Current mood:	sleepy
Entry tags:	firefly

defensive measures
For jambery, who wanted Jayne and River or Jayne and Mal. It was supposed to be a drabble, but...um. I never know when to shut up. *g*


Title: Defensive Measures
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing: Jayne/River, sort of (pre-het? I don't know)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For Ariel
Summary: Jayne and River, alone on Serenity.
Disclaimer: Joss owns all.

Notes: With extra hyphens, especially for my lovely beta, odalisques.


..___..

Jayne understood that Mal needed the doc for this job. He understood that the preacher looked like no trouble for anyone and could still take a man's knee out at fifty yards, and that looking harmless might be real important on this job. He understood why Wash and Zoe had flat out refused to come back to the ship before tomorrow morning. That was a damn nice hotel, after all. Even had a beach. Jayne even understood how it was nice for Kaylee to go off with Inara and do...girly things. Or whatever.

What he didn't understand was why or how any of them had thought it was a good idea to leave him alone on Serenity to look after the doc's moon-brained sister.

"Hey...crazy girl? You in there?"

Jayne stuck his head around the doorway to Inara's shuttle, wishing he'd thought to lock up all the knives when everyone else left. Now he was stuck on the ship alone with the doc's sister and a whole bunch of cutting edges, and he wasn't even allowed to hit her if she got weird.

"Even if she cuts on me?" he'd asked Mal. Mal had said he was a gorram mercenary and ought to be able to keep himself from getting cut by a little girl. Which was kind of true, he had to admit, but the girl was faster than an ex-con in a whore house, and her smile gave him the willies.

She was smiling it now, looking at him from the middle of Inara's bed, where she sat cross-legged. In front of her was a pile of the shiny bits and pieces that usually sat on Inara's dresser. Make-up and such, Jayne guessed. He relaxed. Inara's shuttle was probably the safest place on the ship in terms of lack of weapons. If he could just keep her in here, she wouldn't slice him up, he wouldn't have to smack her, and he wouldn't get yelled at by Mal. Simple.

He stepped inside and shut the door.

***

River liked Inara's room. Everything was soft-shiny-dim, not hard-shiny-bright. There were no sharp edges, and everything blurred into everything else on purpose instead of just in her head. People's feelings blurred too, but they did that everywhere, and the feelings here were mostly happy.

Inara let her come in sometimes and just lie on her bed, floating in silk and the pink-red clouds of joy long passed and not so long passed. There was something more than happiness here, too. Something that made her warm, that had once made her reach down between her legs before her mother's voice had told her that nice girls don't do that. She's spent a long time talking to her mother after that until Inara had come back and asked if she was all right.

The metal in Inara's room was smooth and warm and nothing like the metal in Simon's room. These tiny metal cases contained colors that felt like the room's pink-red memories. She took the top off of one and twisted it so the color rose up. It was dark and sweet, like hodgeberries. She licked the tip to taste the sweetness and paused, about to put it on her lips. She wouldn't be able to see it there.

She looked up as the traitor entered the room and smiled at him.

***

"Come here," the girl said. "So I can paint you. You'll look better in red."

Jayne automatically took a step back, but he could see that what she was holding up was not a knife. It looked more like lipstick.

"Here," she said impatiently, pointing to the space next to her.

His fingers picked at a loose thread in the wall covering as he watched her. Paint him? If she thought he was going to sit there and get done up like a five-credit hooker, she was crazier than he'd thought, and that was a lot of crazy.

"You ain't coming near me with that thing. You just put it down."

She shook her head. "Don't you want to be pretty?"

"No, I don't want to be pretty. Tamade, girl, that stuff ain't for boys."

"Everyone wants to be pretty," she sang quietly. "Everyone want to be real..." She looked straight at him until he blinked. "But you want me to stay here."

He did. Never mind how she knew that, but he did. And if she was doing that, she couldn't be doing anything else. Like stealing knives from the kitchen or picking the locks on the gun lockers.

How much damage could she do with lipstick? Well, maybe lots, but nothing that couldn't be washed off, and he wasn't wearing his good shirt or anything. And it would keep her here.

He crossed to the bed and sat on the edge with a vague sense of unease. His pants weren't actually dirty, but everything in Inara's shuttle seemed cleaner than anything of his had been even when it was brand new.

