Post-BDM fic with a lot of angst. More coming soon, as well as more Dear Ma and Waking Nightmare for those of you following that. As always, reviews feed the muse (and the author loves them, too!). Thanks for reading!
"Well, that was fun," Mal commented wryly as he considered the bodies strewn about the clearing.
"Don't suppose there's some way we can still get paid out of this, do you sir?" Zoe inquired as she idly flipped bodies over with her foot, making sure they wouldn't be any more trouble.
"Nope," the captain answered, regret weighing down his voice. "Fact that it was an ambush makes me think they never meant to pay us. It was a trap." He sighed. "Anything good we can filch?"
"Nothing. These hun dans look as poor as we are." She stepped up next to him and propped her boot on a rock in order to retie the lace. "Have to wonder if we ain't come up against ourselves here," she mused. "Just people trying to survive, trying to feed their families. People like us."
"You know better than to start thinking like that, Zoe," Mal warned her with a hard look. Even if it probably is true. "Anyone we know in that pile? We've done crossed enough people in the Verse that it wouldn't surprise me any."
Her face scrunched up a little at the question. "There was one that looked awfully familiar. Couldn't place why. Over here." She led him to where a sniper had fallen from his tree, a single bullet having neatly removed the back of his head. "You recognize him?" she asked as the captain bent over to peer more closely.
"Hmm..." Awful tall for as young as he looks to be. To have been, he corrected himself. He does look like someone I've met before, though. Why can't I place him? He thought back over the years for several long moments until, finally, he had to give up. With a shrug, he straightened. "Can't say as I remember him, but you're right. That face is rankling at me something fierce." He threw another consternated glance at the dead man. Boy, not man. He can't be more than seventeen or so. How did a kid like that get mixed up in something like this? War's one thing, but this was just a job. The teen's face was permanently locked in a childlike expression that only made the sense of deja vu in Mal's stomach grow deeper. Now I know I don't know any man who's ever looked that innocent. Why do I feel like I've seen him before?
"Good thing Jayne got him early in the fight," Zoe called down from where she balanced halfway up the tree, searching for any loot the kid might have left up there. Climbing back down to the ground easily, she displayed the rifle the boy had carried into the foliage with him. "It's a Callahan," she verified without being asked. "He might have been young, but the way this thing shines you'd think he'd been taking cleaning lessons from our own sniper."
Examining the weapon, Mal had to agree with her. "Even a half-assed marksman could of killed us with this, easy. Especially at such a short range." He smirked. "Looks like Vera's getting a new friend."
"You're going to let him keep that?" she asked languidly, raising one eyebrow. "Worth a grand easy."
Mal shrugged again. "Well, what the hell. We didn't get paid, and Jayne took out half of this posse just from his hiding spot. Suppose that's worth something. Besides, I don't really want to listen to him whine halfway across the Verse about how shiny it'd be up on his wall and how it ain't fair that we're selling it after all the ammo he had to burn to save our hides."
"Probably right," Zoe conceded. "Better to save our hearing."
Speaking of Jayne, Mal thought as he studied the treeline, where the hell is he? Shouldn't take this long to come down off the hill. Almost as quickly as concern began to lick at the edges of his consciousness, the mercenary stepped silently into the clearing, swept his eyes across the carnage, and then grinned widely, patting the gun in his arms.
"You see, Vera?" he spoke aloud to the firearm as he approached. "I told ya it was gonna be a real nice day, now didn't I?" Turning his attention to where Mal stood rolling his eyes at the one-sided conversation, he asked the inevitable question. "We get paid?"
"Nope," the captain shook his head before motioning Zoe forward. "Before you start bitching, though, we did manage to net a little prize when you took out their sharpshooter. Might even let you keep it, if you ask real pretty," he added teasingly as his second in command held the sniper's Callahan out, smirking as she offered it to him.
Jayne's face froze when he saw the gun. He slung Vera around to his back slowly, seemingly without thinking, before he reached one hand forward and almost touched the barrel of the slightly smaller weapon. That's...no. No, it can't be. Just ain't possible. "Is that...is that a Callahan?" he breathed, his brow wrinkling worriedly as he stared.
