I guess I was just in a weird writing mood today. I felt like doing anger and violence, experimenting with trying to portray evil and hate, and madness. I don't consider myself particularly good at any of these things in writing, so this little story was basically practice. I'm pleased with the way it turned out so I decided to go ahead and upload. I only recently saw 'Serenity' and part of the Firefly series, so I can only hope I have important details right. If I messed up something that is going to drive Firefly fans inane feel free to let me know, and yeah, sorry about that.
Something about the line in Serenity, referring to innocent people being killed in the sky, and then in response Mal's line "you have no idea how true that is," somehow got me thinking.
I must be responsible here and warn about both spoilers for "Serenity" and about some pretty excessive violence through the entire story. There is blood and a couple of good beatings involved as well as references to killing.
Oh and of course the obligatory *I do not own the movie the TV series of its characters. I just borrowed a couple of 'em for fun. I'll give 'em back.*
Captain Malcolm Reynolds took a second to lean against a wall to catch his breath and think, assessing the situation. Only a second though and he was back to standing up straight, his eyes wide open, ears listening, paying attention for any sound or sign of motion. Serenity's kitchen, in which he stood now, was slightly trashed but such messes were simple enough to clean up. Backing up a step, he kicked a cooking pot out of his way across the floor with his left boot. His other foot crunched over the smashed bits of what were once a china bowl and a coffee mug. It was the blood on the floor and the edge of the door that made him mad. He pushed the annoyance from his mind. There would be time to wipe up a few bloodstains later.
He looked back toward the cupboards, to the one lone Reaver seated securely in an old wooden chair, hands and feet bound tightly with a length of industrial chain and fastened tightly to a drainpipe behind it. He smiled to himself at his accomplishment in capturing the creature, at securing it, and at his assurance that one alone and tied up like that could not exactly get itself free easily. The thing was still unconscious anyway, knocked out by the well placed blow to the head. It was a female, that much was clear even through the bloodied face and ragged loosely fitted heavy clothing. Not very big either compared to others he'd had run ins with. He'd knocked her out easily enough with that piece of the wreckage of her ship. Still though he had no illusions about his own safety and that of his crew. She'd been armed when he found her. Thinking again he booted the long jagged bloodstained blade he had taken from her, out into the hallway, kicking its wooden handle.
"Sir..." Zoe was arguing with his reasoning, disagreeing from the doorway. "If that creature gets loose in here, the whole crew will be ripped to pieces and worse, then of course the ship will be taken back to some raiding party as a prize."
Mal only kicked the cooking pot again for no real reason at all.
"Not gonna get loose."
"And you are sure about that? Why don't you just shoot it dead? The only safe ones are the dead ones."
Mal turned around to face her, never fully taking his attention off his deadly captive either. "I don't want to kill this one. Well not yet. Not saying I won't. But I want to question her first. There are answers to be had."
"Sir you know I support your decisions and will always back you up, but I must still make it known that I consider this is a real bad idea."
"Duly noted," Mal muttered.
"Look at her face," Zoe commented then, speaking with a mixture of shock and disgust at the state of the thing. Few, including either of them had ever really gotten a good close look at a Reaver while it was not bent of killing anything in its path. Their faces always seemed to be bloody and damaged, in various degrees of injury, but were it always quite that bad?
"This was entirely self-inflected," Mal explained shaking his head in disbelief as he relayed the information. "I found her at the controls of that crashed ship. I guess she'd been the one flying. Bashing her own face against the control board in some kind of rage when I found her alive. They do that, constantly smash up and injure their own bodies. I thought she'd knock herself out and save me the trouble. I guess she was mad about crashing the ship."
He asked her to leave him them, to go to her room and lock herself in. His first mate shook her head at him, hardly bothering to hide her doubt about his sanity, but she followed his directions anyway and wandered away slowly.
Out of nowhere the Reaver's head shot upright and her eyes snapped open wide, staring straight ahead. There was a second, a very brief second that she showed some tiny sign of confusion, of complete disorientation. In the next second though her look was only one entirely of utter rage and fury. For many long seconds and then at least a couple of minutes, she screamed and shrieked like nothing a human would ever forget, pulling against the heavy chain and rocking the wooden chair loudly and dangerously. When the creature failed to free herself she only screamed with greater rage. Finally she stopped trying to move and only sat staring Mal down with eyes that reflected only a state far beyond insanity and madness. Her mouth, dripping blood from her earlier rage against her control panel, turned up in an animalistic snarl, showing horribly pointed teeth. Mal promptly grabbed her firmly by her hair and slammed her head backwards against the drainpipe.
