Stocking-stuffer fic for selenak!
She requested a Jossverse/Sandman crossover. So, Mal meets Death.
Title: Everybody Dies Alone
Rating: PG-13, Teen, whatever
Characters: Mal, Zoe, Neil Gaiman's Death
Spoilers: Series, "Out of Gas"
Summary: Mal talks with Death in Serenity Valley.
Night fell on Serenity Valley. It was the tenth night since the battle ended. Mal Reynolds had kept count.
Night was better than day here (“better” being a painfully subjective term) for the simple reason that at night, the temperature dropped and the air settled, making the air something like breathable. In the heat of the day, the stench rising from the bodies, the acres of Alliance and Independent corpses, was well-nigh fit to kill a man. Those left alive covered their faces with fabric, all but smothering themselves in a futile attempt to block out the worst of it.
There weren’t many left alive; fewer every day.
Mal sat sentinel over a group of around a dozen such souls. He didn’t rightly know how many there were at any given moment. Two were injured and fevered and didn’t look to last another day. Another was like to die any time. A few more weren’t rightly present inside their own bodies. Unless help came soon, Mal doubted that half of this little knot of humanity would see anything outside of Serenity Valley ever again.
If help didn’t come soon, they’d all be dead or mad. Except maybe Zoë.
Zoë slept now, huddled with two other soldiers. It had been all Mal could do to persuade her to get some rest, to let go for a little while. This watch was his alone. He doubted that at this point they even needed a watch; no one in the valley seemed terribly interested in killing anymore. Not dying was all they could manage.
A day ago, an Alliance soldier, a young fellow no older than Watts, who clung to Zoë in her sleep, had entered their camp. He’d handed over his gun, saying in his high-flown Londinium accent, “Either shoot me or give me a drink. I don’t care which.”
They’d given him a drink, and he now lay curled up a little distance from Zoë and the others. Mal had little pity to spare for anyone, but even less bile. The kid had served the Alliance, and it had failed him same as the Independence had failed Mal. They were all in the same slaughterhouse now.
Unconsciously, Mal’s hand had gone to his cross as the light faded. But the cross wasn’t there; it was somewhere among the bodies, where Mal had thrown it when the sun had risen over the field of flesh and blood of the Alliance’s victory.
Nothing left to believe in for Mal. Just himself, his gun, and Zoë.
Suddenly, movement caught Mal’s eye. He blinked to clear his vision, lifting his rifle as he searched out whatever was moving. For a moment, he thought his eyes were fooling him; but then, there it was. A dark figure was moving among the bodies. Mal pinpointed it and looked through his scope.
What he saw left him absolutely flummoxed. The figure appeared to be a woman in a long, black garment of some kind. Something glinted on her chest, something that looked like a cross from this distance. Was she a Shepherd?
Whoever and whatever she was, she moved with apparent ease and no great hurry, picking her way almost gracefully among the bodies. Mal made out thick black hair flowing over her shoulders, and skin so pale it seemed to glow. The “cross” on her chest wasn’t a design he’d ever seen before, either; the top was a circle instead of a straight bar.
Mal blinked hard and peered through his scope again. The closer she came, the stranger she seemed.
And then she looked straight at him. And waved.
“What in Hell’s name . . ?” muttered Mal. He lifted his head away from the scope and looked at the woman, then looked around to see if there was anyone else she might be waving at. No, just him and the corpses.
The woman kept on in her steady approach. Mal kept his gun up, but more out of a soldier’s ingrained wariness than a sense of being threatened. The woman might be crazy, but she didn’t act like a threat.
Finally, she was climbing the barrier Mal and Zoë had created with sandbags (and a few bodies), and Mal found himself reaching out to give her a hand up. Her hand was small, smooth, and cool to the touch.
“Thanks, Mal,” she said, and he felt like he’d heard her voice, if only he could remember where.
“What the cao are you doing?” he asked, wondering which of them was the crazy one. He hadn’t discounted the idea that this strange woman was all his imagination running away from his current circumstances.
The woman sat beside him at the lookout point and looked him straight in the face. She was utterly beautiful, by far the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Her skin was perfectly white, as if she was wearing a geisha’s face-paint, but her lips were colored black, and her eyes were also outlined in black kohl, with a little spiral drawn under one. And now that he saw it, her garment was a long, loose gown of black lace, like some antique from Earth-That-Was.
