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theleaveswant Jan. 14th, 2009 04:37 pm)
theleaveswant Jan. 14th, 2009 04:37 pm)MORE never-posted Firefly fic, this time for my claim at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ficalbum (Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken).
Title: The Fallacy of Up
Fandom/character: Firefly/general
Artist, album and song: Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken: Wayfaring Stranger
Rating, wordcount: FRT (violence and angst), 1426 words
Summary/Author’s notes: Mal’s going to kill somebody tonight. Post-movie.
Of course Mal knows that “up” doesn’t really exist. He understands, as must any person who spends as much time vessel-side as he does, that “up” is a perceptual construction, an artifact of inner ears and natural or synthetic gravity. He knows that if he tips his head back he is not really looking up, only away from the centre of the planet on which he stands, and that if he repeated this action from any other point on the surface of this or any other planet, or the deck of any ship, he would be turning his face towards an entirely new direction. Even so, this is the gesture he unconsciously performs whenever he searches for heaven. He finds himself doing it more and more frequently lately, but whether this is because he is beginning to believe again or because Book is no longer there to catch him, he could not tell.
Mal stares out away from Dirt and into Black, and his eyes flicker over an unfamiliar canopy of twinkling lights. He remembers learning from the hands on his mother’s ranch, his diffuse and ever-changing first family, how to recognize patterns in the stars (Angel’s Hammock, the Drowned Lovers, Mother Armadillo) and determine from them his position and the season of the year. He remembers too seeing maps of the sky of Earth-That-Was, the dipper/bears, hunters and winged horses that kept company thousands of years of mariners, philosophers and other night-fond folks. He wonders what stories the people of this orbiting ball of dust find there depicted. He wonders if the man he’s come to kill contemplates the firmament regularly, or at all. If the brain through which he means to pass a bullet ever fires its synapses in facilitation of a game of celestial connect-the-dots.
Mal tries to name the souls he’s loosed from the coils of mortality, but his list begins with a jumble of the most memorable, the first and most recent, and he is alarmed at how quickly he loses track, how soon he starts counting people twice and how many he cannot call to mind. This disquiets Mal less by whatever it may indicate about the condition of his mental faculties and more by what it means for his identity.
A good man, Mal was long ago conditioned to believe, shouldn’t oughtta do nobody harm, not if he can avoid it or at least not without a damned good reason. While Mal feels somewhat confident in claiming justification for his entirely avoidable and rather too-regular harming acts (a confidence born out of, if not truth, at least sincere desire), it also seems to him to follow implicitly that a good man shouldn’t forget the harmful things he’s done. If he can’t keep tally of the lives he’s ended, what chance of inventorying those whose physical or material well-being he has compromised through the course of his life and pursuit of his livelihood? Never mind the harm he’s permitted to occur by inaction or the wounds he’s inflicted by words alone (the barbs he spits constantly in a vain attempt to fool himself into not feeling the flechettes she fires into him with every glance). Mal suspects, not for the first time, that he is not a good man.
Then again neither was the man whose blood would next stain his hands, that was unquestionable. A liar, swindler and cheat, naturally, but that was hardly unusual. Being responsible for extinguishing or endangering numerous lives did not put him in scarce company either, but his incomprehensible nonchalance, Mal wanted desperately to believe, did. Hildred Castaigne kept no count, made no effort to remember or even discover the damage he had done. While Mal’s moral ledger might be a touch on the messy side, Castaigne’s was blank not from innocence but from criminal negligence. Mal wanted to believe that shooting Castaigne would be the right thing to do even if himself and his crew, his kin, the ones he did his very damnedest to see no harm befall, had not been among Castaigne’s latest victims, but it was no use pretending he’d be doing it otherwise.
Castaigne was an ambitious dealer in supplies edible, medical and sundry, and while his prices were good he had ways (they learned subsequent to engaging in financial transaction with him) of tweaking and double-dealing every cheap purchase into a pocket-stuffing profit. In Serenity’s case, they had become the unknowing victims of an undocumented warehouse accident and an ill-considered use of storage space.
Castaigne had been responsible for the distribution of a consignment of essentially untested vaccine (not entirely ready for human use, it turned out), which suffered a mysterious containment failure while sitting next to a stock of fresh meat and produce. When Mal chose Castaigne’s facilities for a resupply, he’d managed to pawn off on them nearly the entire contaminated stock without a word of warning, and if that weren’t wicked enough he’d turned around and reported the vaccine stolen, offering the pharmacorp who owned it (their pristine reputation bought at a high price) an 03-K64 Firefly as culprit.