"Oh shut up," he snapped, after letting her rage and shriek and growl for more than long enough. He reached for a dining chair, turned it backward and sat in it, learning over the back of it and looking at her from barely a meter away. "You may insist and snarling and screaming like some disgusting trapped animal, but I know you can do better than that. You can understand me. You are not stupid, just deranged. Not used to your pray talking back? Not used to someone looking at you without running."
The Reaver only flew into another fit of shrill screams of madness, before she started to simply growl her threatening intent again. Her eyes didn't even blink as she started him down continuously, her expression showing nothing but disgust, hate, and some odd kind of nothingness.
Mal responded by standing up, pushing his chair away, balling up his right hand into a good fist and plowing her across the side of her bloodied face. When she growled loudly in answer to that, he hit her again harder. Then his left hand followed suit.
"See, my father told me once, never just go around mindlessly hittin' girls. But then you are hardly a girl. You might have been once, but now you are just this... snarling beast. Better off crushed under the feet of civilized folk, killed on sight for sake of peace and mercy. Can't let you walk away from this, you'd kill us all. That's what you do, what you know how to do, destroy and kill and chase down anything weak, anything scared. How do you like it then, being the one that's trapped, cornered, staring down your own doom with no way to fight back?"
He paused for a moment, calmed down, and then standing the chair up he took a seat again.
"You know, I don't think you are even scared to die. I think you chase after death like some long lost old friend. You obsess of it, feed on the thought of it. Not like the helpless victims you and your friends drag away to torture before you kill and eat their body parts. They stare up at you wide eyed with terror, shaking and screaming, begging for their lives, begging for a way out of their fate. You enjoy the screaming and terror of course. I've come to think it's almost a game to your kind, see who can catch one the fastest, who can inflict the worse kind of pain."
His own words had made him so angry that he stood up and hit her again, driving each fist into her face at least a couple of times before his boot landed a firm kick in her knees. It was only finding himself board with repeatedly punching someone helplessly tied up, that made him stop so soon.
"Okay," he said. "Here's the thing. I brought you in here because I am genuinely curious about a few things. I want to hear your side in all this. You must have some perspective. Some say you are just mindless now, swarming through the galaxy knowing only to kill, to hunt, to survive. But see I'm not so sure I share that view. You fly ships, you organize, and you obviously function within some social structure. Hey even just deciding who will raid which planet when and who gets what, who rides with what party, and who gets to drive, well that would take some decent awareness. You're pretty good at growling and snarling like a mindless beast, but I think you can talk when you want to."
The Reaver stopped her noise and her eyes lowered a little. Could it be possible, Mal wondered, that she was considering, thinking, formulating some kind of coherent response?
"Well come on then," he demanded of her sharply. "Say something. Speak to me!"
She lifted her eyes and glared at him again, but made not a sound. He supposed he should count his blessings. While she was obviously not willing to talk, at least she was not shrieking and growling anymore either.
Mal dared to turn away from her for a moment. Acting as quickly as he could knowing he should not take his eyes off her at all, he reached for a coffee mug and filled it with cold water from the dispenser. Carrying it back, he held the cup to her mouth. He wondered to himself, why exactly he was moved to do her this act of kindness in the first place. He had to admit to himself that the Reavers and his feelings toward them had confounded him since digging up their secret on Miranda. This one terrified him as much as any of them did, and he was no less terrified then he might have been long before. He hated her and all of her kind for their endless torment of the outer planets, and the trail of carnage that turned up with increasing frequency. But there was much more. A kind of understanding. A realization that it was not quite their fault that they were what they were, that they had not always been that.
She drank from the cup he held for her. Clearly she was thinking only of her own need for water, drinking the cup almost too fast for him to tilt it up further.
Her eyes were blue, Mal saw, while she was distracted from her angry glaring, by drinking the water. Light blue eyes, one bloodshot and the other watery probably from her own self injury on her control panel. Her hair was as un-kept as could possibly be, typical of Reavers, seemingly lacking any concept of beauty. It hung limp and filthy, matted over her face, stained with grime, and dirt, and the blood of her victims mixed with her own. He could see it had once been reddish blond. She wore brown pants, torn to tatters, and some heavy black jacket, with rips in both of its sleeves. Her arms showed though the holes in her coat. The left was just simply caked in grime like the rest of her, but the right, was torn open to the bone, red and mangled horribly. The possibly that she had torn her own skin off, could hardly be discounted. "Who were you when you were still human?" he asked her after she had finished the water. She only started at him, and started to growl again. He had not exactly expected an answer, but he didn't care. He went right on anyway, all the while resisting an urge to shake and slap her violently for her animal noises. "You must have been somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, a best friend. You had a name once, a favorite song, a job, a dream of a better future that must have driven you on to Miranda."
