For a week after Angel came to stay permanently on Serenity, Simon began testing the idea that had struck him at the Danvers' farm. He gathered everyone for a round of check-ups and questioning that baffled the crew. River, who would otherwise have been able to shed light on her brother's new obsession with their moods and energy levels in the past few months, was so caught up with her new responsibilities as a mother that she was barely aware of his activities.
When explaining River's stability to Mal in favor of River keeping Angel, Simon begun questioning the possibility that it wasn't just the effect of Miranda's secret being shared that prompted a return to near-normalcy for his sister. There was a chance—no, more than a chance, Simon discovered—that it was something more. If it was true, this was the breakthrough he'd been waiting for nearly all year.
He worked like mad. He took blood samples and compared the chemicals in them with earlier ones. He looked over the notes the government operative had the doctors at the Alliance hospital release to him after their discharge, and made more comparisons. Everything pointed in the same direction. With all of the medical evidence to back his hypothesis up, Simon made a call.
&&&
January 2519 was already nearly over. Angel had been on Serenity as a junior member of the crew for four weeks and had celebrated her nine-month birthday, which Kaylee and River were adamant about commemorating. During that time, Angel had lived up to her namesake. She was generally quiet and watchful except when laughing. She had a little trouble those first few nights aboard, but now she slept the whole way through. And if she didn't the crew certainly didn't hear about it. River was true to her promise to Mal that Angel was her responsibility and no one else's.
Long after supper had ended and the crew had gone off to their bunks—or someone else's, in the case of Simon and Kaylee—Jayne was up and moving toward the kitchen. It was just after midnight, and no one was awake, so Jayne hadn't bothered to put on anything put his boots and pajama pants when he climbed out of his bunk. Serenity was taking another of Mal's round-about routes while smuggling opium poppies. Trips like this always made Jayne antsy. Too long in the black and not enough to keep a body occupied. And for someone as physical as Jayne, that meant mind-numbing boredom and trouble sleeping.
Jayne dug through the leftovers in the cooling unit, but couldn't find anything in there he actually wanted to eat again. Instead, he went over to the pantry, looked up to make sure no one was on the ceiling because it turned out that you could never be completely sure, and grabbed for the dry cereal. It came in huge bags and stayed edible even when it went a little stale. Mix it with some powdered milk, and it was almost like home.
Minutes of focused eating passed before Jayne registered a new noise drifting up from the first level. He automatically reached for a weapon. He cussed himself first for forgetting to put on his holster before coming out of his bunk, and secondly for not figuring out the sound he heard was Angel crying.
Disgusted, Jayne left his bowl and spoon on the table when he pushed his chair out and got up. He stomped through the mess, into the passageway toward the engine room, and downstairs to tell the girl to keep Angel quiet. There were folks tryin' to sleep! He got to the last step, mouth open to snap, when River circled around to face him.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know you could hear her from up there. I'll keep her quiet. Don't tell Mal! I'm sorry."
She was walking Angel back and forth across the floor in long ovals. She had been at it for hours. Her face showed it. She was pale and drawn. Her nightgown was permanently stretched from Angel's weight pulling it down from the baby's perch on her hip. Nothing River did helped.
Angel cried and cried, and she didn't have enough clarity of thoughts yet for River to understand her complaint. She was so worn out that her crying was more of a monotonous moan punctuated by seconds of quiet when she took another breath. The baby's hair was damp from a bit of sweat, and her face was flushed. She would put her fingers in her mouth, then remove them, then put them back just to take them back out. River had even cracked out the pacifiers again. Angel accepted them for a few minutes, but her natural aversion came back and she had wrenched it out and threw it across the room.
Jayne looked on for a moment, watched her pace. The movements were so practiced that River didn't even have to keep her eyes open the entire time to know the exact place her foot had come down the time before and put it there again. He felt pretty bad about coming down to yell when River was clearly doing her best. "How long ya been at it?"
