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zinjadu: at last, the infamous "non-consensual snuggling fic" has been finished! I'm not overly thrilled with this, and I'm not sure I'll ever get Jayne's speech patterns out of my head, now, but it was amusing to write. I apologize for unintended forays into drunken!angst... I didn't realize this was going to be post-Serenity until it'd already happened.
Fandom: Firefly
Title: Sodden
Warnings: Drunken!Jayne, non-consensual snuggling, and Serenity spoilers. Oh, and some naughty Mandarin, of course.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any money at it, please and thank you to the mighty Joss for the opportunity to play with his toys.
Rating: PG-13ish
It was a pretty surprising thing to get a few days planetside on Serenity, so Kaylee meant to make the most of it. That meant getting the aft couplers fixed and the engine all nice and tuned for lift-off tonight so she could hope for a day in town tomorrow morning, if the Captain didn’t manage to get somebody angry with him while he was out on the job. That was a big if, lately, but Kaylee was still hoping.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps on the steps down to the egine-room and smiled. “Hey, Jayne. How’s town?”
She never did find out. Next thing she knew, Jayne had his thick arms wrapped around her waist and she was struggling not to lose her balance as he pulled her into a bear-hug. The toes of her boots barely scraped the floor. “Hey... You okay?”
“’M fine. Yer... yer too good fer us. Too gorram good.” The thick smell of... well, some kind of alcohol, anyway - it smelled about as strong as the stuff she kept ‘round for cleaning engine bits - seeped out of his pores as if it was trying to cover the habitual sweat, metal and gunpowder smell that was Jayne. “Gotta - hic! - take better care a’ yerself. All sorts a’ crazy sumbitches in this ‘verse, more like me ‘n like you - little girl like you gotta take care. ‘Mind me a’ my oldest sister’s youngest, al’ays gettin’ in trouble wi’ some tamade hundan like me...”
Kaylee laughed, patting his shoulder. “Hey, now - that ain’t true. You’re a good man, Jayne. Come on - what got you goin’ on this?”
He just hugged her tighter for a minute, then let go and turned around, muttering to himself and swaying just a little as he headed toward the fore-decks.
Kaylee stretched out a crick in her neck as she watched him go. “Huh. Wonder what that was all about?”
* * *
“Doc! There y’are!”
Simon barely had time to register panic at Jayne’s approaching bulk before the larger man had draped a thick arm around his shoulders. He was fairly certain the mercenary was going to crush his windpipe if he moved, so he just... didn’t. “Uh. Jayne. Do you... need something?”
“Y’remind me a’ my brother, ya know that? Prolly never told ya’... he’s a scrawny bas’ard, jus’ like you. Sick all the ruttin’ time. Al’us gettin... whaddaya call’em. Ev’ry damn virus comes by the house.” Jayne snickered. “An’ with the nieces and nephews runnin’ around, there’s always a ton a’ those.”
“I... didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Didn’t I tell ya?” Jayne looked genuinely confused. “Could’a sworn I toldja. Yanno. With the thing. The box.”
“The box?” It occurred to Simon that perhaps he was dreaming. Yes, that had to be it. This was a nightmare, probably brought on by congestion or... some kind of precursor to a heart-attack? That could cause a sensation of immense weight on his chest, couldn’t it? He should screen himself when he woke up. If he woke up.
I can’t die. Not now. Not dreaming of a drunken Jayne leaning on me. That’s just not fair. And did he drink the alcohol, or just bathe in it?
“Box wi’ yer sister innit.”
“Oh. You mean when River and I came aboard?”
“Naw. Didn’t like you much then. After. With the... the thing. Time she grabbed me. That was it. Thought I toldja after that.”
Simon flinched at the reminder that his baby sister had touched Jayne in... well, he couldn’t exactly say inappropriate ways - she’d been trying to incapacitate him, not... not...
That really didn’t bear thinking on.
“No. You didn’t tell me.”
“Oh. Well. I do. An’... yanno. Think it’s right as a peach, you takin’ care a’ her like ya’ do. Real noble. Yer a good man. Heh. Little man, but a good one. Remind me a’ Mattie. Ye’d like him, he’s all...” Jayne’s brows knit together, fumbling for a word, then seemed to forget whatever it was he’d been working so hard to remember. “Gotta go find Zoe. An’ the cap’n. Gotta talk to Mal....”
