See, this is what happens when life gets too busy and you fall out of practise and, further, lose the discipline of constantly writing.
No excuses, simply life got in the way and I was too lazy to fight it. I do have an 8 week old baby in the house, which explains what I was doing for the past 2 months…
Anyway – hope you enjoy it (or some of it)
Absurdity, n.:
A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
It had, from Doom's perspective, been an interesting evening. Whilst not the type to routinely engage in voyeuristic pursuits – insofar as the average person retained a degree of interest for him equivalent to the evaporation of moisture pursuant to its effect on the hardening of surface coverings - he found that he couldn't pass up the opportunity to observe Jayne Cobb in this most unnatural of habitats.
He felt himself coming over all anthropological.
It helped, of course, that Cobb was, to damn the word (and the man) with faint praise, an 'interesting' subject. First and foremost was the man's appearance, which, even when accoutred in a thoroughly bespoke manner – as determined by the Board of Governors in the school charter: a document, which if Doom had his way, would have long been launched into the sun – was wholly atavistic in the way it exuded a faint, but palpable, aura of menace.
This, of course, made Cobb a perfect fit for the class of lunatics to which he had been assigned; inasmuch as they needed a keeper – or, perhaps, a lion tamer - not a pedagogue.
Yet however menacing Cobb might be, he did scrub up to the point where he bore a passing resemblance to a – if somewhat piratical – gentleman; certainly there was a pervasive air of debonair danger about the man that had, on several occasions, caused the ladies in the administration block to comment positively on his presence which, when you considered that the ladies in question averaged a good four-score years in age (and between them ruled the local temperance and chastity league) was saying something.
However, Cobb was more than an ambulatory collection of threatening gestures – he had a mind to match the menace, even if the man did his best to obfuscate his intellect to the point where it would have been easier finding a black hole at the bottom of a coal mine. Clearly, Cobb played on creating the appearance of being an ill-educated thug, and he had intimated as much to Doom when he noted that clever plans and stratagems were all well-and-good but a bullet (or knife, or garrotte or…. Doom had patiently waited while Cobb went off onto a tangent about various implements of death) killed far more quickly and effectively than plotting someone to death. Further, experience had taught Cobb that standing around congratulating yourself (on how clever you were) was an invitation for the gods-of-chance to show up and palpably demonstrate why you weren't. Quick and brutal might, Cobb had noted, lack a degree of finesse, but a dead person usually lacked the ability to come back and debate the methodological merit of their demise.
Doom found it somewhat bemusing that Cobb had never chosen to develop a more cultured side; certainly it wasn't a matter of ability and its lack was highlighted by the degree to which Cobb had developed his other skills; somewhat inevitably, this meant that Cobb's interactions in, what was, ostensibly, polite society, presented an on-going battle between the man's base urges, instincts and training and the intellectual understanding that doing so would be a very ... bad ... thing … . While Doom readily acknowledged that coming from the Rim Worlds necessitated a somewhat rough-and-ready approach to existence – especially when coupled with a Cobb's chosen career - and usually meant that the necessity for learning to cock one's pinky finger when drinking tea from the best china was somewhat neglected in the wider scheme of things, it certainly wouldn't have hurt. Doom also had to acknowledge that, within the wider mercenary community , learning or, at least the effete form thereof, associated with books, would have been regarded as, a best, a form of mental aberration and, at worst - and more than likely - as an exploitable weakness (even if Cobb was about as 'weak' as a bank vault made out of the remains of a collapsed star) and within the wider mercenary community weakness, even the perception thereof, was to be hidden at all costs.
So Doom settled in to watch the walking contradiction that was his staff member … and occasionally wished that he'd brought popcorn.
There were times when the Operative wanted to launch his personal computer into orbit such was the frustration it engendered. While it was true that it was a remarkable piece of machinery, functioning at a level of computational power equivalent to that of the most powerful Alliance starships (after all, Operatives had to have top-of-the line equipment in order to sneak at peak effectiveness), the damn thing possessed an operating system designed by a moron.
