Fic: So this is the future (welcome to the past) 1/2
Title: So this is the future (welcome to the past).
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and his associates own the characters; I’m just playing with them.
Rating: Pg-15 (for swearing)
Pairings: Faith/River
Summary: Faith is sent into the future on a mission to track down a wayward girl who could be the answer to, well, something
Author note I: Big, big thanks to electra126 for beta’ing this
Author note II: This is set loosely in Season 8 of Buffy, but the only relevant comic canon is Faith’s chosen role post-No Future For You. There are no spoilers.
Faith stared back at the group of people in front of her, come to say goodbye and see her off. Not that she’d call most of them friends. There was at least one person in that line that couldn’t wait to see the back of her and probably hoped she got her ass space-burned-to-death before she ever made it back home. The rest were either here for technical reasons or just ‘cause they were curious.
She couldn’t believe she’d signed up for this. Not that she had. Coerced might have been a better way of saying it. Buffy-freakin’-Summers leaving voicemail after voicemail, reminding her over and over that this was her job. That Faith had wanted this gig, saving the girls too far gone for anyone else to reach them.
This was in no way what she had meant by that but Buffy kept spouting the words back to her until even Faith couldn’t reliably argue her meaning any more and just gave in because she was sick to death of her hearing her ring tone every five minutes.
It must have nearly killed the blonde, but she - they - were so desperate to track this wayward chick down that Buffy had been forced to admit that Faith was good at it too; the only one they could count on to get the job done. . .
Yeah, the only they didn’t mind risking five hundred years in the freakin’ future more like.
“So do I at least get a spacesuit or something?”
Buffy’s arms were folded as tight as her smirk. “No.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little risky?”
“Willow isn’t going to shoot you out into open space, Faith.” Andrew moved the whiteboard a little closer to her and pointed at it with his long metal pointer thing. “That would be stupid - and messy. She’s going to set you down on a planet called…”
When he hesitated, Dawn helpfully filled in the blank, “Persephone. It’s what the ripples tell us is terraformed.”
“Okay, first off, what the hell is terraformed?”
“It means you can live there. Breathe and stuff,” Buffy said with a little shrug, like she didn’t much care if Faith could breathe there or not.
“Okay, I like the sound of that. Just two more questions…”
“I need to do this in ninety seconds, Faith,” Willow called over from behind the teleportation pod. “Do you have the information pack I compiled for you?”
“Yeah, but hang on.” Purple tendrils were already beginning to zig-zag from the magical ring she was standing in. She eyed them warily, noticing everyone else taking a healthy step back. She started to talk quicker. “Why exactly are we listening to information from a bunch of ripples? It seems kinda…stupid.”
“It’s Willow’s source. She’s been reliable in the past,” Dawn promised.
“And sometimes not so much,” Buffy added. She was having way too good a time with this.
The purple threads were reaching her now. From the demo Willow had given yesterday with the potato, she only had seconds left until the ring went pop and she disappeared a hell of a lot further into the future than the potato had had to go.
“Last question. Can I change my freakin’ mind?”
“No.”
Buffy waved cheerily goodbye and the last thing Faith did in 2009 was flip her the bird.
*****
Faith shot out of an invisible portal and hit the grit rolling.
The first thing that she checked was that she could breathe. She could, though the cloud of dust she’d kicked up with her tumble didn’t make it the most pleasant experience. Coughing it up from her lungs, she stayed where she was for a while, getting her breath back, smiling at the bright blue sky and listening to a chicken cluck just a few feet from her head.
That last one might have bothered her more if she wasn’t just so damn happy to have made it through the portal alive and the right way around. She’d read stories, or okay, seen movies where time-travel scrambled your genetic whatjamaflip all to hell, and her face and her ass might both be fine, but she didn’t really want them switched if it was all the same to the universe.
It took the chicken pecking at her eyebrow to finally make her move. Swatting at it with one hand, she sent it flapping and squawking away, and then she sat up.
She’d landed on the outskirts of a town square. It was noisy and chaotic and no one - but a bunch of little kids who were laughing and pointing at her battle with the curious chicken - had taken the blindest bit of notice of her stylish entrance. A roaring sprung out of nowhere, making her cringe back in the dust, eyes wide with the fear of the unknown, as just a dozen feet or so above her a freakin’ spaceship (okay, a small one, but still!) flew across the square.