Only one kind of woman, a kind Mal had only ever seen in Cortex melodramas, could be this beautiful and theatrical. “Are you--are you a Companion?” he asked.
The woman smiled. “I suppose I am, but not in the way you’re thinking. I’m your companion right now, Mal.”
“How do you know who I am?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
“I know everyone,” she said. “I talk with them at birth and death, and a few, I even have chats with in between, when the situation calls for it. Or when I especially like them, and I like you, Mal.” The grin she gave him was sweet, impish, and totally out of place in this charnel pit.
“What . . .” The incredulous question Mal had been about to ask died away when he looked fully into her eyes. They were dove-gray, as beautiful as the rest of her, and as he looked at them, he knew. He knew who and what she was. And impossible as it was to believe, it would have been harder still to not believe.
“You’re Death,” he said. She smiled and tapped her nose. “But . . . ain’t you s’posed to be ugly?”
“I think you’re confusing me with dying,” said Death wryly. “That can be an ugly business, I’ll admit.”
Well, if that didn’t catch him flat-footed. He just kept staring at her. She sat there, an attitude of infinite patience about her.
Finally, Mal rallied. “All right, then,” he said, feeling a comfortable bit of ire rising inside him. “Maybe you’d like to explain all this.”
“All of what?” she asked.
“This!” Mal gestured at the valley filled with rotting flesh around him. “Why do you do this? What’s the point?”
Death shook her head. “This isn’t my doing. I am Death; I don’t deal it.”
“That don’t make no sense,” Mal grumbled.
“I am what I am, Mal. Death happens every moment in every corner of the universe. When it does, I’m there to lead the dead through the Sunless Lands. But I don’t put it into people’s heads to kill.” She shrugged. “I don’t need to. Humans do quite well enough on their own in that department.”
Mal wasn’t anywhere near satisfied. “All right, then--who is responsible for all this?”
“Hm. Tricky question. It used to be my brother Destruction, but he kinda quit--oh, eight hundred or so years ago, I think. Has it been that long?” Death’s forehead crinkled. “I think it has. Seventeenth century . . . no, that would make it nine hundred years. Huh. I’ll ask Destiny. He keeps better track of these things.” Mal stared at her, and she got back to the point. “What I’m saying is that no one being is responsible for wars like this. This is something humans do to each other--and themselves.”
Mal looked away, out to the valley. He could believe all too easily what Death had just told him. The savagery of people stunned him sometimes. The savagery inside himself . . .
“So, why’re you here talking to me?” he finally asked. “Why ain’t you out there doin’ what it is you do?”
Death laughed a bit. “I’m everywhere at once, Mal. I can afford to take a little time to talk with a weary soldier. And like I said--I like you.”
“Death likes me,” muttered Mal. “Don’t that just make this life perfect?”
“You’re so very much like your mother,” said Death, amused. “You know what she said when she saw me? ‘Well, shit, I guess that didn’t work out so well!’”
That did sound like Ma Reynolds. Mal suddenly missed her fiercely. He wished he could go back to Shadow, back to Ma, back to the horses and the cattle and the green hills, back to the men and women who’d raised him up right--Copper, Jerome, Lucky Lo, and all the rest.
But the ranch was gone, as was Ma; and the ranch hands had scattered among the worlds, trying to survive.
“You gonna tell me how this makes sense?” asked Mal finally. “You gonna tell me how there’s some big cosmic plan, and all of this fits in?”
“It’s not my function to tell you what to believe. You’ll make of this meeting what you will. And you’ll go on, Malcolm Reynolds. A man like you will fight me to the very end.” She smiled a little. “It’s okay; I’m used to it.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve a notion I’ll be sending more your way ‘fore I’m done with this ‘verse.”
“That you will, no doubt.”
Mal looked down at the soldiers sleeping in the shelter, then out at the field of death again. “At least they didn’t die alone,” he mused.