Fortunately, morons - and their operating systems -, could be bypassed with a little creative programming.
Having refrained from manually launching the bothersome machine into a low planetary orbit, the Operative briefly fought with his email handler - a cunning application based on a theoretical breeding programme involving a gin-trap and superglue – insofar as 'fought' indicated that the threat to permanently delete it wasn't an idle one. As most applications these days were, at least, semi-sentient, the programme obligingly promised to let the Operative leave, once he had finished accessing his email, in return for its electronic life.
Finally, he was in.
There were two new messages.
The first was from his mother – even Operatives had mothers.
While it was common practise to kill all members of one's family on assuming the role of Operative - as it was deemed bad form for government assassins to have ties to something that might resurrect their conscience - sometimes it simply wasn't worth the bother. The Operative, after the clusterfuck that was Miranda, had come to the conclusion that had he killed his mother she would have devoted her afterlife to making him miserable; more miserable, that is, as Miranda – and its subsequent shattering of anything that may have posed as an illusion – had made him the poster child for clinical depression.
It was probably fortunate that he hadn't been working for the US Postal Service.
The second message was from his, sole remaining, contact in the Alliance Security and Intelligence Service. It was an update on the previous warning, which had noted that the infamous 'Blue Hands' were coming to Bellerophon. While the overall breadth of information was not great, and the depth of detail was more opaque than illuminating, his friend had been able to expand on some things. Specifically, the Blue hands were coming to retrieve something which they considered 'theirs' and, at the same time, deal with the thief who had taken said 'property'. The Blue Hands were also explicitly instructed to avoid doom at all costs, which, to the Operative, seemed like a fairly reasonable instruction: charging to meet your doom was the sort of things that only idiots and martyrs did.
Well, idiots, martyrs and Malcolm Reynolds.
On further consideration: idiots, martyrs, Malcolm Reynolds and … himself.
It was a sobering thought.
Whilst a fairly infrequent event, the hunt for new clothes was one that was, oft-times, dictated by necessity; after all, working on a ship like Serenity, in both mercenary and non-mercenary capacities, tended to play hell with one's wardrobe.
While it was true that blood came out in the wash – especially if one had access to whore-quality detergents, which got your whites whiter than the pearlescent gates of the heavenly kingdom - it wasn't quite as easy to bleach a bullet hole out of your favourite duster … or shirt … or trousers … and, as the majority of the thread on the ship went towards patching the crew - and not just their clothes – the appearance of any-and-all clothing often approached a truly parlous state; especially in the case of the more martially-inclined members of the crew who attract bullets in much the same way that candles attracted moths.
Of course, Jayne drew more fire than most simply because he was usually, with all due respect to martial Zoe's prowess, identified as the most dangerous of the group. Cobb was prepared to freely admit that River was probably more dangerous than he in a hand-to-hand situation but he was heard to note that the types of folk who tended to favour shooting were usually quite happy to do so from a distance; the sort of distance where hand-to-hand expertise was largely ineffective. This was perfectly understandable. Having someone walk up to you, insert the barrel of a gun in your left nostril and threaten to fire; largely negated the primary advantage the weapon offered.
Also, while River was supremely skilled with a knife, you could only throw a knife *so* far before important principles like gravity and the effect of mass over velocity (where propulsion was not constant and/or ongoing) had to be acknowledged; and River, for all her innate skill and technical training, weighed less than a waterlogged moth and thus could only generate a finite amount of power.
Of the others: Zoe's reputation was well-enough established throughout the black for people to be perfectly content with attempting to turn her into a colander from a distance, whereas the captain, while freely acknowledged that he, too, was a fair hand with a gun, tended to draw shooting folk's attention on the general principle that he aggravated such simply by existing; certainly, the ongoing litany of smug soliloquys on his manifest moral superiority tended to override any initial impulse anyone might have had not to take up arms against him.
Mal never had learnt when to shut up.
The others usually got shot as a by-product of the actions of those three.
