Story Title – Beautiful
Author – Limiculous
Rating – K+
Disclaimer – Don't own. Not making any money. If I was, then I probably wouldn't be writing this. Despite this, do not copy the words that I have written and call them your own. I will be pissed and will call upon my evil voodoo powers to turn you into a rat.
joss-is-god
Jayne Cobb liked pretty things. Not the shiny, frilly stuff Kaylee hoarded away when she was feeling particularly girly, and certainly not the grand elegance of Inara's silk and velvet and incense. His tastes (if a vague inclination in the back of his mind could be called that) went a little closer to Zoe's few sleekly elegant luxuries. To Jayne, Vera was beautiful, deadly and secure, polished, but still whispering of the blood she had shed. He saw Serenity as beautiful, rather like how Kaylee saw the ship, in a patched-up, worn-down, but well loved way.
And River Tam was beautiful.
She could throw a full-grown man, knock him out, or slash him with a table knife, all faster than that desert-snake from back home that had got his brother. That table knife had hurt.
After the doc fixed him up that time, Simon had given him a salve that would take away the scarring. Jayne had hidden the cream behind Alice, the gun named after his Momma, and carefully peeled the scab away again and again to ensure that the scar was as livid as possible.
If River was a different girl, and Jayne a different, richer, man, he would have reported her, and had her thrown into jail.
But his Momma had always told him that when things happen in life that affect you deeply, keep something to remind you of them, and treasure them in your heart— like Mary.
She had scared him, angered him, and he wanted her gone. No way he wanted to see her every ruttin' day. So he did something stupid, and it took a blow to the head to wake him up to that.
But it had turned out okay, eventually, and he had gone back to his bunk and hidden the scar cream and thought.
He had finally come to the conclusion that River was a work of art made by god, and the Alliance had gone and smeared the clay she was made of, and her brother was trying to put her back the way she was. But it wasn't working, and Jayne knew why. River had new pieces that didn't fit in with what Simon remembered, and one of those pieces was the crazy.
But crazy and all, River was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, all danger and death and knowing and mystery and crazy packed into the tiny body of a seventeen-year-old girl.