River grabbed his arm and pulled. He shuffled himself further onto the bed, within her reach. She smiled a slightly less unnerving smile than usual and leaned in with the lipstick. He registered too late that it wasn't his lips she was aiming for.

***

River smeared a dark patch over the traitor's forehead, where his invisible mark was. Now everyone would be able to see it, even if they didn't know what it meant.

"Wrench," she said. It meant the tool, but it also meant an injury caused by twisting a body part or a mind too far. She'd had a wrench. So had the traitor. She didn't want it to happen again. Neither did he.

His face was pale now, ghost-pale, and the streak of hodgeberry looked like blood. He was scared of his wrench. It haunted him. River knew what that felt like.

"Don't...don't know what you're talking about, girl."

She ignored him and wiped the mark away with the cuff of her sleeve. He wasn't the traitor anymore, too afraid for that, but his name slipped in and out of her head and wouldn't stay where it was told. Girl's name.

"Olga?" she tried.

He frowned. "What?"

"Valerie?"

"What are you going on about? Ain't nobody here but us."

But she saw that he was smart enough to look around as if there might be. She liked him for that. It was always possible that there were people around that you couldn't see.

"Vera?"

***

Jayne glared, distracted from his worry about her knowing things she had no right knowing. Again.

"You leave Vera alone."

"Names are slippery." She smiled. "Like fish."

She ran the lipstick over his mouth this time, and he was surprised enough at the feel of it that he didn't answer. It was smooth, not greasy, but definitely slick, faintly warm. He licked his lips. It tasted like wax.

She smacked his knee. "Don't. It'll come off. Alice," she added. It sounded almost like a question.

"Who the ruttin' hell is Alice?"

She bit her lip and frowned. Jayne wondered what her thin little-girl lips would look like all made up dark like Inara's.

"Bethany?" she said, head tilted to one side.

"I swear I'm gonna shake you if you don't cut that out."

She smiled, suddenly and brightly. "Jane! Jane-pain, pain is scary. I remember."

He glared again, but there was nothing he could do. There was never anything you could do, with a name like Jayne, except beat the other guy senseless when he brought it up, and he couldn't do that here.

"You just remember it rhymes with pain," he told her. "That's the part that matters."

He snatched the lipstick out of her hand and held her jaw steady. He ran the tip along her lips more slowly than he had to, mostly because he figured the longer he took at this, the longer she couldn't talk.

She stayed obediently silent. At the end of it, her tongue poked out and flashed along her bottom lip.

Jayne smacked her knee as she had his. "It'll come off, remember?"

She rubbed at her knee and stuck her tongue out at him.

***

"Ouch," River said carefully. It was what you said when you got hurt. She remembered that.

Jane grunted.

"Sorry," River said.

"What?"

"I say ouch, you say sorry. Sorry because you hurt me." That was the way it worked, wasn't it? It had been a long time since anyone had been sorry for hurting her.

"Oh," Jane said. He was fiddling with another metal cylinder. When he turned it, a brush came out of it. "Uh. Sorry."

She pointed to the thing in his hand. "What's that?"

"This?"

He turned it over as if it had just now appeared in his hand, although she didn't think it really had.

"It's for making your cheeks pinker, I guess. Like you're blushing. Never got why that was supposed to make anybody look better."

"Physical response to emotional reaction. Put some on."

A pale pink mist of powder rose from the tip of the brush as he brought it towards his own cheek. She grabbed his wrist.

"On me."

"Oh."

He brushed it across her cheek, and it felt soft and tickly. She smiled and closed her eyes, leaning into it. There were no bad memories here. She wanted to stay like this forever. The back of her mind knew she couldn't, but as long as she could ignore that part she would be safe.

"So...what's it like being crazy?" Jane asked.

River stared at him while her constructed safety fell around her like jigsaw pieces. She'd never be able to put them together in time to keep the bad thoughts out.

She struck out at him with the only weapon to hand, a handful of the shiny treasures in front of her. It took only one movement to scoop them up, fling them in his face, and be off the bed and away.

Away was the closet, full of soft cloth and no light at all. She wasn't scared of the dark. The dark was when they left you alone. With her knees drawn up to her chest, she could sit still inside, and no one could make her remember.

Next time, she thought. She would remember something different next time. She would remember to have a better weapon, and then she could make him be quiet.

