A conversation between me and my friend Brit about the word "eccentric," led to River, then to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, then to how each member of the crew would go about amusing the others – either intentionally or unintentionally. We were feeling silly and decided to write a few oneshots. She suggested all the events of these in list form, and so I'm writing them out. I'm very tired and not used to writing the Firefly 'verse, so hopefully this isn't too painful to read! It's very much done for our own amusement. This takes place sometime during the second half of the series.
Oh and yeah, I don't really own anything...
"I'm bored," Jayne said. "With Preacher's arm hurtin' him there ain't no ball to play, no one to work out with..." He dropped heavily onto one of the boxes. "Don't feel like just sittin' around another four days to Haven."
"I see your point," Simon said. "What I wouldn't give to have the Alliance chasing us right now. Or better yet...Reavers! You're right Jayne, being let alone isn't our goal, we ought to just..."
"Hush up, boy," Jayne said. "Just because I ain't wishin' for Reavers to be breathin' down our necks don't mean I can't be bored."
"You got any ideas, doc?" Kaylee asked hopping up on a box next to Jayne.
"Ideas?"
Kaylee jumped off the box – forever a bundle of energy – and raced for the intercom. "This's Kaylee! Everyone come down to the cargo area, we've got something exciting planned!"
"Ah...what?" Simon looked alarmed.
"This is gonna be so much fun, doc!" Kaylee said, grinning, almost skipping up to him.
"What is? What's about all this...fun?"
"For once in my life, I'm with him," Jayne said, "what are you sounding your mouth about, Little Kaylee?"
"I hope this is real exciting," came Wash's voice from the stairs as he and Zoe descended them, "because 'real exciting' was a couple minutes away from happening in our bunk."
"That 'real exciting' can pick up again later," Zoe promised him, grinning. "What's goin' on, Kaylee?"
"Well, seeing as everybody's bored," Kaylee began, clasping her hands together.
"I wasn't bored..." Wash started, trailing off when Zoe elbowed him.
"The rest of us are likely terribly bored compared to the sort of bored Wash and Zoe ain't," Mal said as he approached, the final three following behind. "Even Inara, seeing as we're in deep space."
Book raised his eyebrows, but the captain was grinning in Inara's direction and her eyeroll seemed almost playful...odd for them, but then again Mal hadn't specifically insulted her job, only stated the obvious fact that of the nine of them, Wash and Zoe were the only ones with truly regular sex lives. And Book was probably the only one that never minded.
"Did you have something in mind, Kaylee?" Book asked the mechanic.
She grinned. "When I was growing up my daddy'd have everyone at the shop do impromptu entertainment to keep up morale. And tonight I was thinkin' 'hey! Serenity can do it too!'" She grinned broadly, looking around the room at the eight expressions that varied greatly in their apparent level of amusement at Kaylee's plan.
The one to break the silence was River. "I like it!" she piped up, grinning.
"Hey, I'm down," Zoe said, "for watchin'."
"I could do shadow puppets!" Wash said, suddenly appearing excited.
"Yay!" Kaylee said, rubbing her hands together. The rest of the crew shifted around, some sitting on the boxes of cargo, Inara and Book on the stairs, River on the floor in front of them.
"What's going on?" Jayne asked again, still appearing confused.
"We're going to take turns entertaining each other," Kaylee said. "Simon will go first."
"Me?"
Mal looked amused, "c'mon doc, you gotta have yourself a funny bone somewhere under those sweater vests."
"I suppose I could tell a joke or two," Simon said, running a hand through his hair.
"Yeah, go on there, Doctor," Kaylee said. "Tell us a joke!"
Simon cleared his throat, grinning in embarrassment. "Okay, so, um...there's a mollusk and a sea cucumber, and the mollusk walks up...well, he swims up...wait!" Simon held up a finger, "neither of them were walking. Okay, starting over, there's a mollusk and a sea cucumber..."
"A what and a what?"
Simon looked at Jayne nervously. "I...uh...I heard it somewhere..." he let out a deep breath, "but I don't actually remember how it ends so just...forget about that one...okay!" He clapped his hands once. "Here's one from medical school. So there's this guy, Sylvester, and he's transferring from this big city to a job in a smaller town, now in the big city, you know, there are...medical buildings everywhere, all sorts of procedures that can be done, and Sylvester's had tests upon tests for various medical afflictions, he's on several meds above what we would normally prescribe to an individual, and he goes into his new doctor, and the new doctor stares at him for several moments, then says...'well, you certainly look better in person than you do on paper'!"
River broke the uncomfortable silence. "That joke was terrible."
"River," Book said.
"I can read your mind," she reminded him.
"Do you have anything you'd like to do, River?" Inara asked.
"Don't ask her that, woman," Jayne said, "she'll take another knife to me!"
River turned to Jayne and stuck her tongue out at him, then spun to face where Mal and Zoe were standing. And she began to sing.
"Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me! First cabin and captain's table, regal company! Whenever I'm bored I travel abroad but ever so properly!"
Kaylee and Wash looked at each other, silently confirming that they had no idea what was coming out of River's mouth. They turned to Simon for an explanation.
"It's..." he shrugged. "It's a song from a classic movie from Earth-That-Was."
River began to dance, prancing around the space, twirling, circling Kaylee, moving on to slip behind Jayne, on to Wash and Zoe.
