Firefly Fic: Servants of Voyagers (R)
Title: Servants of Voyagers
Rating: R
Words: about 2400
Summary: Hunting must be like red haze; it hovers at the edge of him.
Notes: Post-Serenity (the movie).
Disclaimer: Clearly, I do not own the Firefly 'verse or characters, and no profit is being made from this.
Many thanks to lunabee34 for beta work and thoughtful critique; also, many thanks to evilmaniclaugh for reading the second draft and offering encouragement and support. My fic for the Random Title Generator Challenge.
Warnings: Some may find this disturbing.
Ships take work. Even a sturdy ship needs constant maintenance, and Kaylee knows that without her - or someone like her - even a Firefly would start falling apart in a matter of months.
So she can't figure it out. The Reavers. Don't seem like there's much going on upstairs, other than wanting for killing. If the Pax makes them so crazy, how can they keep their ships in the black?
"It doesn't make sense," Wash had said, one night, long before any of them ever even heard of Miranda. Weren't much after Simon and River came onboard. Real late, both of them on watch, and they'd always got to talking about ships and engines and things what would make the perfect ship, something that wouldn't ever fall straight out of the sky.
"They ain't got good ships. All that radiation," she'd said, mostly because she knew what he'd say next.
"They're still doing right enough to keep them flying."
Kaylee knows that. Leaking radiation'll kill you for sure, slow or fast, but it ain't that kind of problem that brings a ship down sudden-like. And them old ships - Trans-Us and such - need a lot of work just to keep the engines right. "I don't get it."
"Me either." He'd suddenly grinned at her. "Know what else I don't get? Why Mal's so very fond of wearing a dress. Especially ugly ones."
She'd laughed, because only Wash could go from puzzling about ships and Reavers to thinking about Mal's dress up times. "He says it's a cunning disguise."
"Think he's just angling for compliments about his legs?"
Alone on watch, where everything's quiet around her, Kaylee smiles at the memory. Ain't no one around these days that could chew the fat like Wash could, during them long nights.
*
He wakes up quickly, easily. Sounds around him are familiar - scrape of metal against metal, or metal against skin. The hisses, grunts of the hunters. The sounds of warm food. It's comfortable. No reason to wake up.
He listens again. Concentrates until his head hurts. An ache, bloody and angry. He waits and listens until he hears it. Clang. Clang. Not the drag of heavy boots on the floor. Clang.
After a minute, he figures it out. Engine. It's not right. And the room's too hot. Hot and sticky.
He drags himself off the floor, out of the nest he's made. Engine isn't right. He can hear it.
*
Sometimes Jayne dreams about them. Dreams about the way they smelled, down there in that little room. Blood, metal, unwashed - layers of bad smells, all mixed up with their sounds.
He wakes up, sweating, his yell echoing off the walls of this bunk. It gets tangled up with his memories, the sounds of his bullets, and Zoe's orders; the little yell Kaylee made when they shot her with them darts.
Jayne makes himself stop thinking about it, because it's over. Ain't ever been a use to dwelling on things.
Some night though, lying in the dark, wondering if maybe Mal or Zoe heard him yelling, he ends up thinking weird little thoughts. Like about them poison darts. And how animals like Reavers figured out how to make them. Animals don't make weapons; animals don't got ships.
Don't make any kind of sense.
*
Ship lands, another new place. The hunters run out, searching for warm, living food. They leave cooling food behind them - food that got in the way, that they killed for pleasure, lost in the hunt.
Red haze. Hunting must be like red haze, joy and hunger and focus. It hovers at the edge of him, never quite pulling him in, but there are days - days when he touches it, almost, almost -
Screams distract him. Tilting his head, he stands inside the ship and watches as the food falls around the hunters. Listens to it scream, to its almost-patterns, just before it dies.
Sometimes he wonders if the food is smart. There's something about they way they move, something that almost reminds him of -
But the food is nothing like the hunters; it's weak, easily taken.
He steps out of the ship, into the brightness. Food is food, he thinks, as he settles down next to a cooling carcass, his mouth already watering. Too stupid to get out of the way.
*
Inara paints her feet with henna, careful whorls and tiny flowers. She never paints her hands - it is a two-person process - but for some clients, or for special events, she paints her feet. The patterns are traditional, memorized and practiced. If she wanted, she could do this with her eyes closed.