The weight lifted from Simon’s shoulders, and the doctor watched as Jayne wove on through the ship, swaying slightly and leaning more than was necessary on the railings at the side of the stairs. A nightmare. It had to be. Simon shivered and turned his back on the shambling monstrosity that was Jayne and and continued straight on to the egine-room. Being around Kaylee would make him feel better. For one thing, Kaylee smelled a lot better.
* * *
“Shouldn’t drink so much. Liver functions will be impaired in the future, and Simon doesn’t have the equipment he’d need to repair the damage here on Serenity.”
Jayne hung his head, shame radiating from him like the bright glow of Serenity’s engines, and for a moment River was pleased. No one ever listened to what she said, but maybe when Jayne was drunk he was sufficiently open-minded that she could make him understand. Perhaps alcohol did have its beneficial qualities...
“M’sorry ‘bout Ariel. An’ before M’randa, too. Wasn’ gonna hurt ya’, I jus.... jus...” Jayne’s face screwed up, twisting into an almost comic mask of sorrow. Like a harlequin of some kind, River thought. “Jus’ don’ know what to do wi’ ya’. Yer all...”
“Scary,” River supplied. “Disturbing. Unnatural.”
“That stuff.” Jayne nodded. “Confoundin’ gorram girl,” he added with a growl.
“I confound even myself, all the time.” River agreed solemnly. “Not so much anymore, though. Getting better.”
“Yeah. No more... uh...” Jayne made a wiggly sort of gesture by his temple. The image of River’s own self seen from the outside flashed in her mind, dancing in circles of death in the Maidenhead bar. Pain and interest, shock and awe.
“Not recently.”
“Right.”
“Can I… uh….” He started toward her, arms outstretched and a look in his eyes like the puppy she remembered begging her parents to buy for her when she was in primary school. Ripped up cushions and an antique rug soaked in canine urine.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“No?” His lower lip began to protrude.
She shook her head, seeing in her mind a wagging tail and large, pathetic brown eyes surrounded by destruction. Yelling. Simon and her mother arguing, her father’s quiet, stern voice cutting in. The puppy had to go. He was too troublesome, going to get too big, too energetic. Liable to hurt her when he got too big to know his own strength, not to mention destroy the whole house in the process.
“The postman doesn’t like to be bothered, and my mother’s flowerbeds are a bad place to dig.” River sought in his eyes for understanding. “You have to learn to behave all the time, not just when Daddy’s here with the spray bottle ready.”
“Uh. Yeah. Yer… yeah.” Jayne hesitated, then lowered his arms and warily, sadly stepped around her and continued his journey toward the front of the ship.
River watched after him, and wondered if he would remember.
* * *
“Jayne. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The mercenary didn’t remove the heavy arms that draped loosely around Zoe’s shoulders. In fact, he didn’t even seem to tense.
“You lookin’ to get hurt, Jayne?” Zoe asked calmly.
“No?” He looked a mite confused. And then, like the big, angry child that he was - “Ya’ can hit me, if it’ll make ya’ feel better. I can take it.”
“I ain’t hittin’ you. Not for no reason. Might change my mind if you don’t let go, though.”
Spiky, unwashed hair pricked into her neck, and she remembered before the harpoon, before Miranda and Lilac and everything else, when her life was normal and she’d at last coaxed Wash into letting her trim his wild halo of ginger hair. They’d laughed that night over how prickly it was, how oddly respectable and military he’d looked. Jayne’s hair had that feeling now. She shoved him roughly away from her, physically ill with the memory.
“Toldja it’d help.”
“You ain’t helping, Jayne.”
The big mercenary hung his head over her shoulder. “Ain’t my fault he’s gone. Would’a traded with him if I could’a. Li’l man didn’t deserve...”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” Zoe’s tone brooked no argument - this was not a conversation she wanted to be having. Not even with Mal could she talk about this, and she sure as hell wasn’t hearing it from Jayne.
“Well...”
“No, Jayne.”
