Firefly - Giselle (10/?)
Title: Giselle
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta-Reader: Thanks go to the amazing revdorothyl.
Character/Pairings: Jayne/River, Blue Hands, Jayne's Family, Regan Tam
Rating: R
Warnings: Post BDM, Violence of the Reavers and Blue Hands variety.
Notes: The prequel to Little Girl Lost, taking place after Miranda is exposed, and three years before Gabriel Tam sets out to find River.
Summary: As the Alliance is ripped apart at the seams, they attempt to recapture their masterpiece. The story of how Jayne Cobb and River Tam left Serenity.
WARNING: Reaver violence. Jayne making new 'friends'.
Chapter Ten
As the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, Jayne’s hand automatically falls down to his waist where he smoothly hooks his fingers around Boo. The air grows sharper as the storm waits to break. Jayne slowly eases Boo out of her holster as he calmly turns around from the food stand he’d just been about to approach.
The sky rumbles overhead, but the rain still doesn't break. Bad sign, that.
Making no sudden moves as he continues to survey his surroundings, Jayne’s eyes run over the various individuals making up the crowd of bodies on the docks, and he soon narrows in on his marks. It’s remarkably easy to spot the Alliance soldiers as they attempt to blend in with the normal, everyday crowd of merchants and buyers. They’re all young, probably having just joined up shortly before relations between the Rim and the Core had drastically soured. Nobody was interested in joining the Alliance military in the days following the Miranda broadcast. Civilian reaction in the Rim to the Alliance had been unfriendly, to say the least, and after the riot a few days ago on Persephone where a number of civilians had been gunned down to ‘keep the peace,’ that attitude of unfriendliness had grown downright vicious - it would explain why they were all in plainclothes.
He frowns when he realizes how many soldiers are milling about the area. There have to be about fifty of them, and he’d bet his mother’s life they weren’t here for a routine exercise.
Like him, they’re scanning the crowd, and Jayne can barely contain his smirk when he notices how they’re all doing it wrong. He slowly eases his body downward, so that he’s now slouching and no longer standing a head taller than everyone else in the crowd. He’s a big man, and it hurts to slouch down so low when he’s used to standing tall and using his height to his advantage, but in this case his height could get him dead, if one of these trigger-happy idiots decides he is too tall for their liking.
That’s really the problem with these soldiers. They were trained to skim the crowd for dangerous suspects, but they were too young to realize that the real danger wouldn’t be holding a flashing sign, waiting for them to politely take him out. It was always the most innocent-looking who were the real threat (which was why taking River out on jobs never got old, no matter how many times she took out a man half her size. And the smile on her face afterwards when she looked to him for approval… that was pretty good, too).
Boo warms the palm of his hand just as he narrows in on his targets. The back of his neck tingles and he knows he’s found them.
You want to find out if something’s more than just a simple threat and whether it’s aimed at you and yours? You go to the source and ask them, real polite-like.
There’s a guy and a girl walking along the pier who don't belong. On the dock, together, in those types of clothes, any way you looked at them, they didn’t belong. Too nervous and jumpy. Obviously unused to wearing good ol’cotton instead of fine wools and silks. Both just a couple of years older than River, but with none of her nerve. They’re perfect.
They're dressed real casual in what look to be their best worn Sunday clothes, as if they were just a couple out on a date, but their boots are new and of military issue. There was no possible way a pair of boots like that would have wound up in the hands of a dock local at this point. They’d have been patched several times over and there’d be holes in the soles of the boots before the previous owner would even think of selling. These boots haven’t even had their first patch yet. Then there’s the fact that the couple aren't even holding hands. The woman looks right through the jewellery the street vendor's showing her and she raises her wrist to her mouth. Her lips move to form the words of her status report, while behind her the male stands right at her back, his eyes searching the crowd, and all Jayne can think is "Amateurs."
They want a big, mean ol’ target that’ll get them that promotion?
Never let it be said that Jayne Cobb did nothing for nobody.
The good soldier boy swings his head again to the side and Jayne abruptly straightens up. The boy freezes, his head snapping around to stare at Jayne. He quickly nudges the girl in the back, almost sending her flying into the cart. She slams her hands on the table, scattering costume jewel pieces all over, screaming at her partner.
Jayne gives his prey his nastiest smile, one full of teeth, before turning on his heel and pushing through the crowd.
Have to be seen to be rushing, but can’t be going so fast they lose sight of you. It’s not that hard, but then, he’s been told he has a certain talent for it.
Jayne rubs his thumb along Boo’s hammer, teasing the safety of his gun on and off as he slips down an alleyway, the sound of loud, shrill voices behind him. He finds a convenient doorway and slips up against the door, content to wait for the good, brainless soldiers to find him.
It doesn’t take them long to find their way into his hands. As the man and woman walk by him, their shoes crunching the gravel underneath, Jayne slips up behind them, reaching for the girl. Boo practically purrs in his hand when he wraps a thick arm around the girl’s thin neck and squeezes. The girl squeals, dropping her gun to the ground to scratch at his arm. Her partner whirls around, his gun shaking in his hands as he aims at Jayne. Jayne presses Boo against the girl’s head and the girl whimpers.
“Put the weapon down!” the boy squeaks. “Or I’ll shoot!”
“Really?” Jayne asks, making a show of pulling back Boo’s hammer. His victim’s heart is pounding in her chest. He really wishes he weren’t dealing with children.
The boy seems confused, as if they didn’t go over this scenario in training camp. Jayne growls in frustration. “On the ground.”
There’s a brief pause as the boy stares at him, wasting time Jayne doesn’t have to waste. He doesn’t know quite why, but it’s important that he find out why they’re here.
“Yer gun. On the ground.”
The soldier boy quickly follows his instructions.
“Kick it over.”
The girl’s feebly kicking at his shins, trying to make him drop her, but he won’t. Not until she passes out. He doesn’t need her leaping up to shoot him the moment he drops her.
He instructs the boy to get on the ground and handcuff his left foot to his right hand. The boy tries to protest and Jayne fires a warning shot right by his ear. The boy’s eyes widen comically as a small trickle of blood slips down from the tiny scrape by the side of his cheek where the bullet grazed.
The girl passes out finally and Jayne lays her down on the ground where he quickly handcuffs her hands behind her back and relieves her of her gun and the wrist communicator. It’s a pulse gun, latest one on the market. Doesn’t fire bullets but rather small bolts of pure energy that would fry a man. Only available to the military, unless you were willing to buy off the black market, and then you never knew how clean the guns were and it was a bitch to replace the power cell later. Jayne frowns in disgust. The thing doesn’t even feel like a gun. It has none of the comforting weight of his own guns with their good, old-fashioned lead ammo.
He puts the pulse gun into the back of his belt and then fishes out the bug from the girl’s ear. Jayne hastily wipes it off on his shirt before slipping it into his own ear just as a cold voice confirms that they’ve reclaimed the precious commodity and are looking to board shortly.
Jayne freezes. Physically and mentally.
“That girl is a precious commodity. They'll come after her. Long after you bury me, they'll be coming,” the idiot Fed who wouldn’t even give Jayne a chance to relieve him of his ear says from the depths of Jayne’s memory.
He’s only ever heard of one person being described as a precious commodity. His mouth curls back in a snarl as Jayne pulls the pulse gun he’d lifted from the girl out of his belt.
“Hey…,” the soldier boy says weakly.
Jayne ignores him. He’s on a timer now. He slides back a hidden side panel of the gun that reveals the inner workings. Red energy pulses in a small canister that’s hooked up to the barrel of the gun.
“Your commander. He have a wife? Kids?” Jayne asks, as he slowly examines the pulse gun.
The kid stares at the unconscious girl, silently begging her to wake up and take charge and deal with the madman. During that time, Jayne takes a small hair clip from his belt, and starts fiddling with the mechanism on the gun, rerouting the wires.
“Too bad ya don’t know.” Jayne squints down at a particularly tricky bit of wiring connecting the energy cell to the shooter. “They always talk faster when there’s leverage involved.”
There’s a small click that Jayne would have missed if he hadn’t been listening for it. His grin widens. “Gotta love these new guns.” He tosses the gun up and down in his hand, testing the balance. “One… Two…”
“What are you doing?” the soldier demands, shifting away from him. Stupid kid. It was safer to be closer, not farther away.