But she keeps her eyes open, taking quiet delight in the contrast of the henna and her skin.
It dries slowly, thick ridges against her skin, eventually flaking and falling to the floor.
Sometimes, as she's painting a peacock along the arch of her sole, or a lotus flower at the base of her ankle, she realizes that if Reavers came right now - if they targeted the ship, shadowed them - the henna, still wet and vulnerable, would be smudged beyond repair.
She doesn't allow her hand to shake.
*
The engine room is hot. Always hot. Engine glows, sometimes. Makes it hotter, but he doesn't care. He can't stop staring, when it glows - watching the pulse of the light, the flares and retreats.
One of them paints the walls while the engine glows. Harsh lines and sudden curves, ceiling to floor. Patterns on patterns, over and over. The scent - copper, warmth, iron - mixes with the burn of the engine as he watches the patterns come alive.
This one is food.
That one is a hunter.
Another is the engine, his kind, scattered and small, around it.
He stares at one for a long time, unsure what it is. Hunger, he finally decides. It's hunger. And he grins at the painter, stretching his lips as wide as he can.
The painter grins back, her face smooth and smudged.
Eventually the patterns flake away, a brown hail to the floor. Then she repaints them.
*
River never thinks about the Reavers.
She never thinks about that day, the day she slipped into their heads, stole their anger and hunger and strength, and used it against them.
Broken people, broken futures. Broken ships, held together with half-skill and half-Reavers.
She never thinks about it, even when the others do.
But some nights, she dreams of a longing to be something - someone - that can't ever be.
*
Sometimes there's warm food on the ship. Taken for the next journey, until the next landing. It smells - salt and skin, fresh meat. Warm, but warm food is for the hunters, not his kind.
Once, some of the food looks at him. Wide eyes, funny sounds. It reaches out to him, and he watches, fascinated. Food never looks at him, or at the hunters. Food heads stay down; food makes crying noises.
He touches the food. Warmth, under his hand; smooth skin, no scars, no burns, no signs of rank or strength and kills. Repulsive, he thinks. Wrong. But somehow he still wants to take the food to his nest. Pet it. Keep it. His.
The thought pushes at him - makes his head ache, makes him angry.
Rage, he thinks, and suddenly it flares. Boils, beneath his skin.
Yes. He feels alive. His fingers twitch, his hands long for a weapon - an axe, heavy and sharp, cutting into -
No. No weapons. Just his hands, reaching out, clawing into flesh. He imagines it - tearing, wet sounds, food shuddering under him; his teeth -
Across the room, a hunter growls. He snaps his head in the direction of the sound. Bares his teeth. Dim light, but he can see - careful carvings on the hunter's face, slashed lips and no eyelids. Powerful.
He knows his own face, has seen it in broken mirrors, shards of glass. It is nothing like the face of the hunters. When he looks at his arms, he only sees burns, peeling skin, irregular and accidental.
The anger banks, sudden and shocking; he cries out its loss, again. Again and again - it always comes, enough that he's almost there, almost right - and it always settles. It leaves him empty, wrong.
He steps away, leaves the warm food where it belongs.
*
"Read it," River says, handing him the wave. She's gone - flash of her back, flick of her hair - before Mal can say anything, before he can do more than glance down at the words.
He doesn't know how she got this - it's stamped "Confidential" and Mal intercepted enough of the purplebelly transmissions during the war to know when something's military.
This sure as hell is. Military and cold, precise and detailed.
There's a war on. It ain't like the war for independence, it ain't dividing up planets and towns and homes. This one is silent, quiet, though Mal and his crew stumble on signs now and then. Alliance ships, broken and silent, drifting in space. Or Reaver ships, empty but somehow still seething.
It's been going on for months now, and Mal ain't got any idea, one way or anther, which side is winning.
He sits down and rereads the wave, the first official acknowledgment of the war he's seen. His eyes itch. Some of the worlds stand out more than others. 'Captured ships' and 'boarding parties'. 'Troop casualties' and the finding of 'civilian remains.'
It's the gorram last two paragraphs that get him the worst case of the itches. Shouldn't be a surprise, reading about speculation of the Pax not quite working on all the Reavers in the same way, not leaving them all perfect killers. Don't much shock him there might social hierarchies on them Reaver ships.
