Fic Amnesty?
I'm not actually 100% sure of when, where and how one decides to request fic amnesty, but dsudis and familyarchives did it recently, and I've been meaning to do it... This is basically just me admitting that I'm probably never writing Firefly again, and here, look at what I didn't write.
Here lies a Firefly au in which there is a circus.
Circus Freaks
When River Tam told her brother she was going to run away and join the circus, he'd thought she was kidding. And when she did run away, he went after her, because that's what the elder brother is supposed to do in these situations.
It took him two years to find her. At first, he didn't believe her about the circus. It just wasn't very likely. She wrote him a coded letter before she left: "I'm leaving. They're hurting us." In the postscript: "Will write when I find work."
Two months later he received a rambling letter about the quality of food aboard long-distance space transports, a letter which included the phrase: "I am doing high wire acts with a traveling circus."
He had thought that was a code as well.
The Feds had thought so, too. They confiscated the letter and came to question him every week for a year. There was a code all right, one that led the Feds on a merry chase from the Core to the Rim and back again.
The constant Fed interference made it hard to search for River, and in the meantime, quiet investigations revealed that a small underground movement was working against the very program that River had fled. What Simon learned was enough to make him realize River had done the right thing, and to make him ashamed she hadn't asked for his help.
But River always had had the knack for getting herself out of trouble just as fast as she'd gotten herself into it.
After her escape, her letters were full of vivid stories of things they had never done as children, and slowly, Dr. Simon Tam came to realize that there was a secondary code in play, one that anyone who didn't know River would never, ever be able to break. The code was the choreography for ballet, written in an obscure baby-talk dialect of Mandarin that she had made up when she was four, which transliterated into ridiculous English-language puns. At first, Simon thought he was insane, and then maybe she was insane, but as time went on he realized that it wasn't insanity.
He didn't try to tell his parents; his parents had refused to talk about River at all since she had disgraced them by running off. He wondered how their weekly meetings about that with the Feds went; he wondered if Regan Tam's perfect facade of denial ever cracked in the face of the questions Lawman Dobson asked.
When River finally told him where she was, about a year after the Fed heat had let up, he packed a bag and left that night.
#
"Tell me you're the goose supplier for this moon," said a man wearing a garish, floral print shirt and a fake red nose.
"I'm, uh, not," Simon said.
"Gorram it! Maaaaaal!" The man, fortunately, turned away to voice this enormous bellow behind him, into the large cargo hold of the antiquated Firefly-class ship. "Mal!" the sandy-haired man said angrily. "How in Hades am I supposed to juggle goslings when there are no goslings to be had?"
"You'll have to make do," said a man wearing the traditional red coat of a ringmaster. "Use what you got."
"What I've got is impossible," the clown-man muttered darkly.
"Look, Jayne and I'll go on in and see if Badger has a line on goslings, but... I wouldn't count on it."
"Jayne," the clown-man said, and then swore a blue streak in Mandarin. His accent was a bit less refined that Simon was used to, but there was an implication that Jayne was a gosling-gobbling nuisance of the highest order.
"Excuse me," Simon said, trying to break into the conversation, which seemed mostly one-sided. Ringmaster Mal was rather taciturn, or at least, uninterested in the clown-man's ramblings.
"And he ate Flossie, Mal! She was my best layer--"
"Wash. Really. I don't have time for this. Curtain is in two hours, and I will do my best to make sure you have baby geese, but really, I have bigger fish to fry."
"Did I mention he fried Flossie's eggs, too? I would have goslings right now if he hadn't gotten peckish in the middle of the night out near the Rim--but no..."
"Wash. Later!" the ringmaster said, and turned to Simon. "What's your business? Box office don't open 'til eight o'clock sharp, plenty of tickets, until then--"
"I'm looking for River Tam," Simon said, thankful that his dark glasses hid parts of what was, no doubt, a horrified expression.
Wash-the-Clown stopped ranting and stared at Simon, and Mal-the-Ringmaster got a rather opaque look. "No one here by that name," Mal said.
"She's my sister," Simon said, and held out the last missive from River. "I received a letter from her. Saying she worked for you."
Mal took the letter and scanned it. "This here seems to be a letter trying to convert you to a really peculiar form of Christianity." Mal's eyebrows went up. "You try this stigmata thing?"
"No," Simon said slowly. "It's a code."
"Yeah, that's great," Mal said, nodding significantly at Wash, who very obviously started backing away. Simon turned so that Wash couldn't get behind him, for all the good that would do him. He probably couldn't take either of the other two men in a bare-knuckles brawl, certainly couldn't take both of them together. "Look, we don't know your sister, and we don't know any River Tam. If you'd like to see the show tonight, uh, we're all sold out."
"You said the box office opened at eight, and that there were plenty of tickets."
"I was mistaken," Mal said, and not very smoothly. Wash had high-tailed it through the cargo hold and was practically flying up some stairs.
"I appreciate that maybe you're trying to protect River?" Simon said. "But if you know her at all, you probably also know she doesn't much need protection. She's got a way about her."
Mal's tallcard face was probably ridiculously easy to crack, if his current expression was any way to judge. It wasn't that his face revealed anything; it was that he very suddenly went blank in a way that revealed that he was hiding an enormous secret.
From the catwalk above the cargo bay echoed the very audible click of a gun being cocked.
"Just turn around and walk out, mister," said a big man with a predatory grin.
Mal's blank tallcard face became a blank smiling tallcard face. "Just turn around," he said, echoing the lummox with the gun.
Simon slowly raised his hands. He wanted to fight, to argue anyway, but he wasn't exactly used to having guns pulled on him. He turned, and slowly marched down the ramp of the ship--
And a sparkle of turquoise sequins caught his eye, as a slight figure in an acrobat's leotard came barreling out of seemingly nowhere and practically knocked him down. "Simon! You came!"
It was sheer luck that he kept his feet. He wheezed, trying to catch his breath: "Yes, mei-mei, I came."
"River?" Mal said. "This really your brother?"
And River turned Simon around with her, smiling so widely and happily that Simon was amazed. "Yes, my big brother, Simon." She landed a big kiss on Simon's cheek, and pulled him after her towards Mal.
Mal had a look of serious distrust about him, but he motioned to the lummox with the gun to put up said gun, and that was a sincere relief.
Some moments later, Simon found himself led up to an eating area, where he was plied with protein and introduced to all of the circus/crew. Mal, the ringmaster, was also the ship's owner-captain. Zoe, his first mate, threw knives. Wash, the pilot, was a clown... who juggled geese.
River, billed as Yangtzee Sue--a play on her name (River Susannah) that Simon found deplorable--did the highwire acts. There was a lovely girl named Inara who did trick-riding--Simon couldn't figure that she had another job as crew of the ship, but maybe taking care of the ponies took up most of her time.
Kaylee was the mechanic for the ship, and managed much of the production side of things for the traveling circus, though Simon thought her smile was magnetic enough that she should be doing pony tricks as well. Or at least, maybe letting Zoe throw knives at her.
The lummox with the gun was Jayne, and he was the bouncer. In certain venues, he also did tricks with sharpshooting and bullwhips, which caused Simon a rather uncomfortable shiver to contemplate.
They were sharp, sarcastic and close-knit, and River fit with them in a way she never had with his parents. Simon spent most of the time watching his sister glowing in the recessed lighting of the dining room. He didn't think it was just the sequins.
"Well, as fascinating as it has been getting to know you, Doctor, we have a show to put on," Mal said. "And Jayne and I have to see to some goslings. Kaylee? You see about getting a cheap replacement for the compression coil, and finding us another act."
"Seals would be nice," Wash said with a fond smile.
"No. No more animals," Mal said. "Something high-falutin' and fancy. A trapeze duo, maybe. Or a contortionist? I ain't picky."
