Firefly - Giselle (16/?)
Title: Giselle
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta-Reader: Thanks go to the amazing revdorothyl.
Character/Pairings: Jayne/River
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.
Chapter Sixteen
Somebody is going to die a horrible death.
Somebody half his size, who couldn’t brush the rat’s nest she called hair to save her life (Mal had lectured them for a good five hours when he stumbled on Jayne pointing his gun at River, who’d been looking between her hair and the hairbrush in absolute confusion), liked nattering on about a bunch of things he didn’t understand when she was feeling in a particularly evil mood. And who’d recently started referring to herself as his fenghuang and then laughing mysteriously to herself when he asked her what the hell that was (and then got really mad when he ever so innocently asked if it tasted any good).
Jayne groans as that particular somebody knocks harder on his bunk door.
It's Sunday, Jayne's unofficial day off (he'd long ago mastered the art of looking busy so whenever Mal suddenly found some task that Jayne just had to perform right now on a Sunday, Mal couldn't interrupt Jayne because the mercenary was always involved in something far more important than whatever it was that Mal wanted done), and the day-cycle hasn't even started yet. Jayne is an incredibly light sleeper, his sleep usually consisting of him closing his eyes and listening to the rhythm of sounds and allowing the map of scents to give him something similar to a deep sleep. He's long since memorized the particular bumps and creaks that are Serenity, as well as the walking patterns of all the crew. Unless he's drunk out of his mind, which only happens once a year, Jayne is the best security the ship could possibly have.
So, when he'd heard the girl coming down the hall, each step a slow movement that he now knows is part of her endless fancy dance solo, he hadn't bothered to reach for his gun or considered himself in any danger. Big mistake.
There is a large thump as the girl slams her fist onto the door again. "JAYNE! SHE IS GOING TO BE NINETEEN IN FIVE MINUTES AND SHE WANTS TO CELEBRATE WITH HER FRIEND! JAYNE!"
If she breaks his door, he's going to snap her spine over his knee. Jayne pulls his pillow over his head and slaps his hands over his newly cushioned ears.
"SHE HEARD THAT!" There is the sound of feet slowly backing up, followed by a short pause, then the sound of the girl bouncing on the tips of her toes, followed by a sudden leap which ended with the girl bouncing off his door with a loud “whack!”
Jayne shoots up, sitting in his bed and staring at the door in horror.
Oh, Book's fluffy Lord. If she just spilt her scrambled brains on the floor...
"SHE IS FINE AND THANKS HIM FOR HIS CONCERN!"
Jayne scowls and immediately flops back on the bed so hard the springs screech in protest. He crosses his arms and glares up at the remains of glue on the ceiling where his girly pics used to be until he pulled them off a day or two after leaving Ariel. He frowns as he looks at one particular blob of dried glue. If he squints, it looks just like the Doc. Ew.
Outside the bunk, he can practically hear River putting her hands on her hips.
"She knows you are up," she says in that really creepy voice of hers, the one she knows bothers the hell out of him and makes him want to run for the hills screaming “witch!” Curse his backwoods upbringing and the girl's ability to exploit it. "If he does not let her in, she will let everyone know he is--"
'--Nice,' her voice echoes in his head as her scent floods his nose and he can feel her ghostly little self in his head.
"CODE'S ‘VERA’!" he screams in an extremely manly fashion.
There is dead silence for a moment.
Then, River kicks the door and Jayne actually sees the metal twist out of shape around her dainty foot. He raises an eyebrow as he swears he can hear the girl muttering something about how Vera can go break into a million pieces and rust at the bottom of any available ocean. Not quite sure what that's all about, Jayne pulls his blanket up around his chin and listens as the girl keys in the code, muttering the entire time.
The bunk door slides open, but River doesn't immediately come in, instead choosing to dick around with the control panel. If Jayne didn't know any better, he'd think she was reprogramming the password.
He begins to suspect that that's exactly what she's done when River suddenly slides down the ladder, a big smile on her face and looking impossibly smug. She practically skips over to him, humming some bright, annoyingly cheerful song, and bounces up onto his stomach. After wiggling about to get comfortable, making Jayne's eyes roll back into his head and getting John Thomas a little too interested in the situation, River waves at him. "Greetings, man named Jayne." She doesn't wait for him to reply as she continues chattering on, "Your new code is ‘Einstein’."