“Three… Four… FIVE!” Jayne throws the gun up as high into the air as he can and ducks.
The pulse gun explodes.
The reaction is immediate as the crowd on the dock bursts into screams and runs off in various directions. Jayne gives a low whistle at the damage. That should keep the good little Alliance soldiers busy for a long while.
“Shame to waste a good gun, but didn’t think I’d need my grenades this early.” Jayne laughs. “Shows what I know.” He shoves Boo back into her holster and quickly fastens the wrist communicator onto his wrist. He wasn’t sure if he would need it, but better to have it now when he didn’t need it, than to complain later when he didn’t have it and desperately needed it. “I need a bigger budget,” he mutters to himself, before walking over to the end of the alleyway where there was a fire escape.
No way he was gonna deal with the early afternoon traffic. He’d take the roof route.
~*~
A mercenary like Jayne Cobb learns real quick that he won’t be doing himself any favours if he lays all his cards out on the table. He’s had more than his fair share of bosses who would have killed him in cold blood if they suspected for a moment that his ambition was also supported by any intelligence. After his first boss tried to murder him in his sleep (Jayne stabbed Binky through his throat), a young Jayne Cobb learned to hide the true extent of his talents. When he was hired onto the next crew, he had his cards ready and he’d marked the rest of the deck. There were no more attempts to stab him in the back by employers who felt money should buy loyalty; when they tried to kill him now, they pointed the gun straight at his head.
It’s the smart mercenary who lives longer, as he’s the one who knows how to hide his smarts and how to keep his mouth shut, never revealing how much he really knows. A smart mercenary learns how to play dumb, and play it so well that even when he slips up (he’s slipped up with this crew more times than he’d like to admit), nobody bats an eye. Yet, if Jayne were to blatantly demonstrate some of the skills and knowledge he’d picked up over the years, the entire crew of Serenity would probably drop dead from shock.
(River told him once that his shelf was missing a lot of Emmys and Oscars. He hadn’t quite gotten what she was trying to say, but she told him it was a compliment, and since the girl couldn’t lie -- she really couldn’t, no matter how much coaching he gave her -- he took it as a compliment).
It’s been a while since he’s really had to use his cunning (and he already misses the girl as she’d probably say something right now about him brushing off the cobwebs or jump-starting his brain with a new battery, and liken herself to the battery or something). An amused smile lights his face. Last time he really used his head, it was to sell his girl and the Doc up the river to the Alliance. If he hadn’t changed his mind when he saw those brain scans, that would have been the last he heard of them both… and of Serenity also. Or rather, it would have been the last they heard of him.
After he sold the girl and the Doc, he’d planned on taking the money and doing what he did best: disappearing. Leaving Zoë and Mal to assume that he’d been taken by the same people who’d taken the others.
Zoë might have suspected the truth, but she would never say anything. The two of them had been the only ones who had realized the extent of the threat the Tams presented when they came on board: a life of running; higher bounties on all of their heads if they continued to elude the Alliance and not hand over their precious commodity; trusting their lives to a Core boy who’d done nothing to earn that trust and who would sell them out if it meant he could keep his feng le sister out of trouble, and the girl was a magnet for trouble.
If he had left, he would have gone underground again and back to his mother and the rest of the Isis Family. He would have handed the money over to her, and she would have given him that sad look of hers, the one that told him that she was mourning him before he’d been laid in the ground. There would be no questions asked about where the blood money came from. Everyone in the Family had stopped asking questions and demanding answers after the i lár na hoíche [in the middle of the night]. Ma would have simply taken the money from his hand and added it to the ever-growing pile that his blood brothers also contributed to (Storm Breakers, they’d been dubbed by the older members of the Family, as it was Jayne and his six blood brothers who’d gotten them all off Isis -- barely alive, but alive nevertheless). She’d probably use the credits to buy more of Mattie’s medicine, trying to prolong her daughter’s life in the hopes that they could one day take her back home. Or she’d buy more clothes for the kids… except they weren’t children no longer -- all in their teens now and trying to pretend that i lár na hoíche was just a bad dream they’d finally woke up from. (Jayne wanted that luxury; all the older members of the Family did). Or she’d use it to buy more guns. Her generation still had problems with using weapons (they’d left the Core and the Rim in the first place to get away from them), but the younger generation, the children they’d saved, they needed to know how to handle a weapon, how to kill without mercy. It was the only way to survive in this ‘verse. They would not be caught in another i lár na hoíche again.
If he’d gone back underground to the Family, they would probably have had to move again, go deeper into the woodwork. They were real good at that. Being lost and never found. But they hadn’t lost themselves. All who survived the i lár na hoíche would never be lost from each other.
Zoë would have suspected the truth, that he’d sold the Tams, but she would have kept quiet about it, just like she kept quiet about his own little ‘Unification day’ ritual when he always ended up almost killing himself -- usually by alcohol poisoning, though there was that one time he’d tried to take a walk through space via the airlock. She would have said nothing, just like he’d later kept quiet about her little ‘incident’ after Miranda when she tried to drown her sorrows in booze, knowing full well she was pregnant. It was the only time Jayne had ever come close to hitting her. She’d reminded him a little too much of his own mother for comfort at that moment. Not the drinking, but the utter despair. He’d had no choice but to pull her out and remind her that Wash would hate her guts if she did anything that threatened his kid. Zoë had smartened up real fast, though he still kept an eye on her and had hid most of the alcohol on board. She’d thanked him once.
However, he had seen the scan of the girl’s brain and realized that if he went through with it… there would be no going back. Her blood would be on his hands, and he’d never get it off. He wasn’t lying when he told River he was glad he changed his mind. At first, it was just that he’d somehow managed to save his soul by saving her. But then Miranda had happened, and the girl had taken on a pack of Reavers by herself.
Reavers so far gone, their faces weren’t human anymore. Reavers so mad they’d forgotten how to be human. Reavers who were only slightly less terrifying than the Reavers he first met all those years ago during the i lár na hoíche, when he became a murderer and spilt his best friend’s blood. Davey had always been the most terrifying of the Reavers because he’d been the first. And because he’d been the future. Jayne had looked into Davey’s dead eyes and his gaping mouth with Brandon Cobb’s blood spilling forth from his lips. He’d looked, and he’d seen his own fate staring straight back at him.
The girl changed all of that. He wasn’t sure how, but she did. The game was all new, now that she’d made her appearance on the board.
Or it could just be that he’d never been able to let a shiny weapon like her lie dirty and beat up in the hands of some hun dun who didn’t know the first thing about a beauty like her. It finally explained why he’d always gotten the same feeling around her that he’d gotten around his guns. The moment she’d popped out of her cryo-chamber, he’d felt it. ‘Least now it made sense, what with her being a living, breathing weapon.
So, his plan to sell the Tams is not the best example of his cunning -- since he never got to see it in action and doesn’t really like thinking about it, and it isn’t exactly a high point in his life -- but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t more than a match for his current opposition. Sure, he may not be book-smart, having never gone to school, which led to a slight disadvantage when the Doc got into one of his moods and decided to insult Jayne using all manner of fancy words (he'd been less than impressed when River told him what Simon was actually saying in plain ol' English -- which, after he translated it from River-speak, was just plain dumb: “Jayne’s an ape.” Compared to the insults that used to spring from Jayne’s little cousin Thomas’s mouth on a daily basis, Simon’s attempt wasn’t very impressive. Thomas had made grown men cry when she was a mere four years old with her biting tongue, which Jayne was never not proud of. He’d gotten in trouble more times than he could count for encouraging her). But that didn’t mean he wasn’t smarter than most people gave him credit for. He’d been alive this long due to knowing how people worked and playing them to his advantage (which was never not fun).
These punks didn’t stand a chance.
First thing he needs to do, now that he has a little inside knowledge as to what his friendly neighbourhood Alliance was up to, is to find their ship. Luckily, Ariel was a Core planet, which meant that the hun duns wouldn’t have had to disguise their ship, even if they felt the need to hide themselves from the locals.
As he walks at a brisk pace over the rooftops, he flips on the comm link to Serenity.
“Lil’ Kaylee?”
“Jayne!” Kaylee’s voice is breathless and she sounds worried. Jayne frowns. “Where are you?!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Zoë’s havin’ the baby!”
Jayne squeezes his eyes shut. “She couldn’t have chosen a better time than now?”