"I'll look, Captain," Kaylee said, "But you know most folks don't want to sign on with an outfit that runs to the Rim."
"People on the border moons got a right to entertainment, same as anyone else," Mal said. He beckoned to Jayne and stalked off.
Kaylee gave Simon an apologetic smile. "I think it's bein' so genial to the audience is what makes him fuss at us in private," she said. "But I love my captain." She scurried off to her chores.
River quirked an eyebrow at Simon. "Mal," she said. "Bad. From the Latin." It was her perfect deadpan expression, her delivery exactly the same as the time she told him that the cook had filleted and smoked his prize plecostamous for breakfast during the war-time lox shortage, that made him realize she was joking.
"I've missed you, mei-mei," he said.
"I'm glad you're here," she replied seriously. "I felt bad about leaving you behind."
He nodded, feeling awkward and out of place, but accepted a second cup of tea from her hand. She handed it to him with studied grace, with a certain flip of her wrist that reminded him of--
"The Companion tea ceremony," he said wonderingly, and then, the thought of what that might mean startled him. "River, you--"
"Inara taught me," she said. "And full Companion training takes much longer than two years, Simon." She smirked a little, and Simon realized what she was thinking.
He blushed, and didn't say anything to defend himself. After all, she wasn't wrong.
And it was supposed to go on in this vein until Mal offered Simon some sort of position on the crew as a doctor/performer. I hadn't come up with an appropriate talent for Simon, which is sort of what put me off. Oh, and Book was going to join up then, too.
"Distance" was s'posed to be my foray into epic slash. It just kinda didn't happen. It was supposed to be all funky, where Simon slept with Jayne ('cause it was a respite from the complex emotions of caring for River) until he realized that he needs slightly more complication, and ends up with Mal, only somehow Mal and Jayne were sleeping together... and you know? I don't actually write slash. Or epic fics. Either one.
Distance
Chapter 1: Complications
It was the fourth time that week. The fourth time she'd done something so bug-fuck crazy that the crew was alternately in an uproar or toe-tippingly silent.
The fire alarms had caught it in time, and Zoe had extinguished it before anyone else could get hurt. River just stared at them all, the devilish gleam in her eyes dying away beneath singed brows, saying: "It is so sorry, but it doesn't know not to drink up all the air..."
And Mal and Kaylee had both come at her from opposite directions, arms up and spread in a "baby-we-won't-hurt-you" stance, and she had tried to climb up the galley walls to get away from them, screaming for Simon.
And Simon had come and pulled her down off the ceiling, literally this time. Kaylee watched with hurt eyes as Simon sedated River and took her away, before fleeing to the engine room. It was Mal who followed to the infirmary.
Before the drugs put River to sleep but after they calmed her, Mal could hear her moaned apologies: "I'm sorry, Simon, I'm so sorry, I know I make things so complicated..."
Mal watched from the doorway. Simon just stroked her hair with one hand, and held her wrist with the other, monitoring her pulse until she fell asleep.
Complicated.
That didn't even come to close to being enough words for it.
#
Mal caught Simon's cuff when he came out of the infirmary.
"You planning on leaving her alone? Again?" Mal asked.
Simon's gaze was drawn as if by magnets to his two fingers hooked on Simon's cuff, before Simon looked Mal directly in the eyes. "She is sedated. I've given her a dog's dose."
"Seems like, as dogs go, she's always slipping her chain."
"I'm doing the best I can," he said tightly.
"Where were you when she was playing (Fire Goddess) in the kitchen? Were you playing jacks with Kaylee?" He said it, mostly to see if Simon was going to own up to liking Kaylee, so maybe he could get some gorram peace from her moony calf-love some day.
Simon blushed, though Mal thought he didn't know he'd done it.
"Nah," Mal drawled, enjoying the look of discomfort on Simon's face. "Kaylee came in from the engine room. So, who were you playing jacks with, Simon?"
Simon pulled hauteur around him like a cloak, which Mal suspected that folks like the Tams wore to places like the opera. Simon stared icily back down at the two fingers Mal still had hooked on his sleeve, and said, "No one. My cuff, Captain Reynolds, if you please?"
Mal pulled the fingers out of the sleeve as though he'd forgotten they were there. "Oh, this cuff?"
Simon glared.
"Can I help you, Captain Reynolds?"
"Yeah." Mal crossed his arms. "You can help me by telling me what the hell we do next."
"I beg your pardon?"
"For her." He ducked his head a little, to look through the glass at River curled up on the counter in the infirmary, and to avoid looking at the gawping-fish look Simon was giving him. Had he been such an ornery bastard that Simon didn't realize he wanted to help her?
"Well." Simon put his best Professional Doctor face on--which crumbled immediately--and said, helplessly, "I don't know. The meds do nothing. (Insert MedicoMumboJumbo here.)"
"I'm right clear on how she ain't getting any better. So, how do we fix her?"
"Short of interrogating the monsters who did this to her?" Simon ran his hands over his cuffs, straightening them. "The problem is, I only have the vaguest outline of what's wrong. I can do nothing, without facilities like back on Ariel."
"Where else are there facilities like those?"
"Out here? In the black?"
"Wherever."
"An--an Alliance ship, maybe? They're practically floating cities. But the only places to be sure of are the Core planets, and the best of those was Ariel--"
"Yeah, alright. We don't need best," Mal said, making a cutting motion with his hand. "We just need better."
Simon just stared at him for a long moment. "Thanks for--"
"I ain't being understanding," Mal said. "I can't have your sister destroying this ship. And in the meantime, you're going to have to keep both eyes on her, not just one."
"Message received, Captain," Simon said, not meeting his eyes. He turned away, to go to his room.
Mal couldn't resist. "And both hands, Doc. No playing with your jacks, 'less she's sedated."
It was heavy-handed. No question about that. But the way the blush stole up the back of Simon's neck and over his ears was well worth it.
#
Simon closed his door carefully. No need to slam it and let the Captain think the needling had gotten to him.
Though it had.
He waited by his door until he thought he heard Mal's footsteps die away, then waited a few seconds more before easing his door open and peering around the corridor. Nothing. Good. He headed toward the kitchen, but stopped when he heard voices. From the sound of it, Wash was cleaning up the fire damage, with Zoe supervising. No, not that way, then.
He turned around quickly, and almost ran smack into Kaylee. The startled intake of her breath and the usual sweet, expectant smile were suddenly too much. She wanted too much. She needed too much. He was a man with nothing left over to give anyone, and that smile, those eyes, they wanted everything from him. Deserved everything. He found himself staring at her, and she stared back, so trusting.
"Simon?" she asked, her voice hopeful, staring into his eyes. She reached for him, hesitantly.
He pushed himself back against the wall to avoid her touch, and sidled past. He glued his gaze to the floor, to avoid the hurt expression he was sure to find on her face. "Excuse me, Kaylee." Still polite, still a gentleman. He didn't look back, though, and hurried up the stairs to the empty shuttle.
He pushed the door shut and sat down at the helm, head in his hands. Silence enveloped him, and with time, his breathing slowed.
The door opened. It was Inara.
"Simon? Are you ok?"
"I'm fine. Thanks."
"You want to be alone. The fire, and River. I understand."
He turned around to look at her. "And Mal, and Kaylee…"
"Kaylee? I thought you two…"
"Us? No! Never. I can't." He put up his hands in denial, realized how much he was revealing with that gesture, and clasped his hands tightly in his lap.
"I thought you two were friends," Inara said, sliding into the co-pilot's seat next to him.
"We are," he said slowly, gathering his calm again. "But that's all we can be."
Inara was silent for a moment. "She wants more than you can give, you think."
"Am I wrong?"
"No," Inara said, and Simon could see she wasn't telling him everything. "No, Kaylee's always been a free spirit. But I knew when she fell, she'd fall hard. And…" She stopped suddenly, an enigmatic smile on her face.
