Firefly fic: The Assembly of the Righteous
The gallows stand, a clean collection of geometry, in the courtyard of Perdono’s capitol building. The last plank was cut and nailed down so recently that the crier’s boots are sending up yellow puffs of sawdust. The whole thing smells deliciously of pine.
The executioner prods the condemned gently in the small of the back, just above his bound hands, as if he’s cuing a fifth-grader in a Christmas pageant. Mal pauses to give the man and his pressed gray uniform a murderous look. Captures flash. It’s a classic bad guy face, and the press adores nothing more than Malcolm Reynolds’ bad guy faces. They made a pet of him during the trial, and now they’ve all turned up with vid reels to see him put down.
Not that he’s bitter.
His rocking-horse limp carries him past the modest audience on the ground, many of whom are the military type in full dress uniform. “Little formal there,” Mal tells the judge who sentenced him as he is led past. “Am I underdressed?”
Good on him if he is, ruining their fancy hanging-party. He’s perfectly comfortable in his old red shirt and suspenders. His brown duster was destroyed, but equatorial Londinium is more than a bit warmish this time of year anyway.
Apart from the assortment of important people (and he knows he will find Inara here if he looks hard enough), some seventy billion more are watching the Cortex feed. Probably his crew is among them, spread across the ‘verse as they are.
After the fourth bounty hunter and the closest call since Miranda, it was clear that Parliament was not prepared to take the Operative’s word on Serenity. There was no way to make a living reeking of Alliance trouble like that. No middleman would touch them with a ten-foot cattle prod. The options were getting few.
Mal was lying to himself. The options were gone.
Of course, the crew was slow to catch on. They almost got shuffled off in a few mad, desperate ways, just trying to keep the damn ship fueled. Mal nearly sold his soul for it a few times. The damn ship.
There was one last heist. They were certain it would work, because if it didn’t they had nothing left. They were certain until their mark saw through Inara’s ploy and then broke her arm in two places. Serenity limped away bleeding in search of someplace quiet to die.
The next morning, Mal called his crew together in the galley, as was customary, ‘cause he had news for them all.
“I suppose y’all know what I’m here to tell you,” he said, leaning heavily on his left leg. He’d favored the right ever since his calf was knifed to ribbons by yet another rutting psycho who “just wanted River Tam.”
“We’re humped, huh?” Kaylee asked, curled in her chair with her knees pulled to her chin.
“Yeah, we are, mei mei.”
“Ain’t we established that?” Jayne said irritably. Pain made him cranky, and his bruised ribs were throbbing. “Why we still talkin’ about this?”
“Peace, Jayne,” Zoë said.
“What did you mean when you said you had news?” Simon said with that cool, analytical inflection. As if he wasn’t heavily invested in the answer.
“You’re all fired,” Mal said flatly.
There was a beat of confusion before everyone but River leaned toward him and said, “What?”
“Ain’t so surprising. All of you know when Serenity touches down on Boros in a few hours’ time, that’s where she stays. I got nothin’ to offer you no more.”
He closed his eyes as five people tried to talk over each other.
“But Cap’n, we find work landside, get Serenity on her feet-“
“If we separate, the Alliance will pick us off, and River will be the first-“
“Hell, Mal, you think any of us is gonna last the space of a bug’s fart like that?”
“Sir, have you considered-“
“Mal, think what you’re saying-“
“Bi zui,” he barked. They did. He glared around at all of them, thumbs hooked in his gun belt. “Can fight me on this, but you’re gonna lose.”
There was more fuss and yelling, but in the end he pulled rank and said they were all off his boat at the next port and that was all there was to it. They were to scatter, lie low, and hope the Alliance passed them over.
“We done what we could. We stick together now, we all burn for it.”
Kaylee sobbed outright, and Mal couldn’t look at her for long, or even muster an apology. Simon dried her tears and cast the captain troubled looks. Zoë sat in silence and carved initials into the table with Jayne’s favorite knife, which he’d left there when he wandered, dazed, back to his quarters. River, who in her more disoriented states sometimes called Mal “Daddy,” watched with brimming china doll eyes as he left the mess.
It was Inara who followed him to his quarters, slowly what with her left arm bound up in a sling. She climbed one-handed down the ladder to stand in his space and befuddle him with that damnable perfume.