"Riiight,” Jayne drawls sarcastically. “I can spell that."
River gives him a pointed stare. The one that makes him feel like an actual idiot who's most likely drooling, playing in the mud, and picking his nose all at the same time.
Then in a move that makes Jayne grin in sheer delight, River hunches her shoulders, hugs her knees, bows her head so he can't see her eyes and says in a pitifully small voice, "She used to have a bunny rabbit doll named Einstein, whom she loved very much and used to go to bed with every night, but she had to leave him behind when she went to the Academy." She gives a little sniffle and ends the act with a bang when she slides down onto Jayne's chest, hiding her face in the blankets.
Jayne moves his face away from the tendrils of River's hair that are tickling his face and neck. He puts his arm around her back, cupping her shoulder in a seemingly comforting gesture. "Guess I could learn how to spell ‘Einstein’."
River's head pops up, her eyes clear and looking entirely too excited for a girl who was so recently distraught. "E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N."
Jayne immediately pulls her off his chest, almost sending her flying off the mattress and onto the floor. The only thing that saves her from a bruise on her backside is her quick reflexes as she hooks a leg around Jayne's knee and grabs the blankets with both of her hands. "How many times do I need to tell you about follow-through, girl?"
River's eyes go wide. "She forgot that part as her goal had been accomplished." She begins pulling herself back up the bed.
Jayne's too tired to argue. "Whatever," he mumbles and turns on his side, nestling into his blankets. "Wake me up when there's food."
He's drifting off when the girl suddenly presses her small body right up against his back and shoves some sort of ticking thing beside his ear. Jayne's eyes pop open. He growls and starts to tell her off when the girl almost puts out his eye as she shoves the Doc's timepiece into Jayne's face.
"Only two minutes left," River breathes in awe, wrapping her other arm around Jayne's neck and pressing herself even closer against him, using her legs to free the blanket from around Jayne’s waist so that she too can enjoy the warmth of his comforter. Her bare legs tangle with his and Jayne has to remind himself and John Thomas that he isn’t gonna touch her until the bruise on her cheek fades (the only physical evidence left from her encounter with those freaks with the switched-out eyes). Hopefully, that will be long enough for the unseen wounds she refuses to tell him about to heal as well.
River’s gaze is fastened on the thin, second hand of the timepiece as it makes its way around all of the numbers. "She has almost completed nineteen years of life."
It's times like this when Jayne wonders if the girl isn't being crazy on purpose, just to annoy him.
"One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand," River says as she counts down the seconds.
Yep. Definitely on purpose.
"Jayne, count! - seven one thousand."
"Y'know," he drawls, "there are other, more interestin' things we could be doing right now, 'stead of counting seconds." Like sleeping.
Without missing a beat, River answers, "She isn't ready for physical intercourse yet. Thirteen one thousand. Fourteen one thousand."
"Whatever," Jayne mumbles, reaching up to hug his pillow. It isn't until River reaches thirty-one one thousand that Jayne suddenly registers what she just said. "SAY WHAT?!" He flips around to stare at the girl.
River stops counting to blink up at him with big, brown eyes.
That’s when Jayne realizes that the girl is actively trying to kill him when he’s trying to be all noble and understanding around her traumatized self. She’s wearing one of her prettier sun dresses that actually makes her look like something other than a drowned bag of potatoes, and that something happens to be fairly attractive and womanish. Jayne also realizes that it might not have been such a smart idea to go to sleep in only his boxers, as John Thomas is starting to get some very wrong (or right) ideas about the way the girl is lying next to him with her hair on his pillow.
Jayne reaches out to drag his fingers through her tangled tresses when he's stopped by River poking him in the chest.
"Made me lose count," she says darkly before turning her attention back to the timepiece. Her look darkens when she realizes that she has less than a minute left until she completes her nineteenth year of life and begins her twentieth. After a moment, she starts up again. "Twelve one thousand. Thirteen one thousand. Fourteen one thousand."
Since she's being incredibly annoying, Jayne responds like any mature adult would -- by rolling on top of her. River squawks and attempts to pound at Jayne's back, which is rather difficult since he's lying on her arms and legs. Jayne hugs his pillow to his chest and drags up his blanket to tuck it snugly under his chin, smirking to himself.
“She is being squished!”
“Not my problem,” Jayne mumbles, hugging his pillow tighter.
He’s just drifting off when she bit his ear.
