Kaylee liked machines. She liked the finite and tangible, the details of things, and she liked the way those details fit together, and gained meaning and grace as part of a whole. Many people dismissed technology – called it cold, or lifeless – but out in the black, machines were life. They made everything possible. Serenity sheltered her crew in her body like a brooding mother, enclosing them in an envelope of warmth and air, humming to herself lightly as she held the merciless black at bay.
It had hurt to see Serenity desecrated for the sake of battle. It had hurt even more to see her battle scars. But, though Kaylee lived to see machines in working order, she also liked the way they broke: their calculable, physical problems, which she could nearly always solve. Kaylee's work was her shelter. She could lose herself in it. No matter what happened inside or around her, when she set to fixing something broken, she slipped into a world where the rules were simple, and everything had a purpose – even lonely prairie girls with odd knacks and no dance partners. She was a mechanic; she fixed things. That truth was all she needed. It would pull her through.
"What in the name of fei fei du pien is wrong with my ship now?"
Kaylee stiffened as Mal strode into the dining hall. Although she couldn't see him, crouched as she was in the half-hollowed oven, she could picture his worn, familiar face clouding with frustration as he took in the wreckage, the dingy, glinting metal and ceramic parts that cluttered the table, and the floor smeared with motor lube and clotted grease. In her time on Serenity, she had learned to measure his footsteps. Today, he was stomping.
"Stove's broke, Cap'n," Kaylee said, turning to look him in the eye.
His face was just as she had imagined it: hard, surly, quietly warm. As she left the world of her work and eased back into her own life, his presence calmed and steadied her. She felt drained, and harried, and about a thousand years old, with a name pressing at the back of her throat -- Simon, Simon -- but she swallowed it back, and kept swallowing. If she could stick to problems what had solutions, she thought, she would be shiny.
"Mal," cried Jayne, "look what it done to my dinner pack!"
Together, they turned to Jayne, who stood at the edge of the kitchen counter, cradling a bowl full of gritty black ash. His face was frantic, almost tearful; he looked like a little girl with a broken doll.
"She's superheating," Kaylee said. "Going too hot, too fast. It's funny, kinda."
"Ain't nothing funny about this," Jayne said. "Look at my dinner pack, gorramit!"
"Yeah," Mal said, roughly. "Life's whimsical that way."
Mal knelt beside his mechanic and touched her arm, lightly. He saw vulnerability and panic flicker through her eyes at the moment of contact. She forced a tentative, half-sided smile, and looked down at the floor. She was, he thought, surprisingly soft on the eyes. Not his type, not really -- he'd always gone for the gussied-up, nose-in-the-air sort, much to his detriment -- but even now, with her hair pulled back into messy buns and her soft white undershirt covered in rust-orange motor lube, there was something about her that made a body want to rest by her side, tell her secrets, take comfort in her smile.
"It's my understanding," he said, "that you got a problem of the type that ain't easy to fix."
Kaylee said nothing, but Mal saw muscles of her throat tighten. She brushed her face with the back of her hand, as if to tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear, trailing ooze and dust across her cheek. He wondered how she managed to look so fresh and clean – healthsome, kind of – even though her job had so much to do with dirt. She reminded him of boys he had fought with during the war, volunteers on the shy side of sixteen, whose souls seemed to shine out right through their skin, lit up as they were with trust in the rightness of the 'Verse. Those were the ones that died early. They would risk anything, would run gleaming into the hand of death, because they trusted that the purity of their cause would save them. It didn't. Good men did not necessarily win the day; smart men, strong men, would gather the planets like a handful of jacks, no matter what they stood for. When Mal looked at Kaylee, he saw the ghost of faith. He wondered how anyone could stand to hurt her.
"You and the Doc broke it off, huh? Good," he said.
"Yeah," Kaylee said, her voice tinged with an unaccustomed bitterness, "good."
"Don't try to sound tough, little Kaylee," he said, "cause I know you ain't. It's gonna hurt for a while. But my feeling is that all this is for the best. See, I got this policy about on-ship relations. It's in the employee handbook and all."
"There's a handbook?" Kaylee said.
Mal saw honest confusion flicker across Kaylee's face.
"Wo de ma," he said, "it's in the gorram cockpit, under the control panel. Why don't nobody ever read it?"
"I read it," Jayne called, from the other end of the room. "It says we gotta wash our hands afore using the bathroom."
"That's after you use it, Jayne!" Mal snapped.
"Huh," Jayne said, philosophically. "I guess that makes more sense."
He gazed into the distance, his face a mask of nearly bovine calm, as he digested the new concept. When his moment of contemplation ended, he snorted back into his throat and spat a gob of sticky, tobacco-stained mucus onto the floor.
"Jayne," Mal said, dragging the words from his throat in a show of patience, "is there any particular reason you're still here?"
Jayne shrugged.
"Stove's broke," he said.
Jayne watched the captain's face go carved and rigid with threat. He heaved himself away from the table and stomped heavily out of the room. Just like the captain, he thought, to get all tetchy over the least little thing.
Kaylee watched him go, and turned back to her Captain. Her heart felt like a mass of broken parts in her chest, sharp-edged and jangling. She trusted Mal, liked him; she knew he meant well, and underneath his tough hide he was softer than anyone she had ever known. Still, she wished that he would leave her alone, to fix things in her own way, or to leave them broken, as she saw fit.
"I don't understand why you're here, Cap'n," she said.
Her voice caught, as if her throat were lined with hooks. Only a whisper emerged unscathed.
"Let's just say," Mal said, "that I got more than one reason to wish Simon away from you. You're the heart of this ship, and I don't conjure that any stranger come from the Core has got the right to go in and start messin' with my ship's heart. You catch my meaning?"
"I thought you liked Simon," Kaylee said, her voice trembling with unshed tears. "You fought with him, fought for his sister."
"I stood with him, cause his stand was true," Mal said. "I'll allow that much. He's crew, and I respect that. But Kaylee, you're… more than crew. You're the one that keeps us flying."
Kaylee felt her tears surge up through her throat, and flow through her, along her face, carrying her hopes along with them. She had wanted so much, believed so much; she had always had courage enough to believe in people. Now, she felt betrayed in that faith, and she didn't know if she could find it in herself to be brave again.
"That's all right, then," Mal said. "You go on and do that. But remember – I trust you to make things go right."
As he stood, he laid his hand on her bowed head. She held his other hand, and they stayed like that for a while, still and silent, in mutual benediction.