Dark Fest fic: Firefly, 'Truth'
Title: End of All Things
Author: CalUK
Fandom: Firefly
Characters/Pairings: Crew. Gen.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Creepiness and mild gore.
Prompt: Any fandom, any characters, the end of all things.
Summary: They're all alone out here in the black.
And they all dead did lie,
and a thousand thousand slimy things
lived on; and so did I.
~~ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ~~
They wait in high orbit for two days. Not as long as he'd like, but a gutted Alliance city ship that had attracted a swarm of Reavers forced them to detour and it took them an extra week of running dark to get here. He tries not to think about everything and everyone they've lost, but times like that make it hard not to remember. He isn't half the pilot Wash was.
He flicks the ship-2-ship.
“You ready?”
“Always, Sir.”
He nods, though no one can see him.
“We go in slow, make sure it's safe before we land.”
“Sir.”
She signs off, and there's just the hiss of dead space. He lets it fill the deck with static for a minute, welcome white noise that does nothing to drown the memories, good and bad. He knows why she left, why she never set foot up here again after Wash, but he still misses her with a sharpness he never imagined. Sometimes, late at night,he wonders if Wash was right when he said they should have just lain together and got it done and then he just feels like a traitor and the cold bastard he knows some of them call him.
He nudges Serenity forward and in the edge of the window, he can see another ship following his move, creeping forward. Together, they drop down into close orbit, just out of atmosphere, scanning through the static until they've mapped the whole surface.
“Anything?”
“Nothing, Sir.”
“Y'know,I made you a captain so you wouldn't have to call me Sir..”
“I know, Sir.”
He rolls his eyes and gives up.
“Let's get in the world.” he says, flicking switches as they dive into the storm clouds, the deck shaking underneath him as Serenity is buffeted by the winds and he clings to the controls, white-knuckled, more grim determination than skill.
“Why the guay haven't you got yourself a new gorram pilot?” he scolds himself, not for the first time, and then they're through, one last bone-rattling quake that shakes something loose in the galley with a crash. “Kaylee!” he calls, hears her muffled reply. “Get that stowed!”
Above them, Zoe's ship rolls out of the cloud, close enough that he can see the name painted on the side. It hurts to read it, it always does, and he wonders how she can stand it;
Leaf on the wind
They land on a wide plain, a dozen klicks from the largest ruins on the planet. It was probably covered with thick grass, once; this was a prairie world, before it was nuked. He can't even remember who claimed the bombings, Alliance or the New Browncoats, or what excuse they used, if they bothered with one at all. They didn't bother much, at the end of the war. Now, he stands in the hold as the door drops and gazes out over the near-desert that's all that's left of the prairie. It's almost dark, though it must be about noon, local time, the dust in the atmosphere that causes the planet-wide storms also stops most of the sunlight reaching the surface. It swirls into the hold, dashed against his face by the wind that scrapes away at the planet. Soon, he thinks it will be almost bare rock, no trace left of the once-thriving world except a few scattered ruins.
It's hard to see how anything could live here, but they've been caught out before, survivors scratching out a living on planets so radioactive even the Reavers don't bother with them. Simon had made him stay there for a week, the first time, while he shuttled down to the surface, treating the gatherers who lost the daily lottery to go out of the bunkers and find food and in the end, Mal had to lock him in the sickbay until they were on the far side of the system.
That was just a few weeks after the Collapse. It only took three or four more worlds for even the doctor to give up on those desperate survivors, nothing human left in them by then.
“Is there anyone out there?” Kaylee asks behind him. He glances back over his shoulder, finds her crouched on the gantry, wiping her hands clean. She doesn't look back at him, staring out at the desolate world over his shoulder.
“No sign of anything.”
“We need more powdered dairy protein,” she says. “Last of our store was what made that tyen-sah mess in the galley.”
“I'll see what I can do.”
“Fuel cells, too.”
“Top of the list. As always.”
She's been trying to figure out a way to make the ships' engines run more efficiently for weeks and it shows; dark shadows bruising her eyes, smudges of grease ground into her skin. Sooner or later, they all know they're going to run out of fuel, stranded in the black. Mal turns back to the desolation.
“Maybe it's time we found a moon somewhere,” Kaylee says, hesitantly. “Place we can settle on.”
“They'd find us.”
Zoe's waiting at the foot of the ramp, Wind's mule idling with a low rumble. Behind him, Mal hears the quiet scrape of Kaylee's boots as she leaves the hold. She still hasn't forgiven Zoe for leaving Serenity, he knows.
“We just have to keep flyin',” he murmurs. “Ain't nothin' can touch us if we keep flyin'.”
He slaps the button to close the bay doors, trots down the ramp as it shudders and begins to rise and clambers into the mule, behind the cannon mounted on the back.
“Let's go get us some powdered dairy protein!”