“DAMMIT, HARPY!” He tries to elbow her in the ribs, but River’s too small and crafty to let him gain a hit.
One of the girl’s hands gets free and she uses this to her advantage, pinching his lower back. “SHE IS A FENGHUANG!”
Jayne jerks, biting his lip.
The girl freezes for a second. Jayne can imagine only too well the pure evil emerging on her face as she discovers yet another weakness.
“He is ticklish?” the girl asks, her voice overly innocent. Like he can’t see right through her even if he’s not even gazing in her direction. “Hypothesis must be tested at least three times before findings can be compiled into a report and published,” she chimes before digging her fingers into his sides.
Jayne doesn’t shriek (just).
Instead, he tries to escape her treacherous fingers by catching them, and when that fails because of her enhanced reflexes (he prays to Book’s fluffy Lord that those Academy freaks suffer terrible deaths), he rolls them both over to land on the floor with a crash as they knock over the small bureau of drawers that hold his possessions.
Thus does River Tam turn nineteen.
~*~
It’s been almost a week and the bruise on River’s cheek continues to fade away far too slowly for Jayne’s taste. Most of the purple has gone and it's mostly just a sickly yellow now.
Jayne knows that there are other hurts, invisible wounds from her ordeal that require more time for healing (most likely they'll leave scars just as hidden and deep as the ones etched into her scalp), but they can't afford to leave off training any longer. Tomorrow. They'll do some light sparring tomorrow and steadily start building up their routine again, but none of the hard stuff until that patch of red, purple, blue and yellow is gone for good. And somehow, he has to figure out how to get rid of that gorram control phase. River will always be at a huge disadvantage as long as she can be turned "off".
He's reminded a bit of when he first found the sniper rifle he calls Sophie. Her scope had been almost bent backwards from a bad fall, among other things, and many of the weapons experts Jayne had taken her to had expressed disbelief that Sophie would ever be able to hit anything again due to the excessive damage. But Jayne had been patient with his girl, slowly straightening her out whenever he managed to find some free time to himself as well as a local blacksmith's. She's now one of his best guns, and he never passes up an opportunity to brag about the time he shot a man from 200 yards away, back when Sophie’s scope was still bent.
River hums in contentment from where she rests curled against Jayne’s side, bundled up in his blankets with his hand resting on her shoulder, admiring the new pink bracelet she’d made him tie around her thin wrist. "That's a nice story. One day, I would like to experience a similar fate to sister Sophie."
"You will," Jayne promises, even though he has no idea how they're going to manage that. She’d tied the other bracelet around his wrist before covering it with his leather brace, saying something about how he was her best and favourite secret out of all the others, and she had many. His heart did not start beating faster when she said that. It didn’t. She’d patted his cheek fondly.
"He will figure out how to fix her handicap." River snuggles herself closer to his side, yawning. "Always knows what to do with his weapons, even if this one is slightly more girl-like than the others."
Jayne supposes that he should be more concerned that the girl is reading his mind so easily, but as far as he can figure, it'll probably be an advantage in the long run if she's hanging out in his head so much. Since he found out that she was a Reader (the equivalent to a witch), Jayne has found himself tempted by the idea of being able to communicate with someone with no one else hearing. One of the first lessons he ever learned as a kid was that walls have ears (a painful lesson as it led to his pa dislocating his mother's shoulder when he found out that Jayne had told the village preacher that his own broken arm wasn’t an accident) and he's never forgotten it.
Being able to communicate privately is a rare thing, and almost immediately he’d found himself experimenting. He’d tried thinking hard that he got stupid and the money was too good when the girl looked at him, back when she was still insane and high off her brother's meds the majority of the time. She'd been standing there in the mess, looking lost as usual, when he'd thought that and she'd looked at him. Grabbed her elbow in that slightly nervous gesture she had (which he now knew she did only when she was trying to ground herself and force out the other minds) and stared at him like the Mudders had - as if he were some sort of miracle sent from God.
