ficpost: "Faithless" Mal Reynolds
Title: "Faithless"
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Featured character: Mal Reynolds
Rating: PG-13 for Inara's profession
Spoilers/Timeline: Set after the film and spoilers therefor.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns everything I love.
Notes: For jedibuttercup in the ninebillion ficathon for faith-based fics. Her prompt is the summary. With apologies for lateness!
Summary: I don't care what you believe. Just believe it.
Wordcount: 1095
Faithless
Folk believe. It's in the constitution of folk, between heart and head, some part that's foolish enough to need certainty. Folk believe, winding through a 'verse that's woven with fables and folklore and myths, the creation of every world that spins from the breath of every God who ever was, on Earth or beyond her, in the minds of men or outside them. Folk believe, as dancers know their own gravity, as a girl, half-mad, knows the ways of wind and human hearts, of spinning through space in a half-dead boat and holding tight to the crew, hearts aflutter and minds astruck. They're grasping, all of them, for a ledge to hang onto, a handy hold in the sheer cliff upwards, the whence-now-shall-we-go? Boat full of criminals, and no shepherd to guide them.
Not Jayne, sheep in wolf's garb, who trusts in Vera's heft and the splintering of bone, the metallic sting of solid coin between his teeth, and not Zoe, who's looking straight into the blinding starlight of every Tomorrow without her man. Zoe's certain: tomorrow will come and after it tomorrow. Tomorrow follows tomorrow as they have since the Battle of Serenity was fought, won and lost, forgotten. Maybe, once, the progression of time was starlit with hope, but that's a long time yesterday in her thoughts, and in Mal's.
There's 'Nara, bred to guide and steer and pilot menfolk into the safe harbor of herself, warm folds of silk cloth hiding shame, and the dissolution of self in the blindness of pleasure. She guides by not guiding, does by not doing, is perfect by emptying herself of perfection, which is fine for a whore but hard virtue for a pirate.
Simon believes in Kaylee, and Kaylee believes in herself, and loving the world into sweetness, the first tart strawberry of spring and the crisp sweet apple of fall, and a two so wrapped in twoness will never turn outward and see the folk staggering after them, wedding procession of ragamuffins and hopeless.
Book believed in his heaven, union at last with the little baby Jesus and all the saints who died to bring His name to the darkest reaches of the 'verse, and Wash believed in flight the way Kaylee believes in springtime.
Even River, brain still twisted, forever searching where no God meant any creature's brain to see, sleeps sound (or sounder) with the certainty of a job finally done, the world set free from some terror and lurching toward another, not her doing, not her fault.
Mal believes in nothing and no one, nowhere and no time, no past and no future, only one ship and she a precious whirr away from freefalling her last, leaf on the wind and then brackish winter rotting her to nothing, not hell and not heaven, not the 'Verse In the Sky where all good ships go and not the egoless Nirvana of an inanimate, intangible thing. Serenity will fall to pieces, and at that moment so will he, for she's the girl, lady or goddess or call her a whore, a scrapheap, a sinner, a savior, who's holding him in one piece, more even than his own skin or the beautiful brown coat he wears: a reminder of Bible verses he's forgotten and the cause they seemed to suggest, the worlds, free and whole, he first saw in the little white church, barely a speck on a hillside half a mile from the center of nowhere, where children sang hymns a quarter beat off any rhythm core-folk knew and grannies too blind to read recited whole chapters of psalmody.
Without a job, a without a war, without stowaways, a past is hard to leave behind. A cross and Bible can be destroyed; a church burned and a shepherd shot, but memories aren't removed so easy from a man's brain. The doc might know what passes for a brain in his sister, but about the plain ordinary pain of yesterday, the rotten spot inside that still craves faith like a drunkard wants liquor, no one on this ship speaks, not the live folks and not the dead ones either.
No one could speak, for language contradicts belief, tries to put words around things unseen and unseeable, like pretty talk could contain ugly truth. Core folk, whether hard and disbelieving like Simon, whose sister is half-living proof of an unjust universe, or soft and faithful like Inara with her web of peace and stillness, have too many words for their knowledge to be real, too many slick answers to oil out the questions that grind and grind, round and round, in Mal's brain.
Folk need faith to do damned foolish things, and that's a blessing or else the 'verse would be empty of humans and full of wiser creatures, lemmings and roaches, who know at least enough not to jump after pretty words and curlicues and mad-eyed visionaries, who know at least not to dream. Folk need faith to run after sisters, to rut strangers, to trust thieves. Heck, folk need faith to put their eggs in a basket, Serenity'll get us there, money's worth it in the end, when you have money and the it is long over, prison averted and both arms more or less intact.
There're better and worse things to believe in but his crew believes in them, all at once and contradictorily, the paradox of the Buddhist whore, unattached ego with more possessions than a gorram dynasty, the simplicity of a mechanic who believes in machines and magic.
Book might've explained it as natural theology, belief in the One God present and disguised in the heart of every creature, and Kaylee calls it the inborn goodness of people, which means more or less the same thing, but that thought circles and goes nowhere, a snake eating its tail. Belief is belief is belief, takes belief to think a rickety spaceship could take to the sky and stay there, that a gorram crazy person could fly it, that a first mate blank with grief could pull her weight and half again. Mal looks up 'n' sees nothing but sky, black with promise -- no celestial cities and no harebrained schemes, no get-rich-quick and no double dealings, nothing past the end of his nose, nothing further in the past than breakfast and nothing more futuristic than bed -- and that seeing, too, is the kind of belief that haunts a man, the kind of belief a man can't help but settle into, the kind of belief that fills a man and leaves him more hollow than before.
