The Floating World (The Murphy's Law Remix)
Remix Author: hossgal
Original Story: Trust by Tara LJC O'Shea
Summary: "You depend on luck, you end up on the drift -- no fuel, no prospects.... That ain't us. Not ever."
Rating: PG
Fandom: Firefly
Gracious Lady
She trusted the law, trusted custom, trusted the fates that had blessed her name day. All the strictures and supports that kept society functional, that governed the interactions of men and women, which permitted the orderly flow and ebb of persons and information across the 'verse. Everything she had been taught had flowed, in one form or another, from those three entities. Law, custom, and fate - they encompassed all, and there was nothing else to lay her faith in.
And why not? Custom granted her high status, of the sort that smoothed entanglements and opened doors under her hand. The law enforced trade that brought her wealth – do silk panels, fine food, poly-satin sheets with the dragonwing watermark. And fate kept her moving, just out of danger's path, but close enough to feel the heat of it passing.
The problem, Inara reflected, was that out in the Black, law and custom both had a limit to their reach. As for her fates, well, perhaps she had flaunted those worthy spirits once too often.
Whatever the error that had set her into her present situation, Inara reserved her ire for the man standing over her - in her room, on her shuttle - daring to threaten her. Very briefly, she considered pulling free the ivory stick-knife in her topknot and using it on Atherton Wing, before folding the impulse away. The situation was not yet that dire.
She had lost track of the situation, though, because Atherton had progressed past threatening her and was now railing against the 'verse that had brought him to this pass. Inara spent a heartbeat silently echoing his rant before finding her voice.
"How dare you! You graceless, honorless, uncouth barbarian! You stand here, in my shuttle" - and now she was standing as well, matching him shout for shout - "and dare to threaten me, a Companion, a Guild Companion! You forget yourself, Wing, and your place -"
She saw his shoulders tense, but the blow still caught her by surprise. She sat down again, from shock as much as the backhanded strike itself. She tasted blood and touched her lip. When she drew her hand away, two fingers glinted crimson. Fury rose in her throat, together with bitter satisfaction. She had him, there was no going back from this now. She raised her eyes to his, expecting him to meet her triumph with shame.
Instead, she found a face bent into mad desperation. The scorn died on her lips, even as his twisted into resolve. She struck at him with the bloody hand, but he swept the blow aside. Her dress twisted under his hand, digging into her shoulders as he jerked her to her feet.
"You are mine," he snarled, his breath thick on her face. "You forget your place. Behind him, the men he had hired - the men who had lied and arranged this meeting - shifted, the anger in his tone reaching even them. Inara had no time to consider their late-come moral quandaries. Her hands twisted at his fists, struggling to pull fabric free. The high collar dug into her neck, an iron finger pressing against the veins running close under the skin. Wing misjudged her struggles for panic and his demon's head grin widened.
She had always trusted to the law. And then she went out beyond the reach of the law. She had trusted custom. And then she had gone out amongst strangers and outlanders with outlander ways. And she had trusted fate, until she cut ties with her gods and turned her face to the stars.
And she had trusted herself, until she thought all she had to rely upon was herself.
Inara kept her face closed and her eyes locked on Wing, even as the outer door behind him slid aside.
***
Right Hand
She had trusted too much - the realization came as a shock to Zoe, as her introspections always did. Mal was always accusing Zoe of over-thinking every move, but the truth was that she spent more time looking at the world than thinking about it. There was a way to things, a way that made them work. You just had to wait for it to come along, and then trust it when you saw how the world ran.
Zoe had trusted the plan, trusted their skill, trusted the armor. Trusted the gods of fortune. It was the last that cut the feet out from under her, of course. Mal had warned her against it, more than once. "Trust to luck, end up hauled to the scrap yard. If your luck holds."
But then she'd trusted Mal, too. Always had.
Trusted him to know his limits, trusted him to stick to the job. Trusted him to trust in her and keep everyone else outside a fist throw.
Perhaps, she thought, you're not recollecting his previous plans. And the situations the man would get into because he thought Zoe had his back.