He'd brushed aside the incident later, as it was his own Unification day, so to speak, and gotten drunk out of his mind in an effort to forget (forgetting is harder than you'd think), which resulted in him almost shooting himself in the head. Thankfully, Zoë had found him before he could pull the trigger and gotten the gun away from him, and then he'd been dealing with his own anger toward himself that a bounty hunter had gotten on board while he’d been sleeping it off and taken everyone else hostage. Plus, if Jayne had been pulling off the job he would have killed the Doc before the Tam siblings had a chance to play mind games on him. Sad to see the bounty hunting profession going downhill like that. Least when he hunted bounties he made sure the job had class. It was a blow to his pride that the girl had taken care of the problem, especially when Mal had turned up and mused aloud that he didn’t know what he was paying his mercenary for these days (Jayne retaliated by dropping the massive crate he’d been hauling into the cargo bay on Mal’s foot and told Mal to get back to him when he remembered).
It wasn't until after the fight on Mr. Universe's moon that Jayne found himself interested in experimenting again with communicating with River. He could usually be found trailing after her during the few times she managed to escape her brother or Mal for a bit of freedom, looking for some way to pay her back for saving his life from those Reavers. Every so often, he’d be uncomfortably reminded of the lengths he’d gone to in order to gain Vera’s attention in another life, but he always ended up concluding that this was different. The girl didn’t have the power or the will to destroy him like Vera had. During that time, he'd sometimes try to think loud to see if she would pick up on it. She never seemed to, but he now suspects that that was probably because she was ignoring him --
"Playing pretend," River interrupts his line of thinking.
"Huh?" Jayne looks down at her.
Her eyes still closed, River pulls the blanket more firmly around her body. "If I wasn't born a Reader I wouldn't be able to hear you or anyone else. Was pretending to be just a normal girl like all the other normal girls. Only problem in the world was finding her true love."
Of all the stupid things in the girl's brain, that's the stupidest. Jayne sees no problem with telling her that. "You'd be borin' if you weren't you an' natterin' on about things I don't understand. An' all that love go se is overrated."
River's lips curl up in a smile. "He is a very good friend. Always says the right things."
"No, I don't," Jayne says bluntly. "I just call 'em as I see 'em."
River opens her eyes. "That is good. She can't always see the truth of things anymore. Is very confusing in her head when she isn't visiting his." She grins, wiggling her eyebrows. "The Moonbrain is ninety-nine percent less likely to slice and dice anyone, especially her Jayne, when his mind is so soothing and welcoming to hers." She giggles and reaches up to tap his forehead with her pointer finger. His eyes are drawn by the pink of her new bracelet (which he still doesn’t get why she wanted it so bad, but hey -- she wanted it, she got it). "There is a little pocket in the Jayne mind where the River mind fits snug as any pie filling."
Jayne's stomach growls.
The girl laughs in utter delight at his body's reaction to the mere mention of food, her voice echoing against the walls of the room, and Jayne thinks he could get used to that sound. Very easily.
He wonders idly if he shouldn't be concerned with how easily the girl is fitting into his life, almost as if she was always meant to be there beside him and there's been a River-shaped hole in his life that up until she got snatched away again by the creepy Alliance dogs with the kink for blue gloves and switching eyeballs he didn't even realize was there.
See?
Already the girl's starting to change him. He never used to think like this, not even when he had Vera. And people claim River isn't a witch, when her witching ways are as clear as day.
She'd have been put through the Trial of Fire faster than a man could cross himself back home if the village elders had ever gotten a hold of her. And Jayne would probably have had to kill them all to get her down (with pleasure). They weren’t like those hun duns from Jiangyin - Jayne’s people had always gotten the deed done without any time spent wasted on big speeches. They’d always gotten the job done, period.
It’s the one thing Jayne’s ever admired about his father’s people.
“Alas, my poor Dragon,” River sits up, looking down on him and she could almost be pretty in this moment. As it is, she’s just River. The girl smiles broadly as the thought passes through Jayne’s head. “All the criminal experts in Londinium think he’s nothing more than a lone wolf chased out of his pack and tagging along for the ride,” she coos in reference to Jayne’s file on the Cortex chip she’d picked off the corpse of one of those blue-handed hun dans who’d dared touch his girl, and then leans forward to touch his cheek and stroke his goatee.
Jayne watches her out of narrowed eyes. She leans closer still and his hand comes around to circle the curve of her waist, settling over her hip. Her eyes are just a little too sane at the moment, as if she’s the only one that is and she’s laughing at some joke only she gets.
Some of River’s long hair cascades over the edge of her thin shoulders in a curtain covering her face and his, while the rest remains draped over her back. He slowly sits up on his elbows and she rests her hands on his shoulders. “What they don’t know--” River starts, finally letting Jayne in on her joke.