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Featured character: Mal Reynolds
Rating: PG-13 for Inara's profession
Spoilers/Timeline: Set after the film and spoilers therefor.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns everything I love.
Notes: For jedibuttercup in the ninebillion ficathon for faith-based fics. Her prompt is the summary. With apologies for lateness!
Summary: I don't care what you believe. Just believe it.
Wordcount: 1095
Faithless
Folk believe. It's in the constitution of folk, between heart and head, some part that's foolish enough to need certainty. Folk believe, winding through a 'verse that's woven with fables and folklore and myths, the creation of every world that spins from the breath of every God who ever was, on Earth or beyond her, in the minds of men or outside them. Folk believe, as dancers know their own gravity, as a girl, half-mad, knows the ways of wind and human hearts, of spinning through space in a half-dead boat and holding tight to the crew, hearts aflutter and minds astruck. They're grasping, all of them, for a ledge to hang onto, a handy hold in the sheer cliff upwards, the whence-now-shall-we-go? Boat full of criminals, and no shepherd to guide them.
Not Jayne, sheep in wolf's garb, who trusts in Vera's heft and the splintering of bone, the metallic sting of solid coin between his teeth, and not Zoe, who's looking straight into the blinding starlight of every Tomorrow without her man. Zoe's certain: tomorrow will come and after it tomorrow. Tomorrow follows tomorrow as they have since the Battle of Serenity was fought, won and lost, forgotten. Maybe, once, the progression of time was starlit with hope, but that's a long time yesterday in her thoughts, and in Mal's.
There's 'Nara, bred to guide and steer and pilot menfolk into the safe harbor of herself, warm folds of silk cloth hiding shame, and the dissolution of self in the blindness of pleasure. She guides by not guiding, does by not doing, is perfect by emptying herself of perfection, which is fine for a whore but hard virtue for a pirate.
Simon believes in Kaylee, and Kaylee believes in herself, and loving the world into sweetness, the first tart strawberry of spring and the crisp sweet apple of fall, and a two so wrapped in twoness will never turn outward and see the folk staggering after them, wedding procession of ragamuffins and hopeless.
Book believed in his heaven, union at last with the little baby Jesus and all the saints who died to bring His name to the darkest reaches of the 'verse, and Wash believed in flight the way Kaylee believes in springtime.
Even River, brain still twisted, forever searching where no God meant any creature's brain to see, sleeps sound (or sounder) with the certainty of a job finally done, the world set free from some terror and lurching toward another, not her doing, not her fault.
Mal believes in nothing and no one, nowhere and no time, no past and no future, only one ship and she a precious whirr away from freefalling her last, leaf on the wind and then brackish winter rotting her to nothing, not hell and not heaven, not the 'Verse In the Sky where all good ships go and not the egoless Nirvana of an inanimate, intangible thing. Serenity will fall to pieces, and at that moment so will he, for she's the girl, lady or goddess or call her a whore, a scrapheap, a sinner, a savior, who's holding him in one piece, more even than his own skin or the beautiful brown coat he wears: a reminder of Bible verses he's forgotten and the cause they seemed to suggest, the worlds, free and whole, he first saw in the little white church, barely a speck on a hillside half a mile from the center of nowhere, where children sang hymns a quarter beat off any rhythm core-folk knew and grannies too blind to read recited whole chapters of psalmody.
Without a job, a without a war, without stowaways, a past is hard to leave behind. A cross and Bible can be destroyed; a church burned and a shepherd shot, but memories aren't removed so easy from a man's brain. The doc might know what passes for a brain in his sister, but about the plain ordinary pain of yesterday, the rotten spot inside that still craves faith like a drunkard wants liquor, no one on this ship speaks, not the live folks and not the dead ones either.
No one could speak, for language contradicts belief, tries to put words around things unseen and unseeable, like pretty talk could contain ugly truth. Core folk, whether hard and disbelieving like Simon, whose sister is half-living proof of an unjust universe, or soft and faithful like Inara with her web of peace and stillness, have too many words for their knowledge to be real, too many slick answers to oil out the questions that grind and grind, round and round, in Mal's brain.
Folk need faith to do damned foolish things, and that's a blessing or else the 'verse would be empty of humans and full of wiser creatures, lemmings and roaches, who know at least enough not to jump after pretty words and curlicues and mad-eyed visionaries, who know at least not to dream. Folk need faith to run after sisters, to rut strangers, to trust thieves. Heck, folk need faith to put their eggs in a basket, Serenity'll get us there, money's worth it in the end, when you have money and the it is long over, prison averted and both arms more or less intact.
There're better and worse things to believe in but his crew believes in them, all at once and contradictorily, the paradox of the Buddhist whore, unattached ego with more possessions than a gorram dynasty, the simplicity of a mechanic who believes in machines and magic.
Book might've explained it as natural theology, belief in the One God present and disguised in the heart of every creature, and Kaylee calls it the inborn goodness of people, which means more or less the same thing, but that thought circles and goes nowhere, a snake eating its tail. Belief is belief is belief, takes belief to think a rickety spaceship could take to the sky and stay there, that a gorram crazy person could fly it, that a first mate blank with grief could pull her weight and half again. Mal looks up 'n' sees nothing but sky, black with promise -- no celestial cities and no harebrained schemes, no get-rich-quick and no double dealings, nothing past the end of his nose, nothing further in the past than breakfast and nothing more futuristic than bed -- and that seeing, too, is the kind of belief that haunts a man, the kind of belief a man can't help but settle into, the kind of belief that fills a man and leaves him more hollow than before.