Animalis

Disclaimer: See Chapter One.
Rating: Hard R for frottage, language, violence and minor character deaths.
Beta: damnednforsaken
Word Count: 4920
Author’s Note: Sorry this took so long, my beta is completely swamped with school right now, a predicament that i find myself in as well, so the slow update couldn’t be helped. The is one more chapter after this one, so we’re almost at the end… but good news is that i have begun plotting out the sequel which i am anticipating being much longer than Animalis. *grins* Okay, enjoy the chapter and remember reviews are love people!

Riddick leaned against Harry, pressing their bodies together as his beast purred in pleasure at the feel of his mate against him. Harry clung to Riddick, his legs and arms wrapped around Riddick’s larger body, holding tight unwilling to let go yet.

He nuzzled the soft flesh of Harry’s throat and licked the newly bitten mark on his mate’s neck. A smug, self-satisfied grin was on his face seeing his claiming mark on such a beautiful body, one that belonged to him in every way. Riddick wanted nothing more than to rip their clothes off their bodies and explore his tiny mate’s body, to lick, kiss, and bite. He wanted to thrust inside him and never leave, wanted to cum inside the hot tight walls of Harry’s body and mark it with his seed, and wanted to make sure that nobody ever doubted to whom this amazing being in his arms belonged.

In the distance, though, Riddick could hear the other survivors and knew he wouldn’t have the time to do anything more than slip in and out, not exactly the way he wanted to treat his mate. Anyone could walk up to them at any second, though… Riddick hadn’t been the type to let that thought bother him in the past. A quick tumble in a dark alley had been fine with him; he would found his pleasure and gave it to his partner and then he left. Harry was different than anyone Riddick had ever been with because he was his mate, and even if he never cared about letting his partner be seen out in the open before, something deep inside of him growled at the thought of anyone seeing what was his alone. The beast took an issue with his mate’s body being on display. Riddick felt a low, territorial growl rumble from deep in his chest at the thought of anybody else seeing his mate without his clothes.

Harry laughed, his breath coming out in warm gusts as he spoke against Riddick’s ear with a big smile on his face, “What are you thinking about? I can smell the ‘HE’S MINE!’ scent coming off of you in waves.”

Riddick gave a gruff snort and returned to nuzzling Harry’s neck. “Was thinking about ripping off all our clothes and slipping inside this hot little body, but…”

“Ahhh, you want me, but you don’t want anyone else to see the goods… I get it. You alphas are so possessive…” Harry heaved a large, put upon sigh while pressing his face into Riddick’s muscled shoulder with an infectiously happy grin on his face. “I guess I can wait.”

An answering rumble from Riddick made Harry’s smile get even bigger. For the last year and a half, Harry had lived with vague images or feelings about what his mate was like, wishing every day that that would be the day that they finally found each other. Now that he had found his mate, Harry was both elated and scared. It was such a gift to be in his mate’s arms and to have his scent and his mark on his body, but he could see a barren planet all round them and smell the creatures underground just waiting for the dark to come so they could feast. It wasn’t such a great place to finally meet his mate.

Now, Harry could feel his body slowly preparing itself for his mate, getting ready for the mating heat that would ensure a future generation. Harry could feel the tingle of magic at his mate’s touch and knew that whatever Riddick’s species had become, they had started out with magic in their blood. The magic had faded away some, but the rest had turned inward, changing and adapting to a new host. Harry could almost feel the crackle of magic on his fingers as they glided over Riddick’s skin. The magic within Riddick’s body was similar to Harry’s, but different enough that it wasn’t as easily accessible as Harry’s was. It had evolved to be used in different ways and Harry wondered what those were. Whatever magic Riddick had in his body was powerful in its own right, however, and with Harry’s own strong magical core, their children would more than likely be very powerful.

