Disclaimer: Don't own Firefly or Serenity. Just playing in Joss's sandbox. Events mentioned when Inara left took place in the Firefly comic books 'Better Days' and 'Those Left Behind'
A/N – The impound story is based on some bad luck my brother recently had. Sorry about the towing, bro – but thanks for the inspiration!
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Heart of Stone
Chapter Four
"But Mrs. Burgess - !" the man protested ineffectively.
"Enough!" Caroline Burgess snapped at him, impatient at being interrupted.
"But it's been nearly three months," he complained. The man – Philips – had insisted on meeting with her this morning, and started with a rehearsed speech about 'a man's right to spend his own coin' which sounded as though he had been fed it by someone else. No doubt a group of her workers wanted to protest the temporary ban on visiting the Heart of Gold, and had sent this poor da sha gua to do it for them, which he did badly, quickly disintegrating into feeble whining.
"It's been two and a half months, and the ban lifts after three months, no more, no less," she said calmly from where she sat imperially at her writing desk sorting through the morning missives.
"A man's got needs, Mrs. Burgess," he whined pathetically.
She considered, and rejected, telling the man the lengths of time she'd occasionally been forced to go without sex. Instead, she turned back to her desk. "There's always Chari," she suggested placidly, as if suggesting one brand of rice wine over another.
The man's eyes went wide in surprise. Never taking her eyes off the letter she was writing she added, "I know she's been doing a little work under the table – or rather, out in the garden shed – since she came into my employ, so don't complain that you haven't got any options until your allowed back to the Heart of Gold."
"Three months total, yes ma'am, I suppose we can all tide ourselves over for a few more weeks," he stammered obsequiously, doing his best to get out of there as fast as possible, highly shocked to hear her, of all people, openly discussing in daylight what everyone had thought off as highly secretive business that was only spoken of in whispers in dimly lit hallways.
She allowed herself to smirk as he shut the door behind him. Men. So impatient. They only had to wait until the christening. That reminded her – she had a meeting later with Petaline about the party.
She had invited Petaline to come to her house this time and had given orders for Rance's hovercraft, recently repaired, to be used to fetch her for the meeting; she wanted to try and wean the little girl off the opinions of the other whores.
The open disdain was mostly gone, but Caroline still caught whispers of things being said behind her back. She knew some were willing to give her a chance, but others, like that tall blonde, Helen, who clearly acted as Petaline's second in command, was still hostile.
When Caroline had brought a small, tasteful rug for the room set up as the baby's nursery on one of her earlier visits about a month back she had mentioned she could have some of the contractors she had shipped in to lay the foundation of the church that was rapidly rising to come do some repairs on the Heart of Gold.
"My, my, gifts and promises," Helen had said frank skepticism. "How are lucky we?" she had snarked. "Wo bu shin wo dah yan jing!" she had said with sarcastic gratitude, silencing only when Petaline had given her a quelling look.
The last time Caroline had visited she had heard Helen whisper to one of the other girls, "Nandi said don't trust that hudan Burgess. I'm sure she would have said the same for his wife," thinking Caroline couldn't hear her.
Nandi said, Nandi said, Caroline thought to herself with exasperation, silently cursing her husband for turning Nandi into a martyr. She smirked slightly at the thought that followed: Saint Nandi, patron saint of whores. She chuckled at the absurd thought of the old brothel keeper rendered in stained glass with a halo around her head.
She pushed the thought of canonization of whores away and scrutinized the just slightly more legitimate business on the paper in front of her. Taking over her husband's holding had made her impressed all over again with his ability to mange and to make money. Never mind the frivolities he spent it on – he certainly had been able to convince other people to give him their money.
Now she just had to make sure it stayed that way. She had a meeting later that morning with some dealers interested in helping her expand Rance's business. The offer could be legitimate, or it could be another covert attempt at a hostile take over – she was going to have tread carefully.