The Reaver looked so far beyond enraged, far more even than was typical for a group that lived in a constant state of rage. Mal knew full well she would tear his face off if she managed to free herself somehow by that point. Little doubt that would be only the beginning of her payback for his actions. And after anything that may be simply payback, she would only go on to do what the Reavers were driven to do by their very nature. He knew that even against one small female he may not stand much of a chance without shooting her down quickly. Considering that logic and then considering his own stupidity at not doing so sooner, he reached for his gun clipped to his belt. He picked it up and held it. Fully loaded. Good. He waved it at her, just to show he could. He struck her with its metal handle a couple of times. She showed no fear reaction at all, but shrieked with a sound that was almost psychotic laughter. He belted her across the side of the head with the empty coffee mug, smashing it into a few sharp pieces. Blood poured from her head, but she only went on laughing in his face, showing no reaction at all to the pain it must have caused. He punched her again, slamming her in the face several times and then finally in the chest, clearly knocking the wind of her, but still getting little reaction other than her laughter and growling.
"Say something!" he demanded roughly. "Talk! Speak like a human being."
Blinded with a rage of his own at this defiance and forgetting that he could not expect any less from a Reaver, he picked up the chair he had once been seated in, and threw it against her body with such force a front leg busted right off of it. He thought he heard a couple of her ribs crack but she only roared like a raging beast at the assault, showing her teeth again and making it more than clear she would tear him and his crew to sheds if she got loose. He shrugged. She would have done that anyway and it was not looking like she was going to get loose anytime soon. He beat her with the broken chair leg, slamming the hardwood object into her body wherever he could until she was slightly less conscious, clearly weakening, and still growling and shrieking fury.
"Say something to me in something that resembles anything like human language. This is just getting old, tiresome, and ridiculous. You could have been someone great, useful, beneficial to society instead of this. It's the alliance. Bunch of selfish cowards. Just typical thinking for that pile of conformist windbags. Looking for their perfect society, of perfect little citizens, bending to their mindless ideals. Poisoning the air to get their nice little pacified conformists. Killed a whole planet for their crazy dream of perfection, and hoped the worlds would never know. And here you are then. A monster created at the hands of their greed, their selfishness. It's not your fault. But still I gotta go and kill you because it's the only way left. What goes through that mind of yours? Do you hate them all too for what you became? Do you ever think of what could have been?"
He was still beating on her, soaking her already filthy clothing with blood, even while he admitted that nothing was truly her fault. At some point he had thrown down the wooden chair leg and picked up the cooking pot from the floor, using that as his weapon instead. This was not going to work. It was never going to work, as it made no real sense at all. He held up his gun. His finger was ready on the trigger and he pointed it right at her head, bent on firing at close range. Shoot her once and kill her dead, she thought. The death he would give her was far better than the ones she had brought upon many innocents.
"You smell like fear. It makes me want to kill you more slow." the Reaver said. Her voice was almost that of a human female, even if her speech pattern was off and sounded awful. It took Mal a moment to realize she had actually spoken to him, but when he did realize it his reaction was a mix of contempt for her implied threat, and a sense of victory for making her talk at all.