“Will kill ‘em,” Jayne promises in a growl.
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta-Reader: Thanks go to the amazing revdorothyl.
Character/Pairings: Jayne/River
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.
Chapter Sixteen
Somebody is going to die a horrible death.
Somebody half his size, who couldn’t brush the rat’s nest she called hair to save her life (Mal had lectured them for a good five hours when he stumbled on Jayne pointing his gun at River, who’d been looking between her hair and the hairbrush in absolute confusion), liked nattering on about a bunch of things he didn’t understand when she was feeling in a particularly evil mood. And who’d recently started referring to herself as his fenghuang and then laughing mysteriously to herself when he asked her what the hell that was (and then got really mad when he ever so innocently asked if it tasted any good).
Jayne groans as that particular somebody knocks harder on his bunk door.
It's Sunday, Jayne's unofficial day off (he'd long ago mastered the art of looking busy so whenever Mal suddenly found some task that Jayne just had to perform right now on a Sunday, Mal couldn't interrupt Jayne because the mercenary was always involved in something far more important than whatever it was that Mal wanted done), and the day-cycle hasn't even started yet. Jayne is an incredibly light sleeper, his sleep usually consisting of him closing his eyes and listening to the rhythm of sounds and allowing the map of scents to give him something similar to a deep sleep. He's long since memorized the particular bumps and creaks that are Serenity, as well as the walking patterns of all the crew. Unless he's drunk out of his mind, which only happens once a year, Jayne is the best security the ship could possibly have.
So, when he'd heard the girl coming down the hall, each step a slow movement that he now knows is part of her endless fancy dance solo, he hadn't bothered to reach for his gun or considered himself in any danger. Big mistake.
There is a large thump as the girl slams her fist onto the door again. "JAYNE! SHE IS GOING TO BE NINETEEN IN FIVE MINUTES AND SHE WANTS TO CELEBRATE WITH HER FRIEND! JAYNE!"
If she breaks his door, he's going to snap her spine over his knee. Jayne pulls his pillow over his head and slaps his hands over his newly cushioned ears.
"SHE HEARD THAT!" There is the sound of feet slowly backing up, followed by a short pause, then the sound of the girl bouncing on the tips of her toes, followed by a sudden leap which ended with the girl bouncing off his door with a loud “whack!”
Jayne shoots up, sitting in his bed and staring at the door in horror.
Oh, Book's fluffy Lord. If she just spilt her scrambled brains on the floor...
"SHE IS FINE AND THANKS HIM FOR HIS CONCERN!"
Jayne scowls and immediately flops back on the bed so hard the springs screech in protest. He crosses his arms and glares up at the remains of glue on the ceiling where his girly pics used to be until he pulled them off a day or two after leaving Ariel. He frowns as he looks at one particular blob of dried glue. If he squints, it looks just like the Doc. Ew.
Outside the bunk, he can practically hear River putting her hands on her hips.
"She knows you are up," she says in that really creepy voice of hers, the one she knows bothers the hell out of him and makes him want to run for the hills screaming “witch!” Curse his backwoods upbringing and the girl's ability to exploit it. "If he does not let her in, she will let everyone know he is--"
'--Nice,' her voice echoes in his head as her scent floods his nose and he can feel her ghostly little self in his head.
"CODE'S ‘VERA’!" he screams in an extremely manly fashion.
There is dead silence for a moment.
Then, River kicks the door and Jayne actually sees the metal twist out of shape around her dainty foot. He raises an eyebrow as he swears he can hear the girl muttering something about how Vera can go break into a million pieces and rust at the bottom of any available ocean. Not quite sure what that's all about, Jayne pulls his blanket up around his chin and listens as the girl keys in the code, muttering the entire time.
The bunk door slides open, but River doesn't immediately come in, instead choosing to dick around with the control panel. If Jayne didn't know any better, he'd think she was reprogramming the password.
He begins to suspect that that's exactly what she's done when River suddenly slides down the ladder, a big smile on her face and looking impossibly smug. She practically skips over to him, humming some bright, annoyingly cheerful song, and bounces up onto his stomach. After wiggling about to get comfortable, making Jayne's eyes roll back into his head and getting John Thomas a little too interested in the situation, River waves at him. "Greetings, man named Jayne." She doesn't wait for him to reply as she continues chattering on, "Your new code is ‘Einstein’."
"Riiight,” Jayne drawls sarcastically. “I can spell that."