Sitting up again after that little fright, she looked around with an unimpressed eye and drawled, “Aw, hell!”
*****
Three weeks later
The first thing Faith was aware of when she started coming round was a dull, heavy thump thump thump going on in her head. Just how much had she drunk last night? Weird thing was, she didn’t remember drinking anything.
She remembered ordering a beer, remembered asking the barman who the chick on the wanted poster behind the bar was and she remembered thinking ‘bingo’ when he said the exact name she’d been looking for the past three weeks. She had finally caught a damn break. Before she could do anything with it, some douche had started hassling a woman on the other side of the bar and Faith had stepped in to lend her some backup. There had been a messy brawl after that - real messy, but hella fun and just what she needed after weeks of hunting alone and keeping herself to herself.
Fun right up until the big-ass bar stool had been swung at her face anyway.
She shifted a little, her bruised cheek coming to rest on the cool metal floor beneath her. It was vibrating just enough to make her face tingle. Frowning, she took a moment to connect the dots between vibrations, thumping and sheet metal. She was in the back of a pick up truck!
Oh hell no! She’d heard tales of slavers working some of the outer moons and there was no way one of them was kidnapping her.
She groaned as she fought against her body’s worth of aches and pains, trying to force herself into a sitting position.
“Think she’s waking up, Cap’n.”
That was the voice of the chick she had saved. Faith’s frown deepened. Fucking great. Knowing her luck she had unwittingly helped a bunch of evil kidnappers escape from whatever passed as the law around here. When would she just learn to look the other way when a pretty girl was in trouble? She never used to have such a problem with ignoring damsels in distress.
Faith’s arms were bound behind her, that explained why she was having such a hard time getting upright. It also pointed to her being in even more trouble than she’d figured.
There was the thud of footsteps that made the metal ring sharper than the engine sounds. Just how the hell big was this Pick-up? She finally forced her eyes open, hoping to get a sense of what she was dealing with, but all she could see was several pairs of boots and the bed of the truck stretching as far as she could see.
“Dunno why we brought her with us anyway,” a gruff voice complained.
Faith frowned. What, they didn’t think she was good enough to dig mud or whatever?
“She mentioned River.”
Faith barely registered the mild, polite if way anxious tone this speaker was using, she was too busy focusing on that name. The ghost she was chasing, maybe they knew where she was. Maybe she could tie them up and torture them for information. If she ever managed to sit up again that was.
She struggled on the floor, trying to use her shoulders to push herself up. There was a crowd of feet around her now but none of them seemed inclined to lend a hand.
“And more importantly,” said a new voice. “She saved Kaylee.”
“Thank you, Cap’n.”
“But if she is Alliance,” began that cultured voice in a serious way that made Faith think her future was about to be decided. “Bringing her with us might not have been the smartest move. What if they’ve placed a tracker inside her? They might be following us right now.”
“For once I agree with the Doc. We should find that tracker and drop it into deep space to confuse the gorram Feds.”
“And how exactly do you propose to find this tracker?”
“Gutting her like a catfish should do it.”
“Jayne!” Faith’s rescuee cried out.
Faith was already through with taking this asshole’s attitude. She spun on the floor, using the side of her head to pivot like a balance-challenged break dancer, boots finding grip on the metal to gain momentum as she went around. She saw feet jump out of the way, but the asshole wasn’t quick enough or just not smart enough to see the threat.
Either way, both of Faith’s heavy boots caught the backs of his ankles hard enough to drop him on his ass. He gave an undignified yell of surprise as his impact made the flooring clang. Flipping herself onto him, Faith used his body as leverage to shimmy to her knees.
“Hey,” he said it in a leering way, with what he probably thought was a sexy smile. That mood ended the second her knee found his groin. “Hey!” He went to grab her.
“Uh uh uh. You lay just one of those filthy fingers on me I’m gonna get ticklish, and when I get ticklish I start getting uncontrollable knee spasms, you get me?” She applied a little more pressure to make sure he did,
His hands went up in the air. “Sure, sure, no tickling.”
Faith looked around at everyone else. There were three people gathered around her, not including the goon she was kneeling on. One was the girl she had saved from the bastards back on Persephone. Out of the other three guys, it didn’t take a genius to work out which one was the doctor and which one was the captain.
“One of you untie me,” she said, calmly given the circumstances. “Or I squash your buddy’s berries hard enough to make juice.”