It took them near a fortnight to discover the abuse, by which point the entire crew save Zoe and River were (or ought to have been) bedridden with fever, wracking cough and mottled rash, symptoms of the trendiest new epidemic (an aggressive cousin of the chicken pox known as Io Strain), with a very angry biomed consortium snapping at their crippled heels. The predicament had been resolved only with a judicious mixture of truth, logic and lie—not to mention a generous measure of luck. The encounter had been in many ways unpleasant and made easier only by the fact that Jayne was too sick to help.
Mal, sick though he was, had declared his intention for revenge the moment that Simon, sick though he was, had announced that their malady was due not to natural contagion but tainted food, but the spark that had really ignited both that declaration and his current ruminations was the sound of Inara, her own eyes dull and face glittered with sweat, sitting at the head of Kaylee’s bed singing softly a mournful old spiritual. This was during the height of the infection, when Mal was staggering back from the cockpit after consulting with Zoe, who suffered a moderate cough but whose temperature never topped 37.5; she was consequently the only one well enough to fly the ship while River, who was not at all affected, was in the galley working her strange alchemy to turn their uncontaminated food stores (mainly protein cubes) into something resembling chicken soup. Caught by her sweet, rough voice, Mal had slid down the wall to sit on the floor, aching and confused and fiercely aware of his own mortality and that of those around him, and murmured along the words he knew. The act of singing had been comforting at the time, but the song’s content (a treatise on the theme of misery and interminable wandering in life soothed by the reassurance of peace and reunion with loved ones in the hereafter) had left him troubled.
A logical extension of the subjectivity of “up” was that it was impossible to go there. One could launch “upwards” from a planet’s surface and travel for an eternity in the same direction and never get any closer. Where then was heaven? For it could not be up, if up was unapproachable. How did one get there, and why were folks conditioned to look away from the floor to find it? Was it just as much a myth as up?
These were the thoughts that occupied Mal’s mind as he trudged along the dirt trail to the private cabin (of which, he had been repeatedly assured, Castaigne would be the sole occupant), still sallow and weak from his infirmity, and no matter how many times or how many ways he asked the questions still the answers would not resolve. All he knew was that he might not be a good man, that Castaigne was definitely not, that up was a lie, and that he would keep looking there for the heaven he wasn’t sure existed and was even less sure he deserved a place in. He would shoot Castaigne at a downward angle to drive his soul farther away from the fallacy of up, and when it was done he would return to Serenity and pretend to be a good man again.
Title: Bleed Out
Fandom/character: Firefly/general
Artist, album and song: Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken: Favorite
Rating: FRM (language, gore), 1180 words
Summary/Author’s notes: Post-movie; angstalicious. Zoe’s grief finally expresses itself, but Jayne’s the only one there to comfort her. Partly inspired by this drabble by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arwen_lune. Thanks to hadespuppy for the beta.
“What’re you stopping for?” Jayne protested as Zoe pulled the mule to a stop at the side of the road. “We’re almost back at the ship.” The sun had nearly set, and the weary trees looming overhead sent fragmented shadows slithering across the road. It was an appealing spot for an ambush, and—although the mercenary hated to admit it—the eerie atmosphere made him more than a little bit uncomfortable.
The mate didn’t answer, only cut the engine but left the headlights running as she slipped from her seat. Jayne followed the beam with his eyes to where it sparkled off a viscous-looking red puddle, then to the crumpled body from which the pool had drained.
“Hey, venison! Y’think it’s safe to eat?”
“I don’t know, Jayne.”
“Well, y’think we could haul it into town and sell it to somebody?”
Zoe stepped carefully around the blood, kneeling cautiously in a dry spot near the animal’s head. It was a whitetail buck, three-point. His tawny hide was streaked with gore and split across the abdomen to reveal a pale loop of intestine, while his hindlimbs lay too flat and floppy on the ground and white bone protruded from one thigh; a layer of dust made his brown eyes dull and his bloated tongue protruded through the red froth crusting around his mouth.
“Come on, Zo, get back on the mule. We gotta get this fèiwù back to Serenity so’s Kaylee can install it and we can get off this rock.”
“Be patient.”
