Fic: Down this Chain of Days, Chapter 8 (Firefly, River/Mal, PG-13)
Title: Down this Chain of Days: VIII. Explain the Life
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3475
Pairing: River/Mal
Summary: For Mal and River, 'happily ever after' takes some work - especially when people from their past keep turning up.
Notes: Chapter title from At Last, by Neko Case, cut text from Lucky Me, by The National.
The second-to-last chapter, though a good chunk of it is what I wrote first.
VIII. Explain the Life
Seems perfectly natural to him, somehow, to think of Shadow when she asks him for home, even though it hasn't been his home for more'n a decade now, and never was hers; even though those are thoughts he's usually none too keen to dwell on, not needing to think on any home other than Serenity. It's almost like he can feel her there with him, riding along through the fields of the old ranch, making memory a little less lonesome for the both of them.
Must be the same strange sense of natural that's made him bring her down to his own bunk, rather than hers; that, or he just wasn't thinking any too hard about where he was going, but either way he's managed to get the both of them safely sitting on the bed, and even if she is shaking like a leaf, she ain't crying, and that's got to be a good sign.
Still, he's not used to seeing her this way, not anymore. Times when she went squirrely over every little thing are long past now, soothed by drugs and security and some kind of understanding of just what kind of horrors had driven her sense away in the first place.
Would have been nice if he'd had a chance to talk to Zoë or Simon, get a read on what the hell had gone on out there. Only so much a man could guess at, even one so well versed in the ways of things going to hell and back as he was.
“Men came after us,” she says, voice all strained and tied up. He might've known she'd read what he wanted, and try and deliver even if it hurt her to do it. “From the Academy. Followed my father, traced him right from Osiris. Waited patient, spiders in a web. Wanted to make prey of us. So I killed them. Killed them all.”
Mal does his best to suppress his thoughts of just what he'd like to do with her father - even if the man hadn't led his children straight into danger on purpose, he had to be one hell of an idiot not to notice he was being tracked across several planets - and thinks instead on the times he's seen River fight for him, for the crew. Always brings her down a bit, especially if there's any killing involved, but never quite this bad, far as he can recall.
“Wasn't the same,” she says, picking up where his thoughts left off again. Strange how he don't really find that so unnerving anymore. “Not like a barfight with thugs. Too complex for thought, have to rely on reflexes, movements that don't belong to me.” The pitch of her voice rises, and he can feel her fingers flexing against his arm, like she's doing her best to hold on to something. “I don't like being that way.”
“Shh, darlin',” he says, holding her tighter. “Did what you had to, ain't nobody gonna blame you for that.”
“Makes me something else,” she says, her voice quavering. He knows the terror and anxiety she's feeling, knows damn well there ain't a thing he can do to stop it for her but give her somewhere to pour it out. “It takes away feeling,” she says slowly, like she's just now able to puzzle it out. “Builds up behind a dam, washes everything away in a wave. Feel nothing but the movement.” She looks up at him with a lost expression he knows all too well, remembers from soldiers who'd done too much killing. “It makes me empty.”
“And that ain't a good thing?” he asks carefully, doing his best to feel out where she needs him to go.
“I never know if I can control it.” She buries her head against his chest, takes a shuddering breath. “Doesn't matter when it's people who deserve hurt. But what if it wasn't?”
Her eyes, when she looks up at him, are brimming with tears, and he can hardly keep control of himself, has to push back the weight of his rage, knowing it won't do her a bit of good to be feelin' that from him right now. “I trust you, River. We all trust you. Know full well you're a person and not a weapon.”
“Maybe I'm whatever someone can make of me. Dangerous. Risky,” she whispers sadly, but she lets him pull her down, lies peacefully enough in his arms.
He's beginning to wonder if she's drifted into sleep when she speaks again. “Mal?”
“Yes, darlin'?”
She curls the fingers of one hand around his, holding on tight. “If it happened - if I couldn't control myself here, if something made me hurt one of you...” she pauses, and he feels his blood freeze, having a good guess at where she's headed. “Would you be able to do it?”
He remembers having this talk, in slightly different form, once before, can still hear Jayne's voice in his mind - She goes wooly again, we're gonna have to put a bullet to her - and even then, even as he'd said, and meant, 'Thought's crossed my mind,' it had made him sick.
“You couldn't do it before,” she says, reading him again, shifting to look at him. “I don't want to be that, Mal. Don't let it consume me. Not ever.”