The captain settled his ass comfortably on the edge of the crate and answered her genially. “Well, I’m not seeing that as being much as a threat considering as there’s likely many women in the verse who’d pay us handsomely for Jayne’s castration.”
“Hey, hey, let’s not be hasty,” her cushion, Jayne, said, waving his hands around but taking care not to let them too close to her.
“Hasty?” Faith asked him, cocking an eyebrow. “Sorry, weren’t you the one who was gonna gut me like a… what was it…Catfish before even learning my name?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
She ignored him, focusing on the captain again. “Look, you can untie me now and we’ll all play nice, or I’ll get myself out of this and I’ll be…less nice.”
“Yeah, I think we’ll run the risk of you doing nothing but sitting right there and griping while we talk on this awhile,” he said.
“Uh, can we put that to a vote or something,” the guy under her asked. “Like, maybe you’d be more comfortable in a chair, Miss?”
“I’m comfy enough, thanks.”
She couldn’t move, they’d see she was straining against whatever the hell was bonding her wrists together. She could feel that she was making a little progress with it. She just had to keep them distracted with her mouth long enough for her to loosen them enough to make a difference.
“So what did you wanna talk about?” she asked. “You know, seeing as you kidnapped me and all, I figure it must be pretty important.”
“Oh, we didn’t kidnap you,” Kaylee promised. “You was just unconscious on account of being hit by that stool and we didn’t want to leave you to get, you know, got by anyone.”
“Oh, right,” Faith said, deadpan. “So you were rescuing me?” Kaylee smiled eagerly. “Goody, that makes me feel better about the ropes and the almost-being-gutted and the being carried off to God knows where by a bunch of strangers in the back of a fuckin’ trailer!”
“Oh, this ain’t no old trailer,” Kaylee said proudly. “She’s a real good ship.”
“Ship, huh?” Faith looked around and gave a sideways nod of the head. She’d deal with the problem with being on open water once her hands were free. Maybe they had a lifeboat or something. “Okay, makes more sense of the captain over there I guess. So why am I tied up again?”
“Actually, I think until we know a little more about you, I’ll do the question-asking,” the Captain said amiably enough but in take-no-bullshit way.
“Are you Alliance?” the doctor blurted out.
“What did I just say about who was asking the questions?” The doctor looked suitably chastised and the Captain crossed his arms, composing himself. “Are you in any way associated with the Alliance?”
“What’s the Alliance?”
They all looked at her a little more closely. Great, her ignorance had made them suspicious and there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about that. It wasn’t like Willow had packed a Future book for her to study on the way here.
“You don’t know who the Alliance is?” The captain checked.
“Never heard of them.”
“The Feds?”
“Now them I’ve heard of,” Faith nodded.
“Is she simple or something?” Jayne asked, and Faith pressed down with her knee. “Hey, not that simple ain’t nice. We already got plenty of simple on this boat.”
“So, you’re a bounty hunter?” It was phrased as a question but the captain sounded pretty sure he’d got it right this time. “Looking to make some honest cash by dragging a poor, innocent girl away from her family, is that it?”
“What?” Faith frowned again as she drew the word out. “No, nobody’s paying me for it.”
She was almost there. Just another minute and her hands would be free.
The clean cut doctor guy stepped up, looking at her intently. “How do you know my sister?”
Faith gave a one shouldered shrug, trying not to let the battle going on behind her back show on her face. “Pretty sure I never met your sister.”
“Then why were you asking about her, back at the bar?”
“Huh?” Faith was concentrating too hard on her bonds to be really listening. “No idea what you’re talking about, dude.”
“Well you better start engaging the brain in that pretty little head of yours ‘cause something about this don’t smell right,” the captain said, pushing himself off the crate so he could crowd her too.
“That’s because she’s lying,” Jayne said. “Has to be. I don’t care what rutting backwater moon she’s from, ain’t no way she’s never heard of Alliance.”
“It’s because she’s old.” The clear, mellifluous voice had everyone turning to the stairs. “Older than time.”
“Doc, I thought I told you to keep her out of harms way until we established exactly what was going here.”
“Yeah, Sweetie, maybe you’d be happier upstairs for a little while,” Kaylee tried. “Look, I’ll come with you.”
“No, wait a minute.” Jayne looked from Faith to the girl and back again. “Both dumb as posts, like kindred spirits or something. I wanna see how they act together.”