Someone's gotta keep them ships working to some degree of order.
And he ain't never heard of no chemical that affected everyone in the same damn way.
He wonders - just briefly - what it's like for them that ain't the killers, them that are stuck halfway between Reaver and a real person. How they get through it.
What it's like on them ships. Every day.
*
Some days, he wakes up to the sound of his own retching. His skin burns, but he shivers. His arms feel heavy, weak.
Even from his nest, he can see the glow of the engine. It's comforting.
The hunters come, threatening and strong. They bring him weapons on those days, left piled at his feet. He cleans and reloads; tries to make things fit where they're broken, or where they don't belong. He loses himself in the repetition.
*
Later, Zoe tells herself she didn't see anything. That nothing slipped out of the room as she approached, that she didn't jump - jarring her back, hissing in pain - that she didn't see.
Sometimes the memory pushes itself through. Dirty, long hair, filthy face, seeping sores along bare arms; something moving too fast for Zoe to shoot, no matter how much her fingers wanted it.
She turns away from the memories - fixes her gaze on a wall, or on the perfect curves of Inara's face, or on the patience of Jayne's hands polishing his guns.
When she watches the light of Kaylee's smile, or the madness of River's eyes, she can forget finding Wash, head thrown back, pinned to the chair where he'd lived so much of his days. She forgets about the signs of gnawing, and the way his hair had been smoothed flat, parted in the wrong direction by unknown hands. Somehow it's more foreign and wrong than the spike sticking out of chest.
*
New place, another landing. Cool, grey. Not like home. Vague memories - a name, Miranda, and bright sun, white buildings. Before the traveling. Before the anger, smoldering underneath his skin.
They're hunting. Chasing food, food that lands here. Lands and scatters.
The hunters leave him - his kind - behind. Same thing, every time. He hovers at the edge of the ship, stays in the shadows and listens. He can hear them, their screams of victory and power; he wants to be there. Wants to cut his own face, peel back his skin with his own hands.
But he can't. He's not strong.
Finally, he steps away, out of the shadows. Doesn't follow the hunters' path. Instead, he goes to the food's ship, gets inside.
Inside, it's wrong. Wrong smells, wrong sounds, no patterns on the walls, no juddering pulse of an engine. Like the food tried to make the ship right, but couldn't be anything but stupid food.
He shakes his head. There's no reason for food to have ships. Food doesn't hunt.
The air tastes wrong. Too cool. No burning with each breath. But he follows a scent, follows it and finds food. Bright, colourful food, with hair like the glow of the engine. He reaches out, presses his hand into the hair; it's soft. He can't help smoothing it down, over and over, soft hair, cold scalp.
Cold. Hunters wouldn't touch it. It's wasted food.
He's hungry. The ship feels wrong, empty and unsafe, but he's hungry enough to push it away. Ignore it. Focus on the food, waiting for him.
He takes an arm. Begins to gnaw before the others - less brave, scared of the outside - follow him in, and he has to share.
*
These days, Simon rarely performs surgery. He stitches and patches up wounds, inoculates against back-world illness, sets bones and medicates for skin infections, rashes, and whatever delightful bacteria Jayne picks on his forays to filthy whorehouses.
It's all rare - the challenges of surgery, the familiar weights of bright, perfectly sharpened scalpels, and the joy of precise incisions.
On the bad days - days when there is surgery, when there's too much blood, and Mal or Zoe or Kaylee is standing tense by the door, fingers clenched - Simon realizes he doesn't miss it. Surgery had once been his dream; it had once been the shape of his days, the centre.
Now it's the sign that something has gone very wrong.
These days, Simon hopes for inoculations, or neat, tidy stitches, or even Jayne's complaints of itching and burning. He hopes for colds, and mild fevers, and broken arms.
He hopes his scalpels stay arranged and clean, out of his hands, and away from his crew.
*
The knife is small. Can't remember where he found it, but it's his. Small, sharp against his fingers, bright. His.
One day, he'll use it. Not for the engine, not for cutting cold food, not for looking at.
He'll use it to cut away the burned skin, cut away his sores; he'll let the anger and power spill out from inside.
His eyes close, and he imagines the perfection of his face, after - split tongue, right down the middle. His ears gone.
Bright, right, like the engine.