She had expected to have to turn away men who would come, hat in hand and smiling duplicitously, trying to charm her into giving away her husband's holdings. She had politely told some that her property and business was not for sale; others needed a little more persuading, with the help of several of her most trusted and intimidating men to administer irrefutable proof of why they should never come back to Deadwood again.
Caroline was, however, surprised by the occasional suitors that showed up trying to woo her into the marriage bed rather than a business arrangement. She knew it was much the same thing either way, but these men she didn't send away quite as fast. It was nice to have a man on her arm now and then when she went out, or to occasionally sleep in a man's arms.
She accepted their sugared words and lying praise, not believing any of it, and graciously took the gifts of rare flowers or exotic fruits that they thought would flatter her, all the while knowing she would never again put a wedding ring on her finger.
Rance had proposed around the time the Unification treaty as being ratified in Parliament. The engagement ring had been a tasteful princess cut pale blue diamond in a silver band brought all the way from the Core in the standard black velvet box with the gold De Beers logo stamped on it.
On the traditional plain platinum wedding band he had engraved my one and only love. The wedding had been typical of the services held right after the war – small and quick, with none of the feasting and festivities that had been the norm before the war.
Greenleaf had paid dearly for supporting Unification. Throwing support to the Alliance was economics, plain and simple – the Independents had neither the money nor the resources needed to support the production of the many pharmaceuticals that could be extracted – with the right labor and equipment – from the rainforests of Greenleaf. The Alliance had only be too happy to have a place so far out in the Border to set up a presence with a guaranteed backing, unlike a lot of the other further out postings where they had to deal with both Independent forces as well as local resistance.
The Independents had approached Greenleaf with a if-we-can't-have-it-no-one-can attitude. The damage had been devastating and at the time Caroline had only been too happy to shake the bomb dust from her heels and leave.
Ashbury Pharmaceuticals was completely ruined by the war, as were a lot of other local businesses. The Alliance stepping in to help reset the damage done to the planet was at first met with joy, quickly followed by consternation as locals realized money was flowing directly back to companies in the Core as Core investors and Alliance run facilities set themselves up on Greenleaf, smoothly claiming it was all being done with everyone's best interest at heart.
The Alliance knew the gold mine they sat on, and guarded it fiercely. Only Alliance cargo ships for ferrying shipments out where allowed to land, or those passenger ships cleared to come to the treatment centers, some said to revival the best in the Core, although some did joke, that, depending on which experimental drug you got, it was a fifty / fifty chance whether you left in better condition than when you came, or found yourself with a green hair and sixteen toes.
The world slowly recovered, but despite the regrowth in the forests and factories, the original residents themselves never regained their pre-war status. The Alliance took a heavy percentage of any profits made in the form of "recovery taxes," said to be owed to their benevolent government as payment for cleaning up the mess the Browncoats had made, despite Greenleaf being an Allied supporter. Any profit leftover from that seemed to all go back to the supplies brought in from the Core and into the hands of the private Core businesses the Alliance had brought with them.
Rance had seemed like a shining white knight from an Earth-That-Was fairy tale when he stepped in at that point. He had managed to profit on the mining shares he had invested and moved up the ladder in wealth as her family had slipped down.
When he came to visit her that day, newly made magistrate of a newly colonized Rim moon, she had torn through every item in her closet and still the best thing she could find had been worn out and out of style.
But despite everything, she still had her background of good social standing – a polish of refinement that no amount of new money could buy. Her marriage with Rance had been an old story even back on Earth-That-Was – he had money and she had social standing. So why not an alliance to combine the two? She supposed he had thought she could bring some grace to the little moon he would run – or at least be something else he could show off.
She had initially been impressed by how much people deferred to him on Deadwood, but quickly realized the price of being back at the top of the social and economic ladder – at least on this little moon – was a complete lack of control. Rance was in charge and had no intention of sharing that power with anyone, not even his wife. He had been determined to stamp his name and force onto everything, and succeeded to such a point that he came to see any obstacles in his path as practically an abomination to both his will and the Almighty's.