The cloud of dust they kick up as they leave hides both ships from his view when he looks back, and a cold frisson snakes down his spine. This wasteland feels very big, all of a sudden. Big, and very, very empty.
“Just gotta keep flyin',” he breathes again, like a prayer.
They don't see anyone, any sign of life, all the way to the city. The ground is rougher the closer they get, jagged crevasses torn open in the bedrock by the forces that shattered the world and he aims the cannon down into every one as Zoe snakes them through the maze. They're deep, plunging down until the bottoms are lost in shadows and he wonders what's down there.
“Sir.”
Zoe's low call breaks him out of his reverie.
“What is it?”
“Up ahead.”
He looks up, and freezes.
They're approaching the outskirts of the city, the first few houses emerging out of the rubble. The nuke must have landed close enough for the blast wave to knock down most of the buildings, and he's distantly glad that it must have been a clean bomb; he's seen enough men dying of radiation sickness over the last few months.
In the middle of the street, there's a figure.
Standing, listing to one side, it watches them as Zoe slows the mule to a crawl and doesn't even flinch when Mal turns the cannon onto it.
“I don't like it, Sir.”
“Me either,” he murmurs. They've learned - the hard way - to avoid the survivors they find on planets. Zoe steers them straight toward the figure and it still doesn't move, and Mal's stomach gives a sick little lurch when they finally get close enough for him to see why through the haze of dust; it's impaled on a stake, jagged end sticking up behind it's left shoulder. There's a scrap of flesh caught on the end, twitching as if it's alive in the scant breeze, but that's as much life as is left in the poor bastard by now.
“Runtse de fwotzoo, ching baoyo wuomun ”, Zoe whispers. Mal wonders how she can still feel the shock that makes her voice catch, when they've seen so much worse, then wonders when he stopped.
He triggers the comm unit, hails Serenity.
”What is it, Cap?” Kaylee asks him.
“Keep a sharp eye,” he tells her. “Don't think this rock's as empty as it looks.”
”Reavers?”
“Yeah.”
“No records that they released the Pax anywhere in this quadrant, Sir,” Zoe says.
“Doubt they were keepin' much account of where they released it, by the end,” Mal answers, catchers her shrug and nod in the corner of his eye. He's still staring at the scarecrow, taking in the ragged wounds torn through skin and flesh down to scored bone. Looks like tooth marks, he thinks, but he doesn't say it aloud. She'll have seen it, probably before he did. “Best get what we came for and get the guay out of here.”
The mule creeps past the grisly warning and into the town. The steady growl of the engine echoes back to them from the crumbling walls until Mal's nerves are as shattered as the buildings are.
“Ta ma de, they have to have heard us by now,” he mutters.
“Maybe they killed each other?” Zoe offers. Neither of them believe it. They make their way through the town until they find a store, load up the mule with protein blocks, packets of dairy substitute and Mal raids the small pharmacy attached to the store until there's barely enough room for them to squeeze back into the mule.
“Let's get this back to the ships. Come back with Jayne, make another run.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Probably not. But we need fuel cells.”
The scarecrow watches them leave the town, the skin on the back of Mal's neck crawling with its dead stare all the way back to the ships, long after it's out of sight. Kaylee meets them at the foot of the ramp, doesn't even look at Zoe as she helps them unload the supplies and finally, Mal catches her arm gently.
“Go get Jayne down here for me. Tell him to bring Vera.”
She nods, hesitates for a second and then she's gone and he thinks he catches a flicker of sadness in Zoe's eyes.
“She'll come around,” he tries. Zoe shrugs.
“Don't see that she will, Sir. Nor that she should.”
They go back to unloading the mule in silence and there's nothing to stop Mal thinking about the man they skewered on that stake, on the people who did it. He doesn't realize he's literally shaking with anger until he fumbles a case of meds and they spill out, bright powders scattering in the wan ochre dust of the desert.
“Tzao-gao!” he snarls.
“Sir?”
“I could, I'd bring the tah-shr suo-yo dee-yure duh biao-tze duh mah who did this to them back, just so I could kill them again. Slowly.”
“We all would, Sir.”
He spins on her, fists trembling at his side.
“Don't call me that,” he snaps and she stops, straightens and faces him with a stack of protein blocks in her arms.
“Why?”
Mal just stares at her.
“Thinks he doesn't deserve it.”
Both of them flinch and River smiles as she strolls between them, takes the cases from Zoe.
“Keep out of my head, Albatross,” Mal snaps again. She ignores him, carries the cases to the bottom of the ramp.
“Day you do something to stop deserving it, I'll stop calling you Sir,” Zoe says. “Sir.”
“Day I do something? Zoe, I got your husband killed!”
“No you didn't. Reavers killed my husband, Alliance made the Reavers. All you did was try and make that right.”