He smiles, his lips cracking.
End.
Rating: R
Words: about 2400
Summary: Hunting must be like red haze; it hovers at the edge of him.
Notes: Post-Serenity (the movie).
Disclaimer: Clearly, I do not own the Firefly 'verse or characters, and no profit is being made from this.
Many thanks to lunabee34 for beta work and thoughtful critique; also, many thanks to evilmaniclaugh for reading the second draft and offering encouragement and support. My fic for the Random Title Generator Challenge.
Warnings: Some may find this disturbing.
Ships take work. Even a sturdy ship needs constant maintenance, and Kaylee knows that without her - or someone like her - even a Firefly would start falling apart in a matter of months.
So she can't figure it out. The Reavers. Don't seem like there's much going on upstairs, other than wanting for killing. If the Pax makes them so crazy, how can they keep their ships in the black?
"It doesn't make sense," Wash had said, one night, long before any of them ever even heard of Miranda. Weren't much after Simon and River came onboard. Real late, both of them on watch, and they'd always got to talking about ships and engines and things what would make the perfect ship, something that wouldn't ever fall straight out of the sky.
"They ain't got good ships. All that radiation," she'd said, mostly because she knew what he'd say next.
"They're still doing right enough to keep them flying."
Kaylee knows that. Leaking radiation'll kill you for sure, slow or fast, but it ain't that kind of problem that brings a ship down sudden-like. And them old ships - Trans-Us and such - need a lot of work just to keep the engines right. "I don't get it."
"Me either." He'd suddenly grinned at her. "Know what else I don't get? Why Mal's so very fond of wearing a dress. Especially ugly ones."
She'd laughed, because only Wash could go from puzzling about ships and Reavers to thinking about Mal's dress up times. "He says it's a cunning disguise."
"Think he's just angling for compliments about his legs?"
Alone on watch, where everything's quiet around her, Kaylee smiles at the memory. Ain't no one around these days that could chew the fat like Wash could, during them long nights.
*
He wakes up quickly, easily. Sounds around him are familiar - scrape of metal against metal, or metal against skin. The hisses, grunts of the hunters. The sounds of warm food. It's comfortable. No reason to wake up.
He listens again. Concentrates until his head hurts. An ache, bloody and angry. He waits and listens until he hears it. Clang. Clang. Not the drag of heavy boots on the floor. Clang.
After a minute, he figures it out. Engine. It's not right. And the room's too hot. Hot and sticky.
He drags himself off the floor, out of the nest he's made. Engine isn't right. He can hear it.
*
Sometimes Jayne dreams about them. Dreams about the way they smelled, down there in that little room. Blood, metal, unwashed - layers of bad smells, all mixed up with their sounds.
He wakes up, sweating, his yell echoing off the walls of this bunk. It gets tangled up with his memories, the sounds of his bullets, and Zoe's orders; the little yell Kaylee made when they shot her with them darts.
Jayne makes himself stop thinking about it, because it's over. Ain't ever been a use to dwelling on things.
Some night though, lying in the dark, wondering if maybe Mal or Zoe heard him yelling, he ends up thinking weird little thoughts. Like about them poison darts. And how animals like Reavers figured out how to make them. Animals don't make weapons; animals don't got ships.
Don't make any kind of sense.
*
Ship lands, another new place. The hunters run out, searching for warm, living food. They leave cooling food behind them - food that got in the way, that they killed for pleasure, lost in the hunt.
Red haze. Hunting must be like red haze, joy and hunger and focus. It hovers at the edge of him, never quite pulling him in, but there are days - days when he touches it, almost, almost -
Screams distract him. Tilting his head, he stands inside the ship and watches as the food falls around the hunters. Listens to it scream, to its almost-patterns, just before it dies.
Sometimes he wonders if the food is smart. There's something about they way they move, something that almost reminds him of -
But the food is nothing like the hunters; it's weak, easily taken.
He steps out of the ship, into the brightness. Food is food, he thinks, as he settles down next to a cooling carcass, his mouth already watering. Too stupid to get out of the way.
*
Inara paints her feet with henna, careful whorls and tiny flowers. She never paints her hands - it is a two-person process - but for some clients, or for special events, she paints her feet. The patterns are traditional, memorized and practiced. If she wanted, she could do this with her eyes closed.