“You smell a little different than you did when I first found you,” Riddick said absently as he pressed a kiss to the skin just under Harry’s jaw line. “Sweeter…”

“Er… Well, now that I’ve met you, my body is getting ready to go into mating heat.” Harry said as a rosy blush appeared on his cheeks. He had known about it since his seventeenth birthday, but the fact that his body would go into mating heat and bear children was still a slightly strange and embarrassing fact of his biology. “Nekomatas are divided into two sub-species, dominants and submissives… Um, as a submissive I am the one to um…” Harry’s blush got a few shades darker before he continued, “to have our children. Now that I’ve met you, my dominant, my body knows it’s nearly time to mate… and it’s getting ready to conceive. It won’t go into heat until I feel safe and secure, so we don’t have to worry about it happening right away, but its getting ready for when I do feel safe…”

Riddick hadn’t thought that he could find his mate any more appealing than he had, but seeing him stumble over his words and blush like a school boy… Damn, was he lucky. “Huh,” was all he said.

“What? What’s the ‘huh’ about? Aren’t you surprised about me being able to have children?” Harry asked with a confused frown.

“Not really… males have been having kids for a long time. It’s not as common as females getting knocked up, but it’s not taboo. Especially with males that aren’t 100 percent human,” Riddick said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Huh,” Harry said with a smile.

RHRHRHRHRHRHRH

“Thirsty?” Harry asked as they trudged along in the back of the group on their way to the settlement.

From beside him Riddick was sweating under the heat of the three suns in the sky. He nodded and then quirked an eyebrow when Harry transfigured a galleon from his pocket into a cup and said “Aguamenti.” Water shot from his wand and began to fill the cup. “Here, if you want more just tell me… Jack, Ali, could you come here for a second.”

He began pulling out a few more galleons and transfigured them as the group began to notice what he was doing. “Sorry, I didn’t think about this earlier,” he said apologetically.

Soon the whole group had had a cup of water in their hands after Remus and Sirius began doing some transfiguring and spells of their own. Jack and Ali had handed out the water cups as Harry helped Shazza pour a few drops of water into Zeke’s mouth to try and keep him from getting dehydrated. Harry performed the health check spell again and quietly sighed. Zeke’s body wasn’t recovering; it was getting worse. He’d lost too much blood before Harry healed him, and Harry didn’t think his body would hang on for very much longer. A couple of hours was the most they could hope for.

Once everyone had their fill of water, they were back to walking again.

“So Riddick, tell us a little about yourself,” Remus said after a while. He caught his godson’s mate’s eye and made sure that the man knew what he was really asking about. Now was as good a time as any to start sizing up the man who was his godson’s mate.

Beside Riddick Harry’s steps faltered for a second at his godfather’s words. He had known that Remus and Sirius wouldn’t just accept his mate without making sure he was worthy of Harry and he knew that Riddick would measure up, but he still had a small worry that his godfathers wouldn’t approve of his mate.

“Don’t know much about where I come from, ‘cept that I’m a Furyan and that some dictator decided to pretty much wipe out my species because of some personal vendetta, including my parents. I survived, lived on the streets.” He shrugged as he looked out at the desert. Riddick wasn’t the type to have long heart to heart conversations, but he knew that if he wanted to be accepted as Harry’s mate by his family he needed to show that he wasn’t a threat to them so he suffered through it.

“Joined the Company when I got older, became a soldier for hire. Moved up in the ranks until I was sent to enforce security on Sigma 3's moon, didn’t like the way they treated people, pretty much slave labor.” Riddick scowled a bit at the memory of the workers on that moon and how he had helped the Company restrict and enslave them for several years. Riddick had finally given in to the urging of his conscience and had tried to show the Company what was happening to their “employees”, thinking naively that the mistreatment had been confined to the director of the facility and his staff. Only he’d found out how corrupt the company really was and got a life sentence for his troubles.