"I should just be totally honest with her, then."
"Totally honest? Oh, [dear], no!"
Simon was caught off-guard by that one. "I don't follow."
"Don't lead her on. Don't be dishonest. But there's often very little merit in telling the whole truth, especially when matters of the heart are concerned."
Simon considered this, then nodded. "So, just…"
"Keep being oblivious to her charms, as you have been all along."
"I haven't been oblivious…"
"Oh, yes, you have," she said, her smile growing toothier by the moment. "I assure you."
He frowned, wondering what he had missed. "No," he said, adamant. "I'm not oblivious, I swear."
"Would you like tea?" she asked, and when he nodded, led him back to her shuttle. She busied herself with the ceremony for a while, not speaking. When they both had cups in hand, she sat back on her heels and sipped carefully, before saying, "Simon, I am going to make a guess, that your experience with women is not as broad as your experience…"
"With men," he finished, his voice flat. "That's true. But I'm aware that's looked on with suspicion on the Border planets."
"Yes, but we're not from the Border planets, either of us. And it's still tolerated, it's simply that Border societies place a necessary emphasis on procreation."
"Right," he said into his teacup, breathing in the smoky scents of civilization contained therein. He sighed with pleasure, then put the cup down.
"Maybe, if things are too complicated with Kaylee…"
He stared. "With you?"
"[Heavens], no!" She smiled. "A Companion takes a lover--a true lover--under only the most special of circumstances. You think things are complicated with Kaylee… You couldn't handle the complications with me, [my dear]."
"Oh." He refrained from making a nervous check of the fit of his shirt, and picked up his teacup again. "What were you suggesting, then?"
"It hasn't occurred to you how most of the men on this ship are no more inclined to complication than you are?"
"Mal is," Simon said without thought, and immediately regretted it when he watched Inara's face freeze.
"Yes," Inara said. "Mal is rather inclined to--complication." She leaned forward. "More tea?"
"Thank you," Simon said. "But I should go."
"The time has passed too quickly," she said with her automatic bright smile.
#
Jayne did not like the plan. Mal could see it in the way his eyes were shifting every which way, but most of all, in how they were studiously not meeting Mal's.
"Where we gonna get the capital to pull something like that off? We been on gorram milk-runs for weeks!"
"You complaining about how I'm running things?" Mal asked mildly.
Jayne's eyes shifted left again, avoiding Mal's stare.
"No, Mal, I just…"
"Though, I think your question about capital is a fine one."
"You do?"
"Yeah, that's one thing I like about you, Jayne, always thinking with your--"
"Aw, Mal…" Jayne's eyes sought the floor, and his hand twitched, almost moving forward to cover his balls.
"--wallet." Mal laughed. "You know, twitchy ain't a good habit for a gunman."
"I ain't twitchy!"
"You are twitchy, and shifty, and possibly even dodgy. You don't like this."
"No, Mal, I don't." Jayne looked up with faint hope in his eyes.
"And that's fine with me."
"I just don't see the profit in it!"
Mal kept his voice cheerful for the moment. "I'm well aware that you wouldn't cross the street to piss on Simon Tam if he were on fire."
It took Jayne a half-second to parse the sentence, as usual, before he broke into a smile. "Naw. I'd cross two streets to piss on him. Pissing on folks is funny!"
Now Mal dropped his voice to a colder note. "But I figure you ought not be too worried about profit, just at the moment. You got a debt to pay, Jayne. You owe that bug-crazy little girl, the one you tried to sell out. And you owe me. Isn't that right?"
Jayne's face fell so slowly it was like a toy winding down. "Yes, Mal," he said, his voice gruff and low and sad.
"Now," Mal said, brisk again. "Back to business. I'm gonna talk to Zoe about the plan, see what I might be missing. Right now, it's just between us three. We're the fighting minds, and we got no cause to worry the others, or raise any hopes. When we're done cogitating, well, then we'll see."
"Alright," Jayne said, a look of monkey-fuddled confusion puckering his brow.
"What is it, Jayne?"
"I just don't see how my mind's supposed to be working on this, is all. It seems pretty straightforward."
"For now, you turn your mind to teaching the doctor how to shoot."
"Aw, he can't shoot fer crap!"
"Which is why I want you to teach him."
"--Raised all namby-pamby in a house with air-conditioning and running water--"
Mal raised an eyebrow. "He's got good eyes and a fine, steady hand from all that surgeoning. If he ain't ready in one month, I'm gonna know who's to blame."
#
Chapter Two: Guns
"You want to teach me what?" Simon asked, looking up from the autoclave.
"To shoot," Jayne said, looming in the doorway of the infirmary. He was eyeballing the scalpel in Simon's hand, and Simon realized that Jayne hadn't been in the infirmary and under his care since their… very pointed conversation.
"What makes you think I want to learn to shoot?"
"Uh, I don't. Cap'n said I should teach you."
"The Captain said."
"Yup!"
Simon lowered his head and peered into the autoclave. "No."
"No?"
"I said, no. I have an oath."
"What kinda oaf?"
"An oath. A Hippocratic Oath."
Jayne squinted at him. "He a bad man, this Ipocraxis fellow? A kind of Niska-like fellow, about word and promises?" He made that charming knife-across-the-throat gesture Simon just loved.
"No, you--" Simon stopped, put a hand up. "Just, no. It's an ancient oath that doctors take. That says I'll heal, not harm."
"Oh, right. On the doctorin' table, you won't harm. I'm thinking, though, what's that got do with when you're in a fight?"
Simon closed his eyes and fought banging his hands on the table in frustration. It wasn't worth the pain of having to re-sterilize. "I've come close to harming some people since I've been on this ship, but that doesn't mean I don't take it seriously. Very seriously."
Jayne blinked. "So, you just… wanna stay weak then?"
Simon felt his ire rise. "No, I don't want to stay weak. I mean, I'm not weak! I have the power to heal and harm."
"Yeah, but you said yourself, you ain't gonna violate your oath on that account."
Simon opened his mouth to argue, but just let his breath out in a huff of air instead.
"So?" Jayne asked. "You ready to start learning?"
"No!"
Jayne blinked. "You gotta, though. Cap'n said."
"Why did the Captain say, precisely?"
Jayne was no good at dissembling when his own interests were so far removed from the situation. "Uh, he said, you have a steady hand from surgeoning, and if you wasn't ready in a month, he'd blame me."
Simon turned back to his work. "You know, Jayne, I think that the Captain may have to come deliver this particular order in person."
"He did deliver the order in person. To me. And I'm giving it to you. Chain of command."
"Yeah… tell me where you are on the chain of command again?"
"I'm second mate." Jayne looked too smug about it. Simon raised an eyebrow.
"I'd never heard that before."
Jayne had the good grace to look confused. "I--well, I am! Zoe is first mate, and I'm second."
"And Wash is what?"
Jayne scratched his head. "You mean, besides the pilot?"
Simon gave him a curious stare. What had gotten into Jayne? "Yes. Besides pilot."
"Helmsman."
"Jayne..." Simon stopped, cleared his throat to avoid laughing, and then started again, "Jayne, have you been reading?"
Jayne stared at the ground in an aw-shucks manner and said, "Yes. The thrilling adventures and heroics of Long John Silver, and his faithful cabin boy, Jim Hawkins."
"You mean--" Simon stopped himself from saying You mean, you own a book? He tried again. "You mean Treasure Island?"
"Huh?"
Simon tried another tactic. "What's this book called?"
"I just told you the title! The Thrilling Adventures and Heroics of Long John Silver, and His Faithful Cabin Boy, Jim Hawkins."
"Oh, of course," Simon said, and lowered the lid on the autoclave. He pulled off his gloves and smiled at Jayne, a false and shining grin. "So, who's the cabin boy, Jayne?"