But she keeps her eyes open, taking quiet delight in the contrast of the henna and her skin.
It dries slowly, thick ridges against her skin, eventually flaking and falling to the floor.
Sometimes, as she's painting a peacock along the arch of her sole, or a lotus flower at the base of her ankle, she realizes that if Reavers came right now - if they targeted the ship, shadowed them - the henna, still wet and vulnerable, would be smudged beyond repair.
She doesn't allow her hand to shake.
*
The engine room is hot. Always hot. Engine glows, sometimes. Makes it hotter, but he doesn't care. He can't stop staring, when it glows - watching the pulse of the light, the flares and retreats.
One of them paints the walls while the engine glows. Harsh lines and sudden curves, ceiling to floor. Patterns on patterns, over and over. The scent - copper, warmth, iron - mixes with the burn of the engine as he watches the patterns come alive.
This one is food.
That one is a hunter.
Another is the engine, his kind, scattered and small, around it.
He stares at one for a long time, unsure what it is. Hunger, he finally decides. It's hunger. And he grins at the painter, stretching his lips as wide as he can.
The painter grins back, her face smooth and smudged.
Eventually the patterns flake away, a brown hail to the floor. Then she repaints them.
*
River never thinks about the Reavers.
She never thinks about that day, the day she slipped into their heads, stole their anger and hunger and strength, and used it against them.
Broken people, broken futures. Broken ships, held together with half-skill and half-Reavers.
She never thinks about it, even when the others do.
But some nights, she dreams of a longing to be something - someone - that can't ever be.
*
Sometimes there's warm food on the ship. Taken for the next journey, until the next landing. It smells - salt and skin, fresh meat. Warm, but warm food is for the hunters, not his kind.
Once, some of the food looks at him. Wide eyes, funny sounds. It reaches out to him, and he watches, fascinated. Food never looks at him, or at the hunters. Food heads stay down; food makes crying noises.
He touches the food. Warmth, under his hand; smooth skin, no scars, no burns, no signs of rank or strength and kills. Repulsive, he thinks. Wrong. But somehow he still wants to take the food to his nest. Pet it. Keep it. His.
The thought pushes at him - makes his head ache, makes him angry.
Rage, he thinks, and suddenly it flares. Boils, beneath his skin.
Yes. He feels alive. His fingers twitch, his hands long for a weapon - an axe, heavy and sharp, cutting into -
No. No weapons. Just his hands, reaching out, clawing into flesh. He imagines it - tearing, wet sounds, food shuddering under him; his teeth -
Across the room, a hunter growls. He snaps his head in the direction of the sound. Bares his teeth. Dim light, but he can see - careful carvings on the hunter's face, slashed lips and no eyelids. Powerful.
He knows his own face, has seen it in broken mirrors, shards of glass. It is nothing like the face of the hunters. When he looks at his arms, he only sees burns, peeling skin, irregular and accidental.
The anger banks, sudden and shocking; he cries out its loss, again. Again and again - it always comes, enough that he's almost there, almost right - and it always settles. It leaves him empty, wrong.
He steps away, leaves the warm food where it belongs.
*
"Read it," River says, handing him the wave. She's gone - flash of her back, flick of her hair - before Mal can say anything, before he can do more than glance down at the words.
He doesn't know how she got this - it's stamped "Confidential" and Mal intercepted enough of the purplebelly transmissions during the war to know when something's military.
This sure as hell is. Military and cold, precise and detailed.
There's a war on. It ain't like the war for independence, it ain't dividing up planets and towns and homes. This one is silent, quiet, though Mal and his crew stumble on signs now and then. Alliance ships, broken and silent, drifting in space. Or Reaver ships, empty but somehow still seething.
It's been going on for months now, and Mal ain't got any idea, one way or anther, which side is winning.
He sits down and rereads the wave, the first official acknowledgment of the war he's seen. His eyes itch. Some of the worlds stand out more than others. 'Captured ships' and 'boarding parties'. 'Troop casualties' and the finding of 'civilian remains.'
It's the gorram last two paragraphs that get him the worst case of the itches. Shouldn't be a surprise, reading about speculation of the Pax not quite working on all the Reavers in the same way, not leaving them all perfect killers. Don't much shock him there might social hierarchies on them Reaver ships.
