Old War Horses 24
Title: Old War Horses
Firefly x Sentinel
Mal/Jayne, Blair/Jim
Rated: ADULT
Taming the Muse prompt:
Malcolm Reynolds fought for the Browncoat rebels. They wanted their freedom. They lost. James Joseph Womak was a commander for the Alliance, determined to bring justice to the common people. His side won, but he still lost.
This time on Old War Horses:
We have a little mini-spurt with two chapters in two days. River can't seem to make herself understood, so when all else fails, just drag the crew along for the ride until they can catch up. It works for her. It doesn't work as well for the confused crew that's getting dragged.
If you want to read the early chapters, go to Twisting the Hellmouth.
If you want to read the most recent chapters, use tags.
24
“So, what’d we get?” Mal asked as River brought up streams of data onto the screen.
Everyone stood around watching, but Jim was focused more on his partner. Blair had been quiet ever since they’d returned. The second they got back on the ship, he’d showered off the blood and changed his clothes, but his eyes were still haunted. Jim reached out and rested a hand on Blair’s shoulder, and Blair summoned up a weak smile. Then he leaned in closer, his weight resting against Jim’s side. Jim wrapped his arm around Blair and held him tightly. “You saved them,” Jim whispered while the others fussed over figures. River brought up a split screen with two sets of data, and Simon Tam was the first to spot that they were two versions of financial records.
“I didn’t save all of them,” Blair whispered back. The air smelled of salt, and Blair turned his face toward Jim’s chest. Kaylee turned a worried face their way, and Jim nodded at her. He appreciated that she cared, but he didn’t want someone else coming in and comforting his partner. If they couldn’t figure out River’s plan and Jim still had to make a suicide run, he wanted to store up every memory of Blair he could get. So he tightened his arms around Blair and rested his cheek on the top of Blair’s head.
“They’re financing the president. Blue Sun isn’t just donating money, they’re actually financing the president and at least half the elected congress. Look at that,” Simon said, pointing at the screen. “They own the government.”
Blair tried to squirm around, but Jim held on tighter. There was a little sob from him, and Jim could feel the tremors. Blair needed to feel this, he needed to let the pain out or he’d swallow it. That’s what he’d done after their big escape. For almost a month, they’d hidden at a little prospector’s place Jim had kept as a bolt hole in case of trouble, and Blair had insisted that he was fine, that he knew he wasn’t at fault for the people inside the Institute. He’d claimed that for almost two weeks, brushing off Jim’s sympathy until he’d finally broken down.
Now that Jim knew his partner had a habit of burying his own guilt, swallowing it whole until it gnawed at his guts, Jim was quicker to force the emotion out. Slowly Blair’s arms came up around Jim, holding on for dear life. It was funny-Blair understood everyone else so well, and yet he still needed Jim to do this for him, to hold him and prick the emotion until it came out. Ideally Jim’d rather do it in private, but Blair had insisted that he wanted to see the information that had come at such a high price.
“Oh my God.” Simon breathed out the words, leaning close to the screen. “This… this could bring down governments. I can’t believe they’re doing this. I can’t believe they’re keeping records about having done this. Oh my God.”
“Brother thinks in grey and grey, all the color leeched from the sky,” River announced as she slowly scrolled through more figures. They didn’t mean all that much to Jim, but if River and Simon thought they were important, Jim would believe them.
“What, so this is like Miranda with some big-ass secret?” Jayne asked. “The last secret looked more important than this. This is just figures.” Jayne clearly wasn’t impressed.
Simon looked at Jayne with his mouth literally open for several seconds. “The last secret could be dismissed as an ill-thought out plan by a small group of overenthusiastic scientists. This is proof that our whole democracy is essentially a farce, a fiction, a nice little fairy tale that Blue Sun has plastered over their own dictatorial control of the universe. My god. They will do anything to control the markets and the profits, all for the benefit of fifteen men who think they own the whole ‘verse. Oh my god.” Simon backed away from the screen, tried to sit on the edge of table and instead ended up on the floor. Stranger still, he didn’t seem to notice he was on the floor.