Course, he knows deep down that it wouldn't much matter. If she went violent and he took her down, he'd like as not never come back from it, be dead just as sure as if he let her kill him. He speaks quickly, wrenching his mind from that path. “That's what you got those code words for. So's that don't have to happen.”
“Might not always work. They didn't have any to use today. Don't know what's in my head - not you, not Simon, not even me. Please, Mal,” she says softly, and he thinks this surely has to be the strangest promise a woman's ever asked him for.
“I'd take you down, if there wasn't any other choice. One way or another.” His thoughts say more, beg her to never mention this again, to leave it to nightmares where it rightly belongs.
He knows she hears from the way she tucks herself right up against him, using her body to tell him right now she's still here, whole and alive. “Thank you,” she says, taking his hand between hers and putting her lips to it.
Though the bunk is silent and still after that, it's a long stretch of time before he feels her relax against him, before he hears the change in her breathing and feels sure enough that she'll stay asleep to untangle himself and head back up into the ship.
Not that he doesn't feel a bit guilty, leaving her there on her own, but he's got a job of his own to do. Never did like having strangers on his boat, and this one in particular ain't like to find much welcome.
***
It takes so long for Mal to make his way down towards the passenger dorms - what with making certain they were free of pursuit, confirming their course with Zoë, and checking up on Kaylee in a suspiciously quiet engine room - that by all rights he should've calmed down some.
But it don't take more than the sight of Simon, with his air of stillness and the shadows in his eyes looking so much like his sister's, to remind him just why he was so riled up in the first place.
“You wanna explain to me why I just had to sit through your sister asking me for a promise to kill her if she should get out of hand?” It's abrupt, Mal knows, and awful unfair to the doc, who so far as he knows hasn't done anything wrong today but go along with River's muddle-headed plan, but there's more emotion than logic in Mal's head just now.
“I - what?” Getting up from the sofa in the lounge, Simon rubs his eyes, looking a good five years older than he had that morning. “Why would she say something like that?”
“That's what I'm askin' you. I've seen her upset over killin' folk before - I know she don't get a lot of pleasure outta fighting. But never like this. She's got herself all worked up again over bein' a danger to the lot of us.”
Simon's mouth opens and closes again without saying a word, the set of his jaw letting Mal know the doc's got plenty of his own anger hiding behind his pretty face. “Our father - he was...shocked, let's say, by River's abilities. I've tried to explain it to him just now, but - well. He flat out said she was dangerous; I can only imagine what more she might have picked up from his thoughts.”
“Take it that much to heart, would she?”
Simon shrugs, all the anger drained out of him like water through a sieve. “She loved him very much.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Shaking his head, Mal whips around the corner, tossing back over his shoulder, “Go on 'n find Kaylee, make sure she knows you're not plannin' on running off. Ain't gonna need you here for a while.”
“Captain - wait.”
Outside the passenger dorms, Mal pauses, waiting for Simon to catch up with him. “You got somethin' needs saying, doc?”
Simon hesitates, looking to the wall as though he could see through it to the man inside. “What are you planning to...he is still our father, Mal.”
Mal's got the urge to respond with something along the lines of gonna give the bastard exactly what he deserves, but the sight of River's face peering at them as she comes down the stairs, sweet and sad and still just a bit sleepy, makes him hold his tongue. “I'm not gonna hurt him. But nobody comes on my boat that I don't meet. And I got me a little curiosity to satisfy. Won't be but a few minutes, I'm sure.”
After a moment, Simon nods, backs away. “He won't like you.”
“Don't much expect him to,” Mal says, walking to the end of the hallway and opening the door.
The man who meets his eyes isn't anything overly special, by his standards - fussily dressed, neat, stiff posture. Puts Mal in mind of what Simon might've been twenty years down the line if he'd stayed in the Core. He doesn't back down though, facing Mal's best glare without a shadow of concern on his face. In that, Mal thinks, he's like his children - too damn proud to be intimidated, the lot of them. He's always harbored some admiration for that quality in Simon and River, but in their father, it's nothing but another mark against him.
“Well now, Mr Tam,” he says, not bothering to sit down, “thought I should come have a bit of a chat with you. We've all agreed it's for the best if I don't introduce myself, leave you knowin' as little as possible 'bout where your children make their home now, for all our sakes. But I figured that don't mean I couldn't stop in, make you welcome for what little time your sorry self is gonna be here.”