River gives him a pointed stare. The one that makes him feel like an actual idiot who's most likely drooling, playing in the mud, and picking his nose all at the same time.
Then in a move that makes Jayne grin in sheer delight, River hunches her shoulders, hugs her knees, bows her head so he can't see her eyes and says in a pitifully small voice, "She used to have a bunny rabbit doll named Einstein, whom she loved very much and used to go to bed with every night, but she had to leave him behind when she went to the Academy." She gives a little sniffle and ends the act with a bang when she slides down onto Jayne's chest, hiding her face in the blankets.
Jayne moves his face away from the tendrils of River's hair that are tickling his face and neck. He puts his arm around her back, cupping her shoulder in a seemingly comforting gesture. "Guess I could learn how to spell ‘Einstein’."
River's head pops up, her eyes clear and looking entirely too excited for a girl who was so recently distraught. "E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N."
Jayne immediately pulls her off his chest, almost sending her flying off the mattress and onto the floor. The only thing that saves her from a bruise on her backside is her quick reflexes as she hooks a leg around Jayne's knee and grabs the blankets with both of her hands. "How many times do I need to tell you about follow-through, girl?"
River's eyes go wide. "She forgot that part as her goal had been accomplished." She begins pulling herself back up the bed.
Jayne's too tired to argue. "Whatever," he mumbles and turns on his side, nestling into his blankets. "Wake me up when there's food."
He's drifting off when the girl suddenly presses her small body right up against his back and shoves some sort of ticking thing beside his ear. Jayne's eyes pop open. He growls and starts to tell her off when the girl almost puts out his eye as she shoves the Doc's timepiece into Jayne's face.
"Only two minutes left," River breathes in awe, wrapping her other arm around Jayne's neck and pressing herself even closer against him, using her legs to free the blanket from around Jayne’s waist so that she too can enjoy the warmth of his comforter. Her bare legs tangle with his and Jayne has to remind himself and John Thomas that he isn’t gonna touch her until the bruise on her cheek fades (the only physical evidence left from her encounter with those freaks with the switched-out eyes). Hopefully, that will be long enough for the unseen wounds she refuses to tell him about to heal as well.
River’s gaze is fastened on the thin, second hand of the timepiece as it makes its way around all of the numbers. "She has almost completed nineteen years of life."
It's times like this when Jayne wonders if the girl isn't being crazy on purpose, just to annoy him.
"One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand," River says as she counts down the seconds.
Yep. Definitely on purpose.
"Jayne, count! - seven one thousand."
"Y'know," he drawls, "there are other, more interestin' things we could be doing right now, 'stead of counting seconds." Like sleeping.
Without missing a beat, River answers, "She isn't ready for physical intercourse yet. Thirteen one thousand. Fourteen one thousand."
"Whatever," Jayne mumbles, reaching up to hug his pillow. It isn't until River reaches thirty-one one thousand that Jayne suddenly registers what she just said. "SAY WHAT?!" He flips around to stare at the girl.
River stops counting to blink up at him with big, brown eyes.
That’s when Jayne realizes that the girl is actively trying to kill him when he’s trying to be all noble and understanding around her traumatized self. She’s wearing one of her prettier sun dresses that actually makes her look like something other than a drowned bag of potatoes, and that something happens to be fairly attractive and womanish. Jayne also realizes that it might not have been such a smart idea to go to sleep in only his boxers, as John Thomas is starting to get some very wrong (or right) ideas about the way the girl is lying next to him with her hair on his pillow.
Jayne reaches out to drag his fingers through her tangled tresses when he's stopped by River poking him in the chest.
"Made me lose count," she says darkly before turning her attention back to the timepiece. Her look darkens when she realizes that she has less than a minute left until she completes her nineteenth year of life and begins her twentieth. After a moment, she starts up again. "Twelve one thousand. Thirteen one thousand. Fourteen one thousand."
Since she's being incredibly annoying, Jayne responds like any mature adult would -- by rolling on top of her. River squawks and attempts to pound at Jayne's back, which is rather difficult since he's lying on her arms and legs. Jayne hugs his pillow to his chest and drags up his blanket to tuck it snugly under his chin, smirking to himself.
“She is being squished!”
“Not my problem,” Jayne mumbles, hugging his pillow tighter.
He’s just drifting off when she bit his ear.
