Disclaimer: same as ever; I own nothing, Joss is god and owns this 'Verse and all within it (except Sia, Kaen, Yuri and Nicos… they belong to me!)
A/N: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!!! I can't believe how long this took to update. My bad! I totally suck, I know… RL has been killing me! And my muse ran away to play in a different fandom… Ugh, ok I'm done making excuses. Here's the new chapter!!! FINALLY!
Thank you for all the wonderful reviews! You guys totally rock!!! And I hope you haven't all given up on this story!
Warning: This chapter contains a scene that has some smut, but only a small amount. (That doesn't mean jump ahead to find it, ya perves! ;-P ). It's still pretty safe, but don't say you haven't been warned!
The crew and the five readers sat or stood all around the mess, silently looking at each other. Mal had ordered everyone up to the mess once all wounds had been attended to. He, Zoe and Jayne had come out without a scratch as they hadn't been all that close to the reavers they had shot. Jayne was still fuming over the events of the last few hours and as he sat clenching and unclenching his fists under the table, he knew that he would only be able to hold out a little while longer before he would have to hit something. Or someone.
"Captain Reynolds," Nicos drawled, breaking the uneasy silence. "Would ya mind telling us what it was exactly that you were thinkin', bringing your people back down into a fight you was told specifically to stay out of?" His friends winced a little at his bluntness, though they too wanted to ask the same question.
"Well boy, here I was thinkin' that lending you folks a hand would be looked at with a might more gratitude than you're showing." Mal's drawl put Nicos' own to shame, as he leaned back against the counter, all nonchalance and authority. "And seein' as how this is my ship and my crew, I'm the only one with the authority to be givin' orders on it. Dong ma?"
"Captain, I would like to–"
"Bi zui." The low command silenced both the browncoat and the assassin and everyone turned to look at River. "Captain, do not make the mistake of thinking that we are children or innocent and helpless." She paused and looked around at her friends. "We have seen, done and experienced far more than any of you could imagine. We were perfectly able to handle that reaver party." She put up a hand to stall the protests coming from Mal, Jayne and her brother. "However, your help was appreciated and certainly made things go faster."
"Riv, c'mon. We didn't need 'em for that. That fight was a joke. Them reavers was dead before they landed their ship; just too crazy to know it."
"Be that as it may," Sia spoke up, quelling Yuri and Nicos with a glare. "It is polite to appreciate aid when given, however unnecessary."
Kaen piped up, adding her two cents. "Now if you two don't stop posturing, I'm gonna take you outside and kick both your pigu's. And you know as well as I do that I can. We have more important things to discuss than which one of you has the most testosterone."
Jayne smirked as the two younger men nodded, suitably chastised by the bitty little women. Then he scowled again, remembering what happened. He turned his attention to the one responsible.
"Moving on, ya wanna explain why ya thought knocking me out 'fore a fight with gorram reavers was a good idea?" He growled at Yuri. Several of the crew members shifted nervously, well aware of the mercenary's bad temper. Looking at his friend, Simon began mentally cataloguing the equipment he was going to need, to put Yuri back together after Jayne got done with him. It was possible that Yuri would beat him, but given Jayne's mood at the moment, Simon doubted it.
"Uh, Jayne?"
"Yeah, Mal?"
"Ya know I'm gonna have to stop you from killing him, right?"
"Yeah, Mal."
"Well alrighty," Mal clapped his hands together. "Just makin' sure we're clear."
Jayne glared hard at Yuri, his blue eyes dark and narrowed. The blonde reader just smiled ruefully, braced himself and spread his arms wide.
"'Spect you're deservin' a fair shot; even things out."
Jayne smirked, considered his opponent for a moment, then took a step forward and hammered one large fist into Yuri's abdomen with … half his usual strength. Even so, the smaller man stumbled back a bit, wheezing loudly. When he looked up, his eyes reflected his surprise and confusion.
"You ever do somethin' like that again; I'll make sure it hurts." Jayne stated evenly, the threat in his eyes and voice. Yuri just grinned and nodded, respect for the mercenary blossoming in him.
"Fair enough."
Jayne nodded back, then feeling a resurging of the anger and jealousy he'd been carrying lately, he whirled around to face Nicos.
"And as for you…" Nicos – a dangerous, government-trained reader assassin – actually gulped and nearly stepped backwards at the feral look in the mercenary's eyes.
Before anyone could react, Jayne punched Nicos in the face, not holding back this time. At all. The younger man went flying across the mess, before landing on his back with a loud thud.
