Son of a Preacher Man
Series: Finding
Title: Son of a Preacher Man
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Post-BDM
Characters: Jayne
Disclaimer: Firefly owns me, I own words
Notes: Leads to Jayne/River but stands alone as it is. Direct reference in Aftermath Part 5 to events surrounding the Academy.
All Jayne/River stories are in the same storyline, even if seen out of order...
Organizational Post
Life was hard, but that weren’t news to no one on the Rim. He was just the first of many children. Some days he couldn’t remember how many there had been. Still births, infant deaths, accidents and disease took so many of the little ones that the rangy teenager had stopped trying to make sense of it. He did what he was asked to do; chores, odd jobs, whatever happened to need doing.
He wasn’t a good boy in the hard studying, non-fighting kind of way. Taciturn and moody, he took care of what he had to, left the rest if he could. He came home with and doled out bruises and scrapes from the first day he went to school. When he was ten he hit a girl for the first time and his Pa took him out back and explained to him that no Cobb ever hit a woman. He walked with a limp and had trouble seeing straight for a week after that. Scar on his cheek reminded him for the rest of his life what a heavy ring can do with a fist behind it. He learned to never wear rings himself that day when his Pa had to nurse a broken finger after leaving the mark.
It was a harsh moon, far off the edge of the Rim. Mostly farmers scraping by in the wet season bracketed by frigid winters and hellaciously hot summers. When farms were lying idle, mining became the primary occupation for the settlers. It was an odd moon that way, couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Only a narrow range of latitudes was even habitable.
His Ma was a tough woman, never let the loss of her flesh and blood slow her down. He couldn’t recall a time when she had let loss defeat her or her sense of humor. His Pa said that was one reason he loved her so deeply. She could find a smile in even the deepest tragedies. Some days her eldest son was sure he had been given the name he had just so his Ma would have something to smile about. Other times he cursed his Pa for having agreed to it when he was fending off the older boys who liked to taunt him with his ‘girl’s name’.
Jayne grew into a tall boy early, hands large and strong well before the other boys his age. Sundays he sang in the choir, standing in the back towering over the other children. The congregation would listen raptly to the joy the children brought to their hard lives. He sang cause it made his Ma happy, his Pa would nod approvingly and mouth the words as he listened.
His Pa was the preacher, and like everyone he worked the mines in the off season, farmed during the wet. Brought the word of God to those that needed to hear it as often as he could. His eldest son would go with him and help on the road when they were gone for days at a time.
School was fit in when they weren’t working the land or deep in the mines carving a bit of profit out of the slim veins of ore. The rest of life’s necessities were hunted or trapped by those that could. Jayne’s Pa and Uncle were both crack shots with quick eyes that could spot game from distances that made folks joke that they must have some far-seeing magic. When Jayne grew old enough to come along he made both the men check their eyes for reasons why they didn’t see birds before Jayne had already had them pocketed.
Jayne could find a deer in miles of forest, follow a downed running bird where no one else even knew it had passed. His Pa insisted that he had nothing to do with his son’s tracking skills. He had just had the gift he said. Jayne never could or cared to explain it. He knew he could just smell most animals from far off, could sense where they were without seeing them most times. The seeing part was secondary. Most shots were fatal, didn’t waste a lot of ammunition by being rash with his trigger finger. Couldn’t afford to be wasteful with shotgun shells he loaded himself with salvaged casings and pellets gathered with a magnet behind the counter at the general store where he worked to help pay for the basics.
He was happy in that way folks on the Rim were wont to be. Didn’t know any other way of living. They were born to hard living, unforgiving weather and unfulfilled desires. Jayne’s family never went hungry but they always knew the closeness of need. His Pa would bring his eldest son with him so as to let him see the lives those less fortunate had to survive on. Jayne learned there were no handouts, no meals that didn’t have to be earned by the sweat of his brow, the ache in his back after working in the mines from dawn until dusk let him know he wasn’t just allowed to coast.
The work in the mines was dangerous and cruel. The teenager often had to flee from cave-ins and alarms reading toxic levels of carbon monoxide and worse leaching from the seams of ore. No one knew then how much those toxins affected the miners. Wasn’t until Jayne’s Ma was looking over her son’s school work that she saw things were beginning to go amiss. His hand writing had worsened, words he used to know were being spelled wrong, left out or used incorrectly. He grew more frustrated with himself and the work that required him to think, analyze. If he was asked he just grumbled about headaches or tiredness from working long hours. He was 15 years old, not quite a man, no longer a boy. He left school and went to work for anyone who needed a sure hand and a strong back. Didn’t let anyone tell him he was slow even as he knew they maybe were right. His Ma was pained for him when he came home dirty and bruised from yet another scuffle. Knew he was fighting back the only way he knew how. His tools for survival were his hands, not his words.
