Dedicated to Aemilia, for she dedicated one to me, and she dressed up as Serenity, and that was really, really funny. This story's kind of... odd. An experiment in non-linear story-telling. I hated making Inara so weak, in it, but she doesn't have an overwhelming physical presence at all, and anybody can get caught flat-footed, so I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about it. She really is quite itty- bitty, you know. Anyway, there's an essay that goes along with this story, in case anyone wants any explanations for it, so if you're curious, email me and I'll be happy to send it to you. I'm a philosophy major, too, so I really write quite interesting essays. Well, if by "interesting" you mean "dead boring." Oh, and you might kind of have to have read my other story "Down in the Valley," to get part of this one, as it's a direct sequel, in some ways.
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"We are in rats' alley, where the dead men lost their bones."
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It all ran together in the dark, Gulchak's wide, scarred face, bursts of gunfire, Inara's dark, frightened eyes. They took up most of the shuttle's corners. Mal could see them everywhere, in the shadow, in the different, colder blackness through the curtained portholes. It was all over. Everyone was still alive. There wasn't much else to say about it. Too many on his boat were dead already.
"What does she mean to you?" he'd asked, voice as ruined as his visage, and touched the gun to her temple, pressed it through the massed curls, "What does she mean to you, Malcom Reynolds?" he'd asked, like she was a gorram poem or some piece of art or Zen riddle which, in a way, Mal guessed she was. She'd accused him of being inconsistent, said there were so many different Mal Reynolds running around the ship, that it was impossible to pin him down, to ever know what he truly thought. That had to drive her Companion's mind crazy, but she turned his old ranch-hand's mind into corn meal and monkey-shit, too. Her shuttle itself threw him off balance, the incense like a woman's fingers, floating ghostly through the draperies, settling into the places that took him away from exploding shells and rotting friends, for just for a minute, and into the high places on Sihnon where the cool girls lounged in silk and smelled like sherbert and linseed oil.
"What does she mean to you?" Jayne was up above with two guns, a mid-sized repeater named Lucinda and Big Gladys, his favorite 9 mil, a family heirloom. Lucinda stripped the air naked on full auto and a half dozen of Gulchak's men fell. Zoe's shotgun boomed, down the corridor. She was as berserk as Jayne, these days. It was getting desperate. The old outlaw was near to beaten... except... Gulchak backed toward the ramp, one huge arm wrapped around Inara's face, big mag revolver pressed up to her head. She'd been taken by complete surprise. "What does she mean to you, Malcom Reynolds? What does this woman mean?" He had a thick accent, so much like Niska. The old man's face superimposed itself in Mal's memory.
Inara struggled against him, twitched like green flame in a verdant sari, but Gulchak was almost as tall as Jayne and weighed near two stone and a half more, most of it muscle. "I got a shot Mal," Jayne said. He leaned across the railing, leveled Big Gladys.
Gulchak turned and presented 'Nara's writhing form. Jayne wavered; he was no crack shot. Gulchak smiled, "It would be more poetic, no, if your own man blew your lover's brains out, yes?"
"Easy Jayne," Mal said, "easy Dimitri. Can I call you Dimitri, still?" It sounded absurd. It was absurd. Mal holstered his gun and advanced slowly. Zoe's shotgun boomed behind him, somewhere. Gulchak flinched, though Mal was realistic enough to stoop and still thank God, his finger did not. "Easy, easy," Mal said. He nearly crawled, talking like you would to a frightened animal or small child, trying to comfort Inara as much as talk this madman down. "Aint no need for us to get... antsy, am I right?"
"Who is antsy, Malcom Reynolds?" Gulchak said, "I want off this go se boat of yours. If you do not open the hatch, I will blow your ji nu's head off, Malcom Reynolds, you won't taste her sweet ji bai again." He backed toward the hatch, eyes wide. They were a pretty color, near the same color as Kaylee's. Another absurd thing to notice.
"Wo xi wang ni man man," Jayne said, "si dan kuai, dian xia di yu!" He still held Big Gladys on the unfolding drama. She trembled so hard that her huge black eye blurred.
"Jayne," Mal said, making his voice steadier than it had any right to be, "calm down. Call Big Gladys off."
"Ni shi sha gua," Jayne said, but drew the gun back to his ear nevertheless, pointed at the ceiling.
"You're a smart man, Malcom Reynolds."
"I'm gonna open the hatch, now Dimitri," Mal said, "let 'Nara go and just run along home now. Shiny?"
