, how his arm ached and felt leadened at his sides and how his eyes and throat burned with pain and sorrow and how he wanted to let the animal take over and raze everything in sight.
"My son," Salim had said running into the gym where he and Jack had been working out. Immediately he knew something was VERY wrong. "There has been another attack. They have taken the school. There are fatalities."
The color drained from Jack's face and he remembered grabbing her hand and running to a waiting car.
Riddick's chest felt tight and he hated that feeling. Images flooded his mind.
He remembered watching Jack run to their daughter's side and the relief seeing Rafe alive. Then he watched as Jack began to scream when Rafe, bloodied with the blood of her sister all over her and a bandage around her head covering the cuts on her face, shaking with unsurpassable grief.
"Rafe?" she said frantically touching her, "it's mommy, where's Yasmine?"
But Rafe said nothing just sat there quiet and still.
Time slowed for him when the medic attending to her injuries pointed towards the sheets that held the ones that didn't make it.
The cry that came out of his wife's mouth mimicked what he felt inside. Riddick's hands fisted at his sides. He hated the anniversary of the massacre,
"Here's her file." Riddick growled standing in a posh office on Talos Prime.
A dark skinned man sat behind a desk looking at the thick folder. After almost an hour the doctor finally spoke. "This last scan is good. Her optic nerves are intact. Generally they do not regenerate."
He remembered wanting to laugh out loud thanking his mother and father for giving him Furyan DNA.
"So," he gruffed trying not to get his hopes up. "Can you help her?"
"It'll be expensive." He contended looking down at the scans and putting them up to the light, the optic scans specifically.
Riddick didn't care what it cost.
"Have you ever heard of a surgical shine?" the doctor asked looking at Riddick sitting back with his goggles on.
Riddick started to laugh, loudly and unrestrained,the irony so acute he could have cut it with a knife. Suddenly the man behind the desk became nervous. Then Riddick took off his glasses and smirked at him.
"I guess you have then." He stammered.
Suddenly serious he spoke, "Will she see again?"
Closing the file and patting it. "Yes, but as you know it will be painful."
"Do it." he growled standing up. "Seven years is enough punishment. No one should have to live in the dark."
Riddick stood and shook hi hand and took the file. His face, unreadable remembered his first days in total darkness.
"I'll be there in a week, at this hotel under the name of Grove."
Riddick sat punching in the landing coordinates and sighed pushing down the gut wrenching sense of pain and loss. No one should ever have to bury a child. He tried to tell himself that he had to let it go, that his other children and his wife were still alive and that they needed him, but on that day, it was damn hard.
"Soon kid, soon." He promised aloud as he saw his home come into view and the clouds swirling in the distance.