Work Text:
Jack’s secret vice, other than going through cargo bins and seeing the stuff people shipped along with them, was dancing. She remembered watching her mother do it, when she was little and still going by the name “Audrey.” It’d been powerful, those fluid shakes and shivers, and it’d stuck with her how much she liked it.
Even before she realized that real dancing didn’t involve ripping your clothes off one by one for money.
The first time she’d tried hacking into a freighter’s systems to put on a little music while she killed the time from one ass-end of space to another, she’d got caught and booted. Then the system had woken up the ship’s security officer - and it should have told her something about the freighter and the cargo it carried that it had a fucking security officer on it. — and he’d diverted the ship’s course and tossed her off on Verseia Ten. He’d been a nice guy, mostly, a little old and grizzled, with sandy blond hair shot with gray and this beard that didn’t just stay on his chin. It looked like it’d eaten his chin. And neck. He had this funny accent, from Earth, he’d told her as they sat in the cockpit and waited. Jack still had never been to Earth, even after all that drifting. Way too much of a hop for her. It wouldn’t be so bad if she was a paying customer and got to cryo like the rest of ‘em, so that she didn’t really feel the months of travel the way she did when she was hiding out in cargo.
Dickson, that’d been his name. Dickson had imparted some truths to her. ‘Dickson’s Guide To Survive On the Outer Fringes,’ he called it. Jack had added the capitals all on her own. The rules had been pretty simple and all shit she already knew.
1. Don’t do anything fucking stupid and get caught.
2. If you are caught, play nice.
3. Learn to run really fucking fast.
Jack had a fourth rule, one she kept to herself: don’t let ‘em know everything you can do. That was Jack’s Guide to Survival On the Outer Fringes.
It’d been Marco, one of the bouncers at Double D’s, back on Pella, had been the one who’d taught her to shoot. “You’re too fucking scrawny to do any damage to a man with a knife or your fists, Audrey. And with the kinda shits your Ma brings home, you’d better have something,” Marco’d told her. So during the days when Jack’s Ma slept, Marco’d take her down to an empty field and taught her how to shoot. Rifles, pistols, machine guns. He covered it all.
Fat lotta a good it did her in the long run though. It wasn’t like she had a gun at home to keep her safe and for an eleven-year old stowaway, getting hold of one - let alone carrying it - was an invitation to trouble. She felt kinda stupid now ’cause she knew that if she’d just stopped to fucking think when she left and gone to Marco, some of the problems she had when she’d first left would’ve been solved. She would’ve had more than a month’s worth of food credits to her name, for one. And probably a gun.
Jack was also pretty sure that Marco would’ve told her to go as a boy. It’d taken a group of prospectors pawing at her and feeling up her hair on Berilla before she figured that one out. She’d been poor and desperate and the fucking port was on lockdown so she’d picked pockets to get money for food.
She’d gotten better at that, just as she’d got better at hacking into systems on ships for fun and amusement. It was easier with the new ones, of course. She couldn’t fly herself but they really made the pilot consoles and laid ‘em out as if pilots were dumb or couldn’t read.
Jack wasn’t all that hot at reading either but if she took her time and the words were actually in English she could figure it out.
It made the second time, when she’d worked up the nerve to try again second months and two hops after Dickson shoved her off, a hell of a lot easier. Or really, not easier, but she’d been more careful and learned from the mistakes she’d made the first time.
It figured all that had been on the Pseudopolis to listen to was classical shit. Jack found she actually kinda liked it, with all the strings and shit, but you just couldn’t dance to it. Not without feeling really weird.
Not that it wasn’t really weird to be a stowaway girl dressed as a boy bumming around the universe.
The ship she was on now, the Hunter-Gratzner — and what sorta fucked up name for a ship was that anyway? - had some good tunes. Real rock ‘n roll. Which was good ’cause this was a long trip, longer than she usually took so she needed something to do. She slept, she stole rations from the prospectors to eat, she danced, and sometimes she even tried reading books through the console.
What was really interesting was walking through the cabins and looking at the people. There was even a badge and a convict on board. He was huge and looked really fucking powerful. Big ass muscles and he was tied up, gagged and blindfolded.
Had to be a real badass.
So Jack had looked him up, curious about what he’d done to deserve it. Richard B. Riddick. She knew that name. Killer, famous for escaping from pretty much everywhere and killing everyone they sent after him.
And she was traveling in the same ship. That was pretty fucking cool. She’d spent some serious time watching him this trip. Just watching him breathing in and out, watching the small twitches everyone made while in cryo. Riddick was different; it was sorta like he was awake. She couldn’t really say why she thought that, she just did. His fingers moved, his legs twitched, he did everything the rest of them did. But his movements were slower. Maybe that was it. Slower. Precise.
Precise. Jack liked that word. Marco’d used it a lot when teaching her to shoot. “You gotta be precise, Audrey. If you can’t aim for shit, then you’ve got no cause to be around guns ‘less you get caught on the business end of it. Precise, Audrey. Don’t forget that.”
She never had. Jack always tried to be precise in everything she did. But she was a kid and most of the time things came out sloppy. But she learned from experience.
Which is why when the first fucking asteroid hit, she was as shocked as anyone. The route should’ve been clear.
And as she scrambled into an empty pod, hoping that it would be safe, Jack realized somewhere on the route she might have got sloppy. Not precise.
She pulled the door shut tight and tried to ignore the gnawing at her stomach that this might’ve been her fault.