“Naw.” He sounded so young, now. “Don’t s’pose I would’a. Kinda wish I would, though. S’the kinda thing them dumb xiāngbālâo at Canton would’a ‘spected me to do, ya know? Think sometimes it’d be better if I could be that. F’I could just... jus’... You an’ Mal, you got the whole hero thing down. Think it’s pretty dumb half the time, but people respect that. F’I could be like that...” He trailed off and sighed.
“Jayne?”
He lifts his head. “Yeah?”
“Go away before you sober up and I hurt you.”
* * *
The teapot had almost finished reached a boil, its metal sides thrumming with the rhythm of the simmering water as it neared its peak. Like working to a fall, like Serenity’s engines pulsing bright before rabbitting away from danger once again. Inara smiled. It was a good day, for this kind of peace to stay with her throughout the day - maybe her return to Serenity really was good for her. She reached for the teapot...
And missed by a good three inches as thick arms crushed around her waist, an unshaven face pressed against her shoulder from behind. Not Mal, and she refused to admit even to herself that she was disappointed by that. Mal’s arms weren’t this big, and Mal never smelled... well, he did smell this badly of cheap whiskey, but it smelled differently on him. Anyway, the arms around her middle were bare to the upper bicep, and Mal never wore t-shirts.
“Jayne, get off me!”
Something warm and wet touched the shoulder of her silk robe, and Jayne snuffled unpleasantly.
“Are you...” This simply was not possible. “Jayne, are you crying?”
“No.”
He rubbed his face against her robe, and this time the dampness had better be tears and not the excretions of another orifice on his face. Inara sighed. “Yes you are, Jayne.”
“Nope. Not cryin’. Jus’...” He sniffled. “Ain’t my fault I ain’t like them.”
“Ain’t... Aren’t like who?”
“Cap’n an’ Zoe.”
Oh for... “There aren’t a lot of people in the ‘verse like them.”
“Never fought in any fancy wars, don’t see as I should get my hide tanned for somebody else. Shepherd... shepherd al’as said... Aw, qingwa cào de liúmáng. Like I wanna be thinkin’ ‘bout that again.” His arms squeezed tighter around her waist, and the tears started right back up again. “Bes’ man I ever met, y’know? Weren’t like the preachers back home, weren’t al’as... al’as tellin’ people how to live, what to do. Jus’ asked stuff, an’... an’ like I wanted to be better jus’ not to disappoint ‘im.”
“He was a man of true goodness,” Inara agreed, trying to pat Jayne’s shoulder behind her own back. “We all miss him.” A moment of silence. “Jayne? Jayne, you’re... I can’t quite breathe like this.”
“Oh. Uh... sorry ‘bout that, ‘Nara.”
Released, Inara took a deep breath and leaned back against the counter for a moment to breath. “Just do the best you can, Jayne. That’s all Shepherd Book would expect of you. It’s all any of us can do in this life.”
Big tears welled up in the mercenary’s eyes, and he wandered off muttering about good people and heroes. And something about cigars, but Inara was fairly sure that was just a drunken tangent.
* * *
“Hey, Mal?”
“We won’t be liftin’ off for another eight hours, Jayne. Go play with your rainstick until the client gets here, ‘cause I ain’t... tamade. You smell like you slept in a still, Jayne.”
“Ain’t slept none yet. Jus’ got back from the bar.”
“Well, that’d explain the stink, too, I guess. Why don’t you... well, you can sure as hell quit lookin’ at me like that, first off. I ain’t really in the mood for one of our little chats right now.”
The alcohol was finally starting to fade from Jayne’s brain a bit, and he looked at Mal with something approaching clear wits, if still slightly painted over with the maudlin attentions of a good whiskey. Best use it while it was still there, then.
“I’m tryin’, Mal. Tryin’ to... You an’ I had our share a’ tussles, but y’ought’a know. M’glad I’m here. Makes me wanna be a better...” He trailed off, unable to figure out exactly the words for what was hanging around his head, and then, in one last impulsive attempt, grabbed Mal by the shoulders and pulled him into a hug. Manly hug. He might be huggin’ the captain, but he weren’t sly, in no way. Mama didn’t raise no girly boys.
Mal coughed a little, then thumped Jayne on the shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s good, Jayne. You do that. And, uh... go take a shower and get some sleep, alright? Time to sleep it off.”