Faith put a little extra weight on his balls for the ‘dumb as posts’ comment, but he wasn’t far wrong. This girl might not be a Slayer in the same way she was, but Faith felt a definite pull coming from her. This girl was something alright, and if Willow had it accurate, she was really something.
“River Tam, right?”
The girl didn’t answer the question but Faith had no doubt she was. As the waif-like chick - what was she, sixteen, seventeen at a push? - began to wander from one side of the hold to the other and back again, drawing closer only a few inches at a time, she kept her eyes locked on Faith.
“You don’t belong here.”
“Nope.”
“Your home is too far down. It shouldn’t be possible. Serious anomaly. Time skips, and skips, then skips again and here you are, purple and green. The gravitational wave came and washed you up the ladder, just for me, but you’re too high.”
“You think I’m the one that’s high?”
Faith flexed her wrists. The bonds were loose; she was as good as free. Now she just had to sneak her hand into her pocket and grab the Time. . . Recaller. . . Sonic. . . thing and grab the girl as she pressed the button. Providing the technology worked as Willow had promised, she’d be home and this mission would be finally over inside five minutes.
“You don’t need me,” River promised her.
“Not what my higher-ups say.”
“Who are your higher-ups?” The doctor asked.
Faith ignored him. He wouldn’t be more than a waste of memory in a minute. The girl was close enough to grab. Everyone was so focused on her that they hadn’t noticed that Faith’s hands were free, one of them sliding into her pocket.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Do what?”
She sucked at the innocent look. Over-compensating, she lunged forward while trying to press the button inside her pocket and fluffed it, her thumb sliding off the plastic casing instead. Her hand closed around River’s wrist but her timing was screwed now and the girl might have been small and skinny but she was whippet-quick and hella feisty and before she knew it they were struggling for the upper hand.
Faith was pushed off of Jayne and then they were rolling over and over on the metal floor while the rest of the crew were shouting and panicking, new voices joining them all the time. The whole time River just laughed, high-pitched and carefree like a girl in elementary school.
Faith finally managed to stay on top, straddling the girl and breathing hard as she tried to fumble the recall device from her pocket. “Got you.”
At the all too familiar sound of a hand gun being cocked, Faith slowly looked down. Uh huh, that was a handgun alright. The weapon looked too big for the girl’s small hands but she held it straight out, pointing at Faith’s chest, with ease.
River giggled again. “Got you.”
“Hey, how’d she get my gun?” Jayne asked, still sitting a few feet away as he tenderly cradled his balls with one hand and checked his holster with the other.
Yep, Faith slowly held her hands up and backed off, gradually rising to her feet. This girl was really something.
Still holding her hands in the air, Faith took her first proper look around from a decent vantage point. There were places she could dive for cover if need be; the ship’s hold was littered with crates, but she still needed to literally get her hands on River and she couldn’t do that when she had a gun trained on her and all her friends were standing around.
No, the best thing she could do was try to avoid getting shot, or gutted, until they hit dry land. Maybe then, with the crowd thinned out a little, she’d get a chance to sneak up and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Okay, you win, I give up. No harm no foul, right? I didn’t hurt anybody, in fact I saved your chick’s life,” Faith waved a hand at Kaylee. “Kinda. So how about I just sit quietly down and then when we dock, I’ll get the hell out of here.”
Everyone just looked at her for a moment.
Jayne broke the silence. “I say we don’t trust her.”
“But she’s right,” Kaylee countered. “She hasn’t actually done us any harm and there is the whole saving my life thing.”
The captain seemed to be trying to decide whether to trust her or tie her up again. “I don’t know. What’s to say you won’t just turn around and try and do whatever it is you’re trying to do with our River here soon as we turn our backs?”
“You have my word.” The captain started laughing cynically and Faith smirked. “Okay, that was weak, but it’s all I’ve got to offer ‘til we’re back on dry land. How long’s that going to be anyway? Where are we exactly?”
“Somewhere just outside Ariel’s atmo.”
“Atmo? What the. . .?” For the first time Faith looked out of one of the little round windows near the ceiling of the hold. It was wicked black out there. “Is it night time?” she asked hopefully.
“It’s always night time in space, silly,” Kaylee told her cheerfully.
“In. . .space?” Shit, she was going dizzy. “This is a spaceship? We’re actually in outerfuckingspace?”
Someone answered her but she missed it, what with the clanging her body made as she hit the metal floor in a dead faint.