Jayne muttered sulkily. “Yeah, patience solves—the ruttin’ hell are you doing?!”
He sat upright in his seat, almost knocking the rifle in his lap to the ground, when Zoe stripped off one of her leather gloves, holding it in her teeth as she laid her trembling hand on the deer’s neck. She jerked her hand away as if scalded, rocking back on her heels, then reached forward again to bury her fingers in the stiff coat. “He’s still warm,” she said, and there was a quaver in her voice.
Jayne leaned forward to catch a glimpse of her face, but in the detail-obliterating glare of the halogens all he could see was the wetness on her cheeks. “Whoa, hey,” he said, swinging down from the mule and slinging the rifle behind his shoulder.
“I’m sure he didn’t suffer none. I bet it were real quick and painless-like.” Jayne knew this was a lie just as surely as she did; knew from the volume and pattern of the blood pool that the stag had been lying there all day, battered, broken and bleeding to death, with no hope of survival but taking hours to die. Just as surely as he knew it wasn’t the animal Zoe was crying for.
The burly man dropped to his knees behind her, not caring what he stepped in (it wouldn’t be the first time these fatigues had been dipped in blood). He held out his hands to comfort her, but they hovered unsteadily within inches of touching her, whether for fear of hurting her or inspiring her to hurt him he wasn’t sure. Finally one palm brushed her shoulder and she started at the touch, then collapsed against his chest, burying her damp face in the cotton of his t-shirt.
Jayne fumbled for something to say, and eventually settled on “I . . . um.”
“He was still alive, Jayne,” she sobbed. “When—we left him and he was still alive.”
Aw, shit. Jayne sighed into her hair and wrapped his arms tentatively around her, patting her on the back. A month since Serenity and her crew were declared fit for travel, two since they’d been made otherwise; it was about time this dam broke, but why did he have to be the one to comfort her? Women were confusing enough at the best of times (even ones like Zoe, tougher than any living man he knew); but when the waterworks were on they turned into another beast entirely.
“Weren’t nothing you could have—weren’t nothing anybody could have done for him.”
“But . . . he was alone, and the Reavers . . .”
“Reavers didn’t touch him. Never even set foot inside the bridge. He weren’t disturbed.” He knew because he’d seen it. Jayne had gone with the Alliance officers to retrieve Serenity from Mr. Universe’s place once the battle was over–Inara, too; they were the only ones fit enough to travel, besides River, and even gut-shot the doc wasn’t letting her out of his sight. He’d seen the mess the Reavers had made of the cargo bay and the common area as they stormed through; seen the perfect quiet of the bridge, hazy sunlight filtering through the shattered windshield around the grotesque centerpiece of the impaled pilot. Jayne had helped to slide the body free of the massive spike, and package it for transport back to the morgue. Then he’d gone outside and retched until his sides ached. With a hole that size punched through his torso, he couldn’t have survived long.
“I should have stayed with him. Should have. . . held his hand, or—“
“No, better you got out when you did, or wouldn’t none of us got out at all.”
“But Jayne . . . he died alone.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “Everything’s—no. Fuck that. It’s not okay. Wash is dead. He may have been an obnoxious little twerp, but he was a good guy, and he’s dead, and if everything were really okay then he fucking wouldn’t be. But he is, and so’s the Shepherd, and Mr. Universe, and all those people on Miranda, and all those Alliance cocksuckers, and the motherfucking Reavers, and my Pa, and my friends, and my brother Davie and even this gorram deer right here. This deer lay here dying all day, in who knows how much fucking pain, because the asshole ran him over didn’t have the courtesy to put a fucking bullet to him. And he died alone too, and none of it is fucking okay.” It wasn’t until the torrent of words came pouring out that Jayne even realized he had them in him, or the tears that streamed with blistering heat down his cheeks and dripped icy-cold from his chin.
The two warriors sat there shaking in the sharp, blood-sticky gravel of the road, drawing a comfort neither one knew they needed from the contact of another grieving body, until the automatic power-savers on the mule shut off the headlights with a clunk and a whirr. Zoe gasped at the sound and the sudden darkness and pulled away, slowly drawing herself together
“I’m sorry about your shirt,” she said, fingertips at her temples.
“S’okay,” Jayne sniffled as he scrubbed the salt and mucus from his face with the sleeve of his coat. “Promise you won’t tell nobody about this.”
“Who would I tell?”
“Just say you promise.”
“I promise.”