Someone's gotta keep them ships working to some degree of order.
And he ain't never heard of no chemical that affected everyone in the same damn way.
He wonders - just briefly - what it's like for them that ain't the killers, them that are stuck halfway between Reaver and a real person. How they get through it.
What it's like on them ships. Every day.
*
Some days, he wakes up to the sound of his own retching. His skin burns, but he shivers. His arms feel heavy, weak.
Even from his nest, he can see the glow of the engine. It's comforting.
The hunters come, threatening and strong. They bring him weapons on those days, left piled at his feet. He cleans and reloads; tries to make things fit where they're broken, or where they don't belong. He loses himself in the repetition.
*
Later, Zoe tells herself she didn't see anything. That nothing slipped out of the room as she approached, that she didn't jump - jarring her back, hissing in pain - that she didn't see.
Sometimes the memory pushes itself through. Dirty, long hair, filthy face, seeping sores along bare arms; something moving too fast for Zoe to shoot, no matter how much her fingers wanted it.
She turns away from the memories - fixes her gaze on a wall, or on the perfect curves of Inara's face, or on the patience of Jayne's hands polishing his guns.
When she watches the light of Kaylee's smile, or the madness of River's eyes, she can forget finding Wash, head thrown back, pinned to the chair where he'd lived so much of his days. She forgets about the signs of gnawing, and the way his hair had been smoothed flat, parted in the wrong direction by unknown hands. Somehow it's more foreign and wrong than the spike sticking out of chest.
*
New place, another landing. Cool, grey. Not like home. Vague memories - a name, Miranda, and bright sun, white buildings. Before the traveling. Before the anger, smoldering underneath his skin.
They're hunting. Chasing food, food that lands here. Lands and scatters.
The hunters leave him - his kind - behind. Same thing, every time. He hovers at the edge of the ship, stays in the shadows and listens. He can hear them, their screams of victory and power; he wants to be there. Wants to cut his own face, peel back his skin with his own hands.
But he can't. He's not strong.
Finally, he steps away, out of the shadows. Doesn't follow the hunters' path. Instead, he goes to the food's ship, gets inside.
Inside, it's wrong. Wrong smells, wrong sounds, no patterns on the walls, no juddering pulse of an engine. Like the food tried to make the ship right, but couldn't be anything but stupid food.
He shakes his head. There's no reason for food to have ships. Food doesn't hunt.
The air tastes wrong. Too cool. No burning with each breath. But he follows a scent, follows it and finds food. Bright, colourful food, with hair like the glow of the engine. He reaches out, presses his hand into the hair; it's soft. He can't help smoothing it down, over and over, soft hair, cold scalp.
Cold. Hunters wouldn't touch it. It's wasted food.
He's hungry. The ship feels wrong, empty and unsafe, but he's hungry enough to push it away. Ignore it. Focus on the food, waiting for him.
He takes an arm. Begins to gnaw before the others - less brave, scared of the outside - follow him in, and he has to share.
*
These days, Simon rarely performs surgery. He stitches and patches up wounds, inoculates against back-world illness, sets bones and medicates for skin infections, rashes, and whatever delightful bacteria Jayne picks on his forays to filthy whorehouses.
It's all rare - the challenges of surgery, the familiar weights of bright, perfectly sharpened scalpels, and the joy of precise incisions.
On the bad days - days when there is surgery, when there's too much blood, and Mal or Zoe or Kaylee is standing tense by the door, fingers clenched - Simon realizes he doesn't miss it. Surgery had once been his dream; it had once been the shape of his days, the centre.
Now it's the sign that something has gone very wrong.
These days, Simon hopes for inoculations, or neat, tidy stitches, or even Jayne's complaints of itching and burning. He hopes for colds, and mild fevers, and broken arms.
He hopes his scalpels stay arranged and clean, out of his hands, and away from his crew.
*
The knife is small. Can't remember where he found it, but it's his. Small, sharp against his fingers, bright. His.
One day, he'll use it. Not for the engine, not for cutting cold food, not for looking at.
He'll use it to cut away the burned skin, cut away his sores; he'll let the anger and power spill out from inside.
His eyes close, and he imagines the perfection of his face, after - split tongue, right down the middle. His ears gone.
Bright, right, like the engine.
He smiles, his lips cracking.
End.