Kaylee gasps in outrage. “She doesn’t exactly git to decide, Jayne!”
“Spare me,” Jayne snaps. This is not good. “Mal back yet?”
“Not yet,” Kaylee’s voice loses some of the rage, and she just sounds scared now. “They lost Inara’s file at the clinic, so they’re stuck.”
Jayne curses.
There was a brief pause before Kaylee asks in a small voice, “A person can’t really do that - can they?”
Since he doesn’t want to give Kaylee any nightmares (she’d had a lot after Miranda and Mr. Universe’s Moon, and they’d only just now started to quiet down. He knows because he’s sat up with her more than once after a really bad one and made her warm milk and threatened the Doc’s life if she told anyone. Girl like Kaylee -- they shouldn’t even have taken her along on that suicide mission in the first place), Jayne says no.
“Just git yerself and River back soon. Zoë’s real scared. She wants you an’ Mal.”
Jayne licks his lips. Go se. This was real bad. “Yeah. Be there soon. Just as soon as we git around the chaos. Some nut tried to test out a grenade in the marketplace.”
Kaylee expresses the proper amount of distracted concern before hurriedly disconnecting just as Zoë cries out. Jayne wipes his hand against his forehead to get rid of the sweat that’s suddenly built up.
The timer’s speeding up, and he needs to get them all out of there now.
~*~
She doesn’t know how long she’s been there. All she knows is that the Blue Hands haven’t bothered to freeze her like Simon did. Perhaps this is another form of punishment for running away the first time. Leaving her trapped in her own body but completely conscious of the world around her. No pretty dreams of rescue and of a new life this time.
Her eyelids slide closed after being left open by the one Blue Hand. River opens them again, even though she has nothing to look at besides darkness. She pauses. Closes her eyelids. Opens them. Closes them again. Opens them.
Her breathing accelerates as she realizes what’s happened. She’s regained some body movement. If she can regain movement of her eyes, that means she can regain control of other parts of her body. She doesn’t need much. She just needs to move her tongue backwards so her airway is blocked.
It would be a slow death, but it would be a death. When they pulled her out of the cryo-chamber, there wouldn’t be any River Tam to experiment on. Just an empty body to complete their collection of fifty little cold bodies buried out back in the recreational gardens beneath the rose bushes.
~*~
The streets are filled with chaos as bodies slam up against each other to get away from the terrorist attack, which makes it easy for Jayne to slip past the distracted ‘guard’ on duty, not that that was hard -- the kid was staring gap-mouthed at the running crowd. Jayne could have tapped him on the shoulder and told him he was just going to walk up onto the ship now and possibly kill people and the kid still wouldn’t have done anything. He stomps into the Alliance Army ship, slamming his fist against the button that will shut the door behind him. He rips a map detailing the proper route to exit the ship in case of an emergency off the wall and, using the ear link, hears the commander of the vessel order all his soldiers to come down to the field and help with crowd control.
Jayne makes a note to himself that when he tells this story, he’ll be fighting off two guys with machine guns instead of just walking onto an empty ship. It is annoying how easy this was. Perhaps he should join the Alliance army to show them how it was done? That way it wouldn’t lead to embarrassing moments like this -- moments that were just as embarrassing for the guy doing the breaking and entering.
He’s probably chasing a dead end, coming to the ship, but she could be here, and if he leaves her here right now during the perfect moment to save her, he’ll shoot himself in the leg. Or maybe let Mal shoot him.
He comes across a small mess hall with a lonely occupant sitting at one of the tables, tapping his fingers in an uneven, nervous rhythm. Jayne scratches his goatee as he studies the man from his place in the shadows. He doesn’t look military. Looks like the Doc, except with none of the Doc’s hardness or determination.
Jayne could pass him by, or Jayne could ask him if he knew where River was. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
He slips up behind the doctor, and in the same move he used on the soldier earlier, he has his hand wrapped around the smaller man’s neck, squeezing. The man squeals and his arms flail about as Jayne hoists him to his feet. There’s a nametag on his white coat proclaiming him to be “N. Brown, Assistant”. But it’s the file on the table before the glorified clerk that really interests Jayne. It’s labelled, ‘Serra, Inara.’
River has been sold out again. And this time, by a little runt who’d put no thought into it. She deserves better than that.
Jayne applies more pressure against the little runt’s throat. “Where’s Inara?” He releases Brown’s throat to allow him to answer.
Brown quickly rubs his bruised flesh, trying to edge away from Jayne without seeming to be obvious. His eyes are still fastened on Boo. “She’s at the Doctor’s office.” He looks at Jayne. “I was just supposed to distract them.”
Jayne grabs the back of Brown’s shirt. “Where’s the girl? Where’s River Tam?”
Brown’s eyes flicker away from Jayne’s as he tries and fails to pretend he doesn’t know what Jayne’s talking about. “Who?”
“Where is she?!” Jayne demands, slamming the scum’s head against the table. He presses Boo hard against the other man’s temple and presses down even further as the man struggles to escape. There’s a tiny ‘crack’ as the man’s skull starts to give under the force of Jayne’s strength.
Brown screams and Jayne eases up a bit. “What was that?”
The smaller man whimpers and Jayne makes a show of lifting Brown’s body back up before slamming his head against the table.
“I can’t hear you.” Jayne snarls.
“I don’t know! They didn’t tell me! All I had to do was tell them when Ms. Serra came back for her check-up! That’s all they wanted to know!” The smaller man slaps his hands feebly against the table. “Please! I have a wife! Kids!”
“So?” Jayne pulls the trigger.
The bullet speeds through his victim’s head to bury itself into the table.
“Git a ring, next time,” Jayne tells the corpse. “Guy like me might believe ya, then.”
He wipes the blood off of Boo with the male nurse’s shirt before kicking the body for being so gorram useless and giving him another dead end.
Jayne has no idea where the girl is, but he does know that this ship is the only exit her captors have got. Anyone else would insist on opening up the cargo (can’t be too careful these days -- you could be letting a Fed on your ship, or some other nasty piece of Alliance scum who’d poison you with PAX).
So he buys himself some time, just in case. Using the emergency map, he finds his way to the cockpit. Then, it’s only a matter of smacking random buttons on the console all at once, pulling out wires, and smashing their computers. Finally he hits the right combination, as the engine wakes up and strains against the barriers presented by the landlock.
Jayne gets out of there quick, knowing from one of Kaylee’s lectures (when she was trying to train him on how to complete any minor repairs, in case she was ever out of commission again like that one time with the Reavers) that if the ship can’t fly due to a landlock, it will most likely overheat from the exertion of the engine and could possibly explode, or just die. Either way, he wasn’t sticking around.
He has his fingers crossed that it will explode. Nothing says, “Hi. Don’t steal my girl again” like a nice, big explosion.
He runs away from the ship, as it strains against the locks, and down a likely looking quiet alley that he personally would use if he were trying to transport a captive girl without anyone noticing and screaming “Slaver!”
He runs and he runs and, eventually, he runs past a small child, playing hopscotch and singing.
“So keep your sons close, for the Reavers are hungry, and your daughters closer, for the Men of Isis are coming and they need brides.”
He hates that children’s rhyme like he’s never hated anything else. He turns his head to tell the kid to shut up and chokes.
His little cousin, Thomas, waves at him with her one hand before tossing a stone on the hopscotch board and skipping around it, still chanting the song. She’s sixteen now, but here she is as she was when he last saw her in another life when he'd had a different name. Four years old. Her hair still done up in the pigtails her mother had made that morning before she’d gone down to Port Town and returned a monster who’d tried to eat her own child. It had been Brandon who’d killed his wife and saved Thomas’ life (her name had been Juliet then), but the murder of his wife had drained the fight out of him. Brandon had thrust Thomas into Jayne’s arms (he’d been Michael then) and told him to run.
Thomas skips up to him and tugs on his pant leg. “You won’t find her here!” she chimes, giggling.
Jayne might be having a heart attack. Or a panic attack. Or some sort of attack that requires lots of drugs to knock him out.
“MIKE-ALLL!” Thomas whines. “You’re goin’ the wrong way!” She points a little finger down a nearby empty street. “She’s this way.”
“What?” he manages to spit out.
“This is not working,” Thomas says in a foreign voice, “and my daughter’s running out of time.”