On to part two
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and his associates own the characters; I’m just playing with them.
Rating: Pg-15 (for swearing)
Pairings: Faith/River
Summary: Faith is sent into the future on a mission to track down a wayward girl who could be the answer to, well, something
Author note I: Big, big thanks to electra126 for beta’ing this
Author note II: This is set loosely in Season 8 of Buffy, but the only relevant comic canon is Faith’s chosen role post-No Future For You. There are no spoilers.
Faith stared back at the group of people in front of her, come to say goodbye and see her off. Not that she’d call most of them friends. There was at least one person in that line that couldn’t wait to see the back of her and probably hoped she got her ass space-burned-to-death before she ever made it back home. The rest were either here for technical reasons or just ‘cause they were curious.
She couldn’t believe she’d signed up for this. Not that she had. Coerced might have been a better way of saying it. Buffy-freakin’-Summers leaving voicemail after voicemail, reminding her over and over that this was her job. That Faith had wanted this gig, saving the girls too far gone for anyone else to reach them.
This was in no way what she had meant by that but Buffy kept spouting the words back to her until even Faith couldn’t reliably argue her meaning any more and just gave in because she was sick to death of her hearing her ring tone every five minutes.
It must have nearly killed the blonde, but she - they - were so desperate to track this wayward chick down that Buffy had been forced to admit that Faith was good at it too; the only one they could count on to get the job done. . .
Yeah, the only they didn’t mind risking five hundred years in the freakin’ future more like.
“So do I at least get a spacesuit or something?”
Buffy’s arms were folded as tight as her smirk. “No.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little risky?”
“Willow isn’t going to shoot you out into open space, Faith.” Andrew moved the whiteboard a little closer to her and pointed at it with his long metal pointer thing. “That would be stupid - and messy. She’s going to set you down on a planet called…”
When he hesitated, Dawn helpfully filled in the blank, “Persephone. It’s what the ripples tell us is terraformed.”
“Okay, first off, what the hell is terraformed?”
“It means you can live there. Breathe and stuff,” Buffy said with a little shrug, like she didn’t much care if Faith could breathe there or not.
“Okay, I like the sound of that. Just two more questions…”
“I need to do this in ninety seconds, Faith,” Willow called over from behind the teleportation pod. “Do you have the information pack I compiled for you?”
“Yeah, but hang on.” Purple tendrils were already beginning to zig-zag from the magical ring she was standing in. She eyed them warily, noticing everyone else taking a healthy step back. She started to talk quicker. “Why exactly are we listening to information from a bunch of ripples? It seems kinda…stupid.”
“It’s Willow’s source. She’s been reliable in the past,” Dawn promised.
“And sometimes not so much,” Buffy added. She was having way too good a time with this.
The purple threads were reaching her now. From the demo Willow had given yesterday with the potato, she only had seconds left until the ring went pop and she disappeared a hell of a lot further into the future than the potato had had to go.
“Last question. Can I change my freakin’ mind?”
“No.”
Buffy waved cheerily goodbye and the last thing Faith did in 2009 was flip her the bird.
*****
Faith shot out of an invisible portal and hit the grit rolling.
The first thing that she checked was that she could breathe. She could, though the cloud of dust she’d kicked up with her tumble didn’t make it the most pleasant experience. Coughing it up from her lungs, she stayed where she was for a while, getting her breath back, smiling at the bright blue sky and listening to a chicken cluck just a few feet from her head.
That last one might have bothered her more if she wasn’t just so damn happy to have made it through the portal alive and the right way around. She’d read stories, or okay, seen movies where time-travel scrambled your genetic whatjamaflip all to hell, and her face and her ass might both be fine, but she didn’t really want them switched if it was all the same to the universe.
It took the chicken pecking at her eyebrow to finally make her move. Swatting at it with one hand, she sent it flapping and squawking away, and then she sat up.
She’d landed on the outskirts of a town square. It was noisy and chaotic and no one - but a bunch of little kids who were laughing and pointing at her battle with the curious chicken - had taken the blindest bit of notice of her stylish entrance. A roaring sprung out of nowhere, making her cringe back in the dust, eyes wide with the fear of the unknown, as just a dozen feet or so above her a freakin’ spaceship (okay, a small one, but still!) flew across the square.
Sitting up again after that little fright, she looked around with an unimpressed eye and drawled, “Aw, hell!”