"You sayin' you don't know?" Zoe cracked, her laughter rising to join Mal's in the moment before she realized that something was wrong with the man in front of her. "Jayne?" she asked, her own expression turning serious as she queried him. "You okay?" I ain't never seen him so still, not even when he's hunting someone. Something's not right. Then he looked up, and the guileless fear in his gaze made everything fall into place. Suddenly, Zoe realized why the enemy sniper had looked so gorram familiar. Subtract ten or twelve years from Jayne's features, give him a clean shave, and erase the muscle that a decade of living hard and dangerously had graced his long, lean frame with, and she found herself staring at the boy that lay dead on the ground a few yards behind her.
"Wo de tien ma," she whispered. Oh, God, no, she found herself praying for the first time in many years. Not this. Not like this.
"Where'd you get that gun, Zoe?" he asked, his voice cracking as he visibly struggled to keep understanding at bay. It ain't, it ain't, it ain't...I couldn't have...I wouldn't never... he wailed mentally, refusing to believe.
"Jayne...honey...I'm so sorry," she murmured, her eyes filling with tears as a shudder went through the man standing in front of her. "Don't-" she started, reaching out as he broke free of his shock to brush past her. He was beyond her reach before she could get her hand up to try and restrain him. She turned to watch him, wetness now rolling freely down her face.
"What the hell's going-" Mal was confounded for the briefest second as his hired gun blew by him, completely ignoring the item in Zoe's grasp and focusing instead on it's previous owner with a haunted look set deep into his features. Then, as Jayne knelt beside the remains and stretched out one trembling hand, shaking his head in negation of what lay before him, the captain comprehended what had happened and stumbled back a half step. Good thing River ain't here, was all he could think as the other man cupped his dead brother's cold cheek. Last thing we need is her going crazy on top of all of this. Can't imagine how heavy she'd be feeling it from him.
Zoe came up beside him and gripped his arm tightly, but neither one could look away from where their partner in crime was now cradling his seventeen-year-old sibling's stiffening body. Jayne sobbed without making a sound, the only indication of his pain the spasms they could see twitching his shoulders beneath his thin t-shirt. Before much time had passed Mal felt his battle-hardened second in command burying her face against his neck, unable to watch any more. A few more voiceless hitches passed across the mercenary's back, and the captain found himself closing his eyes in an attempt at escaping the horror of the accidental fratricide he had witnessed.
He didn't know how long they stood like that, holding each other up while the strongest member of their ragtag family broke into pieces a short distance away, but he would never be able to forget how they were awakened from their stupor. Jayne's gut-wrenching howl of agony reverberated off the hills over and over again, each echo magnifying the primordial torment of the original scream a hundredfold.
If there's a hell, Zoe thought achingly, I reckon that this is what the souls there sound like. Like their pain ain't never going to end, and they know it.
As the final syllable faded into nothingness, Zoe pulled away from Mal and walked haltingly around the dead man's boots. She dropped to the dirt beside where Jayne had slumped, exhausted and desolate, over the figure that he had slaved every day of his adult life to provide for, and waited. When a drop of fresh blood fell from his lowered face, she reached forward numbly and forced his head up until she could see the way his teeth were sunk into the soft skin of his lower lip, tearing at the fragile flesh. If he was feeling physical pain from his mangled mouth, it did not show when he opened his eyes. They were, she noted unwillingly, a darker and stormier blue than she had ever seen them, fighting to contain the bereavement that was wracking every fiber of his body and mind with a self-condemnation that she could not even begin to imagine.
"I...killed...him," he gasped finally, still squeezing the boy tightly as though he believed that holding him close enough might undo the past. She couldn't be certain, but Zoe thought she might have heard something snap inside the corpse when Jayne crushed it to himself, pleading incoherently for someone to wake him up, to make this nightmare stop. All she could do was lean forward enough to rest her hand on the back of his neck, hoping that the simple touch might be enough to keep him anchored to sanity. Before more than a few breaths had passed Mal joined them, gripping the taller man's shoulder with a silent grimace twisting his mouth.
"Why?" The question was so plaintive that they both flinched. "What...how'd he even get here?" The mercenary turned to his captain, the one man he had found in over ten years of wandering that he knew beyond a pale of a doubt he could trust. The one man who wouldn't feed him a line of go se when he asked an honest question. "Why?" he repeated, his face pleading for an answer that made some sort of sense.