He reaches out to grab Thomas’ shoulder. “Thom? Juliet?”
Just before he touches her shoulder, Thomas vanishes. Jayne pulls back his hand, stumbling backward. There’s a splitting pain in his head that makes Jayne grunt in agony and grab onto the corner of one of the buildings as he attempts to remain upright in spite of the way his vision blurs. He gags as memories he’s buried time and time again march forth in front of him.
The smell of raw flesh and broken bone burns the inside of his nostrils as gunfire and screams assault his eardrums, causing his heart to beat to the tune of Death. There are bodies of various sizes on the ground at his feet and there’s blood dripping down his face, his arms and his back. None of it his. He’d killed them all before they could snap their jaws on his flesh. He smells ash in the air and Boo no longer gleams; she’s covered in it, too. There’s the welcoming weight of the last bullet in her chamber. One last bullet just for him. He’d stolen a rifle off the body of George Mitchell, Vera’s brother, and used that instead to kill, selfishly keeping that one last bullet for himself. He’d snap little Juliet’s neck if they couldn’t get away, but that bullet, that was his.
The endless chorus of screams reaches a new level of loud, breaking the sound barrier and tattooing its song in the memory of every man, woman and child who still were themselves. The fires that feed on the little paradise their great-grandfathers had built grow larger and larger, spreading faster. More than one person jumps into the living pyre’s welcome embrace to end their lives. The flames are as hungry as the Reavers (demons they’d been back then -- demons straight from the darkest pits of hell), and none of the remaining survivors are completely convinced that the world isn’t ending.
Jayne stumbles and his eyes fall to the ground.
There are faces of the dead there. So many faces, some of whom he knows are alive, but here they are dead.
He sees his father first. His mother knifed him multiple times in the back. She claimed he’d been possessed by the Devil just like the rest. There’d been a bruise on her cheek, and it wasn’t as if anyone was unused to seeing bruises on Elizabeth Armstrong, but nobody questioned her story. They learned the new way of life real quick. No questions asked and no lies would be told.
Vera, with her warm laughter and fickle nature. Vera, who’d been all that was good in the world, and all the bad too. Vera, who liked the idea that she had him wrapped around her finger. She’d led him on a pretty dance before the Reavers came for their first meal and cut up her face for the evening’s entertainment.
Matthew, with long, dark hair, who’d turned her back on him, not understanding why and not bothering to ask. Little Mattie, who’d given him his new name, and who would never be the same since she took the knife to her belly. Little dying Mattie, who continues to hold on to life in the hope that she can one day be buried on home ground.
His Ma. Both scared for him and scared of him. She’d sat at his bedside during the long trip into the Black, his gun Boo pointed at his head, while she begged God to keep the madness from her son as he struggled with a high fever. Ma, who had declared that since she was the one to bring him into the world, she would take him out if the Devil took him.
Brandon Cobb, his mother’s brother, who’d been shot down as they ran from the Reavers. He lies there with his wife and little Thomas. Brandon, who’d made Jayne promise to do whatever it took to keep their people alive.
Davey, with his glasses and dreamy, intelligent gaze. Stupid Davey, who always forgot to look both ways before crossing the street. Davey who was just as sarcastic as Mal and just as stupid. Davey, who was the first to stain Jayne’s hands with his blood and damn his friend’s soul.
All children of Isis, the planet who had first fed the Reavers and screamed to the ‘Verse that the Reavers were coming. They’d paid a heavy price and were ridiculed for it. Made the subject of children’s stories. Weren’t their fault Isis was so far out in the Black.
“Sucks, don’t it?” a voice he hasn’t heard since the i lár na hoíche (and then it was screaming about shaking hands with the devil and laughing like no human should ever laugh) says. “How the innocent always git blamed. It happens more often than ya think -- eh, Mike?”
“You’re dead,” Jayne says with a grin as he looks up to stare at the sandy haired youth whom Mal reminded him of the first moment Jayne really spoke to the Captain of Serenity. “I killed you.”
Davey pulls off his cracked glasses and pokes himself between the eyes with the end of the eyeglasses frame. “Knew ya would.”
“Was there any doubt?” Jayne asks, his smirk widening as he pushes himself up using the side of the building for support.
Davey smirks back at him. “Never.” His eyes fall on the gun in Jayne’s hand. “It is probably impossible for you to miss,” he muses, his voice shifting just like Thomas’ had and acquiring a Core accent. Davey looks back at Jayne, a gleam in his eye. “You cannot, can you? You cannot miss….”
Jayne growls, “What of it?”
Davey points down the same passageway Thomas had. “River Tam is down that way.”
Jayne narrows his eyes. “That you, girl?”
Davey grins. “Close, but no. I am surprised how good you are. They are just around this corner.” He points again. “Their death… Make it slow.”
Jayne gave the freaky thing that looked like Davey, but wasn’t, a look as if to ask wasn’t it obvious enough he was going to make it slow?
Davey looks down at the gun in Jayne’s hand again, smirking. “Have you ever wondered what a Reader like my daughter is capable of? Really capable of?” Davey asks.
“No,” Jayne says shortly, brushing past the image of the man who was once his best friend and pulling Boo and Georgia out of their holsters. There is the sensation of shoulders bumping up against each other, and Jayne turns back just to see Davey disappear the same way Thomas did.
~*~
On Osiris, Regan Tam (nee Lang), mother of Simon and River Tam, topples to the ground, sizzling blood dripping from her ears and mouth, burning her skin. Her fingers snag on the carpet as she desperately tries to find something to hang onto.
She coughs, spitting out blood and vomit onto the floor of her daughter’s room. She throws back her head and screams as her brain continues to fry itself.
~*~
Jayne presses himself up against the side of the building, wishing he had Vera. Boo hardly ever left his side, but Vera… Vera could really blow a hole through someone.
There are footsteps and Jayne looks quickly around the corner and sees that there are only two men. Jayne pulls back the hammer on both Georgia and Boo. They’re wheeling out a familiar metal box.
Jayne growls. He’s going to have to keep one slightly more alive than he’d intended.
“See ya in hell, sick fucks,” Jayne snarls, the arm holding Georgia snapping out, just as he squeezes the trigger.
Just like always, he finds a target.
He aims Boo and she sings in his hand as he pulls back the trigger, sending a bullet into the hip of the other one.
Agent Anderson barely has time to gasp as his partner stumbles back, his hand going to his chest, blood seeping through his fingers, before he falls to the ground. He barely has time to process the pain or to reach for the sonic device in his pocket when another bullet finds his own body, and he tumbles against the storage container, before sliding down to the ground.
~*~
Inside the container, River freezes, her goal momentarily forgotten as she listens, her ears straining to catch any noise. Something had bumped up against her prison, hard enough for her to feel in this state of trapped consciousness in a stone body.
She tries not to hope as tears slip past the barriers of her eyes to slide over the bridge of her nose and around her other eye to roll down to hang around her chin and her left ear. They finally drop to land in the mat that is her hair.
Soon. She just needs to hold on a little longer.
Her hand twitches and her fingers curl inward to form a fist.
~*~
The Alliance agent doesn’t know how long he lies there, his vision blurring in and out of focus, before his assailant makes his presence known.
A large foot crushes the sonic device before the rest of the assailant moves into the light, revealing himself to be the Browncoat Malcolm Reynolds’ mercenary. The mercenary casts a disinterested glance over the gasping Agent Mason (he’d gotten a lung with that first shot), the cryo-chamber, and the layout of the area before his cold blue eyes look down at Anderson.
Anderson has the sudden urge to drag himself away as quickly as possible.
There’s a small thump from inside the cryo-chamber, which is impossible as the control phrase has been said and the R. Tam subject should be completely out of commission. The mercenary’s eyes flicker over to stare at the box and a slow smile covers the man’s face.
His eyes fall back on Anderson’s face and the smile disappears.
The large man leans down and scrapes a match along the pavement right next to Agent Anderson’s eyes. The Agent flinches, closing his eyes. The mercenary ignores him as he takes the match to the cigar in his mouth. Cupping his hands around the cigar, he lights it. He drops the still burning match onto Anderson’s face before stomping on Anderson’s wrist and grinding the steel toe of his boot on skin and bone.
Reynolds’ mercenary takes a deep drag of his cigar before pulling it away to look down at his catch. A slow, deadly grin spreads over his face.