“DAMMIT, HARPY!” He tries to elbow her in the ribs, but River’s too small and crafty to let him gain a hit.
One of the girl’s hands gets free and she uses this to her advantage, pinching his lower back. “SHE IS A FENGHUANG!”
Jayne jerks, biting his lip.
The girl freezes for a second. Jayne can imagine only too well the pure evil emerging on her face as she discovers yet another weakness.
“He is ticklish?” the girl asks, her voice overly innocent. Like he can’t see right through her even if he’s not even gazing in her direction. “Hypothesis must be tested at least three times before findings can be compiled into a report and published,” she chimes before digging her fingers into his sides.
Jayne doesn’t shriek (just).
Instead, he tries to escape her treacherous fingers by catching them, and when that fails because of her enhanced reflexes (he prays to Book’s fluffy Lord that those Academy freaks suffer terrible deaths), he rolls them both over to land on the floor with a crash as they knock over the small bureau of drawers that hold his possessions.
Thus does River Tam turn nineteen.
~*~
It’s been almost a week and the bruise on River’s cheek continues to fade away far too slowly for Jayne’s taste. Most of the purple has gone and it's mostly just a sickly yellow now.
Jayne knows that there are other hurts, invisible wounds from her ordeal that require more time for healing (most likely they'll leave scars just as hidden and deep as the ones etched into her scalp), but they can't afford to leave off training any longer. Tomorrow. They'll do some light sparring tomorrow and steadily start building up their routine again, but none of the hard stuff until that patch of red, purple, blue and yellow is gone for good. And somehow, he has to figure out how to get rid of that gorram control phase. River will always be at a huge disadvantage as long as she can be turned "off".
He's reminded a bit of when he first found the sniper rifle he calls Sophie. Her scope had been almost bent backwards from a bad fall, among other things, and many of the weapons experts Jayne had taken her to had expressed disbelief that Sophie would ever be able to hit anything again due to the excessive damage. But Jayne had been patient with his girl, slowly straightening her out whenever he managed to find some free time to himself as well as a local blacksmith's. She's now one of his best guns, and he never passes up an opportunity to brag about the time he shot a man from 200 yards away, back when Sophie’s scope was still bent.
River hums in contentment from where she rests curled against Jayne’s side, bundled up in his blankets with his hand resting on her shoulder, admiring the new pink bracelet she’d made him tie around her thin wrist. "That's a nice story. One day, I would like to experience a similar fate to sister Sophie."
"You will," Jayne promises, even though he has no idea how they're going to manage that. She’d tied the other bracelet around his wrist before covering it with his leather brace, saying something about how he was her best and favourite secret out of all the others, and she had many. His heart did not start beating faster when she said that. It didn’t. She’d patted his cheek fondly.
"He will figure out how to fix her handicap." River snuggles herself closer to his side, yawning. "Always knows what to do with his weapons, even if this one is slightly more girl-like than the others."
Jayne supposes that he should be more concerned that the girl is reading his mind so easily, but as far as he can figure, it'll probably be an advantage in the long run if she's hanging out in his head so much. Since he found out that she was a Reader (the equivalent to a witch), Jayne has found himself tempted by the idea of being able to communicate with someone with no one else hearing. One of the first lessons he ever learned as a kid was that walls have ears (a painful lesson as it led to his pa dislocating his mother's shoulder when he found out that Jayne had told the village preacher that his own broken arm wasn’t an accident) and he's never forgotten it.
Being able to communicate privately is a rare thing, and almost immediately he’d found himself experimenting. He’d tried thinking hard that he got stupid and the money was too good when the girl looked at him, back when she was still insane and high off her brother's meds the majority of the time. She'd been standing there in the mess, looking lost as usual, when he'd thought that and she'd looked at him. Grabbed her elbow in that slightly nervous gesture she had (which he now knew she did only when she was trying to ground herself and force out the other minds) and stared at him like the Mudders had - as if he were some sort of miracle sent from God.
He'd brushed aside the incident later, as it was his own Unification day, so to speak, and gotten drunk out of his mind in an effort to forget (forgetting is harder than you'd think), which resulted in him almost shooting himself in the head. Thankfully, Zoë had found him before he could pull the trigger and gotten the gun away from him, and then he'd been dealing with his own anger toward himself that a bounty hunter had gotten on board while he’d been sleeping it off and taken everyone else hostage. Plus, if Jayne had been pulling off the job he would have killed the Doc before the Tam siblings had a chance to play mind games on him. Sad to see the bounty hunting profession going downhill like that. Least when he hunted bounties he made sure the job had class. It was a blow to his pride that the girl had taken care of the problem, especially when Mal had turned up and mused aloud that he didn’t know what he was paying his mercenary for these days (Jayne retaliated by dropping the massive crate he’d been hauling into the cargo bay on Mal’s foot and told Mal to get back to him when he remembered).