She wondered if he had begun to lose his wits or had just listened to his own boasts for so long that he believed them. She suspected the later. He certainly seemed bent on making things happen just on his own say so. But you couldn't simply insist things into existence, otherwise young Madeline Grey-Withers who had caused such a scandal, the same year Caroline had turned seventeen and entered society, would have been able to simply insist the pregnancy out of existence while later Caroline could have insisted her own pregnancy into being when she and Rance had been trying so hard.
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She prepared a proper high tea in her parlor to sit down to with Petaline. She had done some meditation before sitting down in the parlor to calm herself from the anger caused by meeting she had just had beforehand with her husband's lawyer, discussing some of the details about which accounts to use to pay for the church, now standing proud in town with a skeleton structure, with work beginning on the walls and roof.
At one point in the conversation the lawyer had remarked in a too casual tone, "You know, you'd be in complete control of Rance's holdings if something happened to that brat.
She had reared back like a cobra. "If that child gets so much as a scratch on him, I will see to it that you die a death worse than anything you could possibly imagine, dong ma?" she demanded, and something about the glare in her eye made the man visibly gulp, stammer apologies, and race out of the room as fast as he politely could.
By the time Petaline arrived with the child in question being carted about in the portable bassinette she had given her, Caroline was able to present a calm and smiling face.
However, the smile faltered quickly as the two women got into something of a debate over what surname to use as they planned the christening.
"You'll note that I am not trying to insist on the name Rance had lined up," said Caroline stiffly, trying to sound charitable.
"What name was that?" Petaline asked peevishly.
"Rance Burgess the Third," Caroline said with a hint of a sneer in her voice. "If that DNA test had come back saying you were having a daughter, I'm sure he would have just moved on to the next-" she caught herself at the last minute and hastily said, "girl," instead of 'whore.'
"Of course," she went on, "Rance was sure it was going to be a boy, even before that test came back he was boasting about his son to be. He knew God wanted him to have a boy." She rolled her eyes. "Anyway, my point is, for a first name, the name you picked out is lovely, but again, with my goal of stability in mind, the last name of Burgess would help with that. Words have power. God knows anyone in your position would know how a mere word can make you feel," she said, alluding to the many names she was sure the girls at the Heart of Gold had been called.
"There's nothing degrading about my own name," snapped Petaline. "My daddy, Tom Nolan, was a fine man, ain't nobody could say he did wrong 'fore the Red Cough took him, and I'd be proud to have my son be Jonah Nolan."
Years of practice allowed Caroline to keep from showing her frustration openly. She immediately dismissed the idea of using money on the issue. Money had been flat out rejected by both Petaline and that woman Nandi in the initial attempt to simply buy the child.
She remembered Rance ranting about it in the parlor that evening, pacing around with a drink in hand and screaming insults at the absent brothel owner and the knocked up girl for daring to defy him, for thinking his money wasn't good enough for some nothing of a whore.
So offering more money now certainly wasn't going to change the girl's mind on the name.
She smiled a soft smile she had practiced a hundred times in the mirror to make sure she had achieved a look as non-threatening as possible for when the occasion called for it. "What about a compromise then, my dear? What if we were to hyphenate the two names? Jonah Nolan-Burgess. How does that sound?"
"I guess I could think on it some," said Petaline grudgingly.
"I know he is your son to name," said Caroline, forcing herself to clamp down on her irritation, "I'm just thinking long term, to keep things steady here, and to show the 'verse we are solid, so no méiyôu mûqin de xiao gôu gets it into their heads that things are weak here and think they could just waltz in and sell this whole moon off for scrap."
She gave Petaline's knee a brief pat, "But you think on it," she said, hoping she wasn't overplaying it. She hoped that the fact that she was being absolutely honest would help as well.
