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There was an implicit understanding among everyone, no matter creed, occupation, or origin; space was dangerous. That included life on planets, no matter how well colonised they had become since man had left their original home and spread across the stars.
Jack knew life for him was dangerous, but especially because of who he was. The human condition of civilisation, to be angry at what the majority deemed ‘other’, had always applied to him even before he knew he was trans. It was like the fates knew before he did, and so had given him the anxiety and dread to overcome by the time he was twelve. Or at least, he was a stubborn enough kid to think he had a grand fool-proof plan at twelve, a plan that couldn’t go awry.
Crash landing on a planet, being hunted by nocturnal alien creatures, and failing to understand why the adults around him just couldn’t be cool with the serial killer helping them was more than enough to qualify as a plan ‘going awry’.
Jack knew it was a miracle he was alive, knew it was directly tied to Riddick. For years Jack’s mind strayed back to Riddick because of it.
He couldn’t stop thinking about him as he arrived in New Mecca. He cried and grieved the events of the crash, of the death he had seen in such a short amount of time, and in those moments the Holy Man had provided some support, but the tears he had then never came when he thought of Riddick. For months, the escaped prisoner left him empty, complex feelings leaving him raw in the presence of new stability. He had been told at the time that it was normal, understandable, but those lifeless thoughts were a weird space within his mind that Jack just couldn’t understand at such an age.
When Jack had strayed from the Holy Man a couple of years later, he started picking up work as a mechanics assistant to afford food and board on his own. The people he worked for never questioned his thin frame and higher pitched voice, he was clearly the picture perfect example of a boy fledgling on becoming a man, and he earned more sympathy than leers. The money also helped for black market hormones, leaving Jack in the weirdest position of New Mecca’s underground; mingling with other drug users, bartering for clean needles, but instead of the high his fellow consumers received he got a golf ball sized lump of hormones injected into the cheek of his ass that left him sitting funny for days after. Sure, he was grateful, but also jealous of the blissed out looks and apparent ecstasy the people around him were experiencing, while he was just left sore.
In his mid to late teens, that’s when emotion started to return when he thought of Riddick. Things were less empty, and while he would never consider the events of the crash to be a good thing, the lighter moments circled back to the surface. Playing in the sand with the other boys, his meek self becoming a leader in the presence of even shier boys, the small attempts to emulate Riddick. As things started to change within him from the hormones, he pictured himself as a leaner Riddick for his future, prancing around space getting into big meaty fights and doing cool badass shit while being chased by mercs. It had motivated him to work out more, to get stronger, as though he could fight off an alien predator with his bare hands at just seventeen. All of it did help him out in some way though; the exercise and lifting made him better at the manual labour of his job, the muscles when paired with his puberty built him into a young man, both then led him to getting better work. Jack got to work on better rigs, got to earn more coin, which led to more spending money.
When he looked old enough to not get stopped by bartenders at the black markets, Jack started to drink. He had the money, and he was dumb enough to spend more than he should on drink after drink. He was young enough to pick fights, which fueled his off-kilter hero worshipping as he got better and better at taking punches and giving them to fellow drunks at back-alley bars. In his alcohol-addled mind this is what Riddick did, this is what would make him the badass fighter like Riddick. That wasn’t true of course, but at nineteen what else was he meant to think. The alcohol helped him sleep at night, it took away his night terrors and filled his uninhibited moments with living the power fantasy of the one guy who had saved his life years prior.
In his early twenties Jack got smarter. It was cheaper to get a bottle of whatever jet fuel that would get him drunk on any given night than going to a bar, saving his money. In turn, that saved his ass from fighting way more often too. The alcohol Jack couldn’t give up, if only to keep his mind clear to sleep, but in between honest work and running errands, Jack started to learn how to actually fight. It was all underground black market runs, but that didn’t bother Jack. New Mecca was for the holy, but people lived in the city; if fighting and drinking and drugs and everything else that made you human was frowned upon, humanity would still find a way to facilitate it in their own backyard. In the back of his mind Jack knew he was comparing these old soldiers to the skill of his favourite idolised killer, knew that they weren’t up to his gold standard, but it was something. It was technique, tricks, wisdom only a survivor could provide. Jack could use it, he could learn from it all.
His connections led to him finding better paying gigs, people of the black market willing to trust the kid that spent most of his time entertaining people’s uncles and grandfathers by learning their old soldier training, than some random off the streets. Jack quickly learned he was a great flyer, if not an adrenaline junkie when it came to evasive manoeuvres. His style worked for the people paying him, as long as he got the job done, and when on crews he was the lifesaver for patching on-board problems mid dogfight.
Life was good. It was good enough for someone like him; a nobody orphan, survivor of a crash landing horror. He had money, his body was on his side now, he could fight and fly and drink and brawl.
Riddick haunted him though. Jack had experienced enough now to recognise that he was probably idolising the wrong guy, but it was a pedestal that couldn’t fall in his mind. Frequently his mind would stray as he laid horizontal, mind foggy enough to not care, but thinking about being a weird Riddick clone fighting off mercs and living solo in alien wilderness. Jack figured if Riddick wasn’t doing that now himself, he was in some merc’s cage letting them sweat before busting out and killing their asses. Something that felt appropriate to what Jack had learned about Riddick a decade ago.
Jack couldn’t know if Riddick would be proud that he had somehow stayed alive, or maybe at least hadn’t fallen to being a human trophy hunter like the mercs that hunted him. Maybe the man would have been disappointed in him, becoming a black market runner instead of an outlaw like him, a man who hadn’t secured 5 deaths under his belt already. Riddick was truly gone from his life by now, Jack was hung up on a man that probably hadn’t thought of him since dropping him off in a shipping lane with the Holy Man, but the thoughts never left him. If Riddick himself was not already dead, Jack was probably dead to Riddick’s thoughts well and truly by now, more than a decade after.