When his brother Mattie came home choking out blood and black soot Jayne’s Ma put her foot down on her children spending any more time in the dark pits. Pa tried to argue half-heartedly, knowing his wife was right. The money lost was painful, food grew scarcer as it became harder to pay for. Jayne threw himself into whatever work he could find to help, hunted when he could get away. He retreated from his friends and as much as he could, his family.
They both watched their big son grow more sullen, slower with his words. Jayne had lost something in the darkness underground and no one knew what it was. Ma insisted he finish his schooling, Pa argued that his son was doing just fine turning into a man without more schooling. Jayne would go to bed nights, listening to them argue, his Ma slapping her hand down on the kitchen table to emphasize her point. He braced his back against the wall, clenched his jaw. He knew he was struggling, was not thinking straight. He could feel the headaches that made it hard to think were robbing him of something else. His Ma’s pride drove him to go down one night and just tell his Pa he would do it, he would do what his Ma wanted, he would find a way to study and work.
The silent sadness around the table that night was the coldest Jayne had ever felt. His Ma wouldn’t cry, but he knew she was mourning her bright young child. His Pa tried to stand up straight with pride but the years of backbreaking labor and loss of untold children bent his shoulders under their burden. Jayne was his first son, the only one strong enough to fend in the world. Jayne would finish school. He struggled and ground out the hours of studying when he wasn’t working at any job he could find. He finished the rudimentary’s in a year, called it good enough. A certificate hung in his Ma’s kitchen, said he had graduated. Small moon like theirs, that was enough. Higher schooling was a luxury no one even comprehended.
The preacher threw himself into making sure his family had enough to eat, had the grace of God to support them. He traveled further and wider, bringing God to the furthest reaches of the moon. Jayne went with him most times; met hard men living off of the land in nowhere towns, shacks huddled together in the lee of spined mountains. Here Jayne thrived, he could use the wits he had in abundance, hunting, tracking, ranging far in the afternoons after they had stopped for the day. He would explore, find all the haunts of deer and hare’s.
By 17 he had been across most of the moon, seen every half-wild trapper that lived there. And had fought with most boys and young men around his age until everyone acknowledged that he maybe should be given a wide berth. Then the Alliance came. The Feds wanted the mine to increase production, had grown frustrated with the lack of expansion of the operation. The foreman had tried to explain the diseases his miners were coming down with, the damp lung that was taking one man in four out of service. A meeting had been convened in the big hall in town. Everyone had been there, the large room was crammed to the walls with anxious mothers, tightlipped men, and restless teens. Jayne had been begged by his Ma to stay out of anything, to keep to the back of the hall. She knew if it came to raised voices and heated tempers her son would not stand back.
Her prescience would haunt Jayne for the rest of his life. Sure as the sun rose every day, the Feds had pushed for more of the boys to go to work in face of protest by their parents; orders were given, ultimatums passed. And there were two dead men at Jayne’s feet when the haze cleared. It had happened so quickly that no one had rightly seen it start. There had been angry voices, a finger being pointed at a scared mother, a hand had whipped out to slap or push back her frightened appeal to the two Feds ordering her to back off, going to their weapons to reinforce their demand.
Jayne saw the men go to their weapons, go to pressuring a scared woman he had known his whole life as the kind of sweet woman who grew vegetables in her garden for all to share in, had raised her girls and boys to be respectful God-fearing folk. He reacted without thought, large, fast, blind to consequence. He killed the men so easily that everyone stepped back, cleared a space around the large teenager, hands hanging at ease, ready for anyone else to overstep their bounds. He grew up that day. His path altered irrevocably from that moment forward.
Jayne had to leave, had to get off the moon before his deed was circulated to the authorities. No one would turn on him in the small community he had grown up in, but there were others not so forgiving. He wasn’t sad to be going, just knew he couldn’t stay and endanger others. He had tasted what it was to kill with his bare hands, and it didn’t turn him from it. His Ma watched her large son become a man she had hoped would never see. Hard moons make hard men and Jayne was no different. He shipped out on an ore hauler, a long range scow of bolts and men with shadowy pasts. He was just past his seventeenth birthday and working as a man. From the start he sent money home to his Ma, his sole means of apology for becoming what he had become.
He worked the ore hauler for a few months before getting to Persephone and off shipping there. It was a planet so unlike his home that he wanted to see what its treasures were. A large man, alone in a foreign world, knowledgeable with his fists and respectful of women he soon found work bouncing for a cat house in the seedy part of town. Girls of questionable ethics turned his young eyes, encouraged his appetites for contact and more. One young girl, red haired, strong willed and humorous became his closest friend in the unforgiving world of corrupt men, immoral women and carnal pleasures of every kind. Bonnie Tamar was herself from the Rim, come to Persephone to escape the slavery of a marriage to a man she had been promised to by a family with far too many daughters to support dowries for. Jayne and Bonnie looked out for each other from the start, shared nights when she wasn’t working, learned from each other what it meant to not trust, but at the least rely on one person in an environment that destroyed others.