“Tried to stop it and got sent to the slam for my efforts, escaped and ran… the Company doesn’t like loose ends, especially ones that know things they’d rather kept secret, so they put a big bounty on my head and mercs like Johns have been comin’ for me ever since. The kills Johns talked about… those were the merc’s that didn’t know to leave well enough alone. Not saying I ain’t killed others, but I ain’t an all out psychopathic murderer like Johns claims either.”

Riddick didn’t claim to be a good man, but he wasn’t a bad man. Every kill he took had been as either a soldier or in self defense. He’d never killed a woman or child and he never would. The Furyan in him wouldn’t go after the ones weaker than him; it just wasn’t in his DNA. He had a code, maybe it wasn’t as finely tuned as others, but there were lines he wouldn’t cross.

Remus sniffed the air around him and nodded silently. It was times like this when Remus found his lycanthropy curse useful. His finely honed senses could smell lies and emotions, he could hear erratic beats of a heart or the hitched breaths of a target. Given enough information he could tell if a person was lying, why and what they were feelings when they lied. Though Riddick hadn’t told them everything, Remus knew the man had told them the truth and he felt a sense of guilt for the people on the moon and anger at the Company that had enslaved them.

Once they were in a better situation, he would get to know his godson’s mate better, but for now the man had gained his trust with the short, but honest speech. Riddick had known exactly what questions Remus had wanted to ask and had supplied the answers to them. The man wasn’t a murderer, at least not in Remus’s eyes, and he had enough of a moral code to try and change a wrong he saw in his world. Knowing those things Remus felt assured enough to allow the man to be a part of Harry’s life.

From beside his mate, Sirius saw Remus’ body relax just a little bit, the wolf in him having accepted Riddick into the family. He looked over to his godson and saw a small smile on his young face and couldn’t help his grin. He had truly begun to worry about Harry over the last few months as he got weaker and weaker because he still hadn’t found his mate. Now he had found Riddick, and Sirius could already smell and see that Harry was doing better in just the short amount of time since they had met. Harry’s magic was coming back slowly but surely and the slight grayish tinge that had started to show on Harry’s skin was completely gone. Harry’s body had accepted its mate and judging by the flesh bite mark on Harry’s neck, so had Riddick.

Sirius felt his breath catch at the memory the news evoked; he still remembered vividly when Remus had marked him just a few weeks into their seventh year at Hogwarts. They had spent the entire night in the Room of Requirement learning about each other’s bodies. When Remus had been inside of him, pounding away, causing screams of pleasure to erupt from Sirius’ lips, Remus had bitten into his neck and had cum inside his body, marking and claiming him as his mate. The years after that hadn’t been so great with the war and his being sent to Azkaban, but that night was still one of the happiest he had ever had.

Remus turned to Sirius when he smelt the waves of lust and happiness roll off his mate and quirked an eyebrow and grinned.

“Oh shove off. Like their mating hasn’t brought back memories of our mating for you too,” Sirius said sarcastically, though he was unable to hold back the smile on his face.

Harry laughed at his godfathers, then his head turned as a flash of light drew his eyes towards it. After three hours of walking, they had finally reached the settlement. In the distance he could see a small group of metal buildings. They looked old and unused with small mounds of sand gathered against some of the buildings and ripped and ragged material hung from clothes lines and over old equipment. It was obvious no one had used it in a long time.

When they finally reached the settlement, Harry pulled out the power cell he had shrunk and put in his pocket a few hours ago. Resizing it he felt himself flush when Riddick picked up the heavy power cell like it weighed nothing and took it into the skiff for Fry and Shazza to hookup.

Coming out of the skiff Riddick threaded the fingers of his right hand through one of Harry’s and drew him off to go look around the settlement. The place smelled old and unused with the stench of death and decay permeated from every corner of the place, and Harry had to wonder what happened to the people. Why had they left so many things behind? In most of the buildings it looked as if the settlers had just stepped away for a moment and then never come back. It was disturbingly like an old ghost town.