“Yeah.” Jayne smiled. “Yer a good man, Mal.”
“Sometimes I think I might be,” Mal agreed. “You just get outta here, now, ‘fore I change my mind and figure you’d make better use of all that sauce in your brain by cleanin’ out the septics.”
“’Night, Mal.”
Mal watched the big man falter off toward the crew bunks, then shook his head and turned back toward the controls. Sunlight streaming through the glass, and a client would be by any minute with new cargo for them. Not a bad day, altogether, even countin’ his mercenary was drunk as a skunk.
A few minutes later the familiar beat of Zoe’s boots tapped up to him, and he turned to face her. His first officer had rarely looked so... rumpled.
“Sir, we gotta talk about Jayne.”
Mal sighed. Smooth. Why did things just never go smooth? “Had a feeling that might be it. Tell me what he did....”
zinjadu: at last, the infamous "non-consensual snuggling fic" has been finished! I'm not overly thrilled with this, and I'm not sure I'll ever get Jayne's speech patterns out of my head, now, but it was amusing to write. I apologize for unintended forays into drunken!angst... I didn't realize this was going to be post-Serenity until it'd already happened.Fandom: Firefly
Title: Sodden
Warnings: Drunken!Jayne, non-consensual snuggling, and Serenity spoilers. Oh, and some naughty Mandarin, of course.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any money at it, please and thank you to the mighty Joss for the opportunity to play with his toys.
Rating: PG-13ish
It was a pretty surprising thing to get a few days planetside on Serenity, so Kaylee meant to make the most of it. That meant getting the aft couplers fixed and the engine all nice and tuned for lift-off tonight so she could hope for a day in town tomorrow morning, if the Captain didn’t manage to get somebody angry with him while he was out on the job. That was a big if, lately, but Kaylee was still hoping.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps on the steps down to the egine-room and smiled. “Hey, Jayne. How’s town?”
She never did find out. Next thing she knew, Jayne had his thick arms wrapped around her waist and she was struggling not to lose her balance as he pulled her into a bear-hug. The toes of her boots barely scraped the floor. “Hey... You okay?”
“’M fine. Yer... yer too good fer us. Too gorram good.” The thick smell of... well, some kind of alcohol, anyway - it smelled about as strong as the stuff she kept ‘round for cleaning engine bits - seeped out of his pores as if it was trying to cover the habitual sweat, metal and gunpowder smell that was Jayne. “Gotta - hic! - take better care a’ yerself. All sorts a’ crazy sumbitches in this ‘verse, more like me ‘n like you - little girl like you gotta take care. ‘Mind me a’ my oldest sister’s youngest, al’ays gettin’ in trouble wi’ some tamade hundan like me...”
Kaylee laughed, patting his shoulder. “Hey, now - that ain’t true. You’re a good man, Jayne. Come on - what got you goin’ on this?”
He just hugged her tighter for a minute, then let go and turned around, muttering to himself and swaying just a little as he headed toward the fore-decks.
Kaylee stretched out a crick in her neck as she watched him go. “Huh. Wonder what that was all about?”
* * *
“Doc! There y’are!”
Simon barely had time to register panic at Jayne’s approaching bulk before the larger man had draped a thick arm around his shoulders. He was fairly certain the mercenary was going to crush his windpipe if he moved, so he just... didn’t. “Uh. Jayne. Do you... need something?”
“Y’remind me a’ my brother, ya know that? Prolly never told ya’... he’s a scrawny bas’ard, jus’ like you. Sick all the ruttin’ time. Al’us gettin... whaddaya call’em. Ev’ry damn virus comes by the house.” Jayne snickered. “An’ with the nieces and nephews runnin’ around, there’s always a ton a’ those.”
“I... didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Didn’t I tell ya?” Jayne looked genuinely confused. “Could’a sworn I toldja. Yanno. With the thing. The box.”
“The box?” It occurred to Simon that perhaps he was dreaming. Yes, that had to be it. This was a nightmare, probably brought on by congestion or... some kind of precursor to a heart-attack? That could cause a sensation of immense weight on his chest, couldn’t it? He should screen himself when he woke up. If he woke up.