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Captain Malcolm Reynolds was sulking. There was no other word for his current state of being, although River had sing songed at breakfast that the captain smelled like Shakespeare laboring over the war between the sexes with a broken quill, and then she became engrossed in counting out a prime number of protein crackers before eating them, one by one.
The captain now restlessly moved around the cargo hold, triple checking that the boxes were in the same place they had been five minutes ago. They were on their way to Haven, always good for a deal of smuggled goods, although they hadn't been their in a while, definitely not since before Book and the Tams had been on board. There would have been no work there for Inara – not that it mattered now.
Haven was a rough and tumble little moon in the western Qing Long system, known for its retired criminal population. Mal had been waved by the forewoman of the colony, a woman who he had made several cargo runs for in the past, who was an extremely fair dealer – so fair that he often felt like he was being scolded like a little boy whenever he tried his usual style of bs haggling.
She made a deal with him to deliver a passenger – a thief tired of running from the Alliance and ready to settle down and do some honest work mining in a place that didn't care about people's pasts. The forewoman confidently told Mal she knew he could avoid any Alliance patrols along the way.
Mal had agreed, but hadn't really been comfortable with the agreement until after they had picked up the man on New Brisbane, narrowly avoiding an Alliance patrol boat, and he had bluntly told River to sit down at the dining room table and 'talk with the nice man and tell me if he wants to hurt us.'
Simon had unsurprisingly squawked at the command, but River just danced her way into the dining room and asked the man what kind of cake he liked, which segued into a whole conversation about pastries, which the man affably went along with.
River told Mal that the man was covered in gray and green and asked if he could stay for dinner. Mal took this to mean their current passenger wasn't going to try and kill and/or kidnap anyone, or try and hijack the ship, and told Wash to chart a quick and Alliance free course to Haven.
He hoped to do some other business there as well – he had a shipment of protein packs he hoped to unload. Mal was confident enough of Wash's dodging ability that he anticipated this whole deal actually going through – which they were in sore need of, after their latest run of bad luck.
Thinking about how little profit they had seen lately made Mal's bad mood increase and he snapped at Jayne, currently lifting weights, "Those cords on the Mule are way to lose. I told you when you put it away last time it's gotta be more secure if we don't want this thing to bounce around here like a pin ball when we hit atmo!"
"You'd think this thing was an actual baby," grumbled Jayne, referring to the nickname Mal had given the new hover Mule when they had bought it, raving at useful it was going to be, having both ground and hover ability, as well as a lot more room and storage and towing capacity than the old Mule.
Jayne reluctantly put down his weights and came over to assist Mal with stringing some more cords onto the Mule.
"We spent good coin on this," admonished Mal, "Don't want to waste it."
The last time they'd seen profit was when they had finally managed to find a buyer for the Lassiter, and most of that had gone towards buying the new hover Mule.
"Wouldn't have needed to spend the coin if we hadn't lost the old Mule," pointed out Jayne, toeing right up to the line of Too Far, and too annoyed to care.
"Not. My. Fault," Mal ground out between clenched teeth, and then began the old rant, "There were absolutely no signs posted anywhere! Not a single notice on the local Cortex waves! How was I supposed to know that it was an illegal parking spot! It was fine when I left it during the day! How was I supposed to know the deal was going to go south and I wouldn't be able to go back until after nightfall when all the vehicles on the street are supposed to magically disappear somewhere?!"
Mal angrily snapped a line into place, pulling harder than necessary on a lever. As much as the new Mule was his pride and joy, it still rankled that the old Mule had been irrevocably lost to an Alliance impound lot.
Even if they'd had the coin at the time to pay for the fines for the illegal parking, the lack of proper stickers for parking on that particular moon, the towing fees, and the impound fees - which they hadn't – it had finally been considered to dangerous to get that close to the Alliance, and the Mule had been had to be left behind, no doubt already sold at government auction by now.
There had been a very brief spell of solvency after buying the new Mule when they had successfully – an almost completely by accident – managed to steal some valuable techware, but the money from the sale had been confiscated by an Alliance operative.