Admittedly, people tended not to shoot at Wash, because that upset Zoe, which was generally considered to be a spectacularly bad idea; and people tended not to shoot Inara because shooting Companions was just considered an invitation to ritual suicide by social exclusion: if the Companion Guild had been around when Coleridge had written the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there wouldn't have been any need for that damn albatross (although this did get Jayne to wondering just how Inara would have hovered of the stern of the mariner's boat; probably on a hoverboard, which had been invented just before the exodus from the earth-that-Was). Jayne was quite partial to idea of having a companion nailed to the bow of every ship instead of a carved figure; although he doubted even that would do much to remove the average companion's head from their arse or their nose from the air.
Other than the inevitable by-products of his physical endeavours, the secondary consideration in Jayne's hunt for a quality of garment that bespoke a man of, well… whatever he currently was, was that he now had an alternate career to consider. Headmaster Doom, in one of his tangential asides, had indicated to Jayne that while he, Doom, was personally indifferent to the (former) mercenary's choice of wardrobe, the dictates laid down by the school's Board of Directors was not large on anything that could be identified as optional, discretionary or casual.
So, today, Jayne was in search of clothes that, in his opinion, made him resemble a constipated penguin; a constipated penguin that had become horrifically out-of-touch with the latest trends in penguin fashion.
Jayne could handle the dress trousers. Pants were, when you got down to it, pants and no matter the quality of the cloth, and the level of prestidigitation that was involved in the needle work they still went on one foot at a time. (Jayne had tried the two-foot-jump-into-trousers approach on one occasion; an occasion that called for a rapid retreat from a married lady's bedroom upon the, unanticipated, arrival of her husband; but all that approach to trouser application had achieved was a concussion). He also didn't have a problem with black – even if it did make him look like an undertaker - especially when combined with the starched, high-collared white shirt and the (black), long-styled double-breasted blazer he was required to wear.
Jayne's predominant area of issue was the tie, which, as far as he was concerned, reminded one far too much of a hanging than was seemly.
He wasn't a big fan of hanging, least of all when it was he who was the designated guest of honour at the ostensible proceedings – as had been the case on one or two occasions. Fortunately, in addition to shooting with extreme accuracy and his retention of advanced martial skills in psychopathic brutality (when required), Cobb also retained preternatural skills in running for the hills, hiding in caves and, where occasion called for it, stowing away on ships heading in the other direction.
Anyway, it was all a misunderstanding.
Both times.
Why couldn't everyone just get along?
Cobb was distracted from his reminiscences about ropes, trees and unfortunate drops when he arrived at, what was, allegedly, Bellerophon's fashion quarter – it was probably more like a fashion three-sixteenths or seven-thirty seconds, but to quibble would be churlish.
Anyway, he wasn't after the latest in core fashion, which, if Inara was to be believed, would have resulted in Jayne looking like an escapee from a Morris Dancing mardi gras; even the sly folks Jayne knew had standards, and nothing in those standards indicated that dressing in such a way that the wearer resembled a psychedelic hat-stand in any way made one appear fashionable.
Admittedly, the sly folk Jayne knew were all mercenaries of one stripe or another and their acquaintance with fashion was generally was comprised of providing protection detail for some idiot designer who must simply (and here Jayne imagined the outrageous lisp his friend Coraline had donned) 'protect the fall line at all costs …dahling'. He smiled in memory; Coraline had been more dyke than the entirety of Holland on Earth-that-Was and the lisping nightmare she had been mimicking had been the worst serial womaniser in the 'verse. It was a real pity that Coraline was currently enjoying an extended period of hospitality with the Alliance; apparently, the lisping nightmare hadn't appreciated being told 'No', with the butt-end of Coraline's pistol, when he had decided that his 'pet' mercenary needed 'converting.
Money and power overrode claims of 'rape', every time – especially from a no-account mercenary.
Unfortunately (for the designer) money and power didn't override high-velocity bullets delivered by an expert and this time it wasn't his teeth that were being scraped off the floor.
