(no subject)
Fic #3: Raise Your Glass
Request: Firefly: Five times Jayne got drunk and one time he stayed stone sober
Requested by: tamchronin
Length: 838
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Stop requesting Firefly fiction! It’s hard! XD
I.
Jayne got drunk his first night on Serenity.
His own bunk! Ten percent of the spoils! And a couple crew members who weren’t at all hard on the eyes, though he was pretty sure that Zoe would rip his balls off if he tried anything with her. His own bunk! He thought that was worth mentioning twice. A rack all special for his favorite guns, and privacy to get totally hammered.
When the ship took off the next day, he regretted it, a little, but didn’t admit that because men like Jayne regret nothing.
II.
Jayne just didn’t get Reavers.
Sure, they were spooky enough. Fighting them gave him the creeps. Jayne had lived his life knowing that he’d probably die in battle, but he hoped to hell that it wouldn’t be in a fight with Reavers. Or at least if it was, it would be because Mal or Zoe or someone handy had done him the favor of putting a bullet in his head before they could do worse things.
Sure. Spooky.
Having them ‘explained’ by the mysteries of Miranda didn’t really help very much. Perhaps it would have helped a more intellectual person, but Jayne had never prized his intellect particularly highly, though he was no fool. Knowing where the Reavers came from and why they were so crazy didn’t really make a damned bit of difference when he woke up sweating from a nightmare in which one sawed off his leg and roasted it over a slow fire.
Days like that - any day where Reavers were on the menu, no pun intended - were good days to get drunk. And Jayne always did, once the danger was past.
It was, perhaps, one of the things that kept him sane.
He thought maybe the Reavers should try it.
III.
Jayne got drunk after what happened on Ariel, and then again after what happened on Persephone.
Because, really, who wouldn’t?
IV.
For six nights after they left Canton, Jayne kept himself plied with as much liquor as it took to reduce the recent events into a pleasant haze. He knew that it was unusual that Mal was allowing this, but he wasn’t leaving his bunk long enough to find out why. He didn’t care, as long as Mal let him do what he wanted.
Nothing that had happened on that damn mudball had made sense.
He could deal with it, though. He was Jayne fuckin’ Cobb and he could deal with anything. He could deal with the embarrassment of having been thought of a hero and the anger and - yes, he thought it was probably shame - of being found out that he wasn’t. He could live with Stitch trying to kill him. Hell, he could even live with that stupid mudder having taken a bullet for him.
It didn’t make sense, but it was what it was and Jayne had spent an awful lot of his life dealing with what had been set in front of him.
For only the briefest of moments back there, though, he had felt like a hero. He had even wished, maybe a little, that it actually had happened the way they thought it had. That he had robbed the rich and given to the poor. Who would do a damnfool thing like that?
Maybe if they knew what being a hero was like, more people would.
V.
From time to time, Jayne’s mother sent him things.
It depended on the time of year and on what sort of thing had been going on back on his backwards moon. Food, clothes, armaments, fuzzy caps. He received each gift with genuine gratitude and pleasure, despite how incongruous they occasionally were to the life he lived.
He knew that his mother had no illusions. She sent things like fuzzy caps because even heartless mercenaries needed to keep their ears warm.
So when she sent a bottle of his homeworld’s best Scotch, he was no more or less pleased than he was about the scarf she had sent him the month before. The scarf, however, did not provide anywhere near as much drunken goodness, as he thoroughly enjoyed the entire bottle of Scotch before anyone else could realize he had it.
VI.
When the rain was coming down hard, and everyone else was busy with last minute chores to get the ship moving that Jayne knew little about and frankly did not care much about either, he left the ship with a bottle of his best bourbon.
He hadn’t done this earlier, though he’d meant to. Little things had always kept him away. Not like things had been busy or anything.
He walked out to the graves and opened the bottle of bourbon. He went to take a swig, then stopped and didn’t. No sense shortchanging the man, right? With a shrug, he turned the bottle upside down and emptied it over Wash’s grave.
“Don’t worry,” he grunted, tossing the bottle over the edge of the cliff. “I won’t tell the wife you’ve been drinkin’.”