He was expecting Jayne dive in with an insult, but Jayne just shifted his weight to a different foot, and said, "Are you gonna learn to shoot or not?" High on Jayne's cheekbones, a faint flush had broken out.
Simon stared at him for a moment. Flush: an automatic physiologic reaction to a stimulus, such as embarrassment, guilt, shame or modesty.
No, it couldn't be any of those.
Could be a physical factor. Temperature, medication, spicy food…
Simon said curtly, "If the Captain has something he wants to say to me, he can come say it in person."
"Fine," Jayne said, equally curt, and left.
#
Chapter Z:
Mal's arms tightened convulsively around him, and there was a hitch to his voice when he said, "I don't know. I just know I don't ever want anything to be that complicated again."
Simon was surprised by the catch in his own voice when he answered. "Yeah. I know."
They drifted together, not quite sleeping, listening to the breathing, until Simon fell asleep, resting easy in the distance between them.
And... I barely remembered this, until I re-read the IM transcript between me and dsudis. But it's so time to admit it's dead.
And then there's Vat!Jayne. A semi-crossover with Star Wars and not in a good way. (All for the sake of getting in a Boba Fett joke.) The point of this was to prove that Jayne was grown in a vat, not born of woman.
Vat!Jayne
Jayne shot the man, and there was no regretting that, because the man was a mite unsavory in the way of character. What little character he had.
But then Mal had what you might call a sneaking suspicion, and had Zoe search the guy for his ident card.
She pulled it out and ran it through the card-scanner that [piece of shit] lawman Dobson left behind. Zoe just tightened her lips, and behind her, Wash went pale and started flailing his hands and making squeaky noises.
Mal held his hand out for the scanner, and read it.
"[Pig-monkey spawn of the outer hells]," he said.
Jayne looked perplexed. "He weren't a criminal?"
"Another [shit-tastic] bounty hunter."
Jayne nudged him with the toe of his boot. "Not a very good one, then."
"No, but look." He held the screen up for Jayne, who leaned forward and squinted at it.
"I don't get it," Jayne said.
"Bo Bah Phett... The Phett Brothers, Jayne," Zoë said, all patience.
Jayne nudged the body again, this time right in the gut-wound he'd sustained. "So, he's got a brother. Big ruttin' deal."
"He doesn't just have a brother, Jayne. He's got a hundred brothers. Who all look just like him."
"A clone, then," Jayne said.
"A clone *army*," Mal said.
"A clone army with unshakeable bonds of brotherhood that would warm the cockles of anyone's heart if they weren't all sworn to enact blood revenge for each other!" Wash added.
Jayne was quiet for a moment, still nudging the guy.
"Jayne," Mal said, trying to keep an aggrieved note from entering his voice. "Would you mind not sticking your feet in the man's gut-wound? It might help us avoid the whole blood revenge thing."
"I don't see how," Jayne said, pulling his boot back.
"You don't think on it too hard," Mal said. "You just help me get him to the infirmary."
#
"He's dead," was Simon's verdict, flatly delivered.
"You sure?" Mal asked.
Simon glared, lifted the bounty hunter's hand high in the air and let it fall back down with a thump. "Yep. I'm sure."
"Not even a little alive?" Mal asked.
Simon sighed and pulled a pair of doodads from a drawer. "Functionally, dead," Simon said. "I don't have the equipment to revive him, even if he is--" he applied the doodads to the man's temples, and checked the displays, then double-checked them.
"What is it, doc?" Jayne asked nervously, shuffling his feet in the doorway.
"Well. It looks like he's only mostly dead."
"Which is... slightly alive, right?" Mal asked.
"Yes."
"What does that *mean*?"
"It means we could cryo-freeze him, if we had that kind of equipment, which we don't..."
"Does it mean anything else?" Jayne asked.
Simon made a face. "What's with you? You want me to revive him so you can shoot him again?"
Jayne perked up at that. "Can you do that?"
"No."
"Aw."
"Jayne," Mal said. "We got enough problems right now with this bounty hunter and his thousand vengeance-swearing kinsmen."
"I thought it was just a hundred!" Jayne protested, while Simon's jaw dropped.
"Can you do anything, Doc? Anything at all? To keep him slightly alive."
Simon stared down at him. "Bounty hunter. After... River?"
"After both of you." Mal felt obliged to point it out. Simon's self-preservation instincts weren't real solid, as far as he could tell.
"And you want me to keep him alive."
"Only so we don't get the whole cloned brotherhood on our heads."
"I see."
"Well?"
"I could... well, I could inject him with a sylvatic activator. It prevents tissue damage from freezing by causing water to osmose from cells interstitially and replacing water molecules with glucose--"
"Argh!" Jayne clutched his head.
"Prevents tissue damage from freezing?" Mal asked. "Then what? We strap him to the hull, and haul him into a port that can revive him?"
"Oh, no," River said from somewhere, her voice muffled. Mal looked all around. Simon caught his eyes and shook his head, and pointed at one of the cupboards. River's voice continued. "Space is too cold even for frogs."
"Right," Mal said.
"The deep-freeze would work," Simon said.
"The deep-freeze!" Jayne sounded none too pleased. "It's full of food."
Mal looked at the Loskowski on Simon's table and shook his head. "I guess we have a feast tonight. Let's get moving."
#
They were in Botany Colony 'til Inara finished with no less than three clients, so Mal invited the local middlemen to come join them in the feast. No harm in being friendly, and at least the food wouldn't go to waste.
Wash dug a big pit in the sand and Kaylee flirted her way into a big pile of charcoal, and they buried the coals with the half-haunch of dead pig that Jayne had acquired under some rather suspicious circumstances some months ago.
"I was saving that for my birthday," Jayne said, mournful.
"Your birthday was two weeks ago. Did you forget?" Kaylee asked.
"I was saving it for my next big birthday." He pouted until Kaylee offered him the box of cookies baked by her Mama that she'd found underneath his dead pig.
Thing is, I think I wrote about twice this many words about what happened after this, and one of Jayne's vat-kin shows up and everything, but I'll be damned if I know where that file is. But really. This is MORE than enough.
Not Firefly, but The OC, finally: the sequel to Lex Fucking Luthor. It was too hard to keep it within the show's continuity, plus S3 went off the rails so badly... basically, if I'd finished this before S3 started, it might have worked. This was supposed to be all about the summer after the intervention with Kirsten. Uh, that was a working title.
Dude
"Dude," Seth said from the threshold of the poolhouse. Ryan was merely a lump in the darkness from here.
"Dude," Seth said, when he got no answer.
Ryan mrphed softly into his pillow.
"Dude," Seth said again.
Ryan flopped over onto his back, but still didn't answer.
"Dude!" Seth said.
"What?" Ryan shouted, sitting up.
"Dude, we need to talk about this."
"Talk about what, Seth?"
"Dude, you kissed me. Are you, like, on red Kryptonite or something?"
Ryan snapped on the light. "That happened a year ago ago, Seth."
"Yeah, well, ten months, actually, and since then..." Seth swallowed past the lump suddenly in his throat. I've been thinking about it. Every ten seconds, for ten months, I've been thinking about it.
"And since then, you've mentioned you aren't gay about a hundred times, and you've also gotten back together with Summer at least... three times? And you've eaten the whipped cream off a half-naked girl and... I'm forgetting someone..."
"Alex," Seth said.
"Alex," Ryan agreed.
"Look, I was a little weirded out by the kiss, I admit," Seth said. "But I've had some time to reflect on it, and I've decided it's simply out of character for you, so I was wondering if you were working through some deeper psychological issues when you kissed me."
Ryan stared at him.
Seth considered leaving.
"Jesus Christ, Seth," Ryan said, lying back with an arm flung over his eyes.
"Because, right now, if I were to kiss you, you might think, hey, maybe it's because my mom's in rehab..."