They'd had a plan, a good plan, as their plans went - ease into Wing's property, all nice and quiet. Set up to case the situation, then call in the other shuttle as a diversion. And for backup. Which they would need, a casual 'scope showing above twenty men, making a mockery of sentry duty with their loafing but with enough firearms to be...difficult.
Except they had eased in a little too slick, and a little too close to Inara's shuttle, and now they were a heartbeat away from the stupidly unguarded door. Mal looked back at her and she looked back at him. Nodded. Then they were in, and that's when they were definitely humped.
She honestly hadn't thought - after all the stomping and hollering and swearing that went on about their (then) still new pilot - that Mal would ever bind himself up in a shipboard romance. Thought that bit of him had been burnt away by the cold and the hunger at Serenity.
She not expected it of him, anymore - to throw his heart over a ledge and then leap after it. She'd have kept a better look out if she had. Would have kept a better watch on their flank. Surely wouldn't have trusted him to play things straight.
But she didn't, and he didn't, and so when she went right he went left - which was what they'd agreed on - and she'd gone high and dropped the two men between her and the piloting compartment, one temporarily and one not. Again, as they'd set it up.
Which left two more and Wing himself for Mal to deal with, according to the plan. But Mal had his eyes and arms full of Companion instead, and rather than drop her and apologize later, he'd had to let her down gentle.
Zoe saw all this while she was ducking for the pilot's chair. Saw it out of the corner of her eye and kept moving; praying to whatever gods looked after fools and thieves that they hadn't changed the ignition codes. Get it in the air, that was all that was left to them - the first shots would have carried and alerted the rest of the yard. Now they were truly humped, the guards having left off loafing for the time being and assuming firing positions that actually looked half professional. But she had the power levels rising and the yoke responded to her touch and they were up now, up and moving, her screens alive, the beacon shouting for mama Serenity and the sounds of a brawl still going on behind Zoe.
She half turned in the chair, one hand pulling out a sidearm in case Mal really did need help.
The blow hit her high on the right side, in the gap where the armor unlinked to let her arm out. It hit like a mule kick, knocking the breath out of her, but even worse was the smack of her head against the control panel. She tried to push off - she was pinning the yoke, they could be a heartbeat away from diving into the dirt - but her arm wouldn't work.
More shouting behind her. She ought to see to that, right after she made sure they were flying straight. Wash wouldn't like it if she crashed the shuttle. There was a roaring in her ears and something hit the side of the shuttle like thunder and someone had her by the collar and damned if that didn't hurt worse.
***
Flyboy
He had trusted too much. Trusted her to come back, of all the idiot things. Never mind that she'd done so a hundred times before. It was still foolish.
The leaving had been the hardest thing to understand. He hadn't wanted to accept that she didn't think of him so much as a wingmate as she did a secure dock - a place to come back to, a place to rest. Not a place to live.
It made him crazy - not the good crazy either, not the way the tilt of her hip would or the cant of her head, a glance at him and then away again. That was a perfectly respectable sort of insane, the way that touch-and-go maneuver would make his hands tremble and his breath run short and that was fine. Really.
This was another sort of crazy - when she would drop a kiss to the side of his neck and pat his shoulder and leave him again. Walk - or run - right out that door after her guin shi captain - himself another whole bundle of equally bad madness. A man who flew entirely under the radar and who shifted vectors without notice or proper signaling.
She trusted Mal. Wash wasn't sure yet if he did. If he was ever going to. There was too much baggage - even if he got past the whole time-before-during-The-Very-Difficult-War-when-Things-were-shared-and-Bonds-were-forged issue, there was still the ongoing taking-his-wife-off-to-dangerous-and-scary-places issue.
Case in point: today.
It made him crazy. And that was before the plan - such as it had been, yet another mad hosh-mi caper that had been half his wife's own doing - had been completely rusted not a quarter of the way in. Shuttle Two hadn't even left when the 'game high' beacon went off, nearly an hour early and completely without warning. He had time to choke out a warning to the rest of the crew before he slammed the power online and snatched Serenity into the air. No time to plan, no time to explain. It made him insane.