“And look what happened because of that!” Mal throws his arms up, shouts at last and only realizes that they've both been arguing in hushed whispers as it echoes out across the desert. They cringe.
“You two fixin' to get us all et'?”
Jayne, this time, and he snatches the last few cases from the mule, stomps back into Serenity's hold. Zoe crosses the space between them, stands so close to Mal he can hear her breathing.
“We started a war that needed to be fought,” she bites out. “Maybe it cost us more than we ever would have imagined but ain't none of us could have walked away from what we found.”
“How many folk - ”
“Wasn't you, or me, or any of us decided to start carpet bombing whole planets, Mal” she interrupts him. It's oddly shocking to hear her call him by name, jarring and strange. She leans in until he can feel her breath against his face and all he can see is the loss and the old, old anger in her eyes. “And it sure as guay wasn't any one of us who used Pax as a weapon.”
She doesn't give him a chance to answer, turning on her heel and stalking back to Wind. He feels very alone, standing there in the dust of a dead planet, between the two ships and a shiver crawls down his spine.
“She's right.”
“Don't feel right,” he answers the girl and River circles him. He doesn't bother wondering how long she was standing there, she could have heard them from Serenity's engine room.
“Truth never does.”
“What they did to those people, Albatross,” he murmurs and she stops, just in front of him, staring out into the desert. “All those people they turned, took away what made them people and they did it knowin' what would happen, what they'd make 'em. All because we couldn't walk away from what we found out there.”
“Some things are meant to be.”
“No,” he says. “They're really not.”
She looks back at him over her shoulder.
“So you play Moses, lead your people out of Egypt.”
“Assumin' I know what the heck you're talkin' about, you tell me what else I could've done.”
“Contradictions, false logistics. Integrated non-progressional evolution theory but taking orders from a talking bush? Have to assume early hallucinogenic consumption. Nothing,” she answers him with a tilt of her head. “Are we going now?”
“Sure you want to come, Albatross? Not a pretty sight out there.”
She smiles at him and twirls away on her toes, jumps lightly up onto the mule and sits behind the cannon.
“Right,” he mutters. “Stupid question. Jayne! We're movin'!”
They pile into the mule and Zoe drives them back to the town. She pauses at the scarecrow again and Jayne growls at it.
“Ain't right, doin' that to a man.”
“Ain't right doin' that to any of them,” Zoe says and the big man grunts. She guns the engine and they roll into town, winding their way through streets crowded with rubble, just fast enough to stay ahead of the choking dust cloud the tires kick up. The devastation is total; every window is shattered, gaping holes in cracked, crumbling walls, most of the roofs caved in where they weren't peeled back by the force of the blast, just so much tile and twisted rafter on the street. Every now and then they pass oddly intact belongings, chairs or tables, kettles and pots and once a bed, stripped of its mattress but otherwise untouched in the middle of a wide avenue and Mal can't decide if they were left here when people ran from the Pax, or blown here by the blast of the nuke.
“Why'd they nuke and dose the place?” Jayne asks. It's the first time any of them have spoken in almost an hour. Zoe shrugs behind the wheel.
“Don't know which side did what. Could be the New Browncoats nuked it after the Alliance released the Pax.”
“Could be the other way around,” Mal adds, sour taste in his mouth.
“Doesn't matter who did what to who,” River says softly. The girl's staring out at the town as if she can see something they can't and Mal wonders if she's watching the ghosts of the people who died here. “They're all ghosts now,” she goes on, glances back at him. “Even the ones ain't dead.”
The back of his neck crawls, every hair standing on end and he knows this feeling, all too well. “Zoe,” he starts, but Jayne interrupts;
“Some-gorram-thin' out there,” the big man snaps, Vera up, nestled against his shoulder and Zoe slews the mule in a tight turn that has them all coughing on the dust. Mal's eyes are streaming, he blinks but it feels like sandpaper and he bites out a curse, feels the mule thrum as the engine roars and then the machine rocks as it hits something, or something hits it and River's scream whips away from him. He snatches blindly, lunges after the sound and his fingers close around her arm, slide down to her wrist before she locks her hand onto his.
“Jayne!” he chokes out, cringes as the gun thunders right next to his ear and there's a hot splatter against his face but he pushes it aside, hauls on River's arm and drags the girl and the Reaver latched on to her waist up on to the mule. The Reaver snarls at him, half its face simply gone, torn away but it snaps at him with what's left of its jaw, mangled bone hanging by a rotting sinew until River twists and slams her elbow up and back. The Reaver's head snaps up and away in two different directions, its arms loosen, slithering away as River clambers over Mal's shoulder and the body disappears into the howling mass that's appeared around the mule. At first Mal can't work out where they came from, but then the vehicle lurches into a trench clawed out of the ground. He wrenches his revolver out of its holster at his hip, fires twice into the ragged, blistered face of the creature about to grab Zoe and twice more into the next one dragging itself out of its foxhole.