It wasn't until after the fight on Mr. Universe's moon that Jayne found himself interested in experimenting again with communicating with River. He could usually be found trailing after her during the few times she managed to escape her brother or Mal for a bit of freedom, looking for some way to pay her back for saving his life from those Reavers. Every so often, he’d be uncomfortably reminded of the lengths he’d gone to in order to gain Vera’s attention in another life, but he always ended up concluding that this was different. The girl didn’t have the power or the will to destroy him like Vera had. During that time, he'd sometimes try to think loud to see if she would pick up on it. She never seemed to, but he now suspects that that was probably because she was ignoring him --
"Playing pretend," River interrupts his line of thinking.
"Huh?" Jayne looks down at her.
Her eyes still closed, River pulls the blanket more firmly around her body. "If I wasn't born a Reader I wouldn't be able to hear you or anyone else. Was pretending to be just a normal girl like all the other normal girls. Only problem in the world was finding her true love."
Of all the stupid things in the girl's brain, that's the stupidest. Jayne sees no problem with telling her that. "You'd be borin' if you weren't you an' natterin' on about things I don't understand. An' all that love go se is overrated."
River's lips curl up in a smile. "He is a very good friend. Always says the right things."
"No, I don't," Jayne says bluntly. "I just call 'em as I see 'em."
River opens her eyes. "That is good. She can't always see the truth of things anymore. Is very confusing in her head when she isn't visiting his." She grins, wiggling her eyebrows. "The Moonbrain is ninety-nine percent less likely to slice and dice anyone, especially her Jayne, when his mind is so soothing and welcoming to hers." She giggles and reaches up to tap his forehead with her pointer finger. His eyes are drawn by the pink of her new bracelet (which he still doesn’t get why she wanted it so bad, but hey -- she wanted it, she got it). "There is a little pocket in the Jayne mind where the River mind fits snug as any pie filling."
Jayne's stomach growls.
The girl laughs in utter delight at his body's reaction to the mere mention of food, her voice echoing against the walls of the room, and Jayne thinks he could get used to that sound. Very easily.
He wonders idly if he shouldn't be concerned with how easily the girl is fitting into his life, almost as if she was always meant to be there beside him and there's been a River-shaped hole in his life that up until she got snatched away again by the creepy Alliance dogs with the kink for blue gloves and switching eyeballs he didn't even realize was there.
See?
Already the girl's starting to change him. He never used to think like this, not even when he had Vera. And people claim River isn't a witch, when her witching ways are as clear as day.
She'd have been put through the Trial of Fire faster than a man could cross himself back home if the village elders had ever gotten a hold of her. And Jayne would probably have had to kill them all to get her down (with pleasure). They weren’t like those hun duns from Jiangyin - Jayne’s people had always gotten the deed done without any time spent wasted on big speeches. They’d always gotten the job done, period.
It’s the one thing Jayne’s ever admired about his father’s people.
“Alas, my poor Dragon,” River sits up, looking down on him and she could almost be pretty in this moment. As it is, she’s just River. The girl smiles broadly as the thought passes through Jayne’s head. “All the criminal experts in Londinium think he’s nothing more than a lone wolf chased out of his pack and tagging along for the ride,” she coos in reference to Jayne’s file on the Cortex chip she’d picked off the corpse of one of those blue-handed hun dans who’d dared touch his girl, and then leans forward to touch his cheek and stroke his goatee.
Jayne watches her out of narrowed eyes. She leans closer still and his hand comes around to circle the curve of her waist, settling over her hip. Her eyes are just a little too sane at the moment, as if she’s the only one that is and she’s laughing at some joke only she gets.
Some of River’s long hair cascades over the edge of her thin shoulders in a curtain covering her face and his, while the rest remains draped over her back. He slowly sits up on his elbows and she rests her hands on his shoulders. “What they don’t know--” River starts, finally letting Jayne in on her joke.
“Will kill ‘em,” Jayne promises in a growl.