He was a cruel, hard, cold man, the sort that would double cross you and put lead in your gut before you got the chance to say hun dan. But he was also the type of man that was good enough with a gun to be worth the risk. So Frank Dunough had hired him, hoping that when the time came, his reflexes would be fast enough to enable to pull the trigger before one of the giant's bullets could find him.
When the mercenary had signed up, he'd given his name: Jayne Cobb, and that had been the only personal information that Frank had ever been able to glean from him. The man said nothing about his life and only spoke when spoken to. He kept to himself, taking his meals in his bunk, ignoring the rest of the crew. The others had attempted to engage him at first, but had been met with silence and a cold, empty stare. After a few weeks, they had given up and left him to himself.
He was cruel and a smidgen sadistic, that much Frank did know. The only time the man ever smiled was when he was killing, which was downright disturbing. His face would split into a feral grin, and a light born of hatred would enter his eyes, and even fellow members of the crew would shiver in fear and edge away from him as his bullets tore through the air.
But there was a tenderness there too, lurking beneath the surface. Frank glimpsed it when the mercenary sat in the common room cleaning his guns, running his rough, calloused hands over the scarred but gleaming surfaces with a lover's caress. It was visible every time Jayne Cobb would gently turn the small, delicate looking gun that he habitually carried in the holster on his hip over in his hands, his eyes soft and his brow creased.
There were other indications as to who the hard man truly was- the ballerina charm that dangled from the leather cord around his neck, the slight quirk of the lips that rested upon his normally stoic features whenever he received a package from home. And then there had been the time that they'd been at the market and Frank had picked up a pretty yellow flower, thinking about his lady friend, and Jayne's snort of derision had distracted him.
"You don't want to give her that," the mercenary had said, his arms crossed over his chest.
"Well why wouldn't I?" Frank had replied, insulted.
"'Cause that there's a marigold, and if your lady is all fancified like you say she is, she's gonna know the language of flowers. And that 'un you're holding means that you're grievin' something fierce. That ain't no way to let a woman know you got feelings for her," the man had replied with a roll of his shoulders, and Frank' brow had risen to his hairline.
The second Frank had questioned how a gun for hire from a backwater planet with a rim accent thicker than he'd ever heard knew anything about something as pansy as the language of flowers, the mercenary had clammed right up. "Knew a girl from the core, once," was all that he'd been able to get out of Cobb before the man started pretending he didn't hear the questions. He'd refused to help him find a more suitable flower, and instead had headed straight back to the ship.
Once, while on Persephone, he ran into a man that said he knew Cobb. Creepy little fellow in a moth eaten suit and top hat who affected the mannerisms of a gentleman. "A sad little king of a sad little hill," Jayne had said with a rueful twist of his lips when Frank had informed him of his meeting with Badger. It sounded oddly poetic coming from the lips of such a gruff man, and oddly fitting for Badger's character. Cobb hadn't asked him what Badger had divulged, and Frank took the mercenary's cue and kept silent.
But Badger had told him quite a bit about Jayne, told him that the man had been a hired gun on a firefly called Serenity. He'd said something about a woman, more girl than woman really, with pale skin and dark hair who made the hardened criminal that Frank had hired melt into a puddle at her dainty little feet. "Right pretty thing, she was," Badger had concluded. "Shame she died the way she did, so young and all." he'd added.
At one point, a job had taken them to Osiris. Cobb had gotten even more broody than usual as they broke atmo, his hand never straying from the delicate little gun on his hip. He stroked it absently, his blue eyes dark and glazed. When they finally landed dirt-side, he'd caught the generally frugal merc spending a precious penny on a fistful of flowers. They looked strange in his big, meaty hands, the white of the asphodels, blue of the forget-me-nots, and pink of the azaleas standing out against his dirty skin and faded cargos. Cobb had merely raised his eyebrows at the captain, tightened his fist around the flowers and stalked away.
When he got a chance, Frank looked up the meanings of those flowers on the cortex. My regrets will follow you to the grave, my woman, my true love, the bouquet seemed to say. Awful sappy, for a man like Jayne Cobb. On a hunch, he went to the nearest cemetery, surprised to see it was surrounded by a lacquered black fence and filled with topiaries and roses. A resting place for rich folk. And there his big, dirty merc sat, looking entirely out of place beneath a large oak tree, stroking the characters engraved on a headstone made of marble. He never mentioned the cemetery, and if Cobb knew he'd been followed, he'd never let on.
All those soft things could almost make a man forget about the hardened bastard that the merc truly was: the man who loved his weapons more than living things, who drank liquor like it was water, and took more pleasure in killing than most men took in sexing. And because he'd started to forget, because he'd seen the soft side of Cobb, he'd honestly been surprised when the man put a bullet in his gut. He reminded himself as he lay bleeding, as the merc carelessly stepped over his prostrate body, that Cobb was a killer, the type that would pump you full of lead without remorse.
And he wondered, absently, as he bled out, what the cruel giant had been like before. Back when the dancer's shoes had been on a pale girl with dark hair whose smile could turn the merc into mush instead of on a leather cord around his neck, back when alabaster was the color of her skin rather than the color of the marker that she was buried beneath. Back in time, when Jayne Cobb had stroked the face of the girl, had been able to hold her, love her, touch her, instead of merely being able to brush his fingertips against the gleaming side of a dainty gun named River.