I can’t die. Not now. Not dreaming of a drunken Jayne leaning on me. That’s just not fair. And did he drink the alcohol, or just bathe in it?
“Box wi’ yer sister innit.”
“Oh. You mean when River and I came aboard?”
“Naw. Didn’t like you much then. After. With the... the thing. Time she grabbed me. That was it. Thought I toldja after that.”
Simon flinched at the reminder that his baby sister had touched Jayne in... well, he couldn’t exactly say inappropriate ways - she’d been trying to incapacitate him, not... not...
That really didn’t bear thinking on.
“No. You didn’t tell me.”
“Oh. Well. I do. An’... yanno. Think it’s right as a peach, you takin’ care a’ her like ya’ do. Real noble. Yer a good man. Heh. Little man, but a good one. Remind me a’ Mattie. Ye’d like him, he’s all...” Jayne’s brows knit together, fumbling for a word, then seemed to forget whatever it was he’d been working so hard to remember. “Gotta go find Zoe. An’ the cap’n. Gotta talk to Mal....”
The weight lifted from Simon’s shoulders, and the doctor watched as Jayne wove on through the ship, swaying slightly and leaning more than was necessary on the railings at the side of the stairs. A nightmare. It had to be. Simon shivered and turned his back on the shambling monstrosity that was Jayne and and continued straight on to the egine-room. Being around Kaylee would make him feel better. For one thing, Kaylee smelled a lot better.
* * *
“Shouldn’t drink so much. Liver functions will be impaired in the future, and Simon doesn’t have the equipment he’d need to repair the damage here on Serenity.”
Jayne hung his head, shame radiating from him like the bright glow of Serenity’s engines, and for a moment River was pleased. No one ever listened to what she said, but maybe when Jayne was drunk he was sufficiently open-minded that she could make him understand. Perhaps alcohol did have its beneficial qualities...
“M’sorry ‘bout Ariel. An’ before M’randa, too. Wasn’ gonna hurt ya’, I jus.... jus...” Jayne’s face screwed up, twisting into an almost comic mask of sorrow. Like a harlequin of some kind, River thought. “Jus’ don’ know what to do wi’ ya’. Yer all...”
“Scary,” River supplied. “Disturbing. Unnatural.”
“That stuff.” Jayne nodded. “Confoundin’ gorram girl,” he added with a growl.
“I confound even myself, all the time.” River agreed solemnly. “Not so much anymore, though. Getting better.”
“Yeah. No more... uh...” Jayne made a wiggly sort of gesture by his temple. The image of River’s own self seen from the outside flashed in her mind, dancing in circles of death in the Maidenhead bar. Pain and interest, shock and awe.
“Not recently.”
“Right.”
“Can I… uh….” He started toward her, arms outstretched and a look in his eyes like the puppy she remembered begging her parents to buy for her when she was in primary school. Ripped up cushions and an antique rug soaked in canine urine.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“No?” His lower lip began to protrude.
She shook her head, seeing in her mind a wagging tail and large, pathetic brown eyes surrounded by destruction. Yelling. Simon and her mother arguing, her father’s quiet, stern voice cutting in. The puppy had to go. He was too troublesome, going to get too big, too energetic. Liable to hurt her when he got too big to know his own strength, not to mention destroy the whole house in the process.
“The postman doesn’t like to be bothered, and my mother’s flowerbeds are a bad place to dig.” River sought in his eyes for understanding. “You have to learn to behave all the time, not just when Daddy’s here with the spray bottle ready.”
“Uh. Yeah. Yer… yeah.” Jayne hesitated, then lowered his arms and warily, sadly stepped around her and continued his journey toward the front of the ship.
River watched after him, and wondered if he would remember.
* * *
“Jayne. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The mercenary didn’t remove the heavy arms that draped loosely around Zoe’s shoulders. In fact, he didn’t even seem to tense.
“You lookin’ to get hurt, Jayne?” Zoe asked calmly.
“No?” He looked a mite confused. And then, like the big, angry child that he was - “Ya’ can hit me, if it’ll make ya’ feel better. I can take it.”
“I ain’t hittin’ you. Not for no reason. Might change my mind if you don’t let go, though.”