"Jesus Fucking Christ, Seth," Ryan said.
And maybe it could have been called "Jesus Fucking Christ" now that I think about it.
Here lies a Firefly au in which there is a circus.
Circus Freaks
When River Tam told her brother she was going to run away and join the circus, he'd thought she was kidding. And when she did run away, he went after her, because that's what the elder brother is supposed to do in these situations.
It took him two years to find her. At first, he didn't believe her about the circus. It just wasn't very likely. She wrote him a coded letter before she left: "I'm leaving. They're hurting us." In the postscript: "Will write when I find work."
Two months later he received a rambling letter about the quality of food aboard long-distance space transports, a letter which included the phrase: "I am doing high wire acts with a traveling circus."
He had thought that was a code as well.
The Feds had thought so, too. They confiscated the letter and came to question him every week for a year. There was a code all right, one that led the Feds on a merry chase from the Core to the Rim and back again.
The constant Fed interference made it hard to search for River, and in the meantime, quiet investigations revealed that a small underground movement was working against the very program that River had fled. What Simon learned was enough to make him realize River had done the right thing, and to make him ashamed she hadn't asked for his help.
But River always had had the knack for getting herself out of trouble just as fast as she'd gotten herself into it.
After her escape, her letters were full of vivid stories of things they had never done as children, and slowly, Dr. Simon Tam came to realize that there was a secondary code in play, one that anyone who didn't know River would never, ever be able to break. The code was the choreography for ballet, written in an obscure baby-talk dialect of Mandarin that she had made up when she was four, which transliterated into ridiculous English-language puns. At first, Simon thought he was insane, and then maybe she was insane, but as time went on he realized that it wasn't insanity.
He didn't try to tell his parents; his parents had refused to talk about River at all since she had disgraced them by running off. He wondered how their weekly meetings about that with the Feds went; he wondered if Regan Tam's perfect facade of denial ever cracked in the face of the questions Lawman Dobson asked.
When River finally told him where she was, about a year after the Fed heat had let up, he packed a bag and left that night.
#
"Tell me you're the goose supplier for this moon," said a man wearing a garish, floral print shirt and a fake red nose.
"I'm, uh, not," Simon said.
"Gorram it! Maaaaaal!" The man, fortunately, turned away to voice this enormous bellow behind him, into the large cargo hold of the antiquated Firefly-class ship. "Mal!" the sandy-haired man said angrily. "How in Hades am I supposed to juggle goslings when there are no goslings to be had?"
"You'll have to make do," said a man wearing the traditional red coat of a ringmaster. "Use what you got."
"What I've got is impossible," the clown-man muttered darkly.
"Look, Jayne and I'll go on in and see if Badger has a line on goslings, but... I wouldn't count on it."
"Jayne," the clown-man said, and then swore a blue streak in Mandarin. His accent was a bit less refined that Simon was used to, but there was an implication that Jayne was a gosling-gobbling nuisance of the highest order.
"Excuse me," Simon said, trying to break into the conversation, which seemed mostly one-sided. Ringmaster Mal was rather taciturn, or at least, uninterested in the clown-man's ramblings.
"And he ate Flossie, Mal! She was my best layer--"
"Wash. Really. I don't have time for this. Curtain is in two hours, and I will do my best to make sure you have baby geese, but really, I have bigger fish to fry."
"Did I mention he fried Flossie's eggs, too? I would have goslings right now if he hadn't gotten peckish in the middle of the night out near the Rim--but no..."
"Wash. Later!" the ringmaster said, and turned to Simon. "What's your business? Box office don't open 'til eight o'clock sharp, plenty of tickets, until then--"
"I'm looking for River Tam," Simon said, thankful that his dark glasses hid parts of what was, no doubt, a horrified expression.
Wash-the-Clown stopped ranting and stared at Simon, and Mal-the-Ringmaster got a rather opaque look. "No one here by that name," Mal said.
"She's my sister," Simon said, and held out the last missive from River. "I received a letter from her. Saying she worked for you."
Mal took the letter and scanned it. "This here seems to be a letter trying to convert you to a really peculiar form of Christianity." Mal's eyebrows went up. "You try this stigmata thing?"
"No," Simon said slowly. "It's a code."
"Yeah, that's great," Mal said, nodding significantly at Wash, who very obviously started backing away. Simon turned so that Wash couldn't get behind him, for all the good that would do him. He probably couldn't take either of the other two men in a bare-knuckles brawl, certainly couldn't take both of them together. "Look, we don't know your sister, and we don't know any River Tam. If you'd like to see the show tonight, uh, we're all sold out."
"You said the box office opened at eight, and that there were plenty of tickets."
"I was mistaken," Mal said, and not very smoothly. Wash had high-tailed it through the cargo hold and was practically flying up some stairs.
"I appreciate that maybe you're trying to protect River?" Simon said. "But if you know her at all, you probably also know she doesn't much need protection. She's got a way about her."
Mal's tallcard face was probably ridiculously easy to crack, if his current expression was any way to judge. It wasn't that his face revealed anything; it was that he very suddenly went blank in a way that revealed that he was hiding an enormous secret.
From the catwalk above the cargo bay echoed the very audible click of a gun being cocked.
"Just turn around and walk out, mister," said a big man with a predatory grin.
Mal's blank tallcard face became a blank smiling tallcard face. "Just turn around," he said, echoing the lummox with the gun.
Simon slowly raised his hands. He wanted to fight, to argue anyway, but he wasn't exactly used to having guns pulled on him. He turned, and slowly marched down the ramp of the ship--
And a sparkle of turquoise sequins caught his eye, as a slight figure in an acrobat's leotard came barreling out of seemingly nowhere and practically knocked him down. "Simon! You came!"
It was sheer luck that he kept his feet. He wheezed, trying to catch his breath: "Yes, mei-mei, I came."
"River?" Mal said. "This really your brother?"
And River turned Simon around with her, smiling so widely and happily that Simon was amazed. "Yes, my big brother, Simon." She landed a big kiss on Simon's cheek, and pulled him after her towards Mal.
Mal had a look of serious distrust about him, but he motioned to the lummox with the gun to put up said gun, and that was a sincere relief.
Some moments later, Simon found himself led up to an eating area, where he was plied with protein and introduced to all of the circus/crew. Mal, the ringmaster, was also the ship's owner-captain. Zoe, his first mate, threw knives. Wash, the pilot, was a clown... who juggled geese.
River, billed as Yangtzee Sue--a play on her name (River Susannah) that Simon found deplorable--did the highwire acts. There was a lovely girl named Inara who did trick-riding--Simon couldn't figure that she had another job as crew of the ship, but maybe taking care of the ponies took up most of her time.
Kaylee was the mechanic for the ship, and managed much of the production side of things for the traveling circus, though Simon thought her smile was magnetic enough that she should be doing pony tricks as well. Or at least, maybe letting Zoe throw knives at her.
The lummox with the gun was Jayne, and he was the bouncer. In certain venues, he also did tricks with sharpshooting and bullwhips, which caused Simon a rather uncomfortable shiver to contemplate.
They were sharp, sarcastic and close-knit, and River fit with them in a way she never had with his parents. Simon spent most of the time watching his sister glowing in the recessed lighting of the dining room. He didn't think it was just the sequins.
"Well, as fascinating as it has been getting to know you, Doctor, we have a show to put on," Mal said. "And Jayne and I have to see to some goslings. Kaylee? You see about getting a cheap replacement for the compression coil, and finding us another act."
"Seals would be nice," Wash said with a fond smile.
"No. No more animals," Mal said. "Something high-falutin' and fancy. A trapeze duo, maybe. Or a contortionist? I ain't picky."
"I'll look, Captain," Kaylee said, "But you know most folks don't want to sign on with an outfit that runs to the Rim."