“Get us out of here!” he roars, ducks as the cannon swings over his head and it's so loud he doesn't hear it when it fires just a handful of inches from him, he feels it, shaking his bones until he thinks they're going to fall apart. The world goes silent; he sees Zoe shout something, sees the Reavers' maniacal smiles carved into their faces stretch and twist as they laugh and then disintegrate in the hail of lead still pouring out of the cannon and when he looks back he sees River screaming as she holds the triggers down, Jayne swinging Vera by a smoking muzzle, blood dripping from his hands as he bats away the Reavers climbing the back of the mule.
They leave the street carpeted with corpses that look weeks old, some still twitching with the last, stubborn dregs of life. Two klicks out of town, Zoe hands over the controls to Jayne and he drives with a grim focus as if he can forget about the burns on his hands by sheer force of will. The tall woman climbs up to where Mal's sitting, leaning back against the footplate of the cannon and she cradles his face in her hands, peers into his eyes and says something he can't make out.
“I can't hear you,” he whispers, or maybe he shouts. He wants to scream.
She frowns, says it again, slowly, shaping each word carefully and he watches her mouth.
Are you okay, Sir?
“Don't call me Sir,” he grouses and she rolls her eyes, tilts his head from side to side to dab at the blood trickling from his ears.
Simon will patch it up, she tells him and he grins lopsidedly.
“Heck, the doc glued one of 'em back on again once.”
She doesn't laugh.
By the time they get back to the ships, Zoe driving again while Jayne cradles his hands in his lap, he can just about make out a high pitched ringing, a steady, throbbing toll like the bells of the old chapel on the ranch on Shadow. Kaylee and Simon are waiting at the foot of Serenity's ramp, guns in their hands and Zoe drives the mule straight onto the ship. It's bigger than the one Serenity used to have, takes up too much space in the hold and Mal slides down to the deck awkwardly, stumbles around the bulk of the vehicle until Simon steadies him.
Let me see, he thinks the doctor says, and Mal shrugs him off.
“'m fine. We gotta get off this gorram rock.”
But he stumbles again on the steps, trips and falls and winds up sprawled across them, cheek pressed against the blessedly cool metal. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, feels the steady thrum of Serenity's engines shift and roar and doesn't even remember to wonder who's piloting them.
::
They stand beside him on the bridge as he presses the fire controls and Serenity lurches underneath him three times as the missiles streak through the vacuum. The antimatter payload River designed will tear the planet apart and he draws a small, black cross through its mark on the old fashioned chart spread across the console. No one speaks as they watch the missiles trail smoke and fire through the atmosphere until they hit with a flare that turns the nightside to day. Kaylee and Simon go first, hand in hand, then Jayne and Zoe squeezes his shoulder gently as she passes.
“I'm sorry about Wind,” he tells her. She's silent for a moment and he doesn't think she's seeing him or the planet or even the ship, not really.
“I'm know,” she finally answers, softly and she closes the door behind her with a quiet thump.
He watches the first big storms rip through the clouds, visible even from orbit and looks down at the chart, covered with small black crosses.
“Ain't nowhere left to run,” he says, traces a few of them, places he knew, once.
“Not where you run to that counts,” River says. She's crouched right down where the glass meets the deck, drawing patterns in the mist of her breath. “Just the running that matters.”
He watches her as she traces the shapes of the clouds below, turns them into creatures and faces. The lightning turns to flames, firestorms the size of continents raging as the planet begins to tear itself apart.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he murmurs, more to himself. “Kicked up a hornets nest was better left untouched.”
“No.”
She's watching him, standing slowly.
“Inevitable, immutable truth. Sooner or later, Schröedinger's cat crawls out of the bag.”
He thinks about Miranda, about watching the 'casts from Persephone when they first realized the Pax had been released there, too; the people who just lay down and died and the Reavers who swarmed through the slums, tearing them down as they went. He thinks about the war leaders and the politicians, blaming each other; they'd thought it was the Alliance at first but all along, something felt off about the attack and he remembers the night he figured out where the blame really lay. He'd burned his old uniform greatcoat that night, standing alone on an empty moon on the edge of the system and called his crew together, told them he was running, leaving the war behind. He runs his hand over the chart, rests it over the only part of the system not covered with black crosses and stares down at the label, Haven.
Nowhere left to run.
“They turned the whole 'verse into Reavers,” he tells her. She presses herself up against the screen, the flames visible even through the storm clouds.
“We're alone,” she whispers. He can't watch, closes his eyes but the after-image of her silhouette against the light as the planet burns stays with him and he knows he'll dream of it tonight, just one more nightmare to add to the dozens already crowding his sleep.