The small row of shops that made up the fashion quarter appeared, if nothing else, utilitarian – that is, they retained all their doors and the windows appeared intact. Jayne smiled at his exaggeration, for all its distance from the Core, Bellerophon was extremely civilised and bore little resemblance to the dystopic chain-store hell that was the Rim. Casting a discerning (well, literate …) eye across the store frontages, Jayne chose to enter a modest looking enterprise that advertised itself as servicing the 'Needs of the Discerning Gentleman'; in a past life, Cobb would have assumed that the use of such nomenclature would have indicated the presence of high-class prostitutes, but he decided to take the locality and context into account and entered anyway.
Clearly, there was something to be said for operating from the basis of logical interpretation and context for there was nary a courtesan in sight; there was, however, a significant amount of men's clothing, in a wide range of black: Doom would have felt right at home, as would a murder of ravens and a collection of undertakers.
Jayne paused to consider the collective noun for undertakers; he was fairly certain that is was something like an 'unction', which retained a decidedly religious connotation; something to do with catholic priests and oils and blessing and the like - he was fairly certain it didn't have anything to do with choir boys. Unction, however, was decidedly esoteric, and certainly dull, and if ever a group needed enlivening it was undertakers. Further consideration on the subject, however, was interrupted by a light touch on his shoulder.
"Mister Cobb?"
If he was surprised at being approached by name in a clothing store, Jayne was further surprised – if not alarmed - at the source of said approach, a source that was known to him; and one that still caused him to wince reflexively.
"Miss Evans, how pleasant to see you again."
Amédée Evans regarded the man in front of her appraisingly, her lips quirking in amusement, "Perhaps you should try that again, Mister Cobb, if only to convince yourself."
Cobb indicated the touch with a slight smile, "Not at all, Miss Evans, it is indeed pleasant to see you; admittedly, I generally define pleasant in terms of 'someone who is not currently shooting at me', but that doesn't mean I am unable to administer a degree of contextual flexibility," he paused and smiled wryly, "You're also not shooting at me."
"Currently."
"Indeed. … Currently."
Miss Evans smiled, "It's nice to see that your grasp of the obvious remains undiminished."
Jayne sketched an ironic bow, "I've always thought that the ability to see what was right in front of you was, generally speaking, positive in nature and, in consideration of my former position, determining whether someone was planning on shooting at me has, over the years, proven to be somewhat useful."
"The lack of holes would indicate the value of such perception."
"Although, we could also infer that the vast majority of people can't shoot straight."
This latter observation was, in fact, true; at least under certain circumstances. Shooting straight was, while a learnable skill, something that was spectacularly situation specific. It was one thing to be able to make use of a weapon in the service of hunting down one's lunch; it was another thing entirely to retain said skillset when staring down a person, one just as likely to be armed. It was, Jayne considered, why there were, in actuality, very few of what he would call, 'true' mercenaries: most people simply didn't have the mind-set to be able to kill, let alone do so in cold blood. The truth of things was, if truth could be broken down through statistical analysis and sound research methodology, that the majority of those who claimed to be 'mercenaries' were simply people who had taken to the life as they saw no option before them but being a hired gun; be it through unfortunate circumstance or stillborn scholastic ability resulting in a severe limitation in potential employment options. Most had no training and, if actually confronted with violence, ended up dead. There were cemeteries the 'verse over filled with people who couldn't get the job done when faced with the business end of reality.
Jayne had placed a fair few of them in there himself.
He felt no remorse.
While it might be trite to wheel out clichés, pertaining to things like the legal code and its operation in patches of overgrown vegetation, clichés were clichés for good reason in that they were, statistically speaking, accurate and true representations of how things worked. Hegel had said that 'Those who failed to learn from history were doomed to repeat it,' to which a wit had added the corollary that 'Hegel must have been taking the long view', as the wit knew people who couldn't learn from yesterday. Long view, or short view, the failure to learn usually had one result - one indicated with a hole in the ground and a couple if sticks bound together – if someone cared enough to bother to tie a couple of sticks together, that is.
Jayne was, for this reason, strongly in favour of learning, and paying attention, which jerked him from his considerations and back to the woman standing in front of him
Evans smirked, "Pity."