Spiky, unwashed hair pricked into her neck, and she remembered before the harpoon, before Miranda and Lilac and everything else, when her life was normal and she’d at last coaxed Wash into letting her trim his wild halo of ginger hair. They’d laughed that night over how prickly it was, how oddly respectable and military he’d looked. Jayne’s hair had that feeling now. She shoved him roughly away from her, physically ill with the memory.
“Toldja it’d help.”
“You ain’t helping, Jayne.”
The big mercenary hung his head over her shoulder. “Ain’t my fault he’s gone. Would’a traded with him if I could’a. Li’l man didn’t deserve...”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” Zoe’s tone brooked no argument - this was not a conversation she wanted to be having. Not even with Mal could she talk about this, and she sure as hell wasn’t hearing it from Jayne.
“Well...”
“No, Jayne.”
“Naw.” He sounded so young, now. “Don’t s’pose I would’a. Kinda wish I would, though. S’the kinda thing them dumb xiāngbālâo at Canton would’a ‘spected me to do, ya know? Think sometimes it’d be better if I could be that. F’I could just... jus’... You an’ Mal, you got the whole hero thing down. Think it’s pretty dumb half the time, but people respect that. F’I could be like that...” He trailed off and sighed.
“Jayne?”
He lifts his head. “Yeah?”
“Go away before you sober up and I hurt you.”
* * *
The teapot had almost finished reached a boil, its metal sides thrumming with the rhythm of the simmering water as it neared its peak. Like working to a fall, like Serenity’s engines pulsing bright before rabbitting away from danger once again. Inara smiled. It was a good day, for this kind of peace to stay with her throughout the day - maybe her return to Serenity really was good for her. She reached for the teapot...
And missed by a good three inches as thick arms crushed around her waist, an unshaven face pressed against her shoulder from behind. Not Mal, and she refused to admit even to herself that she was disappointed by that. Mal’s arms weren’t this big, and Mal never smelled... well, he did smell this badly of cheap whiskey, but it smelled differently on him. Anyway, the arms around her middle were bare to the upper bicep, and Mal never wore t-shirts.
“Jayne, get off me!”
Something warm and wet touched the shoulder of her silk robe, and Jayne snuffled unpleasantly.
“Are you...” This simply was not possible. “Jayne, are you crying?”
“No.”
He rubbed his face against her robe, and this time the dampness had better be tears and not the excretions of another orifice on his face. Inara sighed. “Yes you are, Jayne.”
“Nope. Not cryin’. Jus’...” He sniffled. “Ain’t my fault I ain’t like them.”
“Ain’t... Aren’t like who?”
“Cap’n an’ Zoe.”
Oh for... “There aren’t a lot of people in the ‘verse like them.”
“Never fought in any fancy wars, don’t see as I should get my hide tanned for somebody else. Shepherd... shepherd al’as said... Aw, qingwa cào de liúmáng. Like I wanna be thinkin’ ‘bout that again.” His arms squeezed tighter around her waist, and the tears started right back up again. “Bes’ man I ever met, y’know? Weren’t like the preachers back home, weren’t al’as... al’as tellin’ people how to live, what to do. Jus’ asked stuff, an’... an’ like I wanted to be better jus’ not to disappoint ‘im.”
“He was a man of true goodness,” Inara agreed, trying to pat Jayne’s shoulder behind her own back. “We all miss him.” A moment of silence. “Jayne? Jayne, you’re... I can’t quite breathe like this.”
“Oh. Uh... sorry ‘bout that, ‘Nara.”
Released, Inara took a deep breath and leaned back against the counter for a moment to breath. “Just do the best you can, Jayne. That’s all Shepherd Book would expect of you. It’s all any of us can do in this life.”
Big tears welled up in the mercenary’s eyes, and he wandered off muttering about good people and heroes. And something about cigars, but Inara was fairly sure that was just a drunken tangent.
* * *
“Hey, Mal?”
“We won’t be liftin’ off for another eight hours, Jayne. Go play with your rainstick until the client gets here, ‘cause I ain’t... tamade. You smell like you slept in a still, Jayne.”
“Ain’t slept none yet. Jus’ got back from the bar.”
“Well, that’d explain the stink, too, I guess. Why don’t you... well, you can sure as hell quit lookin’ at me like that, first off. I ain’t really in the mood for one of our little chats right now.”