Gabriel Tam, Mal finds, is one of those people who can manage to look down their noses even at someone who's standing over them.
“I assume you must be the Captain of this ship then, though I find that somewhat hard to believe.”
“Really now? And here I thought my ship and I made a fine matching pair.”
Gabriel takes a quick glance around the room, raising an eyebrow as his eyes settle back on Mal, chilly as a winter frost. “Indeed, now that I've met you, I certainly agree with that statement. It's only that my children told me - well. My daughter fancies herself in love with you?”
Mal smiles as he pulls up a chair and settles in; if the man wants to be offensive, Mal's had more'n enough practice at that over the years. “Well now, she ain't said it in so many words, but she sure does have a way of actin' like it,” he says, leaning back and putting on his most self-satisfied grin.
“Forgive me, Captain, if I say you're not exactly what I had in mind for her.”
Mal feels his fingers curling into a fist, keeps his voice calm with an effort. “Look, Gabe - can I call you Gabe? - seeing as how, from my point of view, it seems you ain't had much of anything in mind for her these past years but forgettin' she ever existed, you'll forgive me if I don't give a good gorram what you think.”
“Do you think any of this is what we had in mind for her?” Gabriel says, gesturing to the room around them. “That we thought, when we sent our genius daughter off to school, that she would end up what and where she is?”
“What she is?” Mal says, his voice going cold. “Last I checked, River was a who. A woman who'd been thrown away by near everyone in the 'verse who was supposed to care for her. But those of us on this boat are real keen on seein' her as a person, not a thing, so you wanna think very carefully on your choice of words here.”
Gabriel's eyes narrow. “We had no intention of throwing her away. What it would have meant to stand up to those people, to go against the government - it simply wasn't feasible. You don't know.”
“Oh, but I do know,” Mal says, rising from his seat so quickly Gabriel flinches. “I've gone through things for her that you can't even begin to imagine. And I'd be willin' to do it all again, which is a hell of a lot more than could ever be said for you.” The older man says nothing as Mal moves closer, looming over him. “Here's what you don't understand, Mr Tam. Ain't nobody on this boat who wouldn't be willin' to lay down their life for any of the others. Your children understand that, made themselves a part of it. Proven it more'n once, both of 'em. That's the kind of people they are. What I don't understand is how they ever got to be that way, raised by a man who left his daughter in the hands of butchers cause he was scared of losin' his place in the world.”
It's a moment before Mal regains control of himself, moves back to his seat. “Took a long time to convince River there were those as believed the worth of her outweighed any risk she posed. Seems it ain't taken you more'n a day to undo that, so you got anything to say for yourself, give me a reason why I shouldn't shove you out the airlock, best get it out now.”
“Idle threats do not become you, Captain. My children wouldn't stand for such a thing.”
“You really wanna bet on who they've got more loyalty to now? Don't push me,” Mal says, a world of darkness in his tone.
Gabriel sighs, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “They would have ruined us, Captain. Surely you must know what Simon gave up to rescue her - his fortune, his career, his entire future. Frankly, I have no idea how he's managed to keep going all this time. How he managed to get her out of there in the first place, to keep her both safe and under control. Maybe it was easier for him, being younger. Maybe he had more hope, more belief that it was possible to fight the government. But,” he says, looking pointedly at Mal, “those of us with more experience in life know that is a fight you do not win.”
Mal sits back in his chair, crossing his arms. “Yet seems to me that's just what Simon went out and did.”
“And what would have happened to them if they'd found themselves on a different ship? One with a crew less inclined to aid fugitives and more interested in cooperating with the government? How much more difficult do you think it would have been for a family of four to hide themselves, rather than just two? Make no mistake, Captain, I know it can only be by incredible luck that they've managed to survive this long.”
“Luck?” Mal shakes his head. “May have been luck that your boy chose us out of all the ships he could have taken, but since then, luck ain't had a part in it. Been a hell of a lot of work, keepin' them safe and hid. But unlike you, it's work I've been willin' to take on. Cause they're mine now, you understand? And where I come from, somebody threatens you and yours, you fight like hell for 'em. And you never leave someone behind.”