“We're all that's left.”
Author: CalUK
Fandom: Firefly
Characters/Pairings: Crew. Gen.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Creepiness and mild gore.
Prompt: Any fandom, any characters, the end of all things.
Summary: They're all alone out here in the black.
And they all dead did lie,
and a thousand thousand slimy things
lived on; and so did I.
~~ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ~~
They wait in high orbit for two days. Not as long as he'd like, but a gutted Alliance city ship that had attracted a swarm of Reavers forced them to detour and it took them an extra week of running dark to get here. He tries not to think about everything and everyone they've lost, but times like that make it hard not to remember. He isn't half the pilot Wash was.
He flicks the ship-2-ship.
“You ready?”
“Always, Sir.”
He nods, though no one can see him.
“We go in slow, make sure it's safe before we land.”
“Sir.”
She signs off, and there's just the hiss of dead space. He lets it fill the deck with static for a minute, welcome white noise that does nothing to drown the memories, good and bad. He knows why she left, why she never set foot up here again after Wash, but he still misses her with a sharpness he never imagined. Sometimes, late at night,he wonders if Wash was right when he said they should have just lain together and got it done and then he just feels like a traitor and the cold bastard he knows some of them call him.
He nudges Serenity forward and in the edge of the window, he can see another ship following his move, creeping forward. Together, they drop down into close orbit, just out of atmosphere, scanning through the static until they've mapped the whole surface.
“Anything?”
“Nothing, Sir.”
“Y'know,I made you a captain so you wouldn't have to call me Sir..”
“I know, Sir.”
He rolls his eyes and gives up.
“Let's get in the world.” he says, flicking switches as they dive into the storm clouds, the deck shaking underneath him as Serenity is buffeted by the winds and he clings to the controls, white-knuckled, more grim determination than skill.
“Why the guay haven't you got yourself a new gorram pilot?” he scolds himself, not for the first time, and then they're through, one last bone-rattling quake that shakes something loose in the galley with a crash. “Kaylee!” he calls, hears her muffled reply. “Get that stowed!”
Above them, Zoe's ship rolls out of the cloud, close enough that he can see the name painted on the side. It hurts to read it, it always does, and he wonders how she can stand it;
Leaf on the wind
They land on a wide plain, a dozen klicks from the largest ruins on the planet. It was probably covered with thick grass, once; this was a prairie world, before it was nuked. He can't even remember who claimed the bombings, Alliance or the New Browncoats, or what excuse they used, if they bothered with one at all. They didn't bother much, at the end of the war. Now, he stands in the hold as the door drops and gazes out over the near-desert that's all that's left of the prairie. It's almost dark, though it must be about noon, local time, the dust in the atmosphere that causes the planet-wide storms also stops most of the sunlight reaching the surface. It swirls into the hold, dashed against his face by the wind that scrapes away at the planet. Soon, he thinks it will be almost bare rock, no trace left of the once-thriving world except a few scattered ruins.
It's hard to see how anything could live here, but they've been caught out before, survivors scratching out a living on planets so radioactive even the Reavers don't bother with them. Simon had made him stay there for a week, the first time, while he shuttled down to the surface, treating the gatherers who lost the daily lottery to go out of the bunkers and find food and in the end, Mal had to lock him in the sickbay until they were on the far side of the system.
That was just a few weeks after the Collapse. It only took three or four more worlds for even the doctor to give up on those desperate survivors, nothing human left in them by then.
“Is there anyone out there?” Kaylee asks behind him. He glances back over his shoulder, finds her crouched on the gantry, wiping her hands clean. She doesn't look back at him, staring out at the desolate world over his shoulder.
“No sign of anything.”
“We need more powdered dairy protein,” she says. “Last of our store was what made that tyen-sah mess in the galley.”
“I'll see what I can do.”
“Fuel cells, too.”
“Top of the list. As always.”
She's been trying to figure out a way to make the ships' engines run more efficiently for weeks and it shows; dark shadows bruising her eyes, smudges of grease ground into her skin. Sooner or later, they all know they're going to run out of fuel, stranded in the black. Mal turns back to the desolation.
“Maybe it's time we found a moon somewhere,” Kaylee says, hesitantly. “Place we can settle on.”
“They'd find us.”
Zoe's waiting at the foot of the ramp, Wind's mule idling with a low rumble. Behind him, Mal hears the quiet scrape of Kaylee's boots as she leaves the hold. She still hasn't forgiven Zoe for leaving Serenity, he knows.
“We just have to keep flyin',” he murmurs. “Ain't nothin' can touch us if we keep flyin'.”
He slaps the button to close the bay doors, trots down the ramp as it shudders and begins to rise and clambers into the mule, behind the cannon mounted on the back.
“Let's go get us some powdered dairy protein!”