“I’m not on your crew,” she said, blazing with anger. “You don’t pay me, you can’t fire me.”
“I can terminate your lease.”
“Mal, why are you doing this to us? You were willing to take on an Operative to keep this crew together, but you won’t brave the hired grunts?”
“Callin’ me a coward is a few klicks wide of the point, and also buyin’ you nothing in the way of my good will,” he said, splashing water on his face.
“You can’t order me gone. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Easy there, you’ll knock that sling awry.” He dried his forehead, too weary to give her the satisfaction of anger.
“Mal. What are you doing, Mal? You love this ship.” She was going all misty-eyed, and yet she was still here, which was contrary to all past experience and beyond his comprehension. Just more wiles, he figured. She was trying to goad him into holding ground he’d already lost, gorram witchy playacting manipulative wh-
His image of her blurred, and her fingers tangled in his hair, and yesterday’s stubble was scratching the pretty curve of her neck.
“She’s just a ship, mei li,” he said thickly, willing it true.
“Shhh. We’ll make it right. We’ll make it right,” she whispered back, trying to convince herself. He was too selfish to tell her different. If he did, she’d pull away.
She held him steady until Boros. In return he kicked her off his broken-winged bird just as unceremoniously as he’d promised to.
And a good thing, too, or she’d be bound here next to him.
“Nice of ‘em to build this thing special just for us,” he says over his shoulder.
“Makes me feel all warm and fluffy inside,” Zoë replies, mounting the first step of the gallows behind him.
Here’s another damn fool woman who wouldn’t clear off when he told her to. The Alliance tried them together, which was about as much fun as a morning walk through the seventh circle of hell. Though Mal did appreciate the look on the prosecutor’s face when Zoë told him to go rut himself. Mentions of Wash tended to elicit that response.
Mal’s on the platform now with a good view of the twin trapdoors and the conscientiously solemn faces at ground level. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again Inara is staring back at him like he’s already a ghost. Damned if she’s not ten yards away, alone and untouchable in the crowd. Her eyes are huge and liquid in the fashion of fever-dreams.
Mal would curse her for a fool if he didn’t know she was here only at his beckoning. He lied his face off, confessed to kidnapping and blackmail and holding her at gunpoint, referred to her as a “fancified whore” in court, and generally twirled his mustache in an effort to get her clear of this thing. He even took credit for that nasty break in her arm-laughed about it on an interplanetary Cortex feed. She swore she’d never forgive him, so it’s kind of her to see him off anyway.
“Mal, I’m not going to help you incriminate yourself,” she hissed at him during one of the three visits that his poor, frazzled lawyer arranged. “I was responsible for my own actions on Miranda and on that godforsaken moon.” She paused, stared at him across the table he was handcuffed to. “I’m a big girl.”
“Yeah, a big girl fixin’ to get herself convicted of high treason.”
“Well, so be it,” Inara said, pale and stately and burning with the sort of loyalty he’d never dreamed to see in her. It made her beautiful. It made his chest ache.
He snarled at her. “No, not so be it. That’s a hangin’ offense, honey, and I’d rather not go to my death knowin’ I’ve led you to yours. You wanna help me out here?”
She sat back in her chair, rigid and expressionless.
“Please,” he growled in his sergeant’s intonation.
“You think I could live with myself, if I let you do that?”
“You won’t even have to testify. Zoë’ll back me up, the court’ll be glad to believe it, and my lawyer won’t touch you.”
“Mal, I could never.”
“Please.”
“Mal,” she whispered. “No.”
Her eyes were welling, and he wondered when he’d got such a gift for hurting her. The cuffs caught his hands three inches above the tabletop, long before they had any power to soothe or compel. His fingers fanned, and he did something he’d never done before. He looked Inara mutely in the face and begged.
In the end she stopped saying no, which he decided meant yes. He laid out the lie for her-ugly and nauseating-and she bowed her head and cried silently.
“It’s a hard thing you’re asking her,” Zoë said later through a wall of bars. “Ain’t really fair on her.”
“She’ll live,” Mal said gruffly. And that was an end to it.
Well, he thinks as Zoë steps up next to him, this here’s the end of the line. More fanfare’n I expected.
“The hell are you smirkin’ about, sir?”
“How much attention we’re gettin’,” he tosses back. He knows it’s not so much a smirk as a grimace, dark and animal in its cynicism. “You reckon we should moon ‘em?”