It's the set of Gabriel's shoulders that gives him away, slumping just a bit, like a man defeated, and he avoids Mal's eyes, his voice quiet. “We never meant for it. Any of it. But there comes a time when you have to turn your back on plans and ideas that are obvious suicide. If that makes me a coward, if you think it makes me and my wife poor parents and terrible people, then so be it. But I did come looking for Simon. As soon as a - a friend of ours, in the government, let it be known to us that Simon and River were no longer officially considered fugitives, I started looking. It's simply taken me this long to get anywhere.” He looks up, ghost of a smile on his face. “You people do a very good job of hiding. Especially since I had so little to go on. People out here are...less than willing to talk, I've found.”
Mal snorts. “Then you ain't been bribing them enough.” Running a hand through his hair, he rises, finding he's no longer got the heart to fight with this man. “Look, Mr Tam - when Simon and River first came here, all they had in the 'verse was each other. Now they got the rest of us too, and while I can't speak for them, I don't conjure they'll be any too eager to be leavin' us behind for you.”
He's got a hand on the door when Gabriel speaks again. “Wait.” He pauses for a moment, studying Mal carefully. “Do you love my daughter?”
Shaking his head, Mal lets out a hollow laugh. “What in the name of hell gives you the right to be askin'?”
“She is still my child,” he says, shoulders squared and stiff as a fence post again. “Even after all that's happened - it would be good to be able to tell her mother that River is loved.” There's some spark of honesty in his eyes now, something in his expression that brings to mind River's face, and Simon's, makes Mal's tone softer even if his words ain't.
“You think I'd go to the bother of hatin' you so damn much if I didn't love her?”
He turns away without giving Gabriel the chance to answer, if there's any answer to be made. Figures, though, that the man's daughter has one, and that she's waiting right outside the door to give it.
“You don't say it enough,” River says softly, talking to him like there wasn't anybody else in the room. “But neither do I.”
Shouldn't be any surprise either that she thinks now's the perfect time to take his face between her hands and kiss him, sweet and slow, full on the mouth, a thing that would've been a hell of a lot more enjoyable if he hadn't been half expecting to hear the protests of an angry father at any second.
“I'm sorry,” she says, fingers still warm against his temples, helm-calloused thumbs stroking over his cheekbones. As a way of saying I love you, he's gotta admit it's absolutely ridiculous - and, coming from River, the biggest admission he's likely to get.
“It's alright, darlin',” he says and takes her by the hand, leading her out and away without a glance back.
Chapter 7 - Master Post - Chapter 9
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3475
Pairing: River/Mal
Summary: For Mal and River, 'happily ever after' takes some work - especially when people from their past keep turning up.
Notes: Chapter title from At Last, by Neko Case, cut text from Lucky Me, by The National.
The second-to-last chapter, though a good chunk of it is what I wrote first.
VIII. Explain the Life
Seems perfectly natural to him, somehow, to think of Shadow when she asks him for home, even though it hasn't been his home for more'n a decade now, and never was hers; even though those are thoughts he's usually none too keen to dwell on, not needing to think on any home other than Serenity. It's almost like he can feel her there with him, riding along through the fields of the old ranch, making memory a little less lonesome for the both of them.
Must be the same strange sense of natural that's made him bring her down to his own bunk, rather than hers; that, or he just wasn't thinking any too hard about where he was going, but either way he's managed to get the both of them safely sitting on the bed, and even if she is shaking like a leaf, she ain't crying, and that's got to be a good sign.
Still, he's not used to seeing her this way, not anymore. Times when she went squirrely over every little thing are long past now, soothed by drugs and security and some kind of understanding of just what kind of horrors had driven her sense away in the first place.
Would have been nice if he'd had a chance to talk to Zoë or Simon, get a read on what the hell had gone on out there. Only so much a man could guess at, even one so well versed in the ways of things going to hell and back as he was.
“Men came after us,” she says, voice all strained and tied up. He might've known she'd read what he wanted, and try and deliver even if it hurt her to do it. “From the Academy. Followed my father, traced him right from Osiris. Waited patient, spiders in a web. Wanted to make prey of us. So I killed them. Killed them all.”
Mal does his best to suppress his thoughts of just what he'd like to do with her father - even if the man hadn't led his children straight into danger on purpose, he had to be one hell of an idiot not to notice he was being tracked across several planets - and thinks instead on the times he's seen River fight for him, for the crew. Always brings her down a bit, especially if there's any killing involved, but never quite this bad, far as he can recall.