"People on the border moons got a right to entertainment, same as anyone else," Mal said. He beckoned to Jayne and stalked off.
Kaylee gave Simon an apologetic smile. "I think it's bein' so genial to the audience is what makes him fuss at us in private," she said. "But I love my captain." She scurried off to her chores.
River quirked an eyebrow at Simon. "Mal," she said. "Bad. From the Latin." It was her perfect deadpan expression, her delivery exactly the same as the time she told him that the cook had filleted and smoked his prize plecostamous for breakfast during the war-time lox shortage, that made him realize she was joking.
"I've missed you, mei-mei," he said.
"I'm glad you're here," she replied seriously. "I felt bad about leaving you behind."
He nodded, feeling awkward and out of place, but accepted a second cup of tea from her hand. She handed it to him with studied grace, with a certain flip of her wrist that reminded him of--
"The Companion tea ceremony," he said wonderingly, and then, the thought of what that might mean startled him. "River, you--"
"Inara taught me," she said. "And full Companion training takes much longer than two years, Simon." She smirked a little, and Simon realized what she was thinking.
He blushed, and didn't say anything to defend himself. After all, she wasn't wrong.
And it was supposed to go on in this vein until Mal offered Simon some sort of position on the crew as a doctor/performer. I hadn't come up with an appropriate talent for Simon, which is sort of what put me off. Oh, and Book was going to join up then, too.
"Distance" was s'posed to be my foray into epic slash. It just kinda didn't happen. It was supposed to be all funky, where Simon slept with Jayne ('cause it was a respite from the complex emotions of caring for River) until he realized that he needs slightly more complication, and ends up with Mal, only somehow Mal and Jayne were sleeping together... and you know? I don't actually write slash. Or epic fics. Either one.
Distance
Chapter 1: Complications
It was the fourth time that week. The fourth time she'd done something so bug-fuck crazy that the crew was alternately in an uproar or toe-tippingly silent.
The fire alarms had caught it in time, and Zoe had extinguished it before anyone else could get hurt. River just stared at them all, the devilish gleam in her eyes dying away beneath singed brows, saying: "It is so sorry, but it doesn't know not to drink up all the air..."
And Mal and Kaylee had both come at her from opposite directions, arms up and spread in a "baby-we-won't-hurt-you" stance, and she had tried to climb up the galley walls to get away from them, screaming for Simon.
And Simon had come and pulled her down off the ceiling, literally this time. Kaylee watched with hurt eyes as Simon sedated River and took her away, before fleeing to the engine room. It was Mal who followed to the infirmary.
Before the drugs put River to sleep but after they calmed her, Mal could hear her moaned apologies: "I'm sorry, Simon, I'm so sorry, I know I make things so complicated..."
Mal watched from the doorway. Simon just stroked her hair with one hand, and held her wrist with the other, monitoring her pulse until she fell asleep.
Complicated.
That didn't even come to close to being enough words for it.
#
Mal caught Simon's cuff when he came out of the infirmary.
"You planning on leaving her alone? Again?" Mal asked.
Simon's gaze was drawn as if by magnets to his two fingers hooked on Simon's cuff, before Simon looked Mal directly in the eyes. "She is sedated. I've given her a dog's dose."
"Seems like, as dogs go, she's always slipping her chain."
"I'm doing the best I can," he said tightly.
"Where were you when she was playing (Fire Goddess) in the kitchen? Were you playing jacks with Kaylee?" He said it, mostly to see if Simon was going to own up to liking Kaylee, so maybe he could get some gorram peace from her moony calf-love some day.
Simon blushed, though Mal thought he didn't know he'd done it.
"Nah," Mal drawled, enjoying the look of discomfort on Simon's face. "Kaylee came in from the engine room. So, who were you playing jacks with, Simon?"
Simon pulled hauteur around him like a cloak, which Mal suspected that folks like the Tams wore to places like the opera. Simon stared icily back down at the two fingers Mal still had hooked on his sleeve, and said, "No one. My cuff, Captain Reynolds, if you please?"
Mal pulled the fingers out of the sleeve as though he'd forgotten they were there. "Oh, this cuff?"
Simon glared.
"Can I help you, Captain Reynolds?"
"Yeah." Mal crossed his arms. "You can help me by telling me what the hell we do next."
"I beg your pardon?"
"For her." He ducked his head a little, to look through the glass at River curled up on the counter in the infirmary, and to avoid looking at the gawping-fish look Simon was giving him. Had he been such an ornery bastard that Simon didn't realize he wanted to help her?
"Well." Simon put his best Professional Doctor face on--which crumbled immediately--and said, helplessly, "I don't know. The meds do nothing. (Insert MedicoMumboJumbo here.)"
"I'm right clear on how she ain't getting any better. So, how do we fix her?"
"Short of interrogating the monsters who did this to her?" Simon ran his hands over his cuffs, straightening them. "The problem is, I only have the vaguest outline of what's wrong. I can do nothing, without facilities like back on Ariel."
"Where else are there facilities like those?"
"Out here? In the black?"
"Wherever."
"An--an Alliance ship, maybe? They're practically floating cities. But the only places to be sure of are the Core planets, and the best of those was Ariel--"
"Yeah, alright. We don't need best," Mal said, making a cutting motion with his hand. "We just need better."
Simon just stared at him for a long moment. "Thanks for--"
"I ain't being understanding," Mal said. "I can't have your sister destroying this ship. And in the meantime, you're going to have to keep both eyes on her, not just one."
"Message received, Captain," Simon said, not meeting his eyes. He turned away, to go to his room.
Mal couldn't resist. "And both hands, Doc. No playing with your jacks, 'less she's sedated."
It was heavy-handed. No question about that. But the way the blush stole up the back of Simon's neck and over his ears was well worth it.
#
Simon closed his door carefully. No need to slam it and let the Captain think the needling had gotten to him.
Though it had.
He waited by his door until he thought he heard Mal's footsteps die away, then waited a few seconds more before easing his door open and peering around the corridor. Nothing. Good. He headed toward the kitchen, but stopped when he heard voices. From the sound of it, Wash was cleaning up the fire damage, with Zoe supervising. No, not that way, then.
He turned around quickly, and almost ran smack into Kaylee. The startled intake of her breath and the usual sweet, expectant smile were suddenly too much. She wanted too much. She needed too much. He was a man with nothing left over to give anyone, and that smile, those eyes, they wanted everything from him. Deserved everything. He found himself staring at her, and she stared back, so trusting.
"Simon?" she asked, her voice hopeful, staring into his eyes. She reached for him, hesitantly.
He pushed himself back against the wall to avoid her touch, and sidled past. He glued his gaze to the floor, to avoid the hurt expression he was sure to find on her face. "Excuse me, Kaylee." Still polite, still a gentleman. He didn't look back, though, and hurried up the stairs to the empty shuttle.
He pushed the door shut and sat down at the helm, head in his hands. Silence enveloped him, and with time, his breathing slowed.
The door opened. It was Inara.
"Simon? Are you ok?"
"I'm fine. Thanks."
"You want to be alone. The fire, and River. I understand."
He turned around to look at her. "And Mal, and Kaylee…"
"Kaylee? I thought you two…"
"Us? No! Never. I can't." He put up his hands in denial, realized how much he was revealing with that gesture, and clasped his hands tightly in his lap.
"I thought you two were friends," Inara said, sliding into the co-pilot's seat next to him.
"We are," he said slowly, gathering his calm again. "But that's all we can be."
Inara was silent for a moment. "She wants more than you can give, you think."
"Am I wrong?"
"No," Inara said, and Simon could see she wasn't telling him everything. "No, Kaylee's always been a free spirit. But I knew when she fell, she'd fall hard. And…" She stopped suddenly, an enigmatic smile on her face.
"I should just be totally honest with her, then."
"Totally honest? Oh, [dear], no!"