"No. Not 'shiny." He said it like a curse. "I thought you were smart, Malcom Reynolds." She was making little scared sounds. They sounded horrible coming out of such a strong woman's mouth. He could still see her eyes, now, twitching back and forth, from Mal, to Jayne, to Gulchak's gun, and back to Mal. His arm obscured her lips, his heavy sleeve kept her sharp, white teeth from his flesh. "Open up. I'll go out. You pick her up when I'm safe and away, dong ma? She'll be safe too. My word, eh?"
"You're word aint worth a whole lot, Dimitri," Mal said.
"Is it worth less than your whore?" What does she mean to you, Malcom Reynolds? It all came back to that, didn't it? He watched her sleep. What was she worth? All the ships on Londinum, all the spices and silks on Sihnon? Sitting there beside her bed, Mal felt like getting drunk. Book was a good man to get drunk with, but he was dead. It was terribly rude of the old fellow to be dead when he needed to get drunk with him, gorramit, and he had some good whiskey from Persephone in the kitchen, brown and hot, like liquid from the engine. Jayne had a tendency to start singing, and Zoe didn't drink, so Mal scratched those ideas and kept on watching 'Nara, silent as a ghost.
She smelled like lavender. The air smelled like lavender. The pot had had burned for two hours, purple tendrils caressing their faces, weaving through their hair. He'd smell like a flower shop for nigh on two weeks, now, and wouldn't that just set Zoe to giggling, well, if anything would, anymore. She had such a pretty smile. It was a shame to see it wasted, like it had been after Serenity Valley. Wash had brought it back, again, with his dinosaurs and silly jokes, but he was gone, now, and so was that glorious smile, like the sun itself falling to eternal night.
Mal liked poetry from Earth-that-Was and beyond, and the incense in Inara's shuttle brought forth the poetry in his soul. He thought he'd left it in the mud, but the smells in 'Nara's shuttle brought it back. Dull sublunary lovers' love, whose soul is sense cannot admit, of absense cause it doth remove, the thing that elemented it. Well, they weren't lovers, in spite of what Gulchak said, what Jayne seemed to believe (denser than a stone, that man, sometimes, but a good man, mostly, he'd proven that), but it had been strange with her not there, no bantering at supper, no fighting before bed. He'd stolen into her shuttle, a few times, late at night, affrighted by some dream that a dead man has, knowing she'd be meditating on her pallet, finding nothing, what's to find but empty air when the incense is gone?
"You are a fool, Malcom Reynolds. I hold the advantage here."
"All your men are gorram dead, you ruttin' jackass," Jayne said. Mal could smell it. The big man was getting nervous.
"Yes, they are dead, Jayne Cobb," he said, "and so will be your Captain's whore if I am not appeased." Such an ugly word. He said it in such an ugly tone. Mal thought of all the times he'd said it, and each one stung a little more than the one before it did, all collected in his stomach.
This was a tense situation. Mal was a bundle of raw, naked nerves himself, and a jumpy Jayne only made it that much worse. Zoe was nowhere to be seen. Inara had stopped struggling. She lay limp against Gulchak's large belly, eyes closed in supplication, maybe begging some strange god's intervention. Mal knew better than to pray to God for help, knew that he and God weren't on precisely friendly terms, and what had it helped before?
Mal felt a gentle touch on his mind. River took his thought and hurled it. The cheery voice exploded outward and rushed inward all at once, "I think we are in rats' alley, where the dead men lost their bones!" Gulchak glanced into the dancing shadows. They rippled like a giggling lake, tickled by a stiff wind.
Mal didn't think. A thousand things, ten thousand, ten million, could go wrong if you thought. He went for the .45. It weighed a thousand pounds and nothing, put together. Three gunblasts ripped through the heavy air. Mal's heart stopped, for a second. Gulchak's face blew in, and his head lifted off, straight back and nor-northwest, threw blood and brains and flecks of bone against the walls and floor. His .45 smoked. Big Gladys smoked like she was satisfied post coitus. Behind him, Mal heard Zoe eject the cartride that had probably torn right between Gulchak's eyes and into his cerebral cortex. She'd always been the best shot. She'd always been at his side, even when she wasn't.
Gulchak tumbled backwards. Inara fell forward. Somehow Mal closed the distance, and she landed in his arms, against his chest. "Oh, Mal," she said, fully naked though she still wore her verdant sari, and gasped for a few deep breaths before shuddering into silent appreciation of his warm nearness. It took several long moments for her composure to return, but it did, monumental and everlasting as the Visvanatha temple to Vishnu on Sihnon.