River looked to the ceiling as if a clock floated there. She dragged in a breath. "Three hours, twelve minutes, fifty-seven seconds."
"What's wrong with her?"
"Don't know," she confided. "I know she hurts, but I can't find where."
"Maybe you should go get the Doc. He'll know."
"No! Can't. He's with Kaylee. I can't go bother him for little things."
"What if it ain't a little thing?" he asked.
She shook her head. "If I wake him up for something small, he'll be annoyed and tell the Captain that I should not be allowed to keep Angel if I am going to be a hypochondriac. If I do not wake him up and it is something serious then Angel gets sick and dies and it is all my fault anyway. My only option is to wait. Wait for a change to occur. Change is good—static tells us nothing."
Jayne shook his head. That was some crazy-ass reasoning. It didn't take a doctor to see that both of those girls were exhausted. Whatever was keeping Angel from sleeping was wearing down on River. At this rate, their pilot was going to fall asleep at the helm, and the best they could hope for was that they'd fly off course and miss their target. And Jayne knew it wasn't healthy for a baby to keep crying on like that.
"This a new thing, or she been like this a while?"
"Angel's been fussy all day. When I laid her down, she wouldn't sleep; kept crying. So I started walking."
"She got a fever?" he asked as he stepped into the common room.
River glanced up, her pacing halted momentarily. She rested her cheek against the crown of Angel's head. "A little."
"She snifflin'? All stuffed up?"
"No."
"Anythin' different in her diapers?"
"No."
Hm. Jayne walked closer. River stopped walking her circuit all together and reverted to the bounce-sway Jayne had shown her originally. Going on a vague remembrance, Jayne took another step closer.
"Uh, can I…?" He motioned toward Angel's face pressed up against River's sternum and neck. He didn't want to reach in there unannounced. River alone might take his hand off; as a mother protecting her young, River might outright kill him. Instead, she nodded.
Jayne reached out and just touched the baby's chin, real gentle like. Angel stared up at him with wary, water-filled eyes, but didn't make any move to bat his hand away. He increased the pressure a little and pulled her bottom lip down. That got Angel's attention. She started bawling again, and twisted her head away from Jayne, but not before he got a look at what was hurting her.
"She's cuttin' teeth," he announced. "Right there on the bottom. 'S why she keeps pullin' her fingers out."
River tried to adjust her hold enough to get her own look into Angel's mouth, but the girl was wise to that trick now. She knew to turn her head away. River sighed. "So how do I fix her?"
Jayne thought back to what his Ma had done for Matty when he'd been teething. She'd made soft sourdough pretzels, froze them in the ice box, and given them to Matty to gnaw on. Jayne knew they didn't have any frozen pretzels, but they did have frozen waffles you could put in a toaster. Like the cereal, those waffles were one of the few grain products that kept on a ship.
"Come on."
River followed Jayne up to the galley. Angel's chest rose and fell against her own. It would have been a comfort if the baby's temperature hadn't gone up due to her prolonged crying—if she hadn't been crying in the first place. River glanced at Jayne's back. She was glad that he'd come down when he did, and not before. There were times when she'd cried right along with Angel at her own ineptitude. She had been sure she was about to start again when the merc came down to yell at her. River had not expected his kindness.
In the mess, Jayne went straight for the freezer unit. River sat down at the table across from Jayne's abandoned bowl of cereal, her legs finally giving out now that there was an end in sight. Angel went back to sticking her fingers in her mouth in hopes of relieving some of the pain in her gums. Not a full minute later, Jayne dropped the whole box of frozen waffles on the table in front of them.
"Wait here," he told her, and turned back out of the room toward his bunk.
River frowned. She reached out and poked the box with a finger. She did not understand what cure could be found in packaged breakfast food. When Jayne reentered the room, he carried a small tube in his hand.
"Here."
River took it, and read the label. It was a generic brand, local anesthetic to be used orally for tooth and gum discomfort. And it was perhaps the only medical supply that Simon did not have stocked in the infirmary. She grinned. "Xei-xie, ren ci de yong. Zhu fu ni."