She gives him a look. “Might be impressionable young people watching.”
“Might be,” he says, and his glare achieves the impossible and goes even darker. “Cute little mechanics, ninety-pound geniuses, and the like.”
“I wish they wouldn’t.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The executioner hovers nearby, hands clasped behind his back. He can’t be much taller than five-two or three. It stings Mal some that he’s gonna get dead by the hand of a man hardly comes up to his armpit.
Next to the midget executioner stands an official-looking bastard in uniform with official slicked-back hair, holding up an official scrap of paper. “Malcolm Reynolds and Zoë Alleyne Washburne,” he says, “for your willful commission of crimes against the Union of Allied Planets, these crimes being treason, conspiracy to commit treason, and armed insurrection against Allied forces, you are sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your souls.” He looks up at them. “Is there anything you would like to say?”
Zoë gives him her fiercest deadpan. Mal glowers.
“That’s a no, then?”
There is no one in earshot to whom they owe anything. Not even an explanation.
The hangman comes forward. “Mrs. Washburne?”
Zoë stiffens, but she takes the first step of her own accord.
Her straight back and steady stride rob Mal of breath. It can’t possibly be right to let her go like this, without some last bracing word from her sergeant. He could say “thank you,” but that would be laughably inadequate. “I’m sorry” isn’t quite right-and what would it help? It never occurs to him to tell her he loves her.
“See you on the other side, Zoë.”
She looks over her shoulder at him, and she smiles.
“Mrs. Washburne?” the hangman says again, and she goes to stand on her own personal trapdoor. “Mr. Reynolds?” the hangman says, and leads Mal to his.
There is no drum roll as they are blindfolded, no jeering as the twin nooses are settled around their necks. Mal thinks briefly of judgment and prayer, for His mercy is great unto the heavens, and His truth unto the clouds.
I’ll laugh all the way to hell, Mal thinks instead, and takes the moment afforded him to wish Kaylee sunshine and kittens, to imagine Inara in a white dress. To fight the twist of nauseous panic in his chest.
“I’m comin’, baby,” Zoë whispers to the black before them both.
But Mal says nothing, and when the floor disappears he is far away, independent of ground or gravity. Serenity purrs under his hands, the stars burn like lighthouses on a dark ocean, and he says nothing. Nothing at all.
The executioner prods the condemned gently in the small of the back, just above his bound hands, as if he’s cuing a fifth-grader in a Christmas pageant. Mal pauses to give the man and his pressed gray uniform a murderous look. Captures flash. It’s a classic bad guy face, and the press adores nothing more than Malcolm Reynolds’ bad guy faces. They made a pet of him during the trial, and now they’ve all turned up with vid reels to see him put down.
Not that he’s bitter.
His rocking-horse limp carries him past the modest audience on the ground, many of whom are the military type in full dress uniform. “Little formal there,” Mal tells the judge who sentenced him as he is led past. “Am I underdressed?”
Good on him if he is, ruining their fancy hanging-party. He’s perfectly comfortable in his old red shirt and suspenders. His brown duster was destroyed, but equatorial Londinium is more than a bit warmish this time of year anyway.
Apart from the assortment of important people (and he knows he will find Inara here if he looks hard enough), some seventy billion more are watching the Cortex feed. Probably his crew is among them, spread across the ‘verse as they are.
After the fourth bounty hunter and the closest call since Miranda, it was clear that Parliament was not prepared to take the Operative’s word on Serenity. There was no way to make a living reeking of Alliance trouble like that. No middleman would touch them with a ten-foot cattle prod. The options were getting few.
Mal was lying to himself. The options were gone.
Of course, the crew was slow to catch on. They almost got shuffled off in a few mad, desperate ways, just trying to keep the damn ship fueled. Mal nearly sold his soul for it a few times. The damn ship.
There was one last heist. They were certain it would work, because if it didn’t they had nothing left. They were certain until their mark saw through Inara’s ploy and then broke her arm in two places. Serenity limped away bleeding in search of someplace quiet to die.
The next morning, Mal called his crew together in the galley, as was customary, ‘cause he had news for them all.
“I suppose y’all know what I’m here to tell you,” he said, leaning heavily on his left leg. He’d favored the right ever since his calf was knifed to ribbons by yet another rutting psycho who “just wanted River Tam.”
