Every inch of him screamed power. He was iron muscle, the blunt force of the operation. The definition of masculine was written into the steel ropes of his arms, the brute strength in his hands and the power emanating from his chest. Strong chiselled jaw, barrel shoulders. Like lead. Like the lead in the belt across his chest, he got the job done. It was as simple as that. Someone tried to screw him, or the captain, or the crew over, and the next thing they knew there was an iron fist crashing into their senses.
She was his perfect opposite. She was every inch a slender, delicate object of subtle beauty. She wore those bright, breezy dresses and muttered madness to herself as she swirled to music only she could hear. It was utterly misconceiving. The explosive power in those long, slender limbs and the damage she could do with all that animal instinct all locked up in that amazing brain.
He walked into a room and commanded notice; raw power and naked weapons. It was primitive; the simple need for sex, violence and rowdy drinks. He'd kill a man for starting something, or before he could start something. He'd kill a man for a woman, or if he was getting paid. Especially if he was getting paid.
Beside him, as she so often was these days, she was passed over for inspection by their contacts or clients or the barroom men looking for trouble. She of the slightly mad brown eyes and untended brown locks, the long dresses and bare white feet; they didn't pay her any attention until she became suddenly savage; in a breathy, graceful way even as she tore them apart, a fluid, ghostly whirring of vague positions; like a handful of gunpowder thrown to the wind.
Brute strength coupled with airy elegance. The carved lump of a mercenary shouldn't have fitted so well with the flowing edges of the Reader. He would stand immobile against the storm and she would bend and curve and twist, dancing to its rhythm. He was earth and she was wind, he was a rock and she was a reed. They shouldn't have fitted together with such accurate precision, like a laser-guided scope.
Why did they? Simply because River wasn't a reed, or the wind that made it dance. Jayne wasn't the broad and honest earth, or the powerful weight of a rock upon it. They were killers, the two of them. Life had made them that way, as surely as the Alliance cutting up River's brain, times and trials had carved a killer out of Jayne Cobb. She was mad, but was he any less when he beat an old comrade to death against the stone base of his own figure? Where he was strong, she was powerful beyond imagining. A little fire could trigger an explosion and when lead was swung right, holes could be torn through flesh and bone.
Alone they were dangerous. Just a thick rod of heavy metallic element and a handful of potassium nitrate and charcoal, but together they were lethal; gunpowder and lead. Blunt force propelled by explosive power. It wasn't until lead and gunpowder mixed that things got truly dangerous. It got them out of dangerous situations alive and for most part in one piece. It got them arguments that turned to blows because the challenge was always there; brain versus brawn and strength versus speed.
It got steaming, desperate meetings of slick flesh and tongues while the adrenaline of a job was still running in their veins, just to reassure each other they were alive. It got somehow perfect union; the comparatively brief moment of blazing ecstasy that assured them that they were made for each other. It got a chemical reaction that changed them both, taught them both; he learned trust, and through it loyalty. She learned love, and through it stability.
No matter how hard he racked his brainpan, he couldn't remember when exactly he had started trusting this crew with a blind faith he sneered at in others. It happened in very quick, short, blazing and bloody moments over a very long time. Zoe plugged his slashed artery as brilliant blood pulsed out and she never gave up on him. Mal opened the airlock and hadn't breathed a word to the crew. Simon...well, Simon saved his life when he should have let him die for Ariel. Kaylee was the reason he stuck around Serenity to learn about trust and loyalty that weren't paid for with gold; she was his voice of reason, his little sun out in the black. Inara had taught him respect without even breaking a sweat. Book had quietly befriended him, and never judged. Wash, standing up to him, even though he was terrified Jayne might actually get that chain and wrap it around his head. Then River Tam; the girl, the weapon, the crazy, the dancer, the beauty, the Albatross. She looked at him with brown eyes and saw something in him that made all the painful lessons about leaps of faith and sticking around when things got rough worth it.
River knew love. She saw it in Simon; that he'd given everything for her and would give more than that to keep her safe. It was simple; she was his mei mei and he would die for her. When she came aboard Serenity she learned about other kinds of love too. She saw its effect when Simon looked at Kaylee, even though he was boob about it sometimes. The Mal and Inara love fascinated her; its fiery brilliance they tried to hide even though it burned them both. The Zoe and Wash love affected her; the slow smouldering iron of it that would last a lifetime and sometimes flared so hot it consumed them both. Since that day when she felt a part of that brilliance on the bridge, on one of her crazy days, she learned to stay away when Zoe and Wash burned. It was too strange, too alien, for her mind to cope. Book loved too; he loved peace and quiet places and the Book of Lies and, long ago, a woman who died in a fire fight and he couldn't save her. Jayne was different; the ape-man-gone-wrong could not be capable of love, surely. He was primitive in his needs; sex, food and a tussle would see him a happy man. Until the day she saw him with his guns, carefully and gently cleaning each one with care and attention. Then she saw the soft look when he read the scratchy words from home, sensed his almost child-like happiness as he settled that straw smelling woollen cap on his head. Then she saw, for a brief moment of sanity, his face as she lay on the ground of the bank, battling the coming Reaver's in her mind; he cared.
She wondered what it would be like if the man-with-a-girl's-name touched her the same way he touched his guns. It gave her a thrill of Zoe and Wash.
The love this family had taught her was like a rock; a big monolith that she could cling to when thrown to the wind. Even when the whole world was a storm, when she wanted to become a stone again, it was Serenity that held her. Safe. Strong. Stable.
The trust this family had taught him was like a rope that tied him down, and for the first time, ever, he didn't mind. He'd been falling down a cliff before, and now he had a rope to hold him. And he trusted that rope with everything.
Love. Trust. Stability. Loyalty. They fitted together in the iron belly of Serenity like gunpowder and lead.