“Do you actually think these people got rescued like Fry and the group seems to think?” Harry asked skeptically as Riddick pushed him up against the side of a building towards the edge of the settlement.

Pressing his body against the much smaller one in his arms, Riddick nuzzled his mates neck and said, “They’re dead. They left their clothes on the hooks, photos on the walls. The skiff is prepped and ready; you don’t prep an emergency skiff unless there’s a fuckin’ emergency.”

“Yeah…” Harry agreed and then giggled as Riddick lifted him up in his arms. Harry raised his legs to wrap around his mate’s waist and sighed in bliss as Riddick started trailing kisses up his neck towards his mouth. Linking his arms around Riddick’s neck, Harry bared his neck for better access.

Riddick growled as he licked a drop of sweat that slowly ran down Harry neck. “Want you on a bed on your back, under me and wrapped around my cock… Want you screaming my name as I cum inside you…”

Harry keened at the words and felt a spark of disappointment that he wouldn’t be able to give his mate what he wanted, what they both needed to complete their bond. He hated being on this barren planet, surrounded by death and ravenous creatures that were just waiting for the lights to go out.

“Oh god, Riddick,” Harry whispered as he turned his head, pressing his mouth to Riddick’s and licking his mate’s lips. He mewled when Riddick pushed his tongue inside his mouth and twirled the appendage around Harry’s. They slid erotically together, mimicking the act that they so desperately wanted but were unable to perform. Riddick began slowly thrusting up against Harry’s body, their cocks rubbing together as the friction of their pants increased the pleasure.

“When we get off this rock, I’m gonna fuck you for days. Want my scent to cover every inch of your body, cum inside your ass and on your skin, don’t want nobody to think you belong to anybody but me,” Riddick growled as he began thrusting harder and faster, rocking their cocks against each other.

He felt Harry’s split tail wrap around each of his thighs, the tails squeezing tightly with every thrust of their bodies. Riddick had never thought of tails as erotic, but judging by the spike in pleasure at their touch, he was soon going to have a tail fetish to add to the list.

“Yes,” purred Harry as he ran one of his hands over Riddick’s shaved head, smiling around Riddick mouth when Riddick growled in pleasure at the touch. “Please… Riddick… Oh, please…”

Harry didn’t even know what he was begging for, only that he felt like he was on fire, pleasure coursing through every vein in his body. He was coming closer and closer to heaven and he wanted Riddick to take him there.

“I got you Kitten, let go…” Riddick breathed against his mate’s lips as he thrust hard and fast, pressing Harry up against the wall of the building. As he felt his balls draw up tight, readying for release, Riddick turned and bit into Harry’s neck again, reopening the claiming mark once again.

Harry gave a muffled scream into Riddick’s shoulder as he felt himself tumble over into orgasm, flooding his pants with his cum. Riddick pulled back and watched his mate go over the edge, his head thrown back in ecstasy. He’d never seen anything more beautiful in life. Giving three more thrusts against the tiny body of his mate, Riddick roared in triumph as he shook with release.

As he leaned against his mate, his body flooded with pleasure with every breath he took, Riddick felt Harry laugh against him. Looking up from where he had his face pressed into his mate’s neck, Riddick quirked and eyebrow in question.

“Merlin, that was amazing, so much better than I’d ever dreamed,” Harry whispered as he leaned in and kissed Riddick’s jaw, licking the slightly salty skin in bliss.

Riddick gave him a smug grin and then with one last kiss, leaned back and let Harry down to stand on his own. He saw Harry pull out his wand and say “Scourgify” as he pointed it at Riddick’s crotch. Riddick shivered a bit as he felt the cooling cum in his pants disappear. “Handy.”

Harry laughed and did the spell on himself and then put his wand away again.