“Good. I’ll get the shovels from the mule; you pick a spot. We’ll give him a decent burial.”
ficalbum (Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken).Title: The Fallacy of Up
Fandom/character: Firefly/general
Artist, album and song: Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken: Wayfaring Stranger
Rating, wordcount: FRT (violence and angst), 1426 words
Summary/Author’s notes: Mal’s going to kill somebody tonight. Post-movie.
Of course Mal knows that “up” doesn’t really exist. He understands, as must any person who spends as much time vessel-side as he does, that “up” is a perceptual construction, an artifact of inner ears and natural or synthetic gravity. He knows that if he tips his head back he is not really looking up, only away from the centre of the planet on which he stands, and that if he repeated this action from any other point on the surface of this or any other planet, or the deck of any ship, he would be turning his face towards an entirely new direction. Even so, this is the gesture he unconsciously performs whenever he searches for heaven. He finds himself doing it more and more frequently lately, but whether this is because he is beginning to believe again or because Book is no longer there to catch him, he could not tell.
Mal stares out away from Dirt and into Black, and his eyes flicker over an unfamiliar canopy of twinkling lights. He remembers learning from the hands on his mother’s ranch, his diffuse and ever-changing first family, how to recognize patterns in the stars (Angel’s Hammock, the Drowned Lovers, Mother Armadillo) and determine from them his position and the season of the year. He remembers too seeing maps of the sky of Earth-That-Was, the dipper/bears, hunters and winged horses that kept company thousands of years of mariners, philosophers and other night-fond folks. He wonders what stories the people of this orbiting ball of dust find there depicted. He wonders if the man he’s come to kill contemplates the firmament regularly, or at all. If the brain through which he means to pass a bullet ever fires its synapses in facilitation of a game of celestial connect-the-dots.
Mal tries to name the souls he’s loosed from the coils of mortality, but his list begins with a jumble of the most memorable, the first and most recent, and he is alarmed at how quickly he loses track, how soon he starts counting people twice and how many he cannot call to mind. This disquiets Mal less by whatever it may indicate about the condition of his mental faculties and more by what it means for his identity.
A good man, Mal was long ago conditioned to believe, shouldn’t oughtta do nobody harm, not if he can avoid it or at least not without a damned good reason. While Mal feels somewhat confident in claiming justification for his entirely avoidable and rather too-regular harming acts (a confidence born out of, if not truth, at least sincere desire), it also seems to him to follow implicitly that a good man shouldn’t forget the harmful things he’s done. If he can’t keep tally of the lives he’s ended, what chance of inventorying those whose physical or material well-being he has compromised through the course of his life and pursuit of his livelihood? Never mind the harm he’s permitted to occur by inaction or the wounds he’s inflicted by words alone (the barbs he spits constantly in a vain attempt to fool himself into not feeling the flechettes she fires into him with every glance). Mal suspects, not for the first time, that he is not a good man.
Then again neither was the man whose blood would next stain his hands, that was unquestionable. A liar, swindler and cheat, naturally, but that was hardly unusual. Being responsible for extinguishing or endangering numerous lives did not put him in scarce company either, but his incomprehensible nonchalance, Mal wanted desperately to believe, did. Hildred Castaigne kept no count, made no effort to remember or even discover the damage he had done. While Mal’s moral ledger might be a touch on the messy side, Castaigne’s was blank not from innocence but from criminal negligence. Mal wanted to believe that shooting Castaigne would be the right thing to do even if himself and his crew, his kin, the ones he did his very damnedest to see no harm befall, had not been among Castaigne’s latest victims, but it was no use pretending he’d be doing it otherwise.
Castaigne was an ambitious dealer in supplies edible, medical and sundry, and while his prices were good he had ways (they learned subsequent to engaging in financial transaction with him) of tweaking and double-dealing every cheap purchase into a pocket-stuffing profit. In Serenity’s case, they had become the unknowing victims of an undocumented warehouse accident and an ill-considered use of storage space.
Castaigne had been responsible for the distribution of a consignment of essentially untested vaccine (not entirely ready for human use, it turned out), which suffered a mysterious containment failure while sitting next to a stock of fresh meat and produce. When Mal chose Castaigne’s facilities for a resupply, he’d managed to pawn off on them nearly the entire contaminated stock without a word of warning, and if that weren’t wicked enough he’d turned around and reported the vaccine stolen, offering the pharmacorp who owned it (their pristine reputation bought at a high price) an 03-K64 Firefly as culprit.
