Title: A Place to Be
Author: Meridian
Summary: The waiting is the hardest part because, after dying, there's not much else to do.
Author's Notes: I wrote this two days after I saw Serenity for the first time. As such, it is very much a comfort-fic, and it's probably schmaltzy as hell. I don't care much about that because I needed it. Just thought I'd share it as I invested 2,000 words to a fanfic equivalent of: "Hush, hush, it's okay! I can make Joss Whedon not hurt you so much!"
Oh yeah, SPOILERS for the Big Damn Movie. If you haven't seen, get off the interweb, do not pass GO, but go directly to your nearest cinema.
italics --Chinese (because I can't be bothered playing around with a language I don't know, okay?)
Wash was at his flight console. Not an unusual place to find a pilot, except the thing was he knew he was dead. He surprised himself by being quite unsurprised by this fact. No confusion about his state, just a keen understanding of the way things were and an itch to investigate where he was.
It was Serenity, all right, but was it the real ship or all in his head? Was he haunting her or she haunting him? He let his feet carry him from the cockpit to the mess where Shepherd Book sat at one end of oak dinner table. The Shepherd looked more or less as he had when Wash had last seen him, but something was different. For one thing, Book's gaping stomach wound was gone, but then so was his.
He placed it with effort, the subtle change that had altered the man he knew into the one he'd first known, "You done something with your hair, Shepherd?"
"Not me," Book shook his head, gesturing for him to sit down. A cup of tea was already set out for him.
"If you knew I was coming, you might have given me a hint about it." Dear Wash, watch out for Mr. Pointy, Love, Shepherd Book. That's all he would have needed.
Book smiled benignly. "Not my works, son. I longed for company, but I had hoped not to have any for a long while. That cup was waiting for you. I was praying you wouldn't arrive."
"Can you pray here, too? I mean, isn't it a bit late?"
"Never too late," Book shook his head. "Was there pain?" Coming from anyone else, in any other place, at any other time, he might have thought the question prurient. But death had a way of distancing him from life, and he found it easy to make his way in this conversation.
"Not really. Happened pretty quick." He thought of how they'd found Book, lying with his guts on the outside and winced. "Nothing like the way you went, Shepherd."
"Yes, quite painful," Book said, his eyes twinkling as he—Wash blinked stupidly at him—laughed. "It seems so long ago."
"I feel like it just happened."
"For you, it just did." Book was quiet a short spell while he figured out how he felt about that. Made sense, mostly. When the Shepherd saw he'd come to peace with the idea, he pressed on, "How did it happen?"
"Reavers. Got pole-axed by some dog-sodomizing, really enormous stick." He remembered landing, thinking it was a miracle they hadn't exploded or been crushed up like Serenity, and then there was the harpoon driving all the life out of his body and nothing much else.
Concern tightened in his stomach. He hadn't lived to see Mal pull out his rabbit from the Alliance's hat; he didn't know if it had been at all worth it. "Do you think they succeeded?"
"In doing what?"
"Getting out the signal," Wash filled him in on the captain's plan, Book's eyes stormy when he described the information they'd got about the origins of the Reavers.
It was a long time before he said, haltingly, "I think they must have made it—so far."
"How'd you figure that?"
Book's smile was melancholic yet grateful. "They're not here."
After him, Jayne was the next to show up. He and Book had taken to hanging around in the cargo bay, Book using the weight equipment, him just reclining on their original mule. He'd missed that thing. Jayne staggered out of the bow, clambering down the catwalk and stairs before catching sight of both of them.
He gaped at them. "You…ghosts?" He laughed, a bit high-pitched, ripe with terror, talking to himself. "Finally gone crazy like that toad-licking girl, I'm seein' ghosts."
Book stood up from the bench press, went over and sucker-punched Jayne. Wash settled for saying, "You are a ghost, Jayne." Together with the physical blow, this sobered Jayne somewhat, and he settled in as they had without further fuss.
Time passed strangely here, such that Wash was aware of its relative expanse but couldn't quite measure the gaps between taking on more folk. However long it took Mal to catch up with Jayne was long enough for the captain to have gray hairs at his temples and still more crows' feet to the sides of his eyes. It didn't last—Mal's sandy hair and smoother face soon reasserted themselves, leaving Book the only one among them to remain at an advanced age.
Mal sussed out the situation almost immediately, upon seeing him.
"Wash, good to see you." He heard his own words and backpedaled. "Well, not good."
"Hey, Cap'n," he returned the quasi-affectionate greeting with a lazy salute.
"Had a fair run," he said, calm as anything, when he met up with the others. "Went smooth-ish in the end." Heart attack, he told them, came upon him in his bed after a vigorous session with a beautiful woman—Inara.
"Bet she loved that. You two finally work out some tension, and you have a stroke."
"Heart attack, 's different," Mal grumbled. "'Sides, is a mite more respectable way to go than the way some people chose." He looked pointedly at Jayne.
"How's it you're looking at me?" Jayne asked. He'd told them he'd gone in his sleep, never knowing how. "Wasn't it just peaceful-like?" From the expression on Mal's face, he ought to have known better.
"Vera didn't take kindly to your grappling with another woman," Mal explained. Apparently, his wife had made another of her psychotic guest stays aboard Serenity, successfully seducing Jayne to achieve her ends. Somewhere in the night, loosened on her pegs from too much thumping, Vera fell from her rack and fired off a womanly protest through Jayne's head.
They all had a good laugh about that, even Jayne.