As they walked back to the main part of the settlement, Harry could smell Jack and Ali following them, stalking them. Harry smiled and ignored it, letting them continue their game unaware that they had been spotted. As they reached a larger domed building Harry felt something crack slightly as he took a step. Backing up he kneeled down in the dirt and saw a pair of old glasses half buried in the dirt and not too much further was a cracked hand light. Harry frowned as he picked them up. They were just outside of the large buildings doors…

Riddick tried to open the doors, but they didn’t open. From inside he could hear the light banging of chains keeping it closed. Looking in the window on the door, he saw a large room filled with equipment, but not much else. Lifting a tarp slightly to look above the doors, he saw the words “Coring Room.”

“Come on. Let’s go see if Fry’s got the skiff working yet,” Harry said as he dropped the items in his hand and stood up.

Riddick nodded, and as he pulled his hand away, the tarp went with it, exposing Jack who was hiding on the roof under it. She was wearing a pair of old goggles over her eyes and had shaved her head to look like Riddick. She gasped in surprise at being found and looked at Riddick and Harry, who was smiling slightly.

“Come on, Jack; you thirsty?” Harry asked as Jack crawled down off of the building. As she did, Harry looked at where she had been hiding and saw some kind of solar machine begin to whirl as it powered up. Looking around, he didn’t see Ali with her. “Where’s Ali?”

Jack shrugged her shoulders and pointed to a small hole in the side of the building where he must have crawled in. Harry stopped for a second and let his senses take over to try and find the younger boy. He heard Ali’s heart beat from inside the coring room, and he smelt some of the creatures a second later.

“Shit!” Harry cried as he ran to the hole and quickly crawled inside with Riddick and Jack not far behind him.

Standing up, Harry looked around for the boy and saw him looking around. Harry let his sight sharpen in the dark and looked up to see a few dozen smaller creatures sleeping up high in the rafters. “Ali!” Harry whispered. The boy turned at Harry’s voice with a frown. “Come here.”

Ali made his way over to them just as the roof started to spilt open letting the bright sunlight into the dark room. The light quickly grew from just one small beam of light to a brightness that crept into every crevice of the room. As the light hit the creatures they shrieked in pain and began to fly up and circled around out of the light. Ali and Jack cried out as they noticed the creatures, attracting the creatures’ attention. The flock swooped and swirled, diving sharply towards them as Riddick put himself in front of Harry and the kids, trying to protect them. Harry whipped out his wand and, pointing it over Riddick’s shoulder towards the coming flock, cried, “LUMOS MAXIMA!” A bright burst of light erupted from his wand, lighting the area around them in an almost blinding light.

The flock turned away with shrieks of pain as drops of blue blood fell to the dirt below them. They circled back towards the center of the room where they dove down into a large enclosure that held a coring shaft at the center. They disappeared with shrieks echoing from within the shaft.

“Reducto!” Harry yelled as he pointed his wand at the entrance doors. The chains locking the doors burst into a thousand pieces and Harry said, “Jack, Ali go outside now.”

The two nodded their heads quickly and ran outside into the sunlight. Riddick walked up to the deep shaft and looked down it to see a bunch of skeletons at the bottom. From the door, the rest of the group came running in, Johns with his weapon drawn.

“What happened?” asked Fry as she looked around.

“Ali crawled in here, and we went after him just as those rafter doors opened up. The light shined on a bunch of the creatures, though these were smaller, and they tried to attack before flying down into this,” Harry explained as he pointed into the coring shaft.

One by one, everyone came to stand around it and look in. Johns activated a glow stick and threw it down into the hole. As it hit the bottom, it illuminated the skeletons of the dead settlers.

“Other buildings weren’t secure so they ran in here; heaviest doors, thought they’d be safe inside, but they forgot to lock the cellar,” Riddick said, his deep rumbling voice echoing down into the shaft.

Fry turned away at the sight of so many dead people, even some that were small enough that they had to have been children. There was a hitch in her breath as she walked away and started to look around.