“Oh, but they did,” said Death. “Everybody dies alone. Each death is as singular as the life that preceded it, and no two people walk the same path to the Sunless Lands. That’s why I’m there to guide them.” She leaned in toward him, and he suddenly realized the air wasn’t at all foul around her. It was clean, like a breeze blowing through a well-scrubbed house. “And you’re not alone, Mal. Did you know that Zoë means ‘life’?”
--and suddenly, she was gone, and someone was jostling Mal’s shoulder.
“Sir?” said Zoë’s voice. “Sir?”
“Huh?” barked Mal, jerking upright. “Where’d she go?”
“Where’d who go, sir?” asked Zoë. The sky was lightening behind her, and Mal realized he must have slept.
He blinked. “No one. Just a dream.”
“You ought to get some rest, sir,” said Zoë. “I’ll keep watch now.”
Ordinarily, Mal would’ve argued with her. At the moment, though, he had other things to think about.
Had it all been a dream? Mal went over the strange conversation as he climbed down into the shelter. Not all of it made a lot of sense. And meeting Death herself was likely a sign he’d been in this stinking valley way too long.
But he couldn’t forget her eyes.
***
Years later, Mal saw her again. This time, he knew that the symbol around her neck was an Ankh, which Inara had told him was an Egyptian symbol of femininity and life when he’d found one while poking through her things. And River, when she’d once felt compelled to discuss the meaning, history, and etymology of everyone’s names, confirmed that Zoë’s name did indeed mean “life” in the Greek.
He was stretched out on the bridge, just shy of reaching Wash’s call-back button, when he saw her. This time, she was wearing a black cheongsam with a flowery pattern embroidered in silver on it.
“Hi,” he said.
She grinned at him. “Hi, Mal. Nice to see you again.”
“Why? ‘Cause I’m so handsome?” he asked, and she laughed.
“I like your ship,” she said. “She’s got heart.”
“I like her, too. Fits that I’d die here.”
Death looked impish. “Well, sorry to disappoint you, but this is just another of your brushes with me.” There was a loud noise from somewhere. “You see, Mal--you’re not alone.”
Then he was opening his eyes in the infirmary, and his crew was gathered around him. His family. Wash’s blood was flowing into his veins, and Zoë looked at the two of them with unabashed love.
Not alone, he thought. And it felt good.
Title: Everybody Dies Alone
Rating: PG-13, Teen, whatever
Characters: Mal, Zoe, Neil Gaiman's Death
Spoilers: Series, "Out of Gas"
Summary: Mal talks with Death in Serenity Valley.
Night fell on Serenity Valley. It was the tenth night since the battle ended. Mal Reynolds had kept count.
Night was better than day here (“better” being a painfully subjective term) for the simple reason that at night, the temperature dropped and the air settled, making the air something like breathable. In the heat of the day, the stench rising from the bodies, the acres of Alliance and Independent corpses, was well-nigh fit to kill a man. Those left alive covered their faces with fabric, all but smothering themselves in a futile attempt to block out the worst of it.
There weren’t many left alive; fewer every day.
Mal sat sentinel over a group of around a dozen such souls. He didn’t rightly know how many there were at any given moment. Two were injured and fevered and didn’t look to last another day. Another was like to die any time. A few more weren’t rightly present inside their own bodies. Unless help came soon, Mal doubted that half of this little knot of humanity would see anything outside of Serenity Valley ever again.
If help didn’t come soon, they’d all be dead or mad. Except maybe Zoë.
Zoë slept now, huddled with two other soldiers. It had been all Mal could do to persuade her to get some rest, to let go for a little while. This watch was his alone. He doubted that at this point they even needed a watch; no one in the valley seemed terribly interested in killing anymore. Not dying was all they could manage.
A day ago, an Alliance soldier, a young fellow no older than Watts, who clung to Zoë in her sleep, had entered their camp. He’d handed over his gun, saying in his high-flown Londinium accent, “Either shoot me or give me a drink. I don’t care which.”
They’d given him a drink, and he now lay curled up a little distance from Zoë and the others. Mal had little pity to spare for anyone, but even less bile. The kid had served the Alliance, and it had failed him same as the Independence had failed Mal. They were all in the same slaughterhouse now.
Unconsciously, Mal’s hand had gone to his cross as the light faded. But the cross wasn’t there; it was somewhere among the bodies, where Mal had thrown it when the sun had risen over the field of flesh and blood of the Alliance’s victory.