It took them near a fortnight to discover the abuse, by which point the entire crew save Zoe and River were (or ought to have been) bedridden with fever, wracking cough and mottled rash, symptoms of the trendiest new epidemic (an aggressive cousin of the chicken pox known as Io Strain), with a very angry biomed consortium snapping at their crippled heels. The predicament had been resolved only with a judicious mixture of truth, logic and lie—not to mention a generous measure of luck. The encounter had been in many ways unpleasant and made easier only by the fact that Jayne was too sick to help.
Mal, sick though he was, had declared his intention for revenge the moment that Simon, sick though he was, had announced that their malady was due not to natural contagion but tainted food, but the spark that had really ignited both that declaration and his current ruminations was the sound of Inara, her own eyes dull and face glittered with sweat, sitting at the head of Kaylee’s bed singing softly a mournful old spiritual. This was during the height of the infection, when Mal was staggering back from the cockpit after consulting with Zoe, who suffered a moderate cough but whose temperature never topped 37.5; she was consequently the only one well enough to fly the ship while River, who was not at all affected, was in the galley working her strange alchemy to turn their uncontaminated food stores (mainly protein cubes) into something resembling chicken soup. Caught by her sweet, rough voice, Mal had slid down the wall to sit on the floor, aching and confused and fiercely aware of his own mortality and that of those around him, and murmured along the words he knew. The act of singing had been comforting at the time, but the song’s content (a treatise on the theme of misery and interminable wandering in life soothed by the reassurance of peace and reunion with loved ones in the hereafter) had left him troubled.
A logical extension of the subjectivity of “up” was that it was impossible to go there. One could launch “upwards” from a planet’s surface and travel for an eternity in the same direction and never get any closer. Where then was heaven? For it could not be up, if up was unapproachable. How did one get there, and why were folks conditioned to look away from the floor to find it? Was it just as much a myth as up?
These were the thoughts that occupied Mal’s mind as he trudged along the dirt trail to the private cabin (of which, he had been repeatedly assured, Castaigne would be the sole occupant), still sallow and weak from his infirmity, and no matter how many times or how many ways he asked the questions still the answers would not resolve. All he knew was that he might not be a good man, that Castaigne was definitely not, that up was a lie, and that he would keep looking there for the heaven he wasn’t sure existed and was even less sure he deserved a place in. He would shoot Castaigne at a downward angle to drive his soul farther away from the fallacy of up, and when it was done he would return to Serenity and pretend to be a good man again.
Title: Bleed Out
Fandom/character: Firefly/general
Artist, album and song: Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken: Favorite
Rating: FRM (language, gore), 1180 words
Summary/Author’s notes: Post-movie; angstalicious. Zoe’s grief finally expresses itself, but Jayne’s the only one there to comfort her. Partly inspired by this drabble by
arwen_lune. Thanks to hadespuppy for the beta.“What’re you stopping for?” Jayne protested as Zoe pulled the mule to a stop at the side of the road. “We’re almost back at the ship.” The sun had nearly set, and the weary trees looming overhead sent fragmented shadows slithering across the road. It was an appealing spot for an ambush, and—although the mercenary hated to admit it—the eerie atmosphere made him more than a little bit uncomfortable.
The mate didn’t answer, only cut the engine but left the headlights running as she slipped from her seat. Jayne followed the beam with his eyes to where it sparkled off a viscous-looking red puddle, then to the crumpled body from which the pool had drained.
“Hey, venison! Y’think it’s safe to eat?”
“I don’t know, Jayne.”
“Well, y’think we could haul it into town and sell it to somebody?”
Zoe stepped carefully around the blood, kneeling cautiously in a dry spot near the animal’s head. It was a whitetail buck, three-point. His tawny hide was streaked with gore and split across the abdomen to reveal a pale loop of intestine, while his hindlimbs lay too flat and floppy on the ground and white bone protruded from one thigh; a layer of dust made his brown eyes dull and his bloated tongue protruded through the red froth crusting around his mouth.
“Come on, Zo, get back on the mule. We gotta get this fèiwù back to Serenity so’s Kaylee can install it and we can get off this rock.”
“Be patient.”
Jayne muttered sulkily. “Yeah, patience solves—the ruttin’ hell are you doing?!”