Zoe knelt by Gulchak with her peculiar, cat-like grace, "He's dead, sir." She always looked a living kanji to her ship's name.
"Folk tend to be that way," Jayne called, "when you blast their gorram brains to gooey chunks."
River, little Shiva, destructive dancer, Nataraja on a small scale, slipped out of the laughing shadows. She stood by Mal and 'Nara, studied Gulchak gravely, and said, "Who knew the old man to have so much blood in him?"
Mal hugged her close, a rare gesture of spontaneous affection mostly reserved for her and Kaylee, "Blessed little albatross." He kissed her forehead, beneath which that amazing brain pulsed.
"Just don't shoot me with an arrow from your crossbow and we'll be shiny, Captain Daddy." He'd tried to discourage that. Oh well. It was preferable to Captain Tight-Pants. She studied Gulchak, again, and sighed. "I guess he wasn't one of the hollow men, after all, his leaning headpiece was NOT filled with straw."
"You know," Mal said, "you still do have a little bit of the strangeness about you, bao-bei. Now let's go find your brother and Kaylee."
Mal and Inara sat in her room for a long time, first in the flickering candlelight, then in the iridescent shadow, taking strong tea and smooth words, then silence, like the black outside. She slid into bed, wrapped herself in the crimson silken coverlets. Mal sat on the small, filigreed chair at the bedside, "Are you sure you're okay?"
She looked like a little girl, all eyes and arabesqued curls, or like one of the infamous geisha dolls, with the big heads that wobbled, "I'm fine, Mal. Everything's all right. We're all alive. We're mostly unhurt, except Jayne's sprained ankle. And that was from the victory dance."
"No," he said, "it's not all right. You almost got killed on this here sorry little boat of mine." He sighed. It hurt him, it burned, and he hoped she couldn't see his grimace in the darkness. "Anywhere you want. We're closest to Persephone, but anywhere you want. Ariel, Bellerophon, hell, even Sihnon or Londinum, or Earth-That-Was or Xanadu, if I could. Take your pick and you'll be there as soon as saying."
He couldn't see her smile, per se, but it felt bittersweet, bright and beautiful. "My whole training, my whole religion, my whole culture, my whole life, Mal, is about finding serenity. Why would I leave it?" Her words tasted strange, they were smoky incense, jasmine rice.
"I've had some trouble leaving Serenity myself," he said, "it aint all it's cracked up to be." This felt strange. Open communication was like an open wound, it tended to bleed, and Mal's first instinct was to stitch it up.
"You never will, Mal," she said, "for better or for worse. You'll always have Serenity."
He thought of the shells, poison gas creeping like a sinister green cat across the night-fields, the yellow fog that rubbed against your cheek and then you died, screaming to scream out but unable to, Zoe by his side, still, when God and country had betrayed him, and the pulpy red hole where Tedesco's chest had been, little splinters of rib so sharp against his fingers when he held this dead man, but then Mal thought of Simon and Jayne, getting along now, some, working out together; Zoe was still by his side, even now, though God and country weren't; he thought of sitting with Inara in the kitchen, watching River and Kaylee play--jacks or cards or dolls--like they were a pair of gorram proud parents. His two little savants, pilot and mechanic. Mal almost meant it when he said, "Lucky me."
Inara reached out and took his hand. Her fingers felt so tiny in his palm, delicate like thin, expensive, gold leaf fluting. "Mal," she said, "you're a good friend." Her voice was lower than normal, huskier, more like breathing than a whisper. He remembered how small she was, such delicate bones under her soft, dusky skin. "Thank you." Mal, you're a good friend. The woman said that, not the Companion. The flesh and fluid said that, up under all the kohl and spice and silk and training. He thought about her flesh, how warm her little hand was, and about how it could have been her, in the cargo bay, her blood and brains splattered gray and red, against the silver walls, laying on the deck in a ruined heap if just one of their shots had missed, or if Gulchak had been an instant quicker. She deserved a better life. Tedesco's chest came into his mind, Book's horrid stomach wound, Wash pinned to the chair, how stupid and surprised he'd looked--he'd be laughing about that, now, if it hadn't killed him, Mal knew. No reply was possible, nor necessary. Instead, he watched her close her eyes and drift into drowsiness. When he finally thought she was hard and fast asleep, Mal laid her hand beside her, sang a subtle lullaby, "Down in the valley, the valley so low, I lost my lover, came courting too slow. Down in the valley, the valley so low, I'll hang my head over, I'll hear the wind blow."