“So, this is important?” Jayne asked as he looked at the screen with some degree of skepticism. Blair squirmed again, this time adding an elbow in the side, and Jim loosened up enough for Blair to turn and study the screen. Jim might not like the idea of Blair postponing the coming emotional storm, but he couldn’t force Blair to focus on himself instead of their newly stolen data.
“It don’t look half as interesting,” Mal agreed. “I suppose we should find someone to broadcast this. It seems like last time, that was the hardest part.” Mal got quiet, and Jim could taste the grief around them. The crew had lost people on that mission, and Jim’s guts tightened at the thought that they might lose more, and none of them had any idea what the endgame looked like since they were following River’s plan.
“Nope,” River said firmly. “Plough horses in the dressage ring.”
“The what?” Jayne asked. Jim figured he wasn’t the only one ignorant as to the finer points of show horses, but he was the only one willing to admit it.
“Dressage,” Simon said wearily, as if Jayne’s ignorance was a personal affront. Jim wasn’t sure how the man had managed to avoid being punched. “It’s a French term. A dressage horse is the ultimate in training, an animal who can respond with the simplest touch of his rider and perform gracefully.”
“And I’m guessing she’s calling us the plough horses,” Mal said.
“It does seem like it, sir,” Zoe agreed. “On the bright side, a good plough horse is a valuable animal.”
Mal looked over at her, his face incredulous, but the corners of Zoe’s mouth were twitching with a smile, and he just rolled his eyes at her.
“However, if we are going to try and find a broadcast platform, I recommend we don’t split the crew again, sir. We don’t have the personnel for that sort of assault.” She gave him a nasty look, but then after finding out that their quick little raid on a dusty office had turned into a full-out assault of a secret base with armed guards, she hadn’t been amused at being left out. On an Alliance ship, these people would all have rank, and Jim would understand their relative positions, but now Zoe, who he had originally thought of as Mal’s second, had been left behind in favor of Jayne, and Jim wasn’t sure how that all worked. It seemed like without rank there were likely to be some hurt feelings somewhere along the way.
“No!” River pushed herself up out of the chair. “Plough horses in the dressage ring ruin everything. Plough horses in the field sow the seeds of wheat the feed the family.” She closed her eyes and clenched her fists in a way that made Jim want to back out of the room slowly and carefully.
However Blair shoved at Jim’s arms to get free. “So River, we can do something with this, but if we do the wrong thing, we’re going to stick out like a plough horse in a show ring and likely make fools of ourselves at the same time?” He asked.
“Already plowed through the quarter line… G to I to X to L.”
“Gixl?” Jayne said. Funny enough, it seemed like when everyone was confused, Jayne was about the only one willing to admit it.
“They’re positions on the dressage ring, she’s describing the line as you move your horse down the field.” The way Simon said that he made it sound like everyone should know that already, but Jim had been raised on Osiris-he’d seen horses and riders performing in the ring-and he still didn’t have a gorram clue about Gs or Xs.
River’s fists slowly unclenched as she nodded. “Horses aren’t all horses,” she muttered softly. “Some eat the elephant from the inside.”
Mal scratched his head. “If we aren’t supposed to tell anyone and we aren’t supposed to take our plough horse selves into the fancy dressage ring, what exactly are we supposed to do with this? I don’t mind saying that I’d be fond of figuring out how to not end up dead, and after leaving witnesses behind, I ain’t so sure on our long-term survival, at least not me and Jayne.”
Jim wondered if they would have left live witnesses if he and Blair hadn’t come along. He didn’t think Mal was the sort to execute people, but Jim knew better than most that desperate people did despicable things. Most days Jim figured he’d even done one or two despicable things himself.
Surprisingly, River turned to Jim. “Ruts under leaves and litter still lead home.”
Mal sighed. “Is anyone else getting mightily annoyed with this talk?”
“Nope,” Blair said, earning a nasty look from Mal. Blair looked up at Jim. “Man, she wants you to use some skill you learned a long time ago, some thought that’s so old it’s covered over by leaves.” From River’s smile, Blair had guessed right.
“Maybe she wants you to start massacring people,” Mal suggested with an overly sweet smile.
Jim drew himself up and just stared right back at the captain. He’d never hidden from his past. After a second, Mal sighed. “Seeing as how River could just as well go massacring herself if she took a mind too, maybe not. This is probably something that only you could do.”