"What happened to Saffron?"
"Well," Mal shrugged, looking none too proud of what came next, "think of how it looked, finding her in Jayne's room, him bled clean out. Did what came natural to me."
"Killed her?" Jayne asked, almost hopefully.
"Gave her a job."
They only found out Mal was joking when Kaylee came skipping out of the engine room. She, too, had years on her, but all her wrinkles were smile-lines, and—like Mal's—they faded off until she could have been mistaken for her living self some thirty years younger. Book complained it wasn't fair he should be stuck at his age, but without the aches and pains of it, he didn't kick up too much noise.
Kaylee updated them on decades' worth of doings. Zoe'd remarried some five years after Mal kicked, and she was still on Serenity as captain. River did most of the hauls, Zoe and some new hire called Garrett backing her up. Little discussion later reveal Garrett not to be a hire but to be Kaylee's eldest.
That was news, Kaylee and Simon having family together, but none of those who'd passed before its happening were surprised it hadn't come up. Them that showed up shared their own tales mostly, and the sporadic appearances of others—Zoe and River in Kaylee's stories—were mostly just by product.
"And Diana, oh, she's gonna drive her papa mad," Kaylee enthused about her only daughter. "She's fixing to be just like her aunt, minus, you know, the crazy cut-up-brain stuff."
Kaylee's family stories were cut short by footsteps leading out from the infirmary, and Simon joined them. Mal barked and howled at seeing the expression on the doctor's rapidly youthifying face.
"Looks like that girl was the death of him."
Simon had succumbed to liver damage. It had pained him, off and on, ever since taking that Reaver bullet in Mr. Universe's complex, but the Alliance doctors who'd fixed him up had done such a good job that the trouble hadn't gotten to him until years later. Small amount of sepsis or some such, Wash couldn't follow all the doctor talk. Simon filled in Kaylee about the doings of their kids, and the two of them were inseparable after his arrival.
"I can't believe I'm stuck on this piece of junk ship after I'm dead, too."
Wash half expected Kaylee to haul off and hit Simon, or pout mightily until he apologized to her for insulting Serenity. But youthful faces hid years of living that'd been done, and she only punched him lightly on the arm.
Besides which, they were all transparent here; even he knew Simon was glad to be home.
Zoe appeared in his bed not long after Simon and Kaylee took up theirs again.
"Hey you," he whispered, tweaking her crone's nose before it disappeared. They made love without speaking another word. He expected it to be better 'cause of Heaven and such, but it was what it was, like old, alive times. He wondered if any of it was actually new. Was he making love to her or just remembering?
He never asked about the intervening years that had put such unhappy marks on his wife, turning down the corners of her full lips. It didn't matter—she was his Zoe again. The sad lines, the worries and cares of a life lived without him evaporated. He was glad they were gone.
Inara walked out of her shuttle, slapped Mal full on the face—enough to draw blood were he alive—and then kissed him hard in front of all the others. Only his wife, Simon and Kaylee seemed unimpressed by this development. They all laughed.
Inara had helped finish raising Simon and Kaylee's kids along with the one she and Mal had conceived shortly before his untimely demise. That shot right through Mal, finding out he had a child he'd never got to see. Inara punished him rightly for missing out—"Because of a blood clot choking up that fetid piece of donkey shit heart of yours!"
Zoe squeezed Wash's hand, saying lowly, "I wished everyday you'd have done that for me."
"Wouldn't have been fair, leaving you in that state. Might've made an enemy of you in the hereafter." He thought about this a second and corrected himself, "The here, anyway."
Zoe smiled that tender way that meant he'd succeeded in lightening a darkness in her, what he'd always done for her and would always do, if it came to that.
"Don't listen to Inara," she chided him, snuggling closer. "That woman cried tears having nothing to do with bitterness or wrongness when she found out. Baby made her whole again."
"My baby makes me whole, too," he said, meaning it.
They waited what seemed like forever—and forever was a concept they were all comfortable with at this point—for River. How would the government's little weapon finally meet her demise? So far, only Mal and Zoe'd died naturally—the two least likely to have gone out peacefully. Besides Simon and Jayne, Kaylee'd been crushed by some equipment in the engine room and Inara'd been poisoned by a subordinate keen on replacing what she thought was a woman unfit to be a house mistress, what with her having birthed a child out of—for lack of a better word—love.
However River went, it wouldn't be right till she walked Serenity's decks right alongside them. They played at remembering, a game that never got old, especially with Jayne's creative revisionist histories. Mostly, they spent forever's coin on those short months when all of them were together. Sometimes, the ones that had been on before the others would talk about the early days, and the ones that'd lived longer would retaliate with tales of the last days.
They were all about it, in the midst of a stirring rendition of "The Hero of Canton" when the cargo bay doors opened. The song died off as, for the first time, Serenity opened herself to what lay outside. All of them had just been on board when they died, and what lay beyond the windows seemed to be nothing but starless Black.
River walked through the open doors, the entire 'verse behind her. There was no age on her, nothing that had to fall away. Wash wondered if that was because of what the Alliance tampering had stole from her, and if that spirit she'd lost had kept her young here. Either way, River entered and brought the rest of Heaven with her. She danced on it, high on her bare tip-toes, laughing and grinning, a beautiful, whole girl again.
"I have found Serenity," she said. Beyond her frail shoulders and tangled mass of hair, the doors closed. None of them felt bereft for the loss.
They played a game of hoop ball, Shepherd refereeing, and went on with the rest of their eternity.