“Wasn't the same,” she says, picking up where his thoughts left off again. Strange how he don't really find that so unnerving anymore. “Not like a barfight with thugs. Too complex for thought, have to rely on reflexes, movements that don't belong to me.” The pitch of her voice rises, and he can feel her fingers flexing against his arm, like she's doing her best to hold on to something. “I don't like being that way.”
“Shh, darlin',” he says, holding her tighter. “Did what you had to, ain't nobody gonna blame you for that.”
“Makes me something else,” she says, her voice quavering. He knows the terror and anxiety she's feeling, knows damn well there ain't a thing he can do to stop it for her but give her somewhere to pour it out. “It takes away feeling,” she says slowly, like she's just now able to puzzle it out. “Builds up behind a dam, washes everything away in a wave. Feel nothing but the movement.” She looks up at him with a lost expression he knows all too well, remembers from soldiers who'd done too much killing. “It makes me empty.”
“And that ain't a good thing?” he asks carefully, doing his best to feel out where she needs him to go.
“I never know if I can control it.” She buries her head against his chest, takes a shuddering breath. “Doesn't matter when it's people who deserve hurt. But what if it wasn't?”
Her eyes, when she looks up at him, are brimming with tears, and he can hardly keep control of himself, has to push back the weight of his rage, knowing it won't do her a bit of good to be feelin' that from him right now. “I trust you, River. We all trust you. Know full well you're a person and not a weapon.”
“Maybe I'm whatever someone can make of me. Dangerous. Risky,” she whispers sadly, but she lets him pull her down, lies peacefully enough in his arms.
He's beginning to wonder if she's drifted into sleep when she speaks again. “Mal?”
“Yes, darlin'?”
She curls the fingers of one hand around his, holding on tight. “If it happened - if I couldn't control myself here, if something made me hurt one of you...” she pauses, and he feels his blood freeze, having a good guess at where she's headed. “Would you be able to do it?”
He remembers having this talk, in slightly different form, once before, can still hear Jayne's voice in his mind - She goes wooly again, we're gonna have to put a bullet to her - and even then, even as he'd said, and meant, 'Thought's crossed my mind,' it had made him sick.
“You couldn't do it before,” she says, reading him again, shifting to look at him. “I don't want to be that, Mal. Don't let it consume me. Not ever.”
Course, he knows deep down that it wouldn't much matter. If she went violent and he took her down, he'd like as not never come back from it, be dead just as sure as if he let her kill him. He speaks quickly, wrenching his mind from that path. “That's what you got those code words for. So's that don't have to happen.”
“Might not always work. They didn't have any to use today. Don't know what's in my head - not you, not Simon, not even me. Please, Mal,” she says softly, and he thinks this surely has to be the strangest promise a woman's ever asked him for.
“I'd take you down, if there wasn't any other choice. One way or another.” His thoughts say more, beg her to never mention this again, to leave it to nightmares where it rightly belongs.
He knows she hears from the way she tucks herself right up against him, using her body to tell him right now she's still here, whole and alive. “Thank you,” she says, taking his hand between hers and putting her lips to it.
Though the bunk is silent and still after that, it's a long stretch of time before he feels her relax against him, before he hears the change in her breathing and feels sure enough that she'll stay asleep to untangle himself and head back up into the ship.
Not that he doesn't feel a bit guilty, leaving her there on her own, but he's got a job of his own to do. Never did like having strangers on his boat, and this one in particular ain't like to find much welcome.
***
It takes so long for Mal to make his way down towards the passenger dorms - what with making certain they were free of pursuit, confirming their course with Zoë, and checking up on Kaylee in a suspiciously quiet engine room - that by all rights he should've calmed down some.
But it don't take more than the sight of Simon, with his air of stillness and the shadows in his eyes looking so much like his sister's, to remind him just why he was so riled up in the first place.
“You wanna explain to me why I just had to sit through your sister asking me for a promise to kill her if she should get out of hand?” It's abrupt, Mal knows, and awful unfair to the doc, who so far as he knows hasn't done anything wrong today but go along with River's muddle-headed plan, but there's more emotion than logic in Mal's head just now.
“I - what?” Getting up from the sofa in the lounge, Simon rubs his eyes, looking a good five years older than he had that morning. “Why would she say something like that?”
“That's what I'm askin' you. I've seen her upset over killin' folk before - I know she don't get a lot of pleasure outta fighting. But never like this. She's got herself all worked up again over bein' a danger to the lot of us.”