The cloud of dust they kick up as they leave hides both ships from his view when he looks back, and a cold frisson snakes down his spine. This wasteland feels very big, all of a sudden. Big, and very, very empty.
“Just gotta keep flyin',” he breathes again, like a prayer.
They don't see anyone, any sign of life, all the way to the city. The ground is rougher the closer they get, jagged crevasses torn open in the bedrock by the forces that shattered the world and he aims the cannon down into every one as Zoe snakes them through the maze. They're deep, plunging down until the bottoms are lost in shadows and he wonders what's down there.
“Sir.”
Zoe's low call breaks him out of his reverie.
“What is it?”
“Up ahead.”
He looks up, and freezes.
They're approaching the outskirts of the city, the first few houses emerging out of the rubble. The nuke must have landed close enough for the blast wave to knock down most of the buildings, and he's distantly glad that it must have been a clean bomb; he's seen enough men dying of radiation sickness over the last few months.
In the middle of the street, there's a figure.
Standing, listing to one side, it watches them as Zoe slows the mule to a crawl and doesn't even flinch when Mal turns the cannon onto it.
“I don't like it, Sir.”
“Me either,” he murmurs. They've learned - the hard way - to avoid the survivors they find on planets. Zoe steers them straight toward the figure and it still doesn't move, and Mal's stomach gives a sick little lurch when they finally get close enough for him to see why through the haze of dust; it's impaled on a stake, jagged end sticking up behind it's left shoulder. There's a scrap of flesh caught on the end, twitching as if it's alive in the scant breeze, but that's as much life as is left in the poor bastard by now.
“Runtse de fwotzoo, ching baoyo wuomun ”, Zoe whispers. Mal wonders how she can still feel the shock that makes her voice catch, when they've seen so much worse, then wonders when he stopped.
He triggers the comm unit, hails Serenity.
”What is it, Cap?” Kaylee asks him.
“Keep a sharp eye,” he tells her. “Don't think this rock's as empty as it looks.”
”Reavers?”
“Yeah.”
“No records that they released the Pax anywhere in this quadrant, Sir,” Zoe says.
“Doubt they were keepin' much account of where they released it, by the end,” Mal answers, catchers her shrug and nod in the corner of his eye. He's still staring at the scarecrow, taking in the ragged wounds torn through skin and flesh down to scored bone. Looks like tooth marks, he thinks, but he doesn't say it aloud. She'll have seen it, probably before he did. “Best get what we came for and get the guay out of here.”
The mule creeps past the grisly warning and into the town. The steady growl of the engine echoes back to them from the crumbling walls until Mal's nerves are as shattered as the buildings are.
“Ta ma de, they have to have heard us by now,” he mutters.
“Maybe they killed each other?” Zoe offers. Neither of them believe it. They make their way through the town until they find a store, load up the mule with protein blocks, packets of dairy substitute and Mal raids the small pharmacy attached to the store until there's barely enough room for them to squeeze back into the mule.
“Let's get this back to the ships. Come back with Jayne, make another run.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Probably not. But we need fuel cells.”
The scarecrow watches them leave the town, the skin on the back of Mal's neck crawling with its dead stare all the way back to the ships, long after it's out of sight. Kaylee meets them at the foot of the ramp, doesn't even look at Zoe as she helps them unload the supplies and finally, Mal catches her arm gently.
“Go get Jayne down here for me. Tell him to bring Vera.”
She nods, hesitates for a second and then she's gone and he thinks he catches a flicker of sadness in Zoe's eyes.
“She'll come around,” he tries. Zoe shrugs.
“Don't see that she will, Sir. Nor that she should.”
They go back to unloading the mule in silence and there's nothing to stop Mal thinking about the man they skewered on that stake, on the people who did it. He doesn't realize he's literally shaking with anger until he fumbles a case of meds and they spill out, bright powders scattering in the wan ochre dust of the desert.
“Tzao-gao!” he snarls.
“Sir?”
“I could, I'd bring the tah-shr suo-yo dee-yure duh biao-tze duh mah who did this to them back, just so I could kill them again. Slowly.”
“We all would, Sir.”
He spins on her, fists trembling at his side.
“Don't call me that,” he snaps and she stops, straightens and faces him with a stack of protein blocks in her arms.
“Why?”
Mal just stares at her.
“Thinks he doesn't deserve it.”
Both of them flinch and River smiles as she strolls between them, takes the cases from Zoe.
“Keep out of my head, Albatross,” Mal snaps again. She ignores him, carries the cases to the bottom of the ramp.
“Day you do something to stop deserving it, I'll stop calling you Sir,” Zoe says. “Sir.”
“Day I do something? Zoe, I got your husband killed!”
“No you didn't. Reavers killed my husband, Alliance made the Reavers. All you did was try and make that right.”