Jayne found his skill with guns was still useful the first time he was hired as a gunhand to a cargo hauler of illicit goods. He had met the Captain while throwing a few rowdies out of the cat house one late night and had had to back up the forcible ejection with a well placed wing-shot to one of the rowdies knees. The Captain had seen still teenager calmly handle the two rubes and then pop one with a small caliber pistol without any compunction whatever. Jayne found himself hired for more of the same for twice the money the Madame at the house offered him. Jayne found a new calling. Gunslinger.
He managed to see most of the ‘Verse that way. Most of the seamier sides of it at least. Hired gun, bouncer, occasional brawler for money. He gained a reputation for being a good man in a fight, a superior shooter to any known gunslingers, and a fair bet to lay money on in a backroom fight club. Jayne Cobb, Rim moon born became a mercenary who lived with skills learned as a youth in a world where he could excel.
He tried to go straight a few times, when it felt like he could earn more coin by it. Always sending money home, he kept his eyes open to opportunities that allowed him to send more. His Ma sent letters telling him how much the money helped especially after the mines dried up and work vanished. The settlers left behind wrestled life from the land that seemed to want nothing so much as to burn them out in the summers and freeze them to death in the winters. The money he sent kept his family in food and fuel. Mattie had medicines he had to take to even breathe enough to get out of bed, his Pa had fallen ill a few years after he had left and was gone not long after that. Jayne didn’t get word from his Ma about his Pa’s passing until months after it happened. He had been shipping out as the preacher drew his last breath. By the time he found out, it was too late to go home and the money he could send was even more needed. His Ma and Mattie had nothing else to live on by then.
Supporting his family drove him to search for work that paid more, had longer prospects. Osiris, a Central Core planet offered the most lucrative contracts to experienced security men. Jayne was able to pass entrance exams for security work at Alliance facilities based on his experience with guns, prior security work and sheer determination. He wanted the job, wanted the credits it offered. A uniform and a regular paycheck followed. A man from the Rim made good he figured.
His job was at a newly built facility on the extreme outskirts of the city. A hospital/research building. He had spent time during time during construction walking the half-finished hallways, seeing the medical systems being installed. Didn’t know what most of the machines were, didn’t rightly care. Only wanted to know the lay of the land; find the weak areas of the security. He would walk the grounds, gardens surrounded the sterile white buildings. Grasses grew soft and lush around trees laden with flowers. Jayne had never seen anything like it. He would scent new fascinations every day, a world of exotic newness. He thought he may find a way to be content there.
Then the ‘students’ began to arrive. Young teenagers, boys and girls. Bright, cheerful children who ran through the gardens laughing and enjoying their wondrous new home. Jayne heard them talking about the ‘Academy’, discuss the exciting classes they were going to be taking and friends they were making. He would shake his head, unsure who what these children were talking about. He was confused by their lack of comprehension as to the medical nature of the facility.
He blocked the crying he could hear from behind closed doors as he walked the halls late at night. Ignored the scent of fear and adrenaline that filled the empty spaces. Averted his eyes from the pleading looks of the children when he passed them. His heart was hardened from feeling for these people who had so blithely gone into buildings that reeked of wrongness to him. The garden’s sweetness became cloying and sickly to his senses. The young man from the Rim was closed to the wrongness of the rotten Core.
A girl had been expelled, eyes found his as she slowly was escorted past the guard’s gate. Some of her hair had been shaved close, scars from surgery revealed behind her ear, across her scalp. Jayne was transfixed by the fear in her eyes. Pleading with him silently to rescue her from what had happened. He turned away, hid from her gaze. Died inside as he rejected her entreaty. A bottle of cheap whiskey and a willing whore would set his mind to ease he decided. The bottle of whiskey burned a trail of fire to his belly; it couldn’t erase the look in the girl’s eyes. The lost pleading.
A man appeared, offered him money to rescue his little girl from the fate of the others. Half drunk, soul dying, Jayne had agreed. He turned on his employers, used his access to the facility to return one girl to her father. Wasn’t until 20 years later that he learned how her fate was worse from being rescued than staying would have been. 20 years he carried a memory around that turned out to be false. A world built carefully crumbled around him. He closes the door, blocks himself from feeling anything but the basics. The aftermath of that choice burned a reality to cinders.
A past filled with choices that he had little choice in, Miranda, blood burning with substances that altered its composition, blocks on inhibitions removed, a girl with more insight into what he had become but with no tools to help repair the break; Jayne Cobb had lost himself before he had even started to find what that meant.
~*~ ~*~
20 years later Jayne Cobb wakes, becomes a weapon as no one had ever imagined. The Alliance doctors would shrink back in fear if they knew how their work could grow beyond its confines, could become feral and uncontained in the body of a man who was barely beyond wild to begin with.
Born on a Rim moon that made hard men with deep wells of survival inbred in their core; Jayne Cobb would be the last man standing.
~*~ ~*~