*****
Three weeks later
The first thing Faith was aware of when she started coming round was a dull, heavy thump thump thump going on in her head. Just how much had she drunk last night? Weird thing was, she didn’t remember drinking anything.
She remembered ordering a beer, remembered asking the barman who the chick on the wanted poster behind the bar was and she remembered thinking ‘bingo’ when he said the exact name she’d been looking for the past three weeks. She had finally caught a damn break. Before she could do anything with it, some douche had started hassling a woman on the other side of the bar and Faith had stepped in to lend her some backup. There had been a messy brawl after that - real messy, but hella fun and just what she needed after weeks of hunting alone and keeping herself to herself.
Fun right up until the big-ass bar stool had been swung at her face anyway.
She shifted a little, her bruised cheek coming to rest on the cool metal floor beneath her. It was vibrating just enough to make her face tingle. Frowning, she took a moment to connect the dots between vibrations, thumping and sheet metal. She was in the back of a pick up truck!
Oh hell no! She’d heard tales of slavers working some of the outer moons and there was no way one of them was kidnapping her.
She groaned as she fought against her body’s worth of aches and pains, trying to force herself into a sitting position.
“Think she’s waking up, Cap’n.”
That was the voice of the chick she had saved. Faith’s frown deepened. Fucking great. Knowing her luck she had unwittingly helped a bunch of evil kidnappers escape from whatever passed as the law around here. When would she just learn to look the other way when a pretty girl was in trouble? She never used to have such a problem with ignoring damsels in distress.
Faith’s arms were bound behind her, that explained why she was having such a hard time getting upright. It also pointed to her being in even more trouble than she’d figured.
There was the thud of footsteps that made the metal ring sharper than the engine sounds. Just how the hell big was this Pick-up? She finally forced her eyes open, hoping to get a sense of what she was dealing with, but all she could see was several pairs of boots and the bed of the truck stretching as far as she could see.
“Dunno why we brought her with us anyway,” a gruff voice complained.
Faith frowned. What, they didn’t think she was good enough to dig mud or whatever?
“She mentioned River.”
Faith barely registered the mild, polite if way anxious tone this speaker was using, she was too busy focusing on that name. The ghost she was chasing, maybe they knew where she was. Maybe she could tie them up and torture them for information. If she ever managed to sit up again that was.
She struggled on the floor, trying to use her shoulders to push herself up. There was a crowd of feet around her now but none of them seemed inclined to lend a hand.
“And more importantly,” said a new voice. “She saved Kaylee.”
“Thank you, Cap’n.”
“But if she is Alliance,” began that cultured voice in a serious way that made Faith think her future was about to be decided. “Bringing her with us might not have been the smartest move. What if they’ve placed a tracker inside her? They might be following us right now.”
“For once I agree with the Doc. We should find that tracker and drop it into deep space to confuse the gorram Feds.”
“And how exactly do you propose to find this tracker?”
“Gutting her like a catfish should do it.”
“Jayne!” Faith’s rescuee cried out.
Faith was already through with taking this asshole’s attitude. She spun on the floor, using the side of her head to pivot like a balance-challenged break dancer, boots finding grip on the metal to gain momentum as she went around. She saw feet jump out of the way, but the asshole wasn’t quick enough or just not smart enough to see the threat.
Either way, both of Faith’s heavy boots caught the backs of his ankles hard enough to drop him on his ass. He gave an undignified yell of surprise as his impact made the flooring clang. Flipping herself onto him, Faith used his body as leverage to shimmy to her knees.
“Hey,” he said it in a leering way, with what he probably thought was a sexy smile. That mood ended the second her knee found his groin. “Hey!” He went to grab her.
“Uh uh uh. You lay just one of those filthy fingers on me I’m gonna get ticklish, and when I get ticklish I start getting uncontrollable knee spasms, you get me?” She applied a little more pressure to make sure he did,
His hands went up in the air. “Sure, sure, no tickling.”
Faith looked around at everyone else. There were three people gathered around her, not including the goon she was kneeling on. One was the girl she had saved from the bastards back on Persephone. Out of the other three guys, it didn’t take a genius to work out which one was the doctor and which one was the captain.
“One of you untie me,” she said, calmly given the circumstances. “Or I squash your buddy’s berries hard enough to make juice.”
