Avon looked around his new quarters as the door closed and locked behind him. The cell was small, but provided ample room for two cots along the side walls and a lavatory of sorts in the back. The lights were low, which meant it was "night", but he could see that he was to have a roommate after all. The cot to the left was occupied, but whoever was under the covers wasn't coming out. Sleeping, Avon decided, although he himself would have awakened at the sound of the door opening. But then, his first instinct would be to study the newcomer from beneath the covers before allowing himself to be seen. He shrugged. If his fellow prisoner didn't feel like being sociable, well, that was his choice. Avon wasn't feeling particularly sociable himself, right at the moment, and a prison cell was hardly the place to make friends. But, as he crossed over to sit on the empty cot, a familiar voice froze him in his tracks.
"Hullo, Avon. It's been a long time."
Avon turned, not believing the evidence of his ears. But his eyes only confirmed her identity. She was sitting up slowly, brushing wayward strands of honey-blonde hair out of her eyes with a familiar gesture. Avon blinked once, then finished crossing the room and sat down to give himself time to think, to wonder what Jenna Stannis was doing here, alive, when Blake had said she was dead...
Well, there was one way to find out. "Hullo, Jenna," he replied. "Fancy meeting you here." He paused. "By the way, what are you doing here? I'd been told you were dead."
Jenna's lips twisted in wry, humorless smile. "Straightforward and to the point as always, Avon. Would you believe rumors of my death--"
"Had been exaggerated?" Avon finished the ancient quote, his own lips quirking in what was almost an answering smile. "Obviously. I am more interested in hearing how you found yourself the prisoner of Madame President--pardon me, of Commissioner Sleer," he corrected himself with a sneer.
Jenna smiled, a real smile this time, but one that quickly faded. "It's difficult to explain, Avon, but I suppose there's no other way than to just come right out and say it." Her shoulders hunched defensively as she lowered her eyes. "I'm the reason you were set up," she said, then waited for the explosion.
When nothing but silence greeted her confession, she raised her head and forced her eyes to meet Avon's. They were icy with anger, but anger held strictly in check. "I assume you have more of an explanation than that," he said, his voice as cold as his eyes, but his mind was churning at the unexpected confession. It made sense, when he stopped to think beyond the mere fact of Jenna being alive when Blake said she was dead--Blake. It wasn't Blake, Servalan had taunted him with those words, but his bruised and battered mind had been unable to pass beyond the moment when she spoke those words, as if they had set up a barrier to his thoughts, a barrier broken now that Jenna had answered the question Servalan's revelation begged. If not Blake, then who?
Jenna pushed irritably at her hair before rising to her feet and pacing a few steps in front of her cot, careful even in her anger not to come any closer to him. Not now. "I had no choice in the matter." The words came out harsher than she'd meant, but Avon's anger, while expected, had the equally expected--but considerably less welcome--effect of bringing her guilt to the surface. Jenna had always masked defensiveness in anger; it occurred to Avon that she hadn't changed, and that comforted him in a way he never would have believed possible. In a world where friends became strangers without warning, any signs of familiar behaviour, of normalcy, were more than welcome.
"Who told you I was dead? Blake?" Without waiting for an answer, Jenna rushed on. "If Blake told you I was dead, it was because I deliberately staged my death. I had to get out, and that seemed to be the safest way to do so. But I got caught." She shook her head in self-disgust. "I wasn't cautious enough, and someone recognized me from my smuggling days. That was almost three months ago. I was being held prisoner until Servalan decided to set up this whole scheme to bring you down. If I didn't tell her what I knew about Blake's operations on Gauda Prime, she'd kill Jared."
"And who might Jared be?" Avon asked, intrigued in spite of himself as to the identity of someone Jenna felt capable of betraying her former comrades for. Especially Blake.
At that moment, the door to the cell opened. A trooper, gun at the ready, ducked into the room. He looked at the two prisoners suspiciously, then nodded to someone still standing in the corridor. "Compliments of Commissioner Sleer," he said, looking over at Jenna. "She says to tell you that she does sometimes keep a promise." With that, he ducked back into the hall. The door remained open just long enough for a small form to run through and hurtle itself straight into Jenna's welcoming arms.
She and the child clung to each other without speaking for a long moment. Jenna sat on the edge of the bed in order to pull the boy into her lap, kissed the soft, curly brown locks covering the top of his head and returned her gaze to Avon. "This is Jared," she said simply.
Avon felt his eyebrows rising, and didn't bother to hide the expression of astonishment he knew to be covering his features. He studied the small boy, who was peeking back at the strange man with a faint expression of alarm in his blue eyes. Those eyes disappeared once again as the child buried his face in Jenna's chest, and her arms tightened around him protectively. "Does Blake know?" Avon finally asked.
Jenna shook her head before lowering it to plant another kiss on the child's head. "As soon as I realized I was pregnant, I left."
"Without telling Blake why." The words could have been accusatory, but they weren't, and after a long moment, Jenna responded to them, and to the mildly inquisitive tone in which they were spoken.
"I wasn't thinking very clearly," she admitted. "My mother used to tell me that running away never solved anything, but the truth is, I panicked. The life I was leading was too dangerous for a child, and although I thought about ending the pregnancy, I couldn't. The baby was too much a part of me; more importantly, it was a part of Blake. A part," she added softly, "he seemed to have lost." Her voice turned bleak. "Blake's changed, changed in ways I never would have believed possible. Become harder, less forgiving and less trusting, and I justified that change in him by running away, by betraying him." Her voice filled with an aching sadness. "I don't know what he's going to say when he finds out."
She fell silent, gnawing on her lip as she rocked the child. Jared. Blake's son. Avon felt an ironic smile tugging at his lips, an irony laced with the bitterness that seemed to be the most popular emotion of the day. He, too, wondered if this was a betrayal Blake would be capable of forgiving--just as he wondered if Blake could forgive the fact that Avon shot him. Or, indeed, if Jenna would be able to forgive him... He raised his eyes to hers once again. "Since this seems to be True Confession time, I suppose I should tell you that Blake is in surgery right now."
Jenna stiffened, but her tone remained neutral as she asked, "What landed him there? Madame President took great delight in describing her plans to me, and she did mention that stun weapons would be used."
"I shot him," Avon replied. His voice was filled with indifference--indifference to what he was saying, indifference to her reaction to those words--but his eyes gave everything away. How had Jenna ever believed him to be cold and emotionless? His eyes reflected his pain in ways he could never fully control; they reflected his guilt, too, and regret. It was fascinating, watching Avon's eyes when he spoke. Usually one was too busy being angry and defensive when Avon was speaking to notice his eyes. Now, Jenna knew better. "I shot him," Avon repeated, more to himself than to her. "Three times. In the chest. With a projectile weapon." There was a lengthy pause before he added, "Tarrant--our new pilot--said he'd betrayed us, and I was foolish enough to believe him."
Jenna supposed that she should be angry with him, with the man who had just confessed to shooting her lover, the father of her child. He hadn't even told her why he did it, not really, or how badly Blake had been hurt, if he would live or was in danger of dying, but she couldn't summon the energy to ask for details. Not yet. Blake had been the center of her life for a long time--too long, maybe. Now, she had other things to consider besides Blake and his Cause. She was tired, tired unto death of it all. Her defensiveness and guilt retreated under a layer of mind-numbing exhaustion. "Well, I guess we've both betrayed him then," was all she could find to say.
Her words held condemnation and absolution for them both.