The alcohol was finally starting to fade from Jayne’s brain a bit, and he looked at Mal with something approaching clear wits, if still slightly painted over with the maudlin attentions of a good whiskey. Best use it while it was still there, then.
“I’m tryin’, Mal. Tryin’ to... You an’ I had our share a’ tussles, but y’ought’a know. M’glad I’m here. Makes me wanna be a better...” He trailed off, unable to figure out exactly the words for what was hanging around his head, and then, in one last impulsive attempt, grabbed Mal by the shoulders and pulled him into a hug. Manly hug. He might be huggin’ the captain, but he weren’t sly, in no way. Mama didn’t raise no girly boys.
Mal coughed a little, then thumped Jayne on the shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s good, Jayne. You do that. And, uh... go take a shower and get some sleep, alright? Time to sleep it off.”
“Yeah.” Jayne smiled. “Yer a good man, Mal.”
“Sometimes I think I might be,” Mal agreed. “You just get outta here, now, ‘fore I change my mind and figure you’d make better use of all that sauce in your brain by cleanin’ out the septics.”
“’Night, Mal.”
Mal watched the big man falter off toward the crew bunks, then shook his head and turned back toward the controls. Sunlight streaming through the glass, and a client would be by any minute with new cargo for them. Not a bad day, altogether, even countin’ his mercenary was drunk as a skunk.
A few minutes later the familiar beat of Zoe’s boots tapped up to him, and he turned to face her. His first officer had rarely looked so... rumpled.
“Sir, we gotta talk about Jayne.”
Mal sighed. Smooth. Why did things just never go smooth? “Had a feeling that might be it. Tell me what he did....”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-06 08:21 pm (UTC)One thing that really struck me was how you portrayed River. I love how you showed her thought processes and the whole speaking "nonsense" thing. I'm not explaining it well, but it was good.
:-)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 07:23 am (UTC)Thanks! River's one of my favorite characters to write for - it's just so fun trying to get into her head. Tends to lead to a lot of stream-of-consciousness weirdness and symbology, but it's sooo entertaining in the process!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-06 09:37 pm (UTC)OK, I'v calmed down now. This is one enjoyable fic, and I'd say that even if I weren't on the flist (I always wonder if my flist thinks my rave reviews of their fics are just to be nice cause we're friends, so I always feel like I have to point that out somehow -- but so far I've been lucky and only friended excellent writers).
The scene with Zoe was almost too much for a slightly hungover and slightly too-emotional-this-morning-because-of-it
*envies your motivation and brain full of fic-ideas*
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Date: 2006-05-07 07:36 am (UTC)Motivation... well, I've had this thing on my plate for a few months. As for the ideas... this one is actually best blamed on some strange combination of a friend of mine,
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Date: 2006-05-07 05:05 pm (UTC)I think a lot of my recent lack-of-fic actually has more to do with never having any time alone to just sit and think and write without interruption. A husband, a needy dog, and eight thousand friends who think my house is a stopping point on the way to anywhere they're going have the tendency to make it kind of hard sometimes.
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Date: 2006-05-07 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 10:38 pm (UTC)I swear, my husband and I are like the parents in our group of friends -- they all know they can always come over to get fed, get alcohol, play poker, watch Firefly, borrow movies, sleep on the couch when they're too drunk to get home, paint in the basement, watch BSG, store their bikes, etc etc etc. Good thing we like 'em all so much!
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Date: 2006-05-07 11:07 pm (UTC)It's cool that your friends see your house as kind of the center of the group, but I can see how that would get really... frustrating, if it means you can't have reliable time to yourself. And the parental overtone isn't exactly fun to get with your friends, either - it means you can't necessarily just have fun like you might want to, always having to be the responsible ones.
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Date: 2006-05-08 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 07:38 am (UTC)Poor Jayne - aside from Kaylee, everybody's just kind of like "ohgodwhy???" And poor Simon, too. I mean, honestly - can you blame him for being scared? Big scary Jayne attacking him with hugs!
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Date: 2006-05-07 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-12 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-07 04:50 pm (UTC)You did a great job on his voice. ^_^
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Date: 2006-05-07 09:32 pm (UTC)