The captain settled his ass comfortably on the edge of the crate and answered her genially. “Well, I’m not seeing that as being much as a threat considering as there’s likely many women in the verse who’d pay us handsomely for Jayne’s castration.”
“Hey, hey, let’s not be hasty,” her cushion, Jayne, said, waving his hands around but taking care not to let them too close to her.
“Hasty?” Faith asked him, cocking an eyebrow. “Sorry, weren’t you the one who was gonna gut me like a… what was it…Catfish before even learning my name?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
She ignored him, focusing on the captain again. “Look, you can untie me now and we’ll all play nice, or I’ll get myself out of this and I’ll be…less nice.”
“Yeah, I think we’ll run the risk of you doing nothing but sitting right there and griping while we talk on this awhile,” he said.
“Uh, can we put that to a vote or something,” the guy under her asked. “Like, maybe you’d be more comfortable in a chair, Miss?”
“I’m comfy enough, thanks.”
She couldn’t move, they’d see she was straining against whatever the hell was bonding her wrists together. She could feel that she was making a little progress with it. She just had to keep them distracted with her mouth long enough for her to loosen them enough to make a difference.
“So what did you wanna talk about?” she asked. “You know, seeing as you kidnapped me and all, I figure it must be pretty important.”
“Oh, we didn’t kidnap you,” Kaylee promised. “You was just unconscious on account of being hit by that stool and we didn’t want to leave you to get, you know, got by anyone.”
“Oh, right,” Faith said, deadpan. “So you were rescuing me?” Kaylee smiled eagerly. “Goody, that makes me feel better about the ropes and the almost-being-gutted and the being carried off to God knows where by a bunch of strangers in the back of a fuckin’ trailer!”
“Oh, this ain’t no old trailer,” Kaylee said proudly. “She’s a real good ship.”
“Ship, huh?” Faith looked around and gave a sideways nod of the head. She’d deal with the problem with being on open water once her hands were free. Maybe they had a lifeboat or something. “Okay, makes more sense of the captain over there I guess. So why am I tied up again?”
“Actually, I think until we know a little more about you, I’ll do the question-asking,” the Captain said amiably enough but in take-no-bullshit way.
“Are you Alliance?” the doctor blurted out.
“What did I just say about who was asking the questions?” The doctor looked suitably chastised and the Captain crossed his arms, composing himself. “Are you in any way associated with the Alliance?”
“What’s the Alliance?”
They all looked at her a little more closely. Great, her ignorance had made them suspicious and there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about that. It wasn’t like Willow had packed a Future book for her to study on the way here.
“You don’t know who the Alliance is?” The captain checked.
“Never heard of them.”
“The Feds?”
“Now them I’ve heard of,” Faith nodded.
“Is she simple or something?” Jayne asked, and Faith pressed down with her knee. “Hey, not that simple ain’t nice. We already got plenty of simple on this boat.”
“So, you’re a bounty hunter?” It was phrased as a question but the captain sounded pretty sure he’d got it right this time. “Looking to make some honest cash by dragging a poor, innocent girl away from her family, is that it?”
“What?” Faith frowned again as she drew the word out. “No, nobody’s paying me for it.”
She was almost there. Just another minute and her hands would be free.
The clean cut doctor guy stepped up, looking at her intently. “How do you know my sister?”
Faith gave a one shouldered shrug, trying not to let the battle going on behind her back show on her face. “Pretty sure I never met your sister.”
“Then why were you asking about her, back at the bar?”
“Huh?” Faith was concentrating too hard on her bonds to be really listening. “No idea what you’re talking about, dude.”
“Well you better start engaging the brain in that pretty little head of yours ‘cause something about this don’t smell right,” the captain said, pushing himself off the crate so he could crowd her too.
“That’s because she’s lying,” Jayne said. “Has to be. I don’t care what rutting backwater moon she’s from, ain’t no way she’s never heard of Alliance.”
“It’s because she’s old.” The clear, mellifluous voice had everyone turning to the stairs. “Older than time.”
“Doc, I thought I told you to keep her out of harms way until we established exactly what was going here.”
“Yeah, Sweetie, maybe you’d be happier upstairs for a little while,” Kaylee tried. “Look, I’ll come with you.”
“No, wait a minute.” Jayne looked from Faith to the girl and back again. “Both dumb as posts, like kindred spirits or something. I wanna see how they act together.”