"…That people can't shoot straight? I'm wounded," Jayne noted; then made a show of inspecting himself, "…Or not."
"Oh, I don't mean you, Mister Cobb, it would be most inconvenient if someone had shot you; after all, who would teach my daughter?"
"I'm sure Headmaster Doom would have found someone adequate or, if not adequate, then temporarily blackmailable," he is a most capable individual."
"Absolutely," Evans agreed, "But I doubt very much that any other teacher could provide a pedagogical repertoire quite like yours. For example," she continued before Jayne could interrupt, "How to loom menacingly or, how to deliver a potential terminal threat with the appropriate degree of savoir faire and, not only that, Mister Cobb, you deliver it in an age-appropriate fashion - something that is so important within the modern educational environment. Further, if you'll allow me to wax eloquent for a second, you provide a degree of positive role-modelling quite unlike any teacher the children have previously experienced. Just the other day I was talking to Lucretia Byron's parents and they are positively delighted to observe that their daughter appears to be headed in the direction of becoming a planetary dictator and not a mass murderer, they put that down to your influence Mister Cobb."
"I'm delighted…" replied Jayne, "At least I think I'm delighted, I might have to get back to you on that."
"No, it's a wonderful thing. Lucretia, dear child that she is, has been making wicker-men out of her brother's action figures since she could walk – which, admittedly is somewhat of a relief insofar as she could have been making wicker-men out of her crèche-mates – the Board of Governors of her pre-school were actively concerned about her future.
Now it was Jayne's turn to smirk, "You mean the Board of Governors were terrified at the thought of how many people she would slaughter on her way to the wherever she decided would give her absolute power over the universe."
"Well … yeeesss … but she was only five at the time."
Jayne shrugged; he was well used to the various idiosyncrasies of his students – in another time and another place he would have been called 'warden' and not 'teacher' and the classroom would have been little better than a euphemism for a psychiatric ward.
Amédée Evans regarded Cobb with a knowing expression, "I am well aware, Mister Cobb, just how different those children are and that their differences become even more apparent when you remove them from their peers. Put one of those children amongst a group of any other children at that school and they stick out like a sore thumb, amongst themselves they only seem to evidence strong individual traits. Take Lucretia, since we were talking about her, the child borders the line between charismatic leader and psychopath; who knows which way she will go? What I do know is that in that class, amongst people like her, she is a leader; amongst others, well… " she hesitated, before Jayne smoothly interjected …
"... Amongst others, she is an outcast and she sees them as little more than chaff, chaff to be used and discarded; they're beneath her notice." Jayne glanced at his watch, "As much as I'd love to spend time discussing the merits and individual foibles of my students, Miss Evans; and by 'love' I mean that next time you should probably bring some restraints and a hot poker, I find myself in the unfortunate position of needing to be in several different places at the same time, which is a trick I have yet to master – although my previous employer has offered, on occasion, to have me torn apart by wild horses so I might get there yet."
"I am sorry, Mister Cobb," Evans apologised, "While it was pleasant to see you I had no intention of waylaying you from your primary task, which I assume was the purchase of some clothes? How about you provide me with a list of your requirements, your pertinent measurements and any stylistic inclinations you may have and I'll have the finished articles sent to your place of residence; which, I am led to believe, is still that near-derelict Firefly parked on the edge of the desert."
"That is most generous, Miss Evans, but I wouldn't wish to put you to any trouble, simply as the result of a chance encounter."
"It's no trouble at all, Mister Cobb, especially in light of the fact that I own this store and can send bespoke clothes to whomever I choose, wherever they might be, whenever I so choose." Amédée Evans gave Cobb a considering look, "Unless of course said person was planning on relocating to the edge of Reaver space; that might necessitate a degree of reconsideration."
"You own this store? I thought, at least inasmuch as I was able to decipher Doom's introduction, that you were the holder of more qualifications than God; so I have to enquire what are you doing with, and by with I mean owning and running, a clothing store."
Evans gave the man an arch look, "I have many fingers in many pies, Mister Cobb, why don't I explain it to you … over dinner … sometime."