“Nice gloves.”
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta-Reader: Thanks go to the amazing revdorothyl.
Character/Pairings: Jayne/River, Blue Hands, Jayne's Family, Regan Tam
Rating: R
Warnings: Post BDM, Violence of the Reavers and Blue Hands variety.
Notes: The prequel to Little Girl Lost, taking place after Miranda is exposed, and three years before Gabriel Tam sets out to find River.
Summary: As the Alliance is ripped apart at the seams, they attempt to recapture their masterpiece. The story of how Jayne Cobb and River Tam left Serenity.
WARNING: Reaver violence. Jayne making new 'friends'.
Chapter Ten
As the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, Jayne’s hand automatically falls down to his waist where he smoothly hooks his fingers around Boo. The air grows sharper as the storm waits to break. Jayne slowly eases Boo out of her holster as he calmly turns around from the food stand he’d just been about to approach.
The sky rumbles overhead, but the rain still doesn't break. Bad sign, that.
Making no sudden moves as he continues to survey his surroundings, Jayne’s eyes run over the various individuals making up the crowd of bodies on the docks, and he soon narrows in on his marks. It’s remarkably easy to spot the Alliance soldiers as they attempt to blend in with the normal, everyday crowd of merchants and buyers. They’re all young, probably having just joined up shortly before relations between the Rim and the Core had drastically soured. Nobody was interested in joining the Alliance military in the days following the Miranda broadcast. Civilian reaction in the Rim to the Alliance had been unfriendly, to say the least, and after the riot a few days ago on Persephone where a number of civilians had been gunned down to ‘keep the peace,’ that attitude of unfriendliness had grown downright vicious - it would explain why they were all in plainclothes.
He frowns when he realizes how many soldiers are milling about the area. There have to be about fifty of them, and he’d bet his mother’s life they weren’t here for a routine exercise.
Like him, they’re scanning the crowd, and Jayne can barely contain his smirk when he notices how they’re all doing it wrong. He slowly eases his body downward, so that he’s now slouching and no longer standing a head taller than everyone else in the crowd. He’s a big man, and it hurts to slouch down so low when he’s used to standing tall and using his height to his advantage, but in this case his height could get him dead, if one of these trigger-happy idiots decides he is too tall for their liking.
That’s really the problem with these soldiers. They were trained to skim the crowd for dangerous suspects, but they were too young to realize that the real danger wouldn’t be holding a flashing sign, waiting for them to politely take him out. It was always the most innocent-looking who were the real threat (which was why taking River out on jobs never got old, no matter how many times she took out a man half her size. And the smile on her face afterwards when she looked to him for approval… that was pretty good, too).
Boo warms the palm of his hand just as he narrows in on his targets. The back of his neck tingles and he knows he’s found them.
You want to find out if something’s more than just a simple threat and whether it’s aimed at you and yours? You go to the source and ask them, real polite-like.
There’s a guy and a girl walking along the pier who don't belong. On the dock, together, in those types of clothes, any way you looked at them, they didn’t belong. Too nervous and jumpy. Obviously unused to wearing good ol’cotton instead of fine wools and silks. Both just a couple of years older than River, but with none of her nerve. They’re perfect.
They're dressed real casual in what look to be their best worn Sunday clothes, as if they were just a couple out on a date, but their boots are new and of military issue. There was no possible way a pair of boots like that would have wound up in the hands of a dock local at this point. They’d have been patched several times over and there’d be holes in the soles of the boots before the previous owner would even think of selling. These boots haven’t even had their first patch yet. Then there’s the fact that the couple aren't even holding hands. The woman looks right through the jewellery the street vendor's showing her and she raises her wrist to her mouth. Her lips move to form the words of her status report, while behind her the male stands right at her back, his eyes searching the crowd, and all Jayne can think is "Amateurs."
They want a big, mean ol’ target that’ll get them that promotion?
Never let it be said that Jayne Cobb did nothing for nobody.
The good soldier boy swings his head again to the side and Jayne abruptly straightens up. The boy freezes, his head snapping around to stare at Jayne. He quickly nudges the girl in the back, almost sending her flying into the cart. She slams her hands on the table, scattering costume jewel pieces all over, screaming at her partner.
Jayne gives his prey his nastiest smile, one full of teeth, before turning on his heel and pushing through the crowd.
Have to be seen to be rushing, but can’t be going so fast they lose sight of you. It’s not that hard, but then, he’s been told he has a certain talent for it.
Jayne rubs his thumb along Boo’s hammer, teasing the safety of his gun on and off as he slips down an alleyway, the sound of loud, shrill voices behind him. He finds a convenient doorway and slips up against the door, content to wait for the good, brainless soldiers to find him.
It doesn’t take them long to find their way into his hands. As the man and woman walk by him, their shoes crunching the gravel underneath, Jayne slips up behind them, reaching for the girl. Boo practically purrs in his hand when he wraps a thick arm around the girl’s thin neck and squeezes. The girl squeals, dropping her gun to the ground to scratch at his arm. Her partner whirls around, his gun shaking in his hands as he aims at Jayne. Jayne presses Boo against the girl’s head and the girl whimpers.
“Put the weapon down!” the boy squeaks. “Or I’ll shoot!”
“Really?” Jayne asks, making a show of pulling back Boo’s hammer. His victim’s heart is pounding in her chest. He really wishes he weren’t dealing with children.
The boy seems confused, as if they didn’t go over this scenario in training camp. Jayne growls in frustration. “On the ground.”
There’s a brief pause as the boy stares at him, wasting time Jayne doesn’t have to waste. He doesn’t know quite why, but it’s important that he find out why they’re here.
“Yer gun. On the ground.”
The soldier boy quickly follows his instructions.
“Kick it over.”
The girl’s feebly kicking at his shins, trying to make him drop her, but he won’t. Not until she passes out. He doesn’t need her leaping up to shoot him the moment he drops her.
He instructs the boy to get on the ground and handcuff his left foot to his right hand. The boy tries to protest and Jayne fires a warning shot right by his ear. The boy’s eyes widen comically as a small trickle of blood slips down from the tiny scrape by the side of his cheek where the bullet grazed.
The girl passes out finally and Jayne lays her down on the ground where he quickly handcuffs her hands behind her back and relieves her of her gun and the wrist communicator. It’s a pulse gun, latest one on the market. Doesn’t fire bullets but rather small bolts of pure energy that would fry a man. Only available to the military, unless you were willing to buy off the black market, and then you never knew how clean the guns were and it was a bitch to replace the power cell later. Jayne frowns in disgust. The thing doesn’t even feel like a gun. It has none of the comforting weight of his own guns with their good, old-fashioned lead ammo.
He puts the pulse gun into the back of his belt and then fishes out the bug from the girl’s ear. Jayne hastily wipes it off on his shirt before slipping it into his own ear just as a cold voice confirms that they’ve reclaimed the precious commodity and are looking to board shortly.
Jayne freezes. Physically and mentally.
“That girl is a precious commodity. They'll come after her. Long after you bury me, they'll be coming,” the idiot Fed who wouldn’t even give Jayne a chance to relieve him of his ear says from the depths of Jayne’s memory.
He’s only ever heard of one person being described as a precious commodity. His mouth curls back in a snarl as Jayne pulls the pulse gun he’d lifted from the girl out of his belt.
“Hey…,” the soldier boy says weakly.
Jayne ignores him. He’s on a timer now. He slides back a hidden side panel of the gun that reveals the inner workings. Red energy pulses in a small canister that’s hooked up to the barrel of the gun.
“Your commander. He have a wife? Kids?” Jayne asks, as he slowly examines the pulse gun.
The kid stares at the unconscious girl, silently begging her to wake up and take charge and deal with the madman. During that time, Jayne takes a small hair clip from his belt, and starts fiddling with the mechanism on the gun, rerouting the wires.
“Too bad ya don’t know.” Jayne squints down at a particularly tricky bit of wiring connecting the energy cell to the shooter. “They always talk faster when there’s leverage involved.”
There’s a small click that Jayne would have missed if he hadn’t been listening for it. His grin widens. “Gotta love these new guns.” He tosses the gun up and down in his hand, testing the balance. “One… Two…”
“What are you doing?” the soldier demands, shifting away from him. Stupid kid. It was safer to be closer, not farther away.