“And look what happened because of that!” Mal throws his arms up, shouts at last and only realizes that they've both been arguing in hushed whispers as it echoes out across the desert. They cringe.
“You two fixin' to get us all et'?”
Jayne, this time, and he snatches the last few cases from the mule, stomps back into Serenity's hold. Zoe crosses the space between them, stands so close to Mal he can hear her breathing.
“We started a war that needed to be fought,” she bites out. “Maybe it cost us more than we ever would have imagined but ain't none of us could have walked away from what we found.”
“How many folk - ”
“Wasn't you, or me, or any of us decided to start carpet bombing whole planets, Mal” she interrupts him. It's oddly shocking to hear her call him by name, jarring and strange. She leans in until he can feel her breath against his face and all he can see is the loss and the old, old anger in her eyes. “And it sure as guay wasn't any one of us who used Pax as a weapon.”
She doesn't give him a chance to answer, turning on her heel and stalking back to Wind. He feels very alone, standing there in the dust of a dead planet, between the two ships and a shiver crawls down his spine.
“She's right.”
“Don't feel right,” he answers the girl and River circles him. He doesn't bother wondering how long she was standing there, she could have heard them from Serenity's engine room.
“Truth never does.”
“What they did to those people, Albatross,” he murmurs and she stops, just in front of him, staring out into the desert. “All those people they turned, took away what made them people and they did it knowin' what would happen, what they'd make 'em. All because we couldn't walk away from what we found out there.”
“Some things are meant to be.”
“No,” he says. “They're really not.”
She looks back at him over her shoulder.
“So you play Moses, lead your people out of Egypt.”
“Assumin' I know what the heck you're talkin' about, you tell me what else I could've done.”
“Contradictions, false logistics. Integrated non-progressional evolution theory but taking orders from a talking bush? Have to assume early hallucinogenic consumption. Nothing,” she answers him with a tilt of her head. “Are we going now?”
“Sure you want to come, Albatross? Not a pretty sight out there.”
She smiles at him and twirls away on her toes, jumps lightly up onto the mule and sits behind the cannon.
“Right,” he mutters. “Stupid question. Jayne! We're movin'!”
They pile into the mule and Zoe drives them back to the town. She pauses at the scarecrow again and Jayne growls at it.
“Ain't right, doin' that to a man.”
“Ain't right doin' that to any of them,” Zoe says and the big man grunts. She guns the engine and they roll into town, winding their way through streets crowded with rubble, just fast enough to stay ahead of the choking dust cloud the tires kick up. The devastation is total; every window is shattered, gaping holes in cracked, crumbling walls, most of the roofs caved in where they weren't peeled back by the force of the blast, just so much tile and twisted rafter on the street. Every now and then they pass oddly intact belongings, chairs or tables, kettles and pots and once a bed, stripped of its mattress but otherwise untouched in the middle of a wide avenue and Mal can't decide if they were left here when people ran from the Pax, or blown here by the blast of the nuke.
“Why'd they nuke and dose the place?” Jayne asks. It's the first time any of them have spoken in almost an hour. Zoe shrugs behind the wheel.
“Don't know which side did what. Could be the New Browncoats nuked it after the Alliance released the Pax.”
“Could be the other way around,” Mal adds, sour taste in his mouth.
“Doesn't matter who did what to who,” River says softly. The girl's staring out at the town as if she can see something they can't and Mal wonders if she's watching the ghosts of the people who died here. “They're all ghosts now,” she goes on, glances back at him. “Even the ones ain't dead.”
The back of his neck crawls, every hair standing on end and he knows this feeling, all too well. “Zoe,” he starts, but Jayne interrupts;
“Some-gorram-thin' out there,” the big man snaps, Vera up, nestled against his shoulder and Zoe slews the mule in a tight turn that has them all coughing on the dust. Mal's eyes are streaming, he blinks but it feels like sandpaper and he bites out a curse, feels the mule thrum as the engine roars and then the machine rocks as it hits something, or something hits it and River's scream whips away from him. He snatches blindly, lunges after the sound and his fingers close around her arm, slide down to her wrist before she locks her hand onto his.
“Jayne!” he chokes out, cringes as the gun thunders right next to his ear and there's a hot splatter against his face but he pushes it aside, hauls on River's arm and drags the girl and the Reaver latched on to her waist up on to the mule. The Reaver snarls at him, half its face simply gone, torn away but it snaps at him with what's left of its jaw, mangled bone hanging by a rotting sinew until River twists and slams her elbow up and back. The Reaver's head snaps up and away in two different directions, its arms loosen, slithering away as River clambers over Mal's shoulder and the body disappears into the howling mass that's appeared around the mule. At first Mal can't work out where they came from, but then the vehicle lurches into a trench clawed out of the ground. He wrenches his revolver out of its holster at his hip, fires twice into the ragged, blistered face of the creature about to grab Zoe and twice more into the next one dragging itself out of its foxhole.