Simon's mouth opens and closes again without saying a word, the set of his jaw letting Mal know the doc's got plenty of his own anger hiding behind his pretty face. “Our father - he was...shocked, let's say, by River's abilities. I've tried to explain it to him just now, but - well. He flat out said she was dangerous; I can only imagine what more she might have picked up from his thoughts.”
“Take it that much to heart, would she?”
Simon shrugs, all the anger drained out of him like water through a sieve. “She loved him very much.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Shaking his head, Mal whips around the corner, tossing back over his shoulder, “Go on 'n find Kaylee, make sure she knows you're not plannin' on running off. Ain't gonna need you here for a while.”
“Captain - wait.”
Outside the passenger dorms, Mal pauses, waiting for Simon to catch up with him. “You got somethin' needs saying, doc?”
Simon hesitates, looking to the wall as though he could see through it to the man inside. “What are you planning to...he is still our father, Mal.”
Mal's got the urge to respond with something along the lines of gonna give the bastard exactly what he deserves, but the sight of River's face peering at them as she comes down the stairs, sweet and sad and still just a bit sleepy, makes him hold his tongue. “I'm not gonna hurt him. But nobody comes on my boat that I don't meet. And I got me a little curiosity to satisfy. Won't be but a few minutes, I'm sure.”
After a moment, Simon nods, backs away. “He won't like you.”
“Don't much expect him to,” Mal says, walking to the end of the hallway and opening the door.
The man who meets his eyes isn't anything overly special, by his standards - fussily dressed, neat, stiff posture. Puts Mal in mind of what Simon might've been twenty years down the line if he'd stayed in the Core. He doesn't back down though, facing Mal's best glare without a shadow of concern on his face. In that, Mal thinks, he's like his children - too damn proud to be intimidated, the lot of them. He's always harbored some admiration for that quality in Simon and River, but in their father, it's nothing but another mark against him.
“Well now, Mr Tam,” he says, not bothering to sit down, “thought I should come have a bit of a chat with you. We've all agreed it's for the best if I don't introduce myself, leave you knowin' as little as possible 'bout where your children make their home now, for all our sakes. But I figured that don't mean I couldn't stop in, make you welcome for what little time your sorry self is gonna be here.”
Gabriel Tam, Mal finds, is one of those people who can manage to look down their noses even at someone who's standing over them.
“I assume you must be the Captain of this ship then, though I find that somewhat hard to believe.”
“Really now? And here I thought my ship and I made a fine matching pair.”
Gabriel takes a quick glance around the room, raising an eyebrow as his eyes settle back on Mal, chilly as a winter frost. “Indeed, now that I've met you, I certainly agree with that statement. It's only that my children told me - well. My daughter fancies herself in love with you?”
Mal smiles as he pulls up a chair and settles in; if the man wants to be offensive, Mal's had more'n enough practice at that over the years. “Well now, she ain't said it in so many words, but she sure does have a way of actin' like it,” he says, leaning back and putting on his most self-satisfied grin.
“Forgive me, Captain, if I say you're not exactly what I had in mind for her.”
Mal feels his fingers curling into a fist, keeps his voice calm with an effort. “Look, Gabe - can I call you Gabe? - seeing as how, from my point of view, it seems you ain't had much of anything in mind for her these past years but forgettin' she ever existed, you'll forgive me if I don't give a good gorram what you think.”
“Do you think any of this is what we had in mind for her?” Gabriel says, gesturing to the room around them. “That we thought, when we sent our genius daughter off to school, that she would end up what and where she is?”
“What she is?” Mal says, his voice going cold. “Last I checked, River was a who. A woman who'd been thrown away by near everyone in the 'verse who was supposed to care for her. But those of us on this boat are real keen on seein' her as a person, not a thing, so you wanna think very carefully on your choice of words here.”
Gabriel's eyes narrow. “We had no intention of throwing her away. What it would have meant to stand up to those people, to go against the government - it simply wasn't feasible. You don't know.”
“Oh, but I do know,” Mal says, rising from his seat so quickly Gabriel flinches. “I've gone through things for her that you can't even begin to imagine. And I'd be willin' to do it all again, which is a hell of a lot more than could ever be said for you.” The older man says nothing as Mal moves closer, looming over him. “Here's what you don't understand, Mr Tam. Ain't nobody on this boat who wouldn't be willin' to lay down their life for any of the others. Your children understand that, made themselves a part of it. Proven it more'n once, both of 'em. That's the kind of people they are. What I don't understand is how they ever got to be that way, raised by a man who left his daughter in the hands of butchers cause he was scared of losin' his place in the world.”