"The hands that hold the scepters, every head that holds a crown, they'll always give their all for me; they'll never let me down. I'm on my way to far away tah tah and toodle-doo, and fare thee well, and Bon Voyage, arrivederci too!"
"This a classic?" Zoe asked, eyebrows raised. She looked to Wash to return her expression, and upon finding her husband bobbing his head along to the music, seeming thoroughly entertained, she turned to her other side, where the expression was matched by Mal.
"It's an old film even for Earth-That-Was," Inara said, leaning back slightly as River's twirling caused the bottom of her skirt to fly up near the companion's face. "It's called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It's about a flying car."
"Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me! Oh rumpety tumpety didity didity dee dee dee dee dee! Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me! First cabin and captain's table regal company!"
River stopped and bowed at Mal, grinning playfully before spinning across the floor again.
"When I'm at the helm the world is my realm, and I do it stylishly! Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh!"
River dropped into the splits, throwing her head back and grinning.
Inara, Kaylee, and Wash began clapping, the pilot throwing in an enthusiastic whoop.
Jayne eased himself over to the stairs and sat down next to Inara. "You going next, 'Nara? I was thinkin'..." he grinned. "Speaking of 'bang bang,' maybe you got some whorein' stuff you could tell us?" He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Inara held her glare for several seconds, and then...
"Ow, ow, ow! Stop it!"
Jane was flat on his stomach, head turned to the side so his left cheek pressed hard against the floor. His arm was twisted behind him, not excruciatingly so, but close enough to that point that he was worried to struggle. He felt Inara's foot on his back, wondering how in the Hell she'd managed to knock him into this position in mere seconds, and so calmly too, as if it was nothing, as if she'd somehow managed the art of gracefully knocking someone flat.
It certainly was something, though, not a response expected from the resident Companion, and Zoe was proving it as such, laughing so hard she needed Wash to keep her on her feet. Book's eyebrows were so high they almost contributed to what River would call his alarming amount of hair, and both Simon and Kaylee had their hands over their mouths in attempts to seem unamused.
"I'm sorry! I don't need to hear yer sexin' stories!"
"Ever?"
"Ever! Ever! Let me up, woman!"
"Let you up..." Inara prompted.
"Please! Okay?"
Zoe's laughter turned into an all out cackle. Wash, attempting to steady her and control his own amusement at the same nearly flipped right over one of the three foot by three foot boxes next to him.
"Alright," Inara said, shrugging. "I suppose..." she released Jayne's arm and stepped back. He jumped to his feet, glared, then cleared his throat. "So what are you going to do about entertainin' us, 'Nara?"
"Oh, I think she just covered it," Mal said, coughing to get his voice under control.
"Effortlessly fulfilling her duty, as usual," Kaylee said, nodding at her friend. Inara smiled and stepped over to Kaylee, pulling the younger girl into a hug.
"So, after the...presentations...of these two lovely ladies," Wash said, "who wants to be the one to follow that?" He smiled and looked around. "Me? Okay!" He jumped up, running to the end of the room to switch on a light. "Now this," he said, "is your run of the mill triceratops...he's just lumbering through the field, looking about for a predator..."
Everyone jumped as the sounds of a heavy creature walking through a meadow filled the room. Wash looked the most alarmed, looking around wildly.
"Shepherd," River said.
He shrugged. "I did some impressions in my younger days."
River started giggling.
"What?" Simon asked. "What, River?"
"Do it out loud!" She begged Book. "Out loud!"
Wash had changed the dinosaur to a terrifying looking Tyrannosaurus Rex. Book imitated what was believed to be what the reptile sounded like. Kaylee and Simon howled along with River.
Then the lights flickered out, first the one Wash had just turned on, then the rest of them. There was silence for a moment. "Well, that's alarming," Mal said.
"I got it," Kaylee said, the sound of her boots telling everyone she'd crossed the room. There were some clicks, some buzzing noises, and then a heavy thud. "I'm okay!"
"Kaylee?" Inara asked.
"Just a moment!" There was some more clicking. "Okay, three...two..."
"Uh oh," River said.
"One!"
Lights flooded the cargo area, and almost everyone jumped. Jayne stood in the middle of all of them, laden with a good half dozen guns.
"It's not show and tell, Jayne" Zoe said.
"Well if Doc got to tell that piss poor joke I get to show off my guns," the said firmly. "Starting with this small little girl right here and leading up to Vera."
"Is it bad that I'm relieved that this is what he's showing us?" Simon asked, leaning over to whisper to Kaylee. She smirked.
"Now this little baby right here," Jayne said, holding up the smallest gun. "I've taken out seventeen with her, she's straight and true, and let me tell you when the little shot in here hits the flesh in just the right spot..."
"I'm ready to re-visit 'real exciting'."
Zoe turned to her husband. "I was just thinkin' the same thing."
"Wish I could come," Kaylee said. "Not! Not in a weirdish way," she clarified. "But in a..."
"Hey, if you wanna leave, just leave!" Jayne said. "I ain' gon' show my guns to folk don't care. It's insulting!"
"Bye," Simon said, spinning on his heel and walking toward the stairs. Inara went after him. Kaylee ran after Inara. Mal followed the lot of them, telling Kaylee that if she thought she was going to get Inara to play at her hair before she figured out exactly why the lights had gone out there'd be dues to pay.
Jayne watched them go, then turned to the remaining crew member and grinned. "Preacher, you are about to learn yourself an awful lot about guns!"