"You ever touch her again, I'll kill you. Dong ma?"
Everyone in the room froze in stunned silence as Jayne growled out the threat, then stomped over to River, grabbed her by her upper arms and kissed her with all the pent-up emotions he had collected in the last few days, letting them all pour into her mouth; frustration, affection, anger, lust, jealousy, fear, arousal, relief. River nearly buckled under the double onslaught of Jayne's mouth and emotions. When he finally released her mouth and took a small step back, she looked up at him with dark, surprised eyes and full, kiss-swollen lips.
"Can we talk?" He asked in a low voice. Utterly unable to speak at that moment, she nodded and went willingly when he grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the mess and off toward her shuttle. Leaving a very shocked crew and four readers; two smug, one bleeding and one chastised, in their wake.
"Well," Mal said, first to break the silence, grinning widely as he watched Nicos scrape himself up off the floor with a moan. "How 'bout that."
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Jayne slid the shuttle door shut with more force than necessary, still riding his anger from the confrontation, and turned to look at River. The reader had taken a seat on her bed and was watching him silently with dark, solemn eyes. He suddenly felt a little nervous, which shocked him, as he couldn't actually remember ever being nervous round a woman, sceptin' his ma, but that woman could scare the devil hisself if she had a mind to. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, unable to decide what to say or where to start, now that they were finally alone together for the first time in days. With a sigh, he decided to start near the beginning.
"Why ya been avoiding me for?
Nervous and still a little dazed from his kiss, River blushed and looked down at her hands.
"I apologize for kissing you, it wasn't what I meant–" Jayne cut her off with a growl.
"If I'da wanted an apology for that, you woulda known. Surely you could tell I was enjoying it just as much as you, genius reader an' all."
"After Nicos, I am unsure of my reception around men and their possible reactions to my advances," she started again cautiously, still looking at her hands.
"Don't even get me started on that hundan!" Jayne barked angrily. That got her attention. River's head came flying up, eyes blazing.
"You asked and I'm telling. If you do not wish to know the answer to a question, then do not ask it!" She took a breath to settle herself down. He made a noise that might have been apology or consent to continue. "Nicos and I had a relationship, sort of, about a year ago, for a brief amount of time."
Jayne sat down on the couch across from the bed, elbows resting on his knees, his blue eyes dark and intent on her face, as he listened. He tried really hard not to interrupt when she said the words relationship and Nicos in the same sentence.
"I hoped that after, he wouldn't be so focused on me, but he was worse. Nothing dangerous," River rushed to assure Jayne when he shifted dangerously and his eyes darkened more. "I wasn't sure how to handle his continued attention, so I finally told him that I didn't want him around and I left to stay with Inara for a few months."
They were both silent for a minute, staring at each other. Finally Jayne took a deep breath and broke the silence.
"So when you kissed me, you thought I was going to be like that tiansheng de yi dui rou and go all bat-shit crazy on ya?" He wasn't sure if he was more insulted or annoyed.
She sighed. "Intellectually, I knew you wouldn't, but the mind and body cannot always work in harmony, as I have learned over the years." Her face twisted at some old memory, but only for a second before she pushed it back. Jayne watched her for a minute, and then came to a decision; one he was sure would change his life, but he knew he wouldn't regret it.
He got up from the couch and knelt on the floor in front of her. Taking both of her hands in his, Jayne looked up at her, bright blue eyes intense and shining.
"Riv, I ain't afraid of admitin' that I like you, yer a powerfully attractive woman and that ain't even just yer looks. But I ain't going to be like that gorram idiot in the mess. You don't want me, you say so and I let you go. But if you do, I wanna see where this could go. I never done nothing like this before, and I think you know that, but hell, I'm game if you are."
Throughout his speech, River's eyes had become brighter and brighter; by the end they were nearly glowing. She wasn't sure she could speak with her heart lodged in her throat (unusual place for an internal organ to be located), so she decided to show him, without words, how much he had come to mean to her. She learned forward and pressed her lips to his, snaking her arms around his shoulders to hold him close.
Unprepared for her sudden assault, Jayne went still against River for a minute, before responding. He wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting her as he stood. Her response was to wrap her legs around his waist. Jayne pulled back to look at her.
"You sure?" He asked. He couldn't believe how important it was to him that she not regret anything of what they were about to do. When she just smiled and nodded, tightening her long legs, he crushed her against him.