It's a moment before Mal regains control of himself, moves back to his seat. “Took a long time to convince River there were those as believed the worth of her outweighed any risk she posed. Seems it ain't taken you more'n a day to undo that, so you got anything to say for yourself, give me a reason why I shouldn't shove you out the airlock, best get it out now.”
“Idle threats do not become you, Captain. My children wouldn't stand for such a thing.”
“You really wanna bet on who they've got more loyalty to now? Don't push me,” Mal says, a world of darkness in his tone.
Gabriel sighs, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “They would have ruined us, Captain. Surely you must know what Simon gave up to rescue her - his fortune, his career, his entire future. Frankly, I have no idea how he's managed to keep going all this time. How he managed to get her out of there in the first place, to keep her both safe and under control. Maybe it was easier for him, being younger. Maybe he had more hope, more belief that it was possible to fight the government. But,” he says, looking pointedly at Mal, “those of us with more experience in life know that is a fight you do not win.”
Mal sits back in his chair, crossing his arms. “Yet seems to me that's just what Simon went out and did.”
“And what would have happened to them if they'd found themselves on a different ship? One with a crew less inclined to aid fugitives and more interested in cooperating with the government? How much more difficult do you think it would have been for a family of four to hide themselves, rather than just two? Make no mistake, Captain, I know it can only be by incredible luck that they've managed to survive this long.”
“Luck?” Mal shakes his head. “May have been luck that your boy chose us out of all the ships he could have taken, but since then, luck ain't had a part in it. Been a hell of a lot of work, keepin' them safe and hid. But unlike you, it's work I've been willin' to take on. Cause they're mine now, you understand? And where I come from, somebody threatens you and yours, you fight like hell for 'em. And you never leave someone behind.”
It's the set of Gabriel's shoulders that gives him away, slumping just a bit, like a man defeated, and he avoids Mal's eyes, his voice quiet. “We never meant for it. Any of it. But there comes a time when you have to turn your back on plans and ideas that are obvious suicide. If that makes me a coward, if you think it makes me and my wife poor parents and terrible people, then so be it. But I did come looking for Simon. As soon as a - a friend of ours, in the government, let it be known to us that Simon and River were no longer officially considered fugitives, I started looking. It's simply taken me this long to get anywhere.” He looks up, ghost of a smile on his face. “You people do a very good job of hiding. Especially since I had so little to go on. People out here are...less than willing to talk, I've found.”
Mal snorts. “Then you ain't been bribing them enough.” Running a hand through his hair, he rises, finding he's no longer got the heart to fight with this man. “Look, Mr Tam - when Simon and River first came here, all they had in the 'verse was each other. Now they got the rest of us too, and while I can't speak for them, I don't conjure they'll be any too eager to be leavin' us behind for you.”
He's got a hand on the door when Gabriel speaks again. “Wait.” He pauses for a moment, studying Mal carefully. “Do you love my daughter?”
Shaking his head, Mal lets out a hollow laugh. “What in the name of hell gives you the right to be askin'?”
“She is still my child,” he says, shoulders squared and stiff as a fence post again. “Even after all that's happened - it would be good to be able to tell her mother that River is loved.” There's some spark of honesty in his eyes now, something in his expression that brings to mind River's face, and Simon's, makes Mal's tone softer even if his words ain't.
“You think I'd go to the bother of hatin' you so damn much if I didn't love her?”
He turns away without giving Gabriel the chance to answer, if there's any answer to be made. Figures, though, that the man's daughter has one, and that she's waiting right outside the door to give it.
“You don't say it enough,” River says softly, talking to him like there wasn't anybody else in the room. “But neither do I.”
Shouldn't be any surprise either that she thinks now's the perfect time to take his face between her hands and kiss him, sweet and slow, full on the mouth, a thing that would've been a hell of a lot more enjoyable if he hadn't been half expecting to hear the protests of an angry father at any second.
“I'm sorry,” she says, fingers still warm against his temples, helm-calloused thumbs stroking over his cheekbones. As a way of saying I love you, he's gotta admit it's absolutely ridiculous - and, coming from River, the biggest admission he's likely to get.
“It's alright, darlin',” he says and takes her by the hand, leading her out and away without a glance back.
Chapter 7 - Master Post - Chapter 9