And Wash handled it like he did everything that made him crazy when he had to fly - he shut down his mouth and held his hands light on Serenity's yoke and flew like an angel of Earth-that-was - fast and hard and perfectly on line.
Shuttle one had lifted off as he came over the rim of the world, with that shimmering sideways dip that said Zoe was at the controls, and not Mal or Inara. Ground fire struck sparks from the little craft's under-carriage. Wash was cutting power even as he dropped in behind the shuttle, letting the backburn tumble over the compound and send the guns and their wielders spinning.
The shuttle was in full flight now, pushing hard, but Serenity was a great striding leviathan to the shuttle's scuttling vermin. Wash tucked down beside her, the shuttle slipping to the side and out of his field of view. Scope images flashed - the shuttle still had its flight surfaces extended. He cut power again, keeping pace. Any second now, he would have to slow again. Kaylee was behind him, staring at the scope and saying something about incoming atmosphere craft and he risked a look at the far-off scope - where the hell had they come from?
Then the claxon was wailing and the world was full of the sound of tearing metal and the yoke jumped in his hands as Serenity staggered under the blow.
***
Greasebug
She trusted the ship in Wash's hands, just as she trusted the captain when Mal said, We're going after her. And she had no cause not to - Captain kept them together and saw the way ahead just as smooth and sure as Serenity flew under Wash's fingers. Kaylee never had reason to doubt them, either one. She did trust them, she did.
It didn't stop her from crying out loud at the impact and the screaming metal - the shuttle, she thought - flight vanes still out and she's trying to burrow into the skin. Serenity - her ship, her girl - she, she stuttered under the blow, so much that Kaylee fell. Knees met the grating hard and the metal bit hard at her hands as she caught herself, just short of having the grid print her face as well. The screaming went on and on, Wash was shouting something over the com but all she could hear was her ship wailing in pain. Then another impact, nearly as hard as the first, and the screaming stopped. She was running, she had been running ever since she had scrambled up from the deck and between the booming rumble of her feet on the ladder the air was full of the claxon and Washing shouting still - something about the shuttle not mated, the snuggy wouldn't close, he couldn't get the outer door to seal.
If the outer wouldn't seal, the inner hatch wouldn't open without an over-ride but that was the least of it. She could feel Serenity shudder and buck through her soles. Serenity wasn't flying right; she was fighting Wash for every meter of atmosphere and every second of velocity. Listen to him, please, please baby, please don't fight him. Then she was outside the shuttle hatch, pounding on the control case. The bulkhead was bulged inward, inward, the way it was never designed to, and one part of her mind was holding the shuttle up against the door and measuring how, yes, that bulge could be the shuttle's port flight vane, crumpled and shoved up hard against the inside of the shuttle bay. That was one part.
The rest of her brain was swearing in language her father would have beaten her to hear and digging in her pockets for a wide-tog vib. Half a breath to pop the case open, seconds more to reset the connections, solder a cross-link. Sparks flew, bit her fingers. All the while she could feel Serenity trembling, Wash calling on the com to Zoe and Zoe not answering, and, through the hull, the captains voice, distant and angry, so angry, telling someone to take their hands off the latch, to not open that door.
The vib was losing charge, but she nearly had it. Then it was done and the final connection bridged. The door slid open and even as it did, the roar of windstream filled the whole 'verse. The shuttle wasn't matched, the snuggy bay still half-open to atmo. Slipstream outside was trying to suck everything in Serenity out around the narrow space around Shuttle One.
Kaylee staggered, caught herself against the hatch. Across the shuttle, she saw Mal's face. He was angry, and worse, he was afraid, and for the first time since they realized that Inara had been snatched Kaylee began to be afraid herself.
***
Medicine Man
Five years internship on Ariel's worst trama floor, three as a cert'd surgeon himself, and all it had ever taught Simon Tam was to trust the laws of science. Prayer