Nothing left to believe in for Mal. Just himself, his gun, and Zoë.
Suddenly, movement caught Mal’s eye. He blinked to clear his vision, lifting his rifle as he searched out whatever was moving. For a moment, he thought his eyes were fooling him; but then, there it was. A dark figure was moving among the bodies. Mal pinpointed it and looked through his scope.
What he saw left him absolutely flummoxed. The figure appeared to be a woman in a long, black garment of some kind. Something glinted on her chest, something that looked like a cross from this distance. Was she a Shepherd?
Whoever and whatever she was, she moved with apparent ease and no great hurry, picking her way almost gracefully among the bodies. Mal made out thick black hair flowing over her shoulders, and skin so pale it seemed to glow. The “cross” on her chest wasn’t a design he’d ever seen before, either; the top was a circle instead of a straight bar.
Mal blinked hard and peered through his scope again. The closer she came, the stranger she seemed.
And then she looked straight at him. And waved.
“What in Hell’s name . . ?” muttered Mal. He lifted his head away from the scope and looked at the woman, then looked around to see if there was anyone else she might be waving at. No, just him and the corpses.
The woman kept on in her steady approach. Mal kept his gun up, but more out of a soldier’s ingrained wariness than a sense of being threatened. The woman might be crazy, but she didn’t act like a threat.
Finally, she was climbing the barrier Mal and Zoë had created with sandbags (and a few bodies), and Mal found himself reaching out to give her a hand up. Her hand was small, smooth, and cool to the touch.
“Thanks, Mal,” she said, and he felt like he’d heard her voice, if only he could remember where.
“What the cao are you doing?” he asked, wondering which of them was the crazy one. He hadn’t discounted the idea that this strange woman was all his imagination running away from his current circumstances.
The woman sat beside him at the lookout point and looked him straight in the face. She was utterly beautiful, by far the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Her skin was perfectly white, as if she was wearing a geisha’s face-paint, but her lips were colored black, and her eyes were also outlined in black kohl, with a little spiral drawn under one. And now that he saw it, her garment was a long, loose gown of black lace, like some antique from Earth-That-Was.
Only one kind of woman, a kind Mal had only ever seen in Cortex melodramas, could be this beautiful and theatrical. “Are you--are you a Companion?” he asked.
The woman smiled. “I suppose I am, but not in the way you’re thinking. I’m your companion right now, Mal.”
“How do you know who I am?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
“I know everyone,” she said. “I talk with them at birth and death, and a few, I even have chats with in between, when the situation calls for it. Or when I especially like them, and I like you, Mal.” The grin she gave him was sweet, impish, and totally out of place in this charnel pit.
“What . . .” The incredulous question Mal had been about to ask died away when he looked fully into her eyes. They were dove-gray, as beautiful as the rest of her, and as he looked at them, he knew. He knew who and what she was. And impossible as it was to believe, it would have been harder still to not believe.
“You’re Death,” he said. She smiled and tapped her nose. “But . . . ain’t you s’posed to be ugly?”
“I think you’re confusing me with dying,” said Death wryly. “That can be an ugly business, I’ll admit.”
Well, if that didn’t catch him flat-footed. He just kept staring at her. She sat there, an attitude of infinite patience about her.
Finally, Mal rallied. “All right, then,” he said, feeling a comfortable bit of ire rising inside him. “Maybe you’d like to explain all this.”
“All of what?” she asked.
“This!” Mal gestured at the valley filled with rotting flesh around him. “Why do you do this? What’s the point?”
Death shook her head. “This isn’t my doing. I am Death; I don’t deal it.”
“That don’t make no sense,” Mal grumbled.
“I am what I am, Mal. Death happens every moment in every corner of the universe. When it does, I’m there to lead the dead through the Sunless Lands. But I don’t put it into people’s heads to kill.” She shrugged. “I don’t need to. Humans do quite well enough on their own in that department.”
Mal wasn’t anywhere near satisfied. “All right, then--who is responsible for all this?”