However, as much as losing the money hurt, since the man had initially been after Zoe for war crimes committed back when she still thought they had a chance of accomplishing something, losing the money hurt a hell of a lot less than losing Zoe would have.
This had been followed by a botched robbery that had ended with no money and Book punching Mal in the face. Next they had been set up by Badger, who pushed them into a trap set up by the Hands of Blue and that old lawman, Dobson.
Mal had thought he had managed to kill him back on Whitefall, but instead it turned out he had only left him with a nasty scar and an unhealthy obsession with returning the favor. Mal had wasted a few extra bullets on him this time round – just to be sure.
And now they were out one middleman, unable to look to Badger for any future work, and Inara had made a haughty exit to go teach at one of the Guild's newer Border training houses. Mal was uncomfortably aware that after their milk run to Deadwood, they were probably going to have to turn to the even less appealing middlemen of Fanty and Mingo for jobs that would bring in some actual profit.
The trip out to Haven had been long enough that Mal had just about run out of chores to assign to people and was at the point was he was ready to make people do things over. After this morning's breakfast he had somewhat randomly assigned people different parts of the ship to clean out, making a rather pompous speech about the need for cleanliness and such, earning him a lot of looks, some pitying (Kaylee), some exasperated (Jayne) and some looking at him wondering if he had finally lost his mind (Wash and Zoe in silent stereo).
As he needlessly tightened a rope holding down some containers, Kaylee came out of Shuttle 2 - not Inara's shuttle anymore, Mal reminded himself – waving a dust rag when she saw her fearless captain in the hold. "Capt'n!" she called excitedly. "Inara left a box of her things in her shuttle! It's a truck with some of her outfits and some shiny jewelry and there's a crossbow in there. Remember how she told us she used to do archery back at her old training house in the Core? Don't you think she'll want that stuff back? Should we-"
"If Inara left one of her boxes of dress-ups here, than that's her look out," interrupted Mal, doing his best to sound authoritative rather than irritable.
"But couldn't we just swing by the training house she's teaching at on Juneau? That moon's only a hop, skip and a jump away from Melrose, and we make runs there a lot!" said Kaylee hopefully, eyes pleading.
"She wants it, she can wave me- us," said Mal firmly, trying very hard not to think of the last time he saw Inara, and failing, his treacherous memory playing out Inara's leave-taking, and his stony silence when he had glared at her and refused to either tell her goodbye – or beg or to stay.
Once they landed on Haven, they delivered their passenger and Mal was able to sell the protein packs at a reasonable price, though not quite as high as he would have liked. They stayed for a couple days extra so Kaylee could do some mechanic repairs around the colony in exchange for some fresh fruits, vegetables and water.
Everyone enjoyed the feeling of land beneath their feet and blue sky above, especially River and Simon, with no worries of being arrested in a colony full of criminals and fugitives, all in sympathy with those in trouble with the Alliance.
When they prepared to leave, Book announced his intention to stay behind. Mal found himself trying to conjure up a reason to convince the itinerant shepherd to stay, but couldn't come up with anything that felt compelling, especially since plenty of the local miners were spiritual folk who would welcome a preacher in their midst.
As everyone said their final goodbyes, Kaylee cried almost as hard as when Inara had left, and Jayne, obviously respectful of the man of God, was downright polite in his goodbyes.
"Can't say I'll miss your prayers overmuch, but you're gonna miss the Christening," said Mal lamely. "We'll be going back to see Petaline and her kid soon."
Book smiled and said, "Give them both my best wishes."
"The 'verse ain't a place of wishes," grumbled Mal as he headed back to the ship.
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Transaltions
Mandarin:
méiyôu mûqin de xiao gôu - motherless cur
dong ma? – understand?
hudan - bastard
da sha gua - fool, idiot
Wo bu shin wo dah yan jing – I can hardly believe my eyes