“Three… Four… FIVE!” Jayne throws the gun up as high into the air as he can and ducks.
The pulse gun explodes.
The reaction is immediate as the crowd on the dock bursts into screams and runs off in various directions. Jayne gives a low whistle at the damage. That should keep the good little Alliance soldiers busy for a long while.
“Shame to waste a good gun, but didn’t think I’d need my grenades this early.” Jayne laughs. “Shows what I know.” He shoves Boo back into her holster and quickly fastens the wrist communicator onto his wrist. He wasn’t sure if he would need it, but better to have it now when he didn’t need it, than to complain later when he didn’t have it and desperately needed it. “I need a bigger budget,” he mutters to himself, before walking over to the end of the alleyway where there was a fire escape.
No way he was gonna deal with the early afternoon traffic. He’d take the roof route.
~*~
A mercenary like Jayne Cobb learns real quick that he won’t be doing himself any favours if he lays all his cards out on the table. He’s had more than his fair share of bosses who would have killed him in cold blood if they suspected for a moment that his ambition was also supported by any intelligence. After his first boss tried to murder him in his sleep (Jayne stabbed Binky through his throat), a young Jayne Cobb learned to hide the true extent of his talents. When he was hired onto the next crew, he had his cards ready and he’d marked the rest of the deck. There were no more attempts to stab him in the back by employers who felt money should buy loyalty; when they tried to kill him now, they pointed the gun straight at his head.
It’s the smart mercenary who lives longer, as he’s the one who knows how to hide his smarts and how to keep his mouth shut, never revealing how much he really knows. A smart mercenary learns how to play dumb, and play it so well that even when he slips up (he’s slipped up with this crew more times than he’d like to admit), nobody bats an eye. Yet, if Jayne were to blatantly demonstrate some of the skills and knowledge he’d picked up over the years, the entire crew of Serenity would probably drop dead from shock.
(River told him once that his shelf was missing a lot of Emmys and Oscars. He hadn’t quite gotten what she was trying to say, but she told him it was a compliment, and since the girl couldn’t lie -- she really couldn’t, no matter how much coaching he gave her -- he took it as a compliment).
It’s been a while since he’s really had to use his cunning (and he already misses the girl as she’d probably say something right now about him brushing off the cobwebs or jump-starting his brain with a new battery, and liken herself to the battery or something). An amused smile lights his face. Last time he really used his head, it was to sell his girl and the Doc up the river to the Alliance. If he hadn’t changed his mind when he saw those brain scans, that would have been the last he heard of them both… and of Serenity also. Or rather, it would have been the last they heard of him.
After he sold the girl and the Doc, he’d planned on taking the money and doing what he did best: disappearing. Leaving Zoë and Mal to assume that he’d been taken by the same people who’d taken the others.
Zoë might have suspected the truth, but she would never say anything. The two of them had been the only ones who had realized the extent of the threat the Tams presented when they came on board: a life of running; higher bounties on all of their heads if they continued to elude the Alliance and not hand over their precious commodity; trusting their lives to a Core boy who’d done nothing to earn that trust and who would sell them out if it meant he could keep his feng le sister out of trouble, and the girl was a magnet for trouble.
If he had left, he would have gone underground again and back to his mother and the rest of the Isis Family. He would have handed the money over to her, and she would have given him that sad look of hers, the one that told him that she was mourning him before he’d been laid in the ground. There would be no questions asked about where the blood money came from. Everyone in the Family had stopped asking questions and demanding answers after the i lár na hoíche [in the middle of the night]. Ma would have simply taken the money from his hand and added it to the ever-growing pile that his blood brothers also contributed to (Storm Breakers, they’d been dubbed by the older members of the Family, as it was Jayne and his six blood brothers who’d gotten them all off Isis -- barely alive, but alive nevertheless). She’d probably use the credits to buy more of Mattie’s medicine, trying to prolong her daughter’s life in the hopes that they could one day take her back home. Or she’d buy more clothes for the kids… except they weren’t children no longer -- all in their teens now and trying to pretend that i lár na hoíche was just a bad dream they’d finally woke up from. (Jayne wanted that luxury; all the older members of the Family did). Or she’d use it to buy more guns. Her generation still had problems with using weapons (they’d left the Core and the Rim in the first place to get away from them), but the younger generation, the children they’d saved, they needed to know how to handle a weapon, how to kill without mercy. It was the only way to survive in this ‘verse. They would not be caught in another i lár na hoíche again.
If he’d gone back underground to the Family, they would probably have had to move again, go deeper into the woodwork. They were real good at that. Being lost and never found. But they hadn’t lost themselves. All who survived the i lár na hoíche would never be lost from each other.
Zoë would have suspected the truth, that he’d sold the Tams, but she would have kept quiet about it, just like she kept quiet about his own little ‘Unification day’ ritual when he always ended up almost killing himself -- usually by alcohol poisoning, though there was that one time he’d tried to take a walk through space via the airlock. She would have said nothing, just like he’d later kept quiet about her little ‘incident’ after Miranda when she tried to drown her sorrows in booze, knowing full well she was pregnant. It was the only time Jayne had ever come close to hitting her. She’d reminded him a little too much of his own mother for comfort at that moment. Not the drinking, but the utter despair. He’d had no choice but to pull her out and remind her that Wash would hate her guts if she did anything that threatened his kid. Zoë had smartened up real fast, though he still kept an eye on her and had hid most of the alcohol on board. She’d thanked him once.
However, he had seen the scan of the girl’s brain and realized that if he went through with it… there would be no going back. Her blood would be on his hands, and he’d never get it off. He wasn’t lying when he told River he was glad he changed his mind. At first, it was just that he’d somehow managed to save his soul by saving her. But then Miranda had happened, and the girl had taken on a pack of Reavers by herself.
Reavers so far gone, their faces weren’t human anymore. Reavers so mad they’d forgotten how to be human. Reavers who were only slightly less terrifying than the Reavers he first met all those years ago during the i lár na hoíche, when he became a murderer and spilt his best friend’s blood. Davey had always been the most terrifying of the Reavers because he’d been the first. And because he’d been the future. Jayne had looked into Davey’s dead eyes and his gaping mouth with Brandon Cobb’s blood spilling forth from his lips. He’d looked, and he’d seen his own fate staring straight back at him.
The girl changed all of that. He wasn’t sure how, but she did. The game was all new, now that she’d made her appearance on the board.
Or it could just be that he’d never been able to let a shiny weapon like her lie dirty and beat up in the hands of some hun dun who didn’t know the first thing about a beauty like her. It finally explained why he’d always gotten the same feeling around her that he’d gotten around his guns. The moment she’d popped out of her cryo-chamber, he’d felt it. ‘Least now it made sense, what with her being a living, breathing weapon.
So, his plan to sell the Tams is not the best example of his cunning -- since he never got to see it in action and doesn’t really like thinking about it, and it isn’t exactly a high point in his life -- but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t more than a match for his current opposition. Sure, he may not be book-smart, having never gone to school, which led to a slight disadvantage when the Doc got into one of his moods and decided to insult Jayne using all manner of fancy words (he'd been less than impressed when River told him what Simon was actually saying in plain ol' English -- which, after he translated it from River-speak, was just plain dumb: “Jayne’s an ape.” Compared to the insults that used to spring from Jayne’s little cousin Thomas’s mouth on a daily basis, Simon’s attempt wasn’t very impressive. Thomas had made grown men cry when she was a mere four years old with her biting tongue, which Jayne was never not proud of. He’d gotten in trouble more times than he could count for encouraging her). But that didn’t mean he wasn’t smarter than most people gave him credit for. He’d been alive this long due to knowing how people worked and playing them to his advantage (which was never not fun).
These punks didn’t stand a chance.
First thing he needs to do, now that he has a little inside knowledge as to what his friendly neighbourhood Alliance was up to, is to find their ship. Luckily, Ariel was a Core planet, which meant that the hun duns wouldn’t have had to disguise their ship, even if they felt the need to hide themselves from the locals.
As he walks at a brisk pace over the rooftops, he flips on the comm link to Serenity.
“Lil’ Kaylee?”
“Jayne!” Kaylee’s voice is breathless and she sounds worried. Jayne frowns. “Where are you?!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Zoë’s havin’ the baby!”
Jayne squeezes his eyes shut. “She couldn’t have chosen a better time than now?”