“We’re humped, huh?” Kaylee asked, curled in her chair with her knees pulled to her chin.
“Yeah, we are, mei mei.”
“Ain’t we established that?” Jayne said irritably. Pain made him cranky, and his bruised ribs were throbbing. “Why we still talkin’ about this?”
“Peace, Jayne,” Zoë said.
“What did you mean when you said you had news?” Simon said with that cool, analytical inflection. As if he wasn’t heavily invested in the answer.
“You’re all fired,” Mal said flatly.
There was a beat of confusion before everyone but River leaned toward him and said, “What?”
“Ain’t so surprising. All of you know when Serenity touches down on Boros in a few hours’ time, that’s where she stays. I got nothin’ to offer you no more.”
He closed his eyes as five people tried to talk over each other.
“But Cap’n, we find work landside, get Serenity on her feet-“
“If we separate, the Alliance will pick us off, and River will be the first-“
“Hell, Mal, you think any of us is gonna last the space of a bug’s fart like that?”
“Sir, have you considered-“
“Mal, think what you’re saying-“
“Bi zui,” he barked. They did. He glared around at all of them, thumbs hooked in his gun belt. “Can fight me on this, but you’re gonna lose.”
There was more fuss and yelling, but in the end he pulled rank and said they were all off his boat at the next port and that was all there was to it. They were to scatter, lie low, and hope the Alliance passed them over.
“We done what we could. We stick together now, we all burn for it.”
Kaylee sobbed outright, and Mal couldn’t look at her for long, or even muster an apology. Simon dried her tears and cast the captain troubled looks. Zoë sat in silence and carved initials into the table with Jayne’s favorite knife, which he’d left there when he wandered, dazed, back to his quarters. River, who in her more disoriented states sometimes called Mal “Daddy,” watched with brimming china doll eyes as he left the mess.
It was Inara who followed him to his quarters, slowly what with her left arm bound up in a sling. She climbed one-handed down the ladder to stand in his space and befuddle him with that damnable perfume.
“I’m not on your crew,” she said, blazing with anger. “You don’t pay me, you can’t fire me.”
“I can terminate your lease.”
“Mal, why are you doing this to us? You were willing to take on an Operative to keep this crew together, but you won’t brave the hired grunts?”
“Callin’ me a coward is a few klicks wide of the point, and also buyin’ you nothing in the way of my good will,” he said, splashing water on his face.
“You can’t order me gone. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Easy there, you’ll knock that sling awry.” He dried his forehead, too weary to give her the satisfaction of anger.
“Mal. What are you doing, Mal? You love this ship.” She was going all misty-eyed, and yet she was still here, which was contrary to all past experience and beyond his comprehension. Just more wiles, he figured. She was trying to goad him into holding ground he’d already lost, gorram witchy playacting manipulative wh-
His image of her blurred, and her fingers tangled in his hair, and yesterday’s stubble was scratching the pretty curve of her neck.
“She’s just a ship, mei li,” he said thickly, willing it true.
“Shhh. We’ll make it right. We’ll make it right,” she whispered back, trying to convince herself. He was too selfish to tell her different. If he did, she’d pull away.
She held him steady until Boros. In return he kicked her off his broken-winged bird just as unceremoniously as he’d promised to.
And a good thing, too, or she’d be bound here next to him.
“Nice of ‘em to build this thing special just for us,” he says over his shoulder.
“Makes me feel all warm and fluffy inside,” Zoë replies, mounting the first step of the gallows behind him.
Here’s another damn fool woman who wouldn’t clear off when he told her to. The Alliance tried them together, which was about as much fun as a morning walk through the seventh circle of hell. Though Mal did appreciate the look on the prosecutor’s face when Zoë told him to go rut himself. Mentions of Wash tended to elicit that response.
Mal’s on the platform now with a good view of the twin trapdoors and the conscientiously solemn faces at ground level. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again Inara is staring back at him like he’s already a ghost. Damned if she’s not ten yards away, alone and untouchable in the crowd. Her eyes are huge and liquid in the fashion of fever-dreams.
Mal would curse her for a fool if he didn’t know she was here only at his beckoning. He lied his face off, confessed to kidnapping and blackmail and holding her at gunpoint, referred to her as a “fancified whore” in court, and generally twirled his mustache in an effort to get her clear of this thing. He even took credit for that nasty break in her arm-laughed about it on an interplanetary Cortex feed. She swore she’d never forgive him, so it’s kind of her to see him off anyway.