River, for one of the very few times in her highly eventful life, found herself unable to form a complete thought as Jayne lowered her gently onto the bed and covered her small body with his own much larger one.
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As they lay panting in the afterglow, Jayne began to trace the nasty scar that marred her stomach. She tensed instantly, the content disappearing from her face.
"You ever gonna tell me what made this?" He asked, uncharacteristically hesitant. The last time he'd asked her, he'd been pretty sure she was about to take his head off with that sword of hers, or cry. He wasn't sure which was worse.
River closed her eyes, not wanting to relive that time. But after everything they had shared, she knew he at least deserved to know that.
"It's from when we attacked the Academy. I told you about the fighting?" She looked over at him. Jayne shifted so he was lying on his side facing her, his head being held up by one arm. He nodded slowly. "Did I tell you that some of the people we fought were other students?"
He shook his head. "Always sorta figured that were the case, but since you didn't say nothing, I didn't want to bring it up."
"There were a lot of students, former friends of ours, who answered our call when we broke into the Academy. But there were some who were too far gone…" River closed her eyes again as she remembered that day.
River slipped down the empty hallway as quietly as she could, stumbling occasionally over the bodies left there from earlier skirmishes. She was trying to move quickly, she was meant to rendezvous with the others on the other side of the facility in less that 10 minutes, and the wounds she had so far sustained were slowing her down too much for her own comfort. She was halfway to the meeting point when she turned a corner and came face to face with the beginning of a nightmare that would haunt her for years after.
Blanked faced, Kate Ching ruthlessly thrust her sword through the heart of one of the scum who had dared to invade the facility. Former students and comrades, they had betrayed the Academy and so deserved to die. As she pulled her sword free, Kate sensed someone coming up behind her and spun to meet her next combatant. Her brilliant, broken mind automatically processed the new arrival and identified her as River Tam, subject 8436-494, Room Block 3C, Training Group 1A. Another betrayer, then; so be it. The Academy Operative, so called now that her training was finally complete, levelled her sword at her opponent and waited for the wounded woman to make the first move.
River didn't say a word as she looked down the blade of a sword and into the blank, dead eyes of a girl who had once been her best friend. Although inside she was screaming at what life and the bastards that ran the Academy had brought them to, externally River Tam was as blank as the Operative she faced. Kate would not be the first ex-friend and comrade she had killed that night. She noted that Kate was waiting for her to make the first move. So be it.
"…We must've fought for more than 10 minutes before I finally managed to knock the sword out of her hand. I went to kill her, but she looked up at me and I hesitated." River sat up and turned away from Jayne, not wanting him to see her like this, as she tried to wipe away the tears trickling down her cheeks. "She tried to gut me with a knife she had hidden in her boot. I pulled back just in time, so she mostly missed the vital organs. Then I killed her, put my sword through her heart."
Jayne stared up at the naked back of the beautiful woman sitting above him. He knew she was crying, even if he hadn't been able to hear the sobs in her voice or the hitching of her breath. He could smell the salt in the air and knew, somehow, just by the way she was holding herself. He sat up and wrapped his arms around and buried his face in her hair, offering what comfort he could.
She stirred but didn't pull away when his arms went around her. "I still don't know how I got out of the facility and back to the others. Yuri told me after that had I been even a few minutes later getting to them, I wouldn't have lived." Jayne tightened his arms around her as he realised how close he came to losing her before he even had her.
"There wasn't anything ya coulda done," he whispered against her skin. "She was too far gone for ya ta save. She woulda killed you instead, Riv"
"Doesn't make it any easier," she whispered back, letting herself draw comfort from the strong arms holding her and the warm mind unknowingly caressing her own.
He nodded slightly. "Don't suppose it do, but it's still the truth. You ain't got nothin to be blamin' yerself for, ya hear me?" Jayne gave her a gentle shake to emphasize his point.
"I know, I do." She whispered and finally let the tears come freely. Her lover drew her back down onto the bed and held her close as she cried for the friends she had lost and the things they had seen and done.
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tiansheng de yi dui rou – stupid inbred stack of meat
A/N: Dear gods, I took forever to update!! I'm sooo sorry! I'm not sure if I really like this chapter, but I couldn't figure out how to make it any better. Also, I know I went kind of vanilla on the smut scene, but frankly, it's my first attempt and I chickened out on actually doing the scene! Plus, I don't think I'm really very good at it, so I'll probably leave it to those who actually can.
As always, reviews are love and concrit is most welcome! -Druid