Kaylee gasps in outrage. “She doesn’t exactly git to decide, Jayne!”
“Spare me,” Jayne snaps. This is not good. “Mal back yet?”
“Not yet,” Kaylee’s voice loses some of the rage, and she just sounds scared now. “They lost Inara’s file at the clinic, so they’re stuck.”
Jayne curses.
There was a brief pause before Kaylee asks in a small voice, “A person can’t really do that - can they?”
Since he doesn’t want to give Kaylee any nightmares (she’d had a lot after Miranda and Mr. Universe’s Moon, and they’d only just now started to quiet down. He knows because he’s sat up with her more than once after a really bad one and made her warm milk and threatened the Doc’s life if she told anyone. Girl like Kaylee -- they shouldn’t even have taken her along on that suicide mission in the first place), Jayne says no.
“Just git yerself and River back soon. Zoë’s real scared. She wants you an’ Mal.”
Jayne licks his lips. Go se. This was real bad. “Yeah. Be there soon. Just as soon as we git around the chaos. Some nut tried to test out a grenade in the marketplace.”
Kaylee expresses the proper amount of distracted concern before hurriedly disconnecting just as Zoë cries out. Jayne wipes his hand against his forehead to get rid of the sweat that’s suddenly built up.
The timer’s speeding up, and he needs to get them all out of there now.
~*~
She doesn’t know how long she’s been there. All she knows is that the Blue Hands haven’t bothered to freeze her like Simon did. Perhaps this is another form of punishment for running away the first time. Leaving her trapped in her own body but completely conscious of the world around her. No pretty dreams of rescue and of a new life this time.
Her eyelids slide closed after being left open by the one Blue Hand. River opens them again, even though she has nothing to look at besides darkness. She pauses. Closes her eyelids. Opens them. Closes them again. Opens them.
Her breathing accelerates as she realizes what’s happened. She’s regained some body movement. If she can regain movement of her eyes, that means she can regain control of other parts of her body. She doesn’t need much. She just needs to move her tongue backwards so her airway is blocked.
It would be a slow death, but it would be a death. When they pulled her out of the cryo-chamber, there wouldn’t be any River Tam to experiment on. Just an empty body to complete their collection of fifty little cold bodies buried out back in the recreational gardens beneath the rose bushes.
~*~
The streets are filled with chaos as bodies slam up against each other to get away from the terrorist attack, which makes it easy for Jayne to slip past the distracted ‘guard’ on duty, not that that was hard -- the kid was staring gap-mouthed at the running crowd. Jayne could have tapped him on the shoulder and told him he was just going to walk up onto the ship now and possibly kill people and the kid still wouldn’t have done anything. He stomps into the Alliance Army ship, slamming his fist against the button that will shut the door behind him. He rips a map detailing the proper route to exit the ship in case of an emergency off the wall and, using the ear link, hears the commander of the vessel order all his soldiers to come down to the field and help with crowd control.
Jayne makes a note to himself that when he tells this story, he’ll be fighting off two guys with machine guns instead of just walking onto an empty ship. It is annoying how easy this was. Perhaps he should join the Alliance army to show them how it was done? That way it wouldn’t lead to embarrassing moments like this -- moments that were just as embarrassing for the guy doing the breaking and entering.
He’s probably chasing a dead end, coming to the ship, but she could be here, and if he leaves her here right now during the perfect moment to save her, he’ll shoot himself in the leg. Or maybe let Mal shoot him.
He comes across a small mess hall with a lonely occupant sitting at one of the tables, tapping his fingers in an uneven, nervous rhythm. Jayne scratches his goatee as he studies the man from his place in the shadows. He doesn’t look military. Looks like the Doc, except with none of the Doc’s hardness or determination.
Jayne could pass him by, or Jayne could ask him if he knew where River was. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
He slips up behind the doctor, and in the same move he used on the soldier earlier, he has his hand wrapped around the smaller man’s neck, squeezing. The man squeals and his arms flail about as Jayne hoists him to his feet. There’s a nametag on his white coat proclaiming him to be “N. Brown, Assistant”. But it’s the file on the table before the glorified clerk that really interests Jayne. It’s labelled, ‘Serra, Inara.’
River has been sold out again. And this time, by a little runt who’d put no thought into it. She deserves better than that.
Jayne applies more pressure against the little runt’s throat. “Where’s Inara?” He releases Brown’s throat to allow him to answer.
Brown quickly rubs his bruised flesh, trying to edge away from Jayne without seeming to be obvious. His eyes are still fastened on Boo. “She’s at the Doctor’s office.” He looks at Jayne. “I was just supposed to distract them.”
Jayne grabs the back of Brown’s shirt. “Where’s the girl? Where’s River Tam?”
Brown’s eyes flicker away from Jayne’s as he tries and fails to pretend he doesn’t know what Jayne’s talking about. “Who?”
“Where is she?!” Jayne demands, slamming the scum’s head against the table. He presses Boo hard against the other man’s temple and presses down even further as the man struggles to escape. There’s a tiny ‘crack’ as the man’s skull starts to give under the force of Jayne’s strength.
Brown screams and Jayne eases up a bit. “What was that?”
The smaller man whimpers and Jayne makes a show of lifting Brown’s body back up before slamming his head against the table.
“I can’t hear you.” Jayne snarls.
“I don’t know! They didn’t tell me! All I had to do was tell them when Ms. Serra came back for her check-up! That’s all they wanted to know!” The smaller man slaps his hands feebly against the table. “Please! I have a wife! Kids!”
“So?” Jayne pulls the trigger.
The bullet speeds through his victim’s head to bury itself into the table.
“Git a ring, next time,” Jayne tells the corpse. “Guy like me might believe ya, then.”
He wipes the blood off of Boo with the male nurse’s shirt before kicking the body for being so gorram useless and giving him another dead end.
Jayne has no idea where the girl is, but he does know that this ship is the only exit her captors have got. Anyone else would insist on opening up the cargo (can’t be too careful these days -- you could be letting a Fed on your ship, or some other nasty piece of Alliance scum who’d poison you with PAX).
So he buys himself some time, just in case. Using the emergency map, he finds his way to the cockpit. Then, it’s only a matter of smacking random buttons on the console all at once, pulling out wires, and smashing their computers. Finally he hits the right combination, as the engine wakes up and strains against the barriers presented by the landlock.
Jayne gets out of there quick, knowing from one of Kaylee’s lectures (when she was trying to train him on how to complete any minor repairs, in case she was ever out of commission again like that one time with the Reavers) that if the ship can’t fly due to a landlock, it will most likely overheat from the exertion of the engine and could possibly explode, or just die. Either way, he wasn’t sticking around.
He has his fingers crossed that it will explode. Nothing says, “Hi. Don’t steal my girl again” like a nice, big explosion.
He runs away from the ship, as it strains against the locks, and down a likely looking quiet alley that he personally would use if he were trying to transport a captive girl without anyone noticing and screaming “Slaver!”
He runs and he runs and, eventually, he runs past a small child, playing hopscotch and singing.
“So keep your sons close, for the Reavers are hungry, and your daughters closer, for the Men of Isis are coming and they need brides.”
He hates that children’s rhyme like he’s never hated anything else. He turns his head to tell the kid to shut up and chokes.
His little cousin, Thomas, waves at him with her one hand before tossing a stone on the hopscotch board and skipping around it, still chanting the song. She’s sixteen now, but here she is as she was when he last saw her in another life when he'd had a different name. Four years old. Her hair still done up in the pigtails her mother had made that morning before she’d gone down to Port Town and returned a monster who’d tried to eat her own child. It had been Brandon who’d killed his wife and saved Thomas’ life (her name had been Juliet then), but the murder of his wife had drained the fight out of him. Brandon had thrust Thomas into Jayne’s arms (he’d been Michael then) and told him to run.
Thomas skips up to him and tugs on his pant leg. “You won’t find her here!” she chimes, giggling.
Jayne might be having a heart attack. Or a panic attack. Or some sort of attack that requires lots of drugs to knock him out.
“MIKE-ALLL!” Thomas whines. “You’re goin’ the wrong way!” She points a little finger down a nearby empty street. “She’s this way.”
“What?” he manages to spit out.
“This is not working,” Thomas says in a foreign voice, “and my daughter’s running out of time.”
He reaches out to grab Thomas’ shoulder. “Thom? Juliet?”