“Mal, I’m not going to help you incriminate yourself,” she hissed at him during one of the three visits that his poor, frazzled lawyer arranged. “I was responsible for my own actions on Miranda and on that godforsaken moon.” She paused, stared at him across the table he was handcuffed to. “I’m a big girl.”
“Yeah, a big girl fixin’ to get herself convicted of high treason.”
“Well, so be it,” Inara said, pale and stately and burning with the sort of loyalty he’d never dreamed to see in her. It made her beautiful. It made his chest ache.
He snarled at her. “No, not so be it. That’s a hangin’ offense, honey, and I’d rather not go to my death knowin’ I’ve led you to yours. You wanna help me out here?”
She sat back in her chair, rigid and expressionless.
“Please,” he growled in his sergeant’s intonation.
“You think I could live with myself, if I let you do that?”
“You won’t even have to testify. Zoë’ll back me up, the court’ll be glad to believe it, and my lawyer won’t touch you.”
“Mal, I could never.”
“Please.”
“Mal,” she whispered. “No.”
Her eyes were welling, and he wondered when he’d got such a gift for hurting her. The cuffs caught his hands three inches above the tabletop, long before they had any power to soothe or compel. His fingers fanned, and he did something he’d never done before. He looked Inara mutely in the face and begged.
In the end she stopped saying no, which he decided meant yes. He laid out the lie for her-ugly and nauseating-and she bowed her head and cried silently.
“It’s a hard thing you’re asking her,” Zoë said later through a wall of bars. “Ain’t really fair on her.”
“She’ll live,” Mal said gruffly. And that was an end to it.
Well, he thinks as Zoë steps up next to him, this here’s the end of the line. More fanfare’n I expected.
“The hell are you smirkin’ about, sir?”
“How much attention we’re gettin’,” he tosses back. He knows it’s not so much a smirk as a grimace, dark and animal in its cynicism. “You reckon we should moon ‘em?”
She gives him a look. “Might be impressionable young people watching.”
“Might be,” he says, and his glare achieves the impossible and goes even darker. “Cute little mechanics, ninety-pound geniuses, and the like.”
“I wish they wouldn’t.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The executioner hovers nearby, hands clasped behind his back. He can’t be much taller than five-two or three. It stings Mal some that he’s gonna get dead by the hand of a man hardly comes up to his armpit.
Next to the midget executioner stands an official-looking bastard in uniform with official slicked-back hair, holding up an official scrap of paper. “Malcolm Reynolds and Zoë Alleyne Washburne,” he says, “for your willful commission of crimes against the Union of Allied Planets, these crimes being treason, conspiracy to commit treason, and armed insurrection against Allied forces, you are sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your souls.” He looks up at them. “Is there anything you would like to say?”
Zoë gives him her fiercest deadpan. Mal glowers.
“That’s a no, then?”
There is no one in earshot to whom they owe anything. Not even an explanation.
The hangman comes forward. “Mrs. Washburne?”
Zoë stiffens, but she takes the first step of her own accord.
Her straight back and steady stride rob Mal of breath. It can’t possibly be right to let her go like this, without some last bracing word from her sergeant. He could say “thank you,” but that would be laughably inadequate. “I’m sorry” isn’t quite right-and what would it help? It never occurs to him to tell her he loves her.
“See you on the other side, Zoë.”
She looks over her shoulder at him, and she smiles.
“Mrs. Washburne?” the hangman says again, and she goes to stand on her own personal trapdoor. “Mr. Reynolds?” the hangman says, and leads Mal to his.
There is no drum roll as they are blindfolded, no jeering as the twin nooses are settled around their necks. Mal thinks briefly of judgment and prayer, for His mercy is great unto the heavens, and His truth unto the clouds.
I’ll laugh all the way to hell, Mal thinks instead, and takes the moment afforded him to wish Kaylee sunshine and kittens, to imagine Inara in a white dress. To fight the twist of nauseous panic in his chest.
“I’m comin’, baby,” Zoë whispers to the black before them both.
But Mal says nothing, and when the floor disappears he is far away, independent of ground or gravity. Serenity purrs under his hands, the stars burn like lighthouses on a dark ocean, and he says nothing. Nothing at all.