“Get us out of here!” he roars, ducks as the cannon swings over his head and it's so loud he doesn't hear it when it fires just a handful of inches from him, he feels it, shaking his bones until he thinks they're going to fall apart. The world goes silent; he sees Zoe shout something, sees the Reavers' maniacal smiles carved into their faces stretch and twist as they laugh and then disintegrate in the hail of lead still pouring out of the cannon and when he looks back he sees River screaming as she holds the triggers down, Jayne swinging Vera by a smoking muzzle, blood dripping from his hands as he bats away the Reavers climbing the back of the mule.
They leave the street carpeted with corpses that look weeks old, some still twitching with the last, stubborn dregs of life. Two klicks out of town, Zoe hands over the controls to Jayne and he drives with a grim focus as if he can forget about the burns on his hands by sheer force of will. The tall woman climbs up to where Mal's sitting, leaning back against the footplate of the cannon and she cradles his face in her hands, peers into his eyes and says something he can't make out.
“I can't hear you,” he whispers, or maybe he shouts. He wants to scream.
She frowns, says it again, slowly, shaping each word carefully and he watches her mouth.
Are you okay, Sir?
“Don't call me Sir,” he grouses and she rolls her eyes, tilts his head from side to side to dab at the blood trickling from his ears.
Simon will patch it up, she tells him and he grins lopsidedly.
“Heck, the doc glued one of 'em back on again once.”
She doesn't laugh.
By the time they get back to the ships, Zoe driving again while Jayne cradles his hands in his lap, he can just about make out a high pitched ringing, a steady, throbbing toll like the bells of the old chapel on the ranch on Shadow. Kaylee and Simon are waiting at the foot of Serenity's ramp, guns in their hands and Zoe drives the mule straight onto the ship. It's bigger than the one Serenity used to have, takes up too much space in the hold and Mal slides down to the deck awkwardly, stumbles around the bulk of the vehicle until Simon steadies him.
Let me see, he thinks the doctor says, and Mal shrugs him off.
“'m fine. We gotta get off this gorram rock.”
But he stumbles again on the steps, trips and falls and winds up sprawled across them, cheek pressed against the blessedly cool metal. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, feels the steady thrum of Serenity's engines shift and roar and doesn't even remember to wonder who's piloting them.
::
They stand beside him on the bridge as he presses the fire controls and Serenity lurches underneath him three times as the missiles streak through the vacuum. The antimatter payload River designed will tear the planet apart and he draws a small, black cross through its mark on the old fashioned chart spread across the console. No one speaks as they watch the missiles trail smoke and fire through the atmosphere until they hit with a flare that turns the nightside to day. Kaylee and Simon go first, hand in hand, then Jayne and Zoe squeezes his shoulder gently as she passes.
“I'm sorry about Wind,” he tells her. She's silent for a moment and he doesn't think she's seeing him or the planet or even the ship, not really.
“I'm know,” she finally answers, softly and she closes the door behind her with a quiet thump.
He watches the first big storms rip through the clouds, visible even from orbit and looks down at the chart, covered with small black crosses.
“Ain't nowhere left to run,” he says, traces a few of them, places he knew, once.
“Not where you run to that counts,” River says. She's crouched right down where the glass meets the deck, drawing patterns in the mist of her breath. “Just the running that matters.”
He watches her as she traces the shapes of the clouds below, turns them into creatures and faces. The lightning turns to flames, firestorms the size of continents raging as the planet begins to tear itself apart.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he murmurs, more to himself. “Kicked up a hornets nest was better left untouched.”
“No.”
She's watching him, standing slowly.
“Inevitable, immutable truth. Sooner or later, Schröedinger's cat crawls out of the bag.”
He thinks about Miranda, about watching the 'casts from Persephone when they first realized the Pax had been released there, too; the people who just lay down and died and the Reavers who swarmed through the slums, tearing them down as they went. He thinks about the war leaders and the politicians, blaming each other; they'd thought it was the Alliance at first but all along, something felt off about the attack and he remembers the night he figured out where the blame really lay. He'd burned his old uniform greatcoat that night, standing alone on an empty moon on the edge of the system and called his crew together, told them he was running, leaving the war behind. He runs his hand over the chart, rests it over the only part of the system not covered with black crosses and stares down at the label, Haven.
Nowhere left to run.
“They turned the whole 'verse into Reavers,” he tells her. She presses herself up against the screen, the flames visible even through the storm clouds.
“We're alone,” she whispers. He can't watch, closes his eyes but the after-image of her silhouette against the light as the planet burns stays with him and he knows he'll dream of it tonight, just one more nightmare to add to the dozens already crowding his sleep.
“We're all that's left.”