Simon was caught off-guard by that one. "I don't follow."
"Don't lead her on. Don't be dishonest. But there's often very little merit in telling the whole truth, especially when matters of the heart are concerned."
Simon considered this, then nodded. "So, just…"
"Keep being oblivious to her charms, as you have been all along."
"I haven't been oblivious…"
"Oh, yes, you have," she said, her smile growing toothier by the moment. "I assure you."
He frowned, wondering what he had missed. "No," he said, adamant. "I'm not oblivious, I swear."
"Would you like tea?" she asked, and when he nodded, led him back to her shuttle. She busied herself with the ceremony for a while, not speaking. When they both had cups in hand, she sat back on her heels and sipped carefully, before saying, "Simon, I am going to make a guess, that your experience with women is not as broad as your experience…"
"With men," he finished, his voice flat. "That's true. But I'm aware that's looked on with suspicion on the Border planets."
"Yes, but we're not from the Border planets, either of us. And it's still tolerated, it's simply that Border societies place a necessary emphasis on procreation."
"Right," he said into his teacup, breathing in the smoky scents of civilization contained therein. He sighed with pleasure, then put the cup down.
"Maybe, if things are too complicated with Kaylee…"
He stared. "With you?"
"[Heavens], no!" She smiled. "A Companion takes a lover--a true lover--under only the most special of circumstances. You think things are complicated with Kaylee… You couldn't handle the complications with me, [my dear]."
"Oh." He refrained from making a nervous check of the fit of his shirt, and picked up his teacup again. "What were you suggesting, then?"
"It hasn't occurred to you how most of the men on this ship are no more inclined to complication than you are?"
"Mal is," Simon said without thought, and immediately regretted it when he watched Inara's face freeze.
"Yes," Inara said. "Mal is rather inclined to--complication." She leaned forward. "More tea?"
"Thank you," Simon said. "But I should go."
"The time has passed too quickly," she said with her automatic bright smile.
#
Jayne did not like the plan. Mal could see it in the way his eyes were shifting every which way, but most of all, in how they were studiously not meeting Mal's.
"Where we gonna get the capital to pull something like that off? We been on gorram milk-runs for weeks!"
"You complaining about how I'm running things?" Mal asked mildly.
Jayne's eyes shifted left again, avoiding Mal's stare.
"No, Mal, I just…"
"Though, I think your question about capital is a fine one."
"You do?"
"Yeah, that's one thing I like about you, Jayne, always thinking with your--"
"Aw, Mal…" Jayne's eyes sought the floor, and his hand twitched, almost moving forward to cover his balls.
"--wallet." Mal laughed. "You know, twitchy ain't a good habit for a gunman."
"I ain't twitchy!"
"You are twitchy, and shifty, and possibly even dodgy. You don't like this."
"No, Mal, I don't." Jayne looked up with faint hope in his eyes.
"And that's fine with me."
"I just don't see the profit in it!"
Mal kept his voice cheerful for the moment. "I'm well aware that you wouldn't cross the street to piss on Simon Tam if he were on fire."
It took Jayne a half-second to parse the sentence, as usual, before he broke into a smile. "Naw. I'd cross two streets to piss on him. Pissing on folks is funny!"
Now Mal dropped his voice to a colder note. "But I figure you ought not be too worried about profit, just at the moment. You got a debt to pay, Jayne. You owe that bug-crazy little girl, the one you tried to sell out. And you owe me. Isn't that right?"
Jayne's face fell so slowly it was like a toy winding down. "Yes, Mal," he said, his voice gruff and low and sad.
"Now," Mal said, brisk again. "Back to business. I'm gonna talk to Zoe about the plan, see what I might be missing. Right now, it's just between us three. We're the fighting minds, and we got no cause to worry the others, or raise any hopes. When we're done cogitating, well, then we'll see."
"Alright," Jayne said, a look of monkey-fuddled confusion puckering his brow.
"What is it, Jayne?"
"I just don't see how my mind's supposed to be working on this, is all. It seems pretty straightforward."
"For now, you turn your mind to teaching the doctor how to shoot."
"Aw, he can't shoot fer crap!"
"Which is why I want you to teach him."
"--Raised all namby-pamby in a house with air-conditioning and running water--"
Mal raised an eyebrow. "He's got good eyes and a fine, steady hand from all that surgeoning. If he ain't ready in one month, I'm gonna know who's to blame."
#
Chapter Two: Guns
"You want to teach me what?" Simon asked, looking up from the autoclave.
"To shoot," Jayne said, looming in the doorway of the infirmary. He was eyeballing the scalpel in Simon's hand, and Simon realized that Jayne hadn't been in the infirmary and under his care since their… very pointed conversation.
"What makes you think I want to learn to shoot?"
"Uh, I don't. Cap'n said I should teach you."
"The Captain said."
"Yup!"
Simon lowered his head and peered into the autoclave. "No."
"No?"
"I said, no. I have an oath."
"What kinda oaf?"
"An oath. A Hippocratic Oath."
Jayne squinted at him. "He a bad man, this Ipocraxis fellow? A kind of Niska-like fellow, about word and promises?" He made that charming knife-across-the-throat gesture Simon just loved.
"No, you--" Simon stopped, put a hand up. "Just, no. It's an ancient oath that doctors take. That says I'll heal, not harm."
"Oh, right. On the doctorin' table, you won't harm. I'm thinking, though, what's that got do with when you're in a fight?"
Simon closed his eyes and fought banging his hands on the table in frustration. It wasn't worth the pain of having to re-sterilize. "I've come close to harming some people since I've been on this ship, but that doesn't mean I don't take it seriously. Very seriously."
Jayne blinked. "So, you just… wanna stay weak then?"
Simon felt his ire rise. "No, I don't want to stay weak. I mean, I'm not weak! I have the power to heal and harm."
"Yeah, but you said yourself, you ain't gonna violate your oath on that account."
Simon opened his mouth to argue, but just let his breath out in a huff of air instead.
"So?" Jayne asked. "You ready to start learning?"
"No!"
Jayne blinked. "You gotta, though. Cap'n said."
"Why did the Captain say, precisely?"
Jayne was no good at dissembling when his own interests were so far removed from the situation. "Uh, he said, you have a steady hand from surgeoning, and if you wasn't ready in a month, he'd blame me."
Simon turned back to his work. "You know, Jayne, I think that the Captain may have to come deliver this particular order in person."
"He did deliver the order in person. To me. And I'm giving it to you. Chain of command."
"Yeah… tell me where you are on the chain of command again?"
"I'm second mate." Jayne looked too smug about it. Simon raised an eyebrow.
"I'd never heard that before."
Jayne had the good grace to look confused. "I--well, I am! Zoe is first mate, and I'm second."
"And Wash is what?"
Jayne scratched his head. "You mean, besides the pilot?"
Simon gave him a curious stare. What had gotten into Jayne? "Yes. Besides pilot."
"Helmsman."
"Jayne..." Simon stopped, cleared his throat to avoid laughing, and then started again, "Jayne, have you been reading?"
Jayne stared at the ground in an aw-shucks manner and said, "Yes. The thrilling adventures and heroics of Long John Silver, and his faithful cabin boy, Jim Hawkins."
"You mean--" Simon stopped himself from saying You mean, you own a book? He tried again. "You mean Treasure Island?"
"Huh?"
Simon tried another tactic. "What's this book called?"
"I just told you the title! The Thrilling Adventures and Heroics of Long John Silver, and His Faithful Cabin Boy, Jim Hawkins."
"Oh, of course," Simon said, and lowered the lid on the autoclave. He pulled off his gloves and smiled at Jayne, a false and shining grin. "So, who's the cabin boy, Jayne?"
He was expecting Jayne dive in with an insult, but Jayne just shifted his weight to a different foot, and said, "Are you gonna learn to shoot or not?" High on Jayne's cheekbones, a faint flush had broken out.