“Hm. Tricky question. It used to be my brother Destruction, but he kinda quit--oh, eight hundred or so years ago, I think. Has it been that long?” Death’s forehead crinkled. “I think it has. Seventeenth century . . . no, that would make it nine hundred years. Huh. I’ll ask Destiny. He keeps better track of these things.” Mal stared at her, and she got back to the point. “What I’m saying is that no one being is responsible for wars like this. This is something humans do to each other--and themselves.”
Mal looked away, out to the valley. He could believe all too easily what Death had just told him. The savagery of people stunned him sometimes. The savagery inside himself . . .
“So, why’re you here talking to me?” he finally asked. “Why ain’t you out there doin’ what it is you do?”
Death laughed a bit. “I’m everywhere at once, Mal. I can afford to take a little time to talk with a weary soldier. And like I said--I like you.”
“Death likes me,” muttered Mal. “Don’t that just make this life perfect?”
“You’re so very much like your mother,” said Death, amused. “You know what she said when she saw me? ‘Well, shit, I guess that didn’t work out so well!’”
That did sound like Ma Reynolds. Mal suddenly missed her fiercely. He wished he could go back to Shadow, back to Ma, back to the horses and the cattle and the green hills, back to the men and women who’d raised him up right--Copper, Jerome, Lucky Lo, and all the rest.
But the ranch was gone, as was Ma; and the ranch hands had scattered among the worlds, trying to survive.
“You gonna tell me how this makes sense?” asked Mal finally. “You gonna tell me how there’s some big cosmic plan, and all of this fits in?”
“It’s not my function to tell you what to believe. You’ll make of this meeting what you will. And you’ll go on, Malcolm Reynolds. A man like you will fight me to the very end.” She smiled a little. “It’s okay; I’m used to it.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve a notion I’ll be sending more your way ‘fore I’m done with this ‘verse.”
“That you will, no doubt.”
Mal looked down at the soldiers sleeping in the shelter, then out at the field of death again. “At least they didn’t die alone,” he mused.
“Oh, but they did,” said Death. “Everybody dies alone. Each death is as singular as the life that preceded it, and no two people walk the same path to the Sunless Lands. That’s why I’m there to guide them.” She leaned in toward him, and he suddenly realized the air wasn’t at all foul around her. It was clean, like a breeze blowing through a well-scrubbed house. “And you’re not alone, Mal. Did you know that Zoë means ‘life’?”
--and suddenly, she was gone, and someone was jostling Mal’s shoulder.
“Sir?” said Zoë’s voice. “Sir?”
“Huh?” barked Mal, jerking upright. “Where’d she go?”
“Where’d who go, sir?” asked Zoë. The sky was lightening behind her, and Mal realized he must have slept.
He blinked. “No one. Just a dream.”
“You ought to get some rest, sir,” said Zoë. “I’ll keep watch now.”
Ordinarily, Mal would’ve argued with her. At the moment, though, he had other things to think about.
Had it all been a dream? Mal went over the strange conversation as he climbed down into the shelter. Not all of it made a lot of sense. And meeting Death herself was likely a sign he’d been in this stinking valley way too long.
But he couldn’t forget her eyes.
***
Years later, Mal saw her again. This time, he knew that the symbol around her neck was an Ankh, which Inara had told him was an Egyptian symbol of femininity and life when he’d found one while poking through her things. And River, when she’d once felt compelled to discuss the meaning, history, and etymology of everyone’s names, confirmed that Zoë’s name did indeed mean “life” in the Greek.
He was stretched out on the bridge, just shy of reaching Wash’s call-back button, when he saw her. This time, she was wearing a black cheongsam with a flowery pattern embroidered in silver on it.
“Hi,” he said.
She grinned at him. “Hi, Mal. Nice to see you again.”
“Why? ‘Cause I’m so handsome?” he asked, and she laughed.
“I like your ship,” she said. “She’s got heart.”
“I like her, too. Fits that I’d die here.”
Death looked impish. “Well, sorry to disappoint you, but this is just another of your brushes with me.” There was a loud noise from somewhere. “You see, Mal--you’re not alone.”
Then he was opening his eyes in the infirmary, and his crew was gathered around him. His family. Wash’s blood was flowing into his veins, and Zoë looked at the two of them with unabashed love.
Not alone, he thought. And it felt good.