"Watch your mouth," he finally snapped. He punched her in the mouth only because she had used it to threaten. "I don't take too kindly to threats on my ship. Especially death threats. I'm tempted to let you meet my friend River. Don't suppose you've heard the name yet, but you will as the word gets around. She's learning to be my co-pilot, but we know her better around here as the only human being to ever take on a whole pack of Reavers and live to tell." He stepped back to lean casually against the dining table. He went on rambling. "It was shocking as you might imagine. Little ninety-five pound eighteen year old, in her pretty little blue dress. Scared shaking little thing most of the time. Not all there in the head. Just another little mistake on the part of the alliance. We found her in a room with the bodies of twenty, thirty of your friends, she'd killed with their own weapons. Ya know, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that going out and killing a fleet of Reavers might have been almost a form of self-help in her case. You fear something, might as well go and kill a few to get over it, right. Just sayin'"
The creature had listened to him quietly as he made his speech and threats of his own. A little too quietly he realized, forcing away the panic that seemed to be almost human instinct by that day and age. How the creature had done it was not clear in his panic, but she had managed to free her hands from their restraint chains. No these things were not stupid at all. Many had debated that for years over the outer planets. Driven by savage primal need to slaughter and chase down anything that ran, yes. Capable of smelling terror like some deranged animal yes. But far from stupid. This one he saw with dread had known full well to stop raging and hollering, and struggling long enough to somehow pick the padlock on her chain, behind her back. The open lock wiggled loose as she moved again, and hit the floor with a little clanging sound. He reflected for a fraction of a second on his earlier assurance to his first mate. Just what was it had had said about the creature never getting loose?
He had thought himself fast enough with his gun. Had won many a shootout in his day. But the creature was faster than he remembered they could move. He tried to guess at her next motion, while he readied his gun to fire, but she lunged right for him before it fully registered in his mind that she was standing at all. He hit the floor hard with the creature landing right over him, with shocking force. He coughed and sputtered, the wind knocked from his lungs in the fall. The gun he'd been holding in his hand but hesitant to fire before, was knocked from his grasp.
There was only one of her. Reavers were known well as pack hunters, running with groups, teaming up, coordinating. Surely he could maintain control of only one. It was the pack tendency that made them so darn deadly, he reasoned, assuring himself even as she hissed and roared and growled in his face. One of them, well that would be little more than one of any other person.
She was looking back and forth quickly. Mal made a confidant guess that she knew she was alone, but looked for the positions of her raiding party anyway, simply out of her own pack instinct. Alone though she hardly seemed as disadvantaged as he had so carelessly guessed. The creature that had been somebody once upon a time scratched at his eyes with fingernails that served more as deadly claws than human nails. He turned his head in time, and kicked her hard in the gut, throwing her off with some deal of force.
"Big mistake, little lady," he said, jumping to his feet before he wasted another second. The creature was sprawled awkwardly on the floor, looking from side to side growling and snarling like little more than mindless again. She snatched at his foot when she took a step, and he planted the other of his boots right into her chest. In a second he dragged her to her feet and holding her by the front of her filthy clothing he let the other fist hit her again and again, letting his own rage, some seemingly right and some greatly misdirected, pound her face to much more of a bleeding mess. He screamed his own rage, his own grief over things he did not understand. For at least a minute he knew he was not even saying a thing, only screaming little more coherent meaning than the creature herself, and the rest of her own kind.
"Gets hard to really communicate when you are so far beyond anger that reason seems a distant dream," he yelled finally. He was still beating on the Reaver mercilessly and had no intentions of stopping soon. He grabbed her shoulders roughly and bounced her off the floor time and again. "Maybe I actually see where you are coming from. Maybe when you've lost it all, and finally just gone insane, it makes more sense to growl and scream than to form any real words anymore."
He kicked her in the stomach until she coughed blood. He wanted to stop and just shoot her dead. He was better than this, better than she was. He kicked her again. She hit the floor and he let her fall. She'd only get back up again, stand and fight and scream and attack mindlessly with no thought of her safety for as long as she was alive. It was the way of things. But somehow she didn't get up.
For a moment he saw the look of confusion in her blue eyes. It was a little too easy, to imagine that she might have felt fear of him, that she might beg for his mercy on her. He saw the pain in her face, the struggle to stand up, to do what nature drove her to do. She stumbled to her feet, but only fell back again. He kicked her again and then again. Her blood was beginning to cover the floor around them both. He booted her again hard, this time in the head, and then he reached for the discarded cooking pot. Let the terrible ruined thing that had once been some human being, beg him to stop and new he would.
"This ship will need an ornament, when it becomes my own. Your body will fit nicely on the front." still menacing even so close to her own end.
Mal turned around fast, letting his eyes leave her just long enough to look toward the door, to stop his gun. He made a fast couple of steps to reach down and grab it firmly. He threw the cooking pot down with a loud clang.
"I'm sorry," he said, turning again to face the battered dying creature that snarled hate even then.
He aimed right for the front of her head. She didn't move to stop him. No begging, no fear. Her blue eyes blinked a couple of times, and he knew it was misguided to think it was her humanity showing itself. He pulled the trigger and turned to kick the wall.