"Put the stuff on her gums, an' then let her chew on a waffle for bit," he directed in favor of responding to her thanks.
Jayne sat back in his chair and poured more cereal into the bowl to cover the soggy taste of the flakes he let sit too long. He watched River gently wrestle Angel to get the numbing gel onto her gums. After a new bout of tears, Angel settled down when the she was given the waffle. River tried to hand the tube back, but Jayne waved it away.
"Keep it. She'll need it again after a while."
She thanked him, and closed her fist around the anesthetic. River leaned back in the chair when Angel quieted. She glanced across at Jayne and accidentally caught his eye. Both looked away.
"How—" she cleared her throat, "how do you know so much? About babies?"
Jayne swallowed before answering. "I helped my Ma when I was younger."
"You have many brothers and sisters?"
"Naw, just Matty. He's almost twelve years younger, though. I was a third parent, more'n anything."
River raised her eyebrows. Twelve years was a big gap. It wasn't unheard of, but on Rim worlds where large families were common, it was odd to have only two children with such an age difference.
Jayne noticed her look and explained, "There were a few brothers and sisters between us, but…."
"I see," she answered. When Jayne frowned a little at her, River realized how that must have sounded. "I mean, I don't see. I understand. I wasn't reading you."
"Oh," he mumbled. "Well, okay, then."
As neither of them seemed to be going anywhere—Jayne continued eating his third bowl of cereal, and River didn't want to risk getting up now that Angel had just found a distraction from pain—River struck up the conversation again as a means of filling the awkward quiet.
"You helped your mother a lot when you were younger?"
"Hm? Oh, yeah. I guess. She was real weak after Matty was born, an' he was early besides, so I quit goin' to school so's I could stay home and help 'til Ma got stronger."
"What did you do when she regained her strength?" River asked, a yawn drawing out the end.
"Got a job." Jayne shrugged. "Didn't like school none, anyhow."
River's eyes were finally starting to drift shut, but she wasn't willing to let go of consciousness yet. "What next?"
"Worked at anything. Helped re-roof on a house when the wind came up and knocked the old one off. Tore down a house. Hauled stuff from one place to another for the mining company my Pa worked for. Did a little of the actual mining for a while, too," Jayne answered. He shifted in his seat. This talk was getting longer than Jayne generally liked his conversations to be. He was getting mighty uncomfortable talking about his life like this.
"When was the first time you picked up a gun?"
"Why you wanna know that?" he snapped.
She managed a slight lift of her shoulders. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
Stupid, feng le girl…he grumbled to himself. "I was twen'y-three—happy? I just got hired on one of the boats that shipped the iron and copper from the mines 'cause one of the hands blew a blood vessal in his brain while takin' a shit. I got his old room, an' under the floor grating I found Boo, my six-gun. I taught myself how to use her. How 'bout you?"
"I was fifteen. Just got upgraded in my training—I was allowed to use crafted weapons now. I shot one of my teachers in the gut, and as punishment they strapped me down and ran eighty thousand volts of electricity through me via little electrodes on my head. I stopped trying to kill my teachers after that."
Jayne wouldn't have admitted it, but he listened wide-eyed. That was horrifying. And not unlike those stories thirteen-year-old boys make up to gross out and impress one another, thought to himself. Jayne knew she was telling the truth, but part of his brain really wanted her to be lying.
What River was doing was falling asleep at the table. Angel watched Jayne eat while she gnawed and drooled. It appeared that the baby was now wide awake and willing to be sociable now that the pressure in her gums was alieved. She watched Jayne get up and walk over to put his dishes in the sink. Then she watched him grab the box of waffles from the table, and replace them in the freezing unit.
"Maybe you should try dopin' her," Jayne suggested.
River jumped. "Huh?"
"Give Angel somethin' to knock her out."
She was appalled. Jayne quickly added, "Not like a shot or nothin'. Just add a little baby-medicine to her bottle to conk her out."