Faith put a little extra weight on his balls for the ‘dumb as posts’ comment, but he wasn’t far wrong. This girl might not be a Slayer in the same way she was, but Faith felt a definite pull coming from her. This girl was something alright, and if Willow had it accurate, she was really something.
“River Tam, right?”
The girl didn’t answer the question but Faith had no doubt she was. As the waif-like chick - what was she, sixteen, seventeen at a push? - began to wander from one side of the hold to the other and back again, drawing closer only a few inches at a time, she kept her eyes locked on Faith.
“You don’t belong here.”
“Nope.”
“Your home is too far down. It shouldn’t be possible. Serious anomaly. Time skips, and skips, then skips again and here you are, purple and green. The gravitational wave came and washed you up the ladder, just for me, but you’re too high.”
“You think I’m the one that’s high?”
Faith flexed her wrists. The bonds were loose; she was as good as free. Now she just had to sneak her hand into her pocket and grab the Time. . . Recaller. . . Sonic. . . thing and grab the girl as she pressed the button. Providing the technology worked as Willow had promised, she’d be home and this mission would be finally over inside five minutes.
“You don’t need me,” River promised her.
“Not what my higher-ups say.”
“Who are your higher-ups?” The doctor asked.
Faith ignored him. He wouldn’t be more than a waste of memory in a minute. The girl was close enough to grab. Everyone was so focused on her that they hadn’t noticed that Faith’s hands were free, one of them sliding into her pocket.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Do what?”
She sucked at the innocent look. Over-compensating, she lunged forward while trying to press the button inside her pocket and fluffed it, her thumb sliding off the plastic casing instead. Her hand closed around River’s wrist but her timing was screwed now and the girl might have been small and skinny but she was whippet-quick and hella feisty and before she knew it they were struggling for the upper hand.
Faith was pushed off of Jayne and then they were rolling over and over on the metal floor while the rest of the crew were shouting and panicking, new voices joining them all the time. The whole time River just laughed, high-pitched and carefree like a girl in elementary school.
Faith finally managed to stay on top, straddling the girl and breathing hard as she tried to fumble the recall device from her pocket. “Got you.”
At the all too familiar sound of a hand gun being cocked, Faith slowly looked down. Uh huh, that was a handgun alright. The weapon looked too big for the girl’s small hands but she held it straight out, pointing at Faith’s chest, with ease.
River giggled again. “Got you.”
“Hey, how’d she get my gun?” Jayne asked, still sitting a few feet away as he tenderly cradled his balls with one hand and checked his holster with the other.
Yep, Faith slowly held her hands up and backed off, gradually rising to her feet. This girl was really something.
Still holding her hands in the air, Faith took her first proper look around from a decent vantage point. There were places she could dive for cover if need be; the ship’s hold was littered with crates, but she still needed to literally get her hands on River and she couldn’t do that when she had a gun trained on her and all her friends were standing around.
No, the best thing she could do was try to avoid getting shot, or gutted, until they hit dry land. Maybe then, with the crowd thinned out a little, she’d get a chance to sneak up and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Okay, you win, I give up. No harm no foul, right? I didn’t hurt anybody, in fact I saved your chick’s life,” Faith waved a hand at Kaylee. “Kinda. So how about I just sit quietly down and then when we dock, I’ll get the hell out of here.”
Everyone just looked at her for a moment.
Jayne broke the silence. “I say we don’t trust her.”
“But she’s right,” Kaylee countered. “She hasn’t actually done us any harm and there is the whole saving my life thing.”
The captain seemed to be trying to decide whether to trust her or tie her up again. “I don’t know. What’s to say you won’t just turn around and try and do whatever it is you’re trying to do with our River here soon as we turn our backs?”
“You have my word.” The captain started laughing cynically and Faith smirked. “Okay, that was weak, but it’s all I’ve got to offer ‘til we’re back on dry land. How long’s that going to be anyway? Where are we exactly?”
“Somewhere just outside Ariel’s atmo.”
“Atmo? What the. . .?” For the first time Faith looked out of one of the little round windows near the ceiling of the hold. It was wicked black out there. “Is it night time?” she asked hopefully.
“It’s always night time in space, silly,” Kaylee told her cheerfully.
“In. . .space?” Shit, she was going dizzy. “This is a spaceship? We’re actually in outerfuckingspace?”
Someone answered her but she missed it, what with the clanging her body made as she hit the metal floor in a dead faint.
On to part two