Jim looked around at the crew all looking to him, but he didn’t have an answers. “Any clearances I had are long since cancelled, any allies turned against me.” Jim hated that Captain Banks probably thought of him as a traitor, but he most likely did, and he’d turn Jim over to the alliance in a second. “And you just saw the sum total of what my senses can do in the field.”
“Gorram unnatural how he found the hidden door,” Jayne agreed.
“Well that ain’t really much of a help,” Mal pointed out.
Simon pushed himself up and stepped to Kaylee’s side. “What other skills do you have?”
“Killing Browncoats and tracking down slavers and pedophiles,” Jim answered. “I was a good cop, but with the reward out for me, I don’t think I can go back to my old contacts without ending up with a gun in my back as one of them try to sell me.”
“Ruts covered in leaves, leaves rotting back to dirt,” River said, her voice tinged with desperation.
“So a really old memory,” Blair said. “Could it be a skill you learned in college?”
Jim tried to think back, but he’d been unremarkable in his college days. That had been before he found himself, and most days he walked around expecting people to accuse him of something. Growing up with Charlie, Jim had learned to expect a knife in the back. Charlie’d do something downright unforgivable, anything from wrecking a shuttle to laming a horse so bad it had to be put down, and the wang ba dan found a way to blame Jim. Jim became the evil twin in the family, and by the time Jim left home, their younger brother Stephen was starting to pull the same gou shi. By the time he got to college, all Jim wanted was to be left alone. He didn’t trust many people, and he sure didn’t learn anything pertinent to this sort of mess. He shook his head, unable to find anything in his memory “I studied military history and criminal profiling. I honestly didn’t do anything particular special.”
“So, she wants you should profile someone?” Mal’s suggestion made River fist her hands up again. River’s frustration was starting to worry Jim because when the Institute’s readers started getting frustrated, people had a habit of ending up dead.
“Ruts crisscrossing with stupid brother,” River said, her hand snapped out to point straight at Simon Tam. And that made no sense at all. Jim looked over to Simon, but the stupid brother in question looked just as confused as Jim.
“Oh man.” Blair looked back and forth between them. River seemed to back away as she watched Blair’s hands start to fly. “Okay, you two have something in common. Let’s start at the beginning and figure this out. There’s a logical solution here.” Blair got his academic voice out, the one where he got excited about numbers and testing. “Okay, we should approach this logically, so one of you can start listing off all the places you’ve been and people you know, and we’ll cross-reference with the other. We should start with places. I mean, no way does everyone remember all the people they’ve met, but if we can’t find a place in common, we can start-”
“She’s changed course and we’re headed for Osiris,” Zoe interrupted. Jim felt the ship shiver as she corrected herself mid-flight, moving onto a new trajectory.
“Or we can wait until River just shows us,” Blair finished, much of his enthusiasm gone as if she’d pricked his balloon…. Or taken away his bright and shiny new puzzle. Jim almost felt sorry for Blair, except he knew that Blair wanted the puzzle so he wouldn’t have to think about the pain of what he’s seen in that basement.
“Osiris? That’s where we grew up,” Simon said.
“Old ruts covered in leaves,” River agreed from the pilot’s seat.
“Jim, isn’t that where you grew up?” Blair asked.
Staring at the new heading, Jim could feel a sinking in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah, and it’s where my father still lives.” This was not good.
“If your father lives there, why do you look like someone just tried to kill your dog?” Mal asked.
Jim looked over. “Maybe I should mention that my father killed my dog to punish me for not following the rules up to his standards.”
Jayne made a face. “He killed your dog?” Clearly that violated Jayne’s moral standards, and Jim figured when you managed to morally offend Jayne, you were out on some pretty thin ice morally speaking.
“Is anyone else getting a bad feeling?” Zoe asked softly.
Jim didn’t answer, but he figured from the way he was getting sympathetic looks and Blair’s arms tightening around his waist, they all knew he agreed.
“Too much gray. Color and colors and horses and elephants all gray,” River announced in the heavy silence that had fallen over the bridge.
Well Cao. They were headed for Osiris.