Just before he touches her shoulder, Thomas vanishes. Jayne pulls back his hand, stumbling backward. There’s a splitting pain in his head that makes Jayne grunt in agony and grab onto the corner of one of the buildings as he attempts to remain upright in spite of the way his vision blurs. He gags as memories he’s buried time and time again march forth in front of him.
The smell of raw flesh and broken bone burns the inside of his nostrils as gunfire and screams assault his eardrums, causing his heart to beat to the tune of Death. There are bodies of various sizes on the ground at his feet and there’s blood dripping down his face, his arms and his back. None of it his. He’d killed them all before they could snap their jaws on his flesh. He smells ash in the air and Boo no longer gleams; she’s covered in it, too. There’s the welcoming weight of the last bullet in her chamber. One last bullet just for him. He’d stolen a rifle off the body of George Mitchell, Vera’s brother, and used that instead to kill, selfishly keeping that one last bullet for himself. He’d snap little Juliet’s neck if they couldn’t get away, but that bullet, that was his.
The endless chorus of screams reaches a new level of loud, breaking the sound barrier and tattooing its song in the memory of every man, woman and child who still were themselves. The fires that feed on the little paradise their great-grandfathers had built grow larger and larger, spreading faster. More than one person jumps into the living pyre’s welcome embrace to end their lives. The flames are as hungry as the Reavers (demons they’d been back then -- demons straight from the darkest pits of hell), and none of the remaining survivors are completely convinced that the world isn’t ending.
Jayne stumbles and his eyes fall to the ground.
There are faces of the dead there. So many faces, some of whom he knows are alive, but here they are dead.
He sees his father first. His mother knifed him multiple times in the back. She claimed he’d been possessed by the Devil just like the rest. There’d been a bruise on her cheek, and it wasn’t as if anyone was unused to seeing bruises on Elizabeth Armstrong, but nobody questioned her story. They learned the new way of life real quick. No questions asked and no lies would be told.
Vera, with her warm laughter and fickle nature. Vera, who’d been all that was good in the world, and all the bad too. Vera, who liked the idea that she had him wrapped around her finger. She’d led him on a pretty dance before the Reavers came for their first meal and cut up her face for the evening’s entertainment.
Matthew, with long, dark hair, who’d turned her back on him, not understanding why and not bothering to ask. Little Mattie, who’d given him his new name, and who would never be the same since she took the knife to her belly. Little dying Mattie, who continues to hold on to life in the hope that she can one day be buried on home ground.
His Ma. Both scared for him and scared of him. She’d sat at his bedside during the long trip into the Black, his gun Boo pointed at his head, while she begged God to keep the madness from her son as he struggled with a high fever. Ma, who had declared that since she was the one to bring him into the world, she would take him out if the Devil took him.
Brandon Cobb, his mother’s brother, who’d been shot down as they ran from the Reavers. He lies there with his wife and little Thomas. Brandon, who’d made Jayne promise to do whatever it took to keep their people alive.
Davey, with his glasses and dreamy, intelligent gaze. Stupid Davey, who always forgot to look both ways before crossing the street. Davey who was just as sarcastic as Mal and just as stupid. Davey, who was the first to stain Jayne’s hands with his blood and damn his friend’s soul.
All children of Isis, the planet who had first fed the Reavers and screamed to the ‘Verse that the Reavers were coming. They’d paid a heavy price and were ridiculed for it. Made the subject of children’s stories. Weren’t their fault Isis was so far out in the Black.
“Sucks, don’t it?” a voice he hasn’t heard since the i lár na hoíche (and then it was screaming about shaking hands with the devil and laughing like no human should ever laugh) says. “How the innocent always git blamed. It happens more often than ya think -- eh, Mike?”
“You’re dead,” Jayne says with a grin as he looks up to stare at the sandy haired youth whom Mal reminded him of the first moment Jayne really spoke to the Captain of Serenity. “I killed you.”
Davey pulls off his cracked glasses and pokes himself between the eyes with the end of the eyeglasses frame. “Knew ya would.”
“Was there any doubt?” Jayne asks, his smirk widening as he pushes himself up using the side of the building for support.
Davey smirks back at him. “Never.” His eyes fall on the gun in Jayne’s hand. “It is probably impossible for you to miss,” he muses, his voice shifting just like Thomas’ had and acquiring a Core accent. Davey looks back at Jayne, a gleam in his eye. “You cannot, can you? You cannot miss….”
Jayne growls, “What of it?”
Davey points down the same passageway Thomas had. “River Tam is down that way.”
Jayne narrows his eyes. “That you, girl?”
Davey grins. “Close, but no. I am surprised how good you are. They are just around this corner.” He points again. “Their death… Make it slow.”
Jayne gave the freaky thing that looked like Davey, but wasn’t, a look as if to ask wasn’t it obvious enough he was going to make it slow?
Davey looks down at the gun in Jayne’s hand again, smirking. “Have you ever wondered what a Reader like my daughter is capable of? Really capable of?” Davey asks.
“No,” Jayne says shortly, brushing past the image of the man who was once his best friend and pulling Boo and Georgia out of their holsters. There is the sensation of shoulders bumping up against each other, and Jayne turns back just to see Davey disappear the same way Thomas did.
~*~
On Osiris, Regan Tam (nee Lang), mother of Simon and River Tam, topples to the ground, sizzling blood dripping from her ears and mouth, burning her skin. Her fingers snag on the carpet as she desperately tries to find something to hang onto.
She coughs, spitting out blood and vomit onto the floor of her daughter’s room. She throws back her head and screams as her brain continues to fry itself.
~*~
Jayne presses himself up against the side of the building, wishing he had Vera. Boo hardly ever left his side, but Vera… Vera could really blow a hole through someone.
There are footsteps and Jayne looks quickly around the corner and sees that there are only two men. Jayne pulls back the hammer on both Georgia and Boo. They’re wheeling out a familiar metal box.
Jayne growls. He’s going to have to keep one slightly more alive than he’d intended.
“See ya in hell, sick fucks,” Jayne snarls, the arm holding Georgia snapping out, just as he squeezes the trigger.
Just like always, he finds a target.
He aims Boo and she sings in his hand as he pulls back the trigger, sending a bullet into the hip of the other one.
Agent Anderson barely has time to gasp as his partner stumbles back, his hand going to his chest, blood seeping through his fingers, before he falls to the ground. He barely has time to process the pain or to reach for the sonic device in his pocket when another bullet finds his own body, and he tumbles against the storage container, before sliding down to the ground.
~*~
Inside the container, River freezes, her goal momentarily forgotten as she listens, her ears straining to catch any noise. Something had bumped up against her prison, hard enough for her to feel in this state of trapped consciousness in a stone body.
She tries not to hope as tears slip past the barriers of her eyes to slide over the bridge of her nose and around her other eye to roll down to hang around her chin and her left ear. They finally drop to land in the mat that is her hair.
Soon. She just needs to hold on a little longer.
Her hand twitches and her fingers curl inward to form a fist.
~*~
The Alliance agent doesn’t know how long he lies there, his vision blurring in and out of focus, before his assailant makes his presence known.
A large foot crushes the sonic device before the rest of the assailant moves into the light, revealing himself to be the Browncoat Malcolm Reynolds’ mercenary. The mercenary casts a disinterested glance over the gasping Agent Mason (he’d gotten a lung with that first shot), the cryo-chamber, and the layout of the area before his cold blue eyes look down at Anderson.
Anderson has the sudden urge to drag himself away as quickly as possible.
There’s a small thump from inside the cryo-chamber, which is impossible as the control phrase has been said and the R. Tam subject should be completely out of commission. The mercenary’s eyes flicker over to stare at the box and a slow smile covers the man’s face.
His eyes fall back on Anderson’s face and the smile disappears.
The large man leans down and scrapes a match along the pavement right next to Agent Anderson’s eyes. The Agent flinches, closing his eyes. The mercenary ignores him as he takes the match to the cigar in his mouth. Cupping his hands around the cigar, he lights it. He drops the still burning match onto Anderson’s face before stomping on Anderson’s wrist and grinding the steel toe of his boot on skin and bone.
Reynolds’ mercenary takes a deep drag of his cigar before pulling it away to look down at his catch. A slow, deadly grin spreads over his face.
“Nice gloves.”