Soon everyone else turned away from the sight of the skeletons except Suleiman who couldn’t stop looking at the horrible sight. He leaned down farther in the hole feeling tears leek out of his eyes at the mounting terror of their situation. His hand slipped as he rested it in a blue-ish liquid on the side and he fell forwards with a cry. Shazza who had been just a few feet away, ran to the shaft and half flung herself down into it to catch him. She caught one of his hands and tried to pull him up, but she lost her footing as well and tipped over into the shaft with a scream. Hanging down the shaft still holding onto Suleiman, she gripped her free hand onto the ledge of the shaft just as Riddick appeared at the hole. He grabbed her arm and began to pull her up as loud grunts of effort slipped from his lips.

“Suleiman!” cried Imam as he ran towards the shaft and tried to pull the two up with Riddick.

Suleiman screamed from within the hole, his cries echoing around him as he tried to climb up Shazza, but only succeeded in causing her to loose her grip on the ledge and slip just a little bit farther down the hole, only Riddick and Imam keeping them from falling. Their screams echoed far down into the shaft, awakening a large creature who quickly made its way through the tunnels towards the bottom of the shaft, eager for a meal to quench its hunger.

“Shazza, hold on! We’ve got to pull them up now; something’s coming!” Harry yelled as he, too, grabbed on to Shazza as they began lifting them up, but the weight of two people, one of whom was struggling frantically, wasn’t easy to pull up quickly.

Just as they started getting Shazza’s head above the edge, something powerful pulled them back down again. Suleiman’s screams took on a gurgling sound as the creature attacked him, his hands trying without hope to climb up Shazza once more. With a final powerful pull from the creature, they lost their grip on Shazza, and Harry watched in horror as she fell down the long hole, her screams echoing with her. Harry turned away just as he saw the creature pierce her in the chest with its tail and her screams abruptly ceased.

“Oh god,” whispered Harry brokenly, and then he pulled his wand from his pocket and pointed it far into the hole as he shouted, “LUMOS MAXIMA!!! You fuckers!!” A powerful shaft of light burst out of his wand and down into the hole, funneling into the surrounding tunnels. Piercing shrieks echoed from below ground as the light hit the creatures.

Harry breathed raggedly as he ended the spell after a few minutes, hearing the creatures scurry farther into the network of tunnels away from the light, as Riddick held him in his arms. Turning, he pressed his face to Riddick’s chest with a muffled sob as tears soaked into his mate’s shirt. For a while, all that could be heard were Harry’s muffled sobs and Imam’s cries for his child. A depressingly heavy feeling settled over them all, emphasizing the bleakness of their situation.

Fry felt tears falls from her eyes and she tried to wipe them away with shaking hands. She heard Imam calling for his child in broken sobs, and she turned away and looked for anything to keep her mind off of the last look in Shazza’s eyes before she was pulled down. Fry’s eyes fell on a group of coring samples, and she walked to them and began looking. They were all dated in sequential order and the last was dated twenty-two years ago. “Twenty-two years ago,” she whispered in a questioning voice.

From a spot a few feet away, Johns turned to her and said, “What? Does that means something?”

Fry frowned. “Maybe… The last one is dated twenty-two years ago this month.” She bit her lip as she tried to figure out what the nagging voice in the back of her head said was wrong. Then a thought hit her and she turned around and ran out of the coring room with half the group following her after her sudden departure.

Entering a small building nearby, Fry walked to a scaled model of the local solar system and set it back to zero years. Then she started rotating the model, the three suns and the three planets revolved around each other and each planet had constant sunlight from the suns until the twenty second year. Then the solar system was situated so perfectly that the smallest planet, the one they were on, was put into total darkness by the other two as they blocked the sunlight on either side of the planet.

“An eclipse…” Fry breathed as she continued to rotate the model for close to another year, but the alignment stayed in the same position… it was going to last for a long time.

“You’re not afraid of the dark are you?” Riddick rumbled with a half grin as he tucked Harry into his side.