***

Jayne got his hand up in time to protect his eyes, but he still caught a perfume bottle to his cheek. It bounced off the bed and cracked when it hit the floor. The shards of the bottle rocked back and forth, catching the dim light. The room smelled sickeningly of flowers. Jayne coughed and held his nose.

He oughta just let her stay in here, he thought. Except Mal wouldn't like it when he got back. He picked up the pieces of the bottle so the girl wouldn't take it into her head to come after him with one of them and threw them away before he pulled on the door. It stayed shut.

He pulled harder. It gave a little. Crazy girl must be holding onto the other side of it.

"Gorrammit," he muttered. He pounded a fist on the door. "You come on out of there!"

He could get it open, but he might hurt her. He sighed. If Mal was as smart as he thought he was, he would've realized that leaving the two of them alone was almost as bad an idea as picking the fugees up in the first place.

"Look, just come out, okay? I'll..." He thought hard. "I'll give you something nice."

He looked around the room. Something nice...something nice... There was a scarf hanging from the back of a chair. It was the same dark color as the lipstick and had gold bits running through it. He snatched it up and stomped back to the closet.

"Don'tcha even want to see it? It's real pretty, I swear."

The door opened a crack, and he dangled the scarf in front of it. A hand reached out to touch it, and he pulled it back a few inches.

Half of River's face appeared in the crack.

***

The things that people gave River now weren't the same things they used to give her. "I have something for you," used to mean hurting and needles and drugs that made her see things that were there, which was sometimes much worse than seeing things that weren't.

Now it meant clothes or food or sometimes pretty things to put in her hair.

He hadn't meant to hurt her before. Maybe he hadn't meant it this time either.

"Sorry?" she ventured. She touched the scarf. It felt like now and not like memories.

He nodded. "Sorry."

She let him pull the door open and lay the scarf around her neck. She smoothed it down over her chest, soft as shadows.

Jane was looking at her hand on the scarf. His lips were wet with hodgeberries.

"Really sorry?" she asked.

"Really. I'm always sayin' the wrong thing."

River nodded. "That's true."

Jane glared at her. "You ain't exactly a genius at that, neither, you know."

"I know."

She was sad about that. It made Simon unhappy when she said the wrong thing. But she was so tired of worrying about it. Jane never worried about it.

Jane just grunted. He never seemed to worry about anything.

"They're coming back," River told him.

"What, now?"

"Now. Soon."

"Well, which is it?"

***

Jayne heard voices raised in argument outside the door and guessed it was now. And she was still in the closet, gorrammit. And perfume all over the floor, and it stank, and oh, Mal was going to rip him a new one for sure.

He sighed and turned to River.

"Don't suppose you want to come out of there now, huh?"

But she was already out and standing next to him, scarf slung around her chest and tied at her hip like a sash. He was used to thinking of her as a kid, but she looked older right now.

He didn't think of moving when she put her hand on his shoulder, and then it was too late. The kiss only lasted a second before he pushed her away, but he could feel it afterwards. She was smiling that eerie smile at him. He touched his mouth, and his fingers came away bloody. He stared at his hand.

It took him until the door open and Mal walked in to realize the blood was lipstick and that he was still wearing it.

Inara came in behind Mal, and they both stopped, Inara with a handkerchief pressed over her mouth and nose.

Jayne sighed, and his shoulders slumped.

"Uh," he said. "Hey there, Mal. 'Nara."

River stepped forward, and the smile on her face grew.

"It's all my fault," she said clearly. "And I don't care!"

She slipped past Mal and ran, laughing, down the stairs. Mal watched her go and then turned back to Jayne.

"Don't ask," Jayne said.

Mal nodded. "Best go wash your face."

Jayne edged past the two of them and headed for his bunk to do just that. It wasn't until after he'd scrubbed away the lipstick that he saw the small metal tube sitting in the center of his bed. He picked it up and opened it. Same color as what he'd just washed off.

It sat in his palm, a barely-there weight. He knew he should take it back to Inara and explain. Instead, he dropped it in a drawer. They'd think the girl took it anyway. Well, she had. And she might want it back. Better to keep it. Inara had more make-up than she could get through in a month of Sundays anyway.

Jayne pulled down his Callahan 9mm from his rack and started cleaning it, which always helped him not think.

***

River tied the scarf over her eyes and lay back on her bed. She smiled into the red-tinted darkness and thought about hodgeberries in a gunpowder-scented drawer. There were all different kinds of weapons. Maybe not all of them had to hurt.

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..end..