Simon stared at him for a moment. Flush: an automatic physiologic reaction to a stimulus, such as embarrassment, guilt, shame or modesty.
No, it couldn't be any of those.
Could be a physical factor. Temperature, medication, spicy food…
Simon said curtly, "If the Captain has something he wants to say to me, he can come say it in person."
"Fine," Jayne said, equally curt, and left.
#
Chapter Z:
Mal's arms tightened convulsively around him, and there was a hitch to his voice when he said, "I don't know. I just know I don't ever want anything to be that complicated again."
Simon was surprised by the catch in his own voice when he answered. "Yeah. I know."
They drifted together, not quite sleeping, listening to the breathing, until Simon fell asleep, resting easy in the distance between them.
And... I barely remembered this, until I re-read the IM transcript between me and dsudis. But it's so time to admit it's dead.
And then there's Vat!Jayne. A semi-crossover with Star Wars and not in a good way. (All for the sake of getting in a Boba Fett joke.) The point of this was to prove that Jayne was grown in a vat, not born of woman.
Vat!Jayne
Jayne shot the man, and there was no regretting that, because the man was a mite unsavory in the way of character. What little character he had.
But then Mal had what you might call a sneaking suspicion, and had Zoe search the guy for his ident card.
She pulled it out and ran it through the card-scanner that [piece of shit] lawman Dobson left behind. Zoe just tightened her lips, and behind her, Wash went pale and started flailing his hands and making squeaky noises.
Mal held his hand out for the scanner, and read it.
"[Pig-monkey spawn of the outer hells]," he said.
Jayne looked perplexed. "He weren't a criminal?"
"Another [shit-tastic] bounty hunter."
Jayne nudged him with the toe of his boot. "Not a very good one, then."
"No, but look." He held the screen up for Jayne, who leaned forward and squinted at it.
"I don't get it," Jayne said.
"Bo Bah Phett... The Phett Brothers, Jayne," Zoë said, all patience.
Jayne nudged the body again, this time right in the gut-wound he'd sustained. "So, he's got a brother. Big ruttin' deal."
"He doesn't just have a brother, Jayne. He's got a hundred brothers. Who all look just like him."
"A clone, then," Jayne said.
"A clone *army*," Mal said.
"A clone army with unshakeable bonds of brotherhood that would warm the cockles of anyone's heart if they weren't all sworn to enact blood revenge for each other!" Wash added.
Jayne was quiet for a moment, still nudging the guy.
"Jayne," Mal said, trying to keep an aggrieved note from entering his voice. "Would you mind not sticking your feet in the man's gut-wound? It might help us avoid the whole blood revenge thing."
"I don't see how," Jayne said, pulling his boot back.
"You don't think on it too hard," Mal said. "You just help me get him to the infirmary."
#
"He's dead," was Simon's verdict, flatly delivered.
"You sure?" Mal asked.
Simon glared, lifted the bounty hunter's hand high in the air and let it fall back down with a thump. "Yep. I'm sure."
"Not even a little alive?" Mal asked.
Simon sighed and pulled a pair of doodads from a drawer. "Functionally, dead," Simon said. "I don't have the equipment to revive him, even if he is--" he applied the doodads to the man's temples, and checked the displays, then double-checked them.
"What is it, doc?" Jayne asked nervously, shuffling his feet in the doorway.
"Well. It looks like he's only mostly dead."
"Which is... slightly alive, right?" Mal asked.
"Yes."
"What does that *mean*?"
"It means we could cryo-freeze him, if we had that kind of equipment, which we don't..."
"Does it mean anything else?" Jayne asked.
Simon made a face. "What's with you? You want me to revive him so you can shoot him again?"
Jayne perked up at that. "Can you do that?"
"No."
"Aw."
"Jayne," Mal said. "We got enough problems right now with this bounty hunter and his thousand vengeance-swearing kinsmen."
"I thought it was just a hundred!" Jayne protested, while Simon's jaw dropped.
"Can you do anything, Doc? Anything at all? To keep him slightly alive."
Simon stared down at him. "Bounty hunter. After... River?"
"After both of you." Mal felt obliged to point it out. Simon's self-preservation instincts weren't real solid, as far as he could tell.
"And you want me to keep him alive."
"Only so we don't get the whole cloned brotherhood on our heads."
"I see."
"Well?"
"I could... well, I could inject him with a sylvatic activator. It prevents tissue damage from freezing by causing water to osmose from cells interstitially and replacing water molecules with glucose--"
"Argh!" Jayne clutched his head.
"Prevents tissue damage from freezing?" Mal asked. "Then what? We strap him to the hull, and haul him into a port that can revive him?"
"Oh, no," River said from somewhere, her voice muffled. Mal looked all around. Simon caught his eyes and shook his head, and pointed at one of the cupboards. River's voice continued. "Space is too cold even for frogs."
"Right," Mal said.
"The deep-freeze would work," Simon said.
"The deep-freeze!" Jayne sounded none too pleased. "It's full of food."
Mal looked at the Loskowski on Simon's table and shook his head. "I guess we have a feast tonight. Let's get moving."
#
They were in Botany Colony 'til Inara finished with no less than three clients, so Mal invited the local middlemen to come join them in the feast. No harm in being friendly, and at least the food wouldn't go to waste.
Wash dug a big pit in the sand and Kaylee flirted her way into a big pile of charcoal, and they buried the coals with the half-haunch of dead pig that Jayne had acquired under some rather suspicious circumstances some months ago.
"I was saving that for my birthday," Jayne said, mournful.
"Your birthday was two weeks ago. Did you forget?" Kaylee asked.
"I was saving it for my next big birthday." He pouted until Kaylee offered him the box of cookies baked by her Mama that she'd found underneath his dead pig.
Thing is, I think I wrote about twice this many words about what happened after this, and one of Jayne's vat-kin shows up and everything, but I'll be damned if I know where that file is. But really. This is MORE than enough.
Not Firefly, but The OC, finally: the sequel to Lex Fucking Luthor. It was too hard to keep it within the show's continuity, plus S3 went off the rails so badly... basically, if I'd finished this before S3 started, it might have worked. This was supposed to be all about the summer after the intervention with Kirsten. Uh, that was a working title.
Dude
"Dude," Seth said from the threshold of the poolhouse. Ryan was merely a lump in the darkness from here.
"Dude," Seth said, when he got no answer.
Ryan mrphed softly into his pillow.
"Dude," Seth said again.
Ryan flopped over onto his back, but still didn't answer.
"Dude!" Seth said.
"What?" Ryan shouted, sitting up.
"Dude, we need to talk about this."
"Talk about what, Seth?"
"Dude, you kissed me. Are you, like, on red Kryptonite or something?"
Ryan snapped on the light. "That happened a year ago ago, Seth."
"Yeah, well, ten months, actually, and since then..." Seth swallowed past the lump suddenly in his throat. I've been thinking about it. Every ten seconds, for ten months, I've been thinking about it.
"And since then, you've mentioned you aren't gay about a hundred times, and you've also gotten back together with Summer at least... three times? And you've eaten the whipped cream off a half-naked girl and... I'm forgetting someone..."
"Alex," Seth said.
"Alex," Ryan agreed.
"Look, I was a little weirded out by the kiss, I admit," Seth said. "But I've had some time to reflect on it, and I've decided it's simply out of character for you, so I was wondering if you were working through some deeper psychological issues when you kissed me."
Ryan stared at him.
Seth considered leaving.
"Jesus Christ, Seth," Ryan said, lying back with an arm flung over his eyes.
"Because, right now, if I were to kiss you, you might think, hey, maybe it's because my mom's in rehab..."
"Jesus Fucking Christ, Seth," Ryan said.
And maybe it could have been called "Jesus Fucking Christ" now that I think about it.