It broke Mal's heart to discover that he didn't have that answer. "I don't know, Jayne. I just...don't know." He shook his head to emphasize his ignorance. "If I had known he was here, I swear to you, I never-"
"I know," the gunman replied. "I know that, Mal." He seemed to calm a little as the long minutes ticked by. "It ain't supposed to be like this," he said simply, brushing bloody locks away from Mattie's smooth brow. "Supposed to be the other way 'round. Ain't supposed to be me buryin' him. Wasn't never gonna be that way." His eyes wandered over the ground, his expression completely lost as he pushed himself up and away from the other two and carried the body a short distance. They watched as he set it down and then walked further, stepping fully into the shade of a tall oak tree before he fell roughly to the ground, catching his weight on his hands as his knees gave out.
They scrambled towards him, distress clear on their faces, when he drew his knife out of it's sheath inexplicably. They were too far away to keep him from damaging himself if that was his intention; no matter how fast they sprinted across the clearing, Jayne was an expert killer, and if he was planning a penitential suicide nothing in the Verse was going to stop him. By the time they reached him the carefully honed blade was buried to the hilt exactly where he wanted it, and they could only watch as he pulled it violently crosswise, the metal making a terrible noise as it grated across something hard and ungiving.
It took a moment, but as soon as he realized that the mercenary was stabbing and slashing at the dirt in an attempt to start digging a grave, Mal reached out and clutched his wrist, forcing him to stop. "Be here all night at that rate," he advised gently. "Let Zoe get a shovel from the ship so it can be done right."
"Ain't neither one a your places to be buryin' him. It's mine. He's mine, my kin."
Kin of yours is kin of ours, flashed through Mal's mind, but he knew that the man on the ground might not be in the mood for such a statement right now. He was too focused on the family he'd just lost to be thinking about the one he still had. "We ain't going to interfere, Jayne, we just don't want you to wear yourself out trying to dig a proper hole with a knife. C'mon, now, if you try and do it this way you know it won't be deep enough. Let Zoe get a shovel for you."
He stared at the captain for what felt like an eternity before he finally nodded. "All right," he whispered. "Don't want it done partways. Gotta be right. He deserves the best, always did. Ain't gonna stand by and let him leave with anythin' less."
"Good choice," Mal nearly crooned. "Zoe'll be quick as she can. We'll get him taken care of by night fall, no worries about that." Sending his second in command a meaningful glance that she took to mean she ought to get going after the spade, he began to try and convince his hired gun to move to someplace where they could sit for a while without being in sight of the younger Cobb's corpse. "Vera looks a little scuffed. Bet she could use a cleaning. Maybe it'll help take your mind off of things for a little while. You did a fair bit of work today, earned a rest. Why don't we move someplace a bit cooler than this clearing while we wait on Zoe?"
Jayne's face clouded over. "Vera," he said quietly, a contemplative note in his voice. Pulling the gun around to his front, he stared at it, holding it almost uncomfortably. "I killed him, Mal," he moaned as he fingered the trigger guard.
"I know," he managed past the lump in his throat.
"I killed him...with this." He shook Vera a little for emphasis, looking monumentally confused. Gun I loved took away the brother I adored. Ain't fair. Didn't even have a chance to pick between 'em. I'd a picked Mattie over any gun in the Verse, every time. "I didn't know it was him, Mal." Wouldn't a never hurt him, not knowingly. Kill myself before I did that. "You gotta believe me, I never-"
"Jayne," the captain interrupted as he realized where his gun hand's train of thought was heading. "I know you didn't know. This ain't your fault. This ain't no body's fault, Jayne. You've got to believe that. Was just...a bad situation gone even more wrong. Look at me." When he did, he went on. "I don't hold this against you," he spoke slowly, wanting every word to sink in. "Nobody else on Serenity's going to hold it against you, neither. Nobody, you understand that? It was an accident, and that's all it was. None of us are going to think any less of you for what happened here, dong ma?"
"But..."
"But what?"
"I killed him. Mattie's dead...on account of me." His sunken eyes met Mal's, the lively spark that had always resided within them conspicuously absent. "What kind of a man kills his baby brother, then don't even have the guts to take his own bu lang bu you pe gu1 out of the Verse?"
For the second time that day, Mal just didn't have an answer. Don't do this, he begged silently. Please, please, don't do this to us. Just give it time, and then be Jayne again. We can't replace you, gorram it. Even if we could, I wouldn't have the heart to try. Don't you dare give up. Don't you dare.
1worthless/good-for-nothing ass