He sat upright in his seat, almost knocking the rifle in his lap to the ground, when Zoe stripped off one of her leather gloves, holding it in her teeth as she laid her trembling hand on the deer’s neck. She jerked her hand away as if scalded, rocking back on her heels, then reached forward again to bury her fingers in the stiff coat. “He’s still warm,” she said, and there was a quaver in her voice.
Jayne leaned forward to catch a glimpse of her face, but in the detail-obliterating glare of the halogens all he could see was the wetness on her cheeks. “Whoa, hey,” he said, swinging down from the mule and slinging the rifle behind his shoulder.
“I’m sure he didn’t suffer none. I bet it were real quick and painless-like.” Jayne knew this was a lie just as surely as she did; knew from the volume and pattern of the blood pool that the stag had been lying there all day, battered, broken and bleeding to death, with no hope of survival but taking hours to die. Just as surely as he knew it wasn’t the animal Zoe was crying for.
The burly man dropped to his knees behind her, not caring what he stepped in (it wouldn’t be the first time these fatigues had been dipped in blood). He held out his hands to comfort her, but they hovered unsteadily within inches of touching her, whether for fear of hurting her or inspiring her to hurt him he wasn’t sure. Finally one palm brushed her shoulder and she started at the touch, then collapsed against his chest, burying her damp face in the cotton of his t-shirt.
Jayne fumbled for something to say, and eventually settled on “I . . . um.”
“He was still alive, Jayne,” she sobbed. “When—we left him and he was still alive.”
Aw, shit. Jayne sighed into her hair and wrapped his arms tentatively around her, patting her on the back. A month since Serenity and her crew were declared fit for travel, two since they’d been made otherwise; it was about time this dam broke, but why did he have to be the one to comfort her? Women were confusing enough at the best of times (even ones like Zoe, tougher than any living man he knew); but when the waterworks were on they turned into another beast entirely.
“Weren’t nothing you could have—weren’t nothing anybody could have done for him.”
“But . . . he was alone, and the Reavers . . .”
“Reavers didn’t touch him. Never even set foot inside the bridge. He weren’t disturbed.” He knew because he’d seen it. Jayne had gone with the Alliance officers to retrieve Serenity from Mr. Universe’s place once the battle was over–Inara, too; they were the only ones fit enough to travel, besides River, and even gut-shot the doc wasn’t letting her out of his sight. He’d seen the mess the Reavers had made of the cargo bay and the common area as they stormed through; seen the perfect quiet of the bridge, hazy sunlight filtering through the shattered windshield around the grotesque centerpiece of the impaled pilot. Jayne had helped to slide the body free of the massive spike, and package it for transport back to the morgue. Then he’d gone outside and retched until his sides ached. With a hole that size punched through his torso, he couldn’t have survived long.
“I should have stayed with him. Should have. . . held his hand, or—“
“No, better you got out when you did, or wouldn’t none of us got out at all.”
“But Jayne . . . he died alone.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “Everything’s—no. Fuck that. It’s not okay. Wash is dead. He may have been an obnoxious little twerp, but he was a good guy, and he’s dead, and if everything were really okay then he fucking wouldn’t be. But he is, and so’s the Shepherd, and Mr. Universe, and all those people on Miranda, and all those Alliance cocksuckers, and the motherfucking Reavers, and my Pa, and my friends, and my brother Davie and even this gorram deer right here. This deer lay here dying all day, in who knows how much fucking pain, because the asshole ran him over didn’t have the courtesy to put a fucking bullet to him. And he died alone too, and none of it is fucking okay.” It wasn’t until the torrent of words came pouring out that Jayne even realized he had them in him, or the tears that streamed with blistering heat down his cheeks and dripped icy-cold from his chin.
The two warriors sat there shaking in the sharp, blood-sticky gravel of the road, drawing a comfort neither one knew they needed from the contact of another grieving body, until the automatic power-savers on the mule shut off the headlights with a clunk and a whirr. Zoe gasped at the sound and the sudden darkness and pulled away, slowly drawing herself together
“I’m sorry about your shirt,” she said, fingertips at her temples.
“S’okay,” Jayne sniffled as he scrubbed the salt and mucus from his face with the sleeve of his coat. “Promise you won’t tell nobody about this.”
“Who would I tell?”
“Just say you promise.”
“I promise.”
“Good. I’ll get the shovels from the mule; you pick a spot. We’ll give him a decent burial.”
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