"Can't do that!"
"Sure you can. Lotsa folks do it."
"I will not drug my daughter because her actions are inconvenient!" she insisted.
"Fine, but you'll be awake for another hour at least until she gets tired again."
"Then I'll be awake."
"Fine, but that gel stuff won't last all night," he pointed out. "Hell, I figure it don't got another fifteen minutes or so 'til Angel starts feelin' those teeth again. The meds would let both of you get some sleep."
River rubbed her eyes. She was so tired, and getting crankier by the minute. And who in the tian sha de xi niu guay permitted Jayne to be right twice in one night? It went against all natural laws!
"I suppose I could give her some infant pain reliever to dull the pain," she conceded. "Just don't want to do what Simon and the Captain always did. Girl's being a nuisance, dope her up, and send her to bed."
Jayne nodded. "I get that. Prob'ly shouldn't have said it like I did."
River shrugged which ended up in a bowing yawn. Angel craned her head up to look at her mother. She tried to copy the funny expression. River smiled. She kissed her daughter's head and forced herself up out of the chair. "Time for bed, nian ching de."
At River's statement, Jayne recalled the time, and who he was in the galley having an actual discussion with. He took his own leave with a muttered, "G'night."
"Jayen?" River called him back.
"Huh?"
"Don't tell Mal or Simon, please," she entreated. "Captain said that Angel was my responsibility and no one else's. If they know I had help, they will think she can't do this on her own, she is not fit to be a mother, and they will take Angel away from her. So, please? Do not tell."
He nodded. "All right."
"Thank you." She smiled. "Good night, Jayne. And thank you for your help."
"Weren't nothin'. See ya in the mornin'."
River carried Angel back down to their room. She made a brief detour into the infirmary and went straight to the cabinet that Simon kept the general medication for slight fevers, headaches, upset stomachs, or allergies; and the recently added baby versions of those medicines. She didn't dare set Angel down on the chair, the cot, or anywhere else, so River held her in her left arm, hand still balled in a fist around the numbing gel, as she filled a graduated spoon with a cherry flavored painkiller, and administered it.
Angel was awake for another twenty minutes. Her eyelids started drooping, and her hold on the waffle slipped. River applied some more gel before Angel fell completely asleep to make sure that no pain prevented her from fully reaching unconsciousness. As soon as Angel was rhythmically sucking on her fingers, beta waves washing through her brain, River dropped onto her bed and was asleep seconds after her head found it's cradle in the pillow.
&&&
Jayne still couldn't sleep. He was awake for nearly another hour. All that helping River reminded him of his own mother, and that he hadn't written her in a while. More out of guilt than sleeplessness, he dug under his bed for the small notebook and pen he kept for this purpose, and began a new letter.
Deer Ma,
I am sory I hav not ritten lately. Things hav bin very bizy. Remember that I told yu we lost owr pilet a few months ago? Wel we got us a new one and she haz got a baby. She iz a new ma and she dont no wut she iz doing all the time but she iz geting the hang of it. I helpd her with the baby ones and it reminded me of wen I helpd yu with Matty. This baby iz a girl thow.
I am fine and not hurt. The crew iz doing fine. We have a job delivering flowers. It shud pay well. I am sending yu the enclosed money to help with Matty's doctor bills. I am glad to heer that he iz feeling better. Tell him and Pa that I wave hi.
Love, yor son, Jayne
He ripped the page out of the notebook, and dug around for the box of envelopes. The next time he hit a port that had a post office, he'd mail it off. Writing letters home was always difficult; not only the posting time, the money for stamps, and the not-knowing if the letter would get there at all, but the guilt Jayne always felt when he wrote instead of visited.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& &&&&
Xei-xie, ren ci de yong. Zhu fu ni.—Thank you, merciful soldier. Bless you. (I tried to find a phrase meaning "my hero," but no luck.)
feng le—crazy
tian sha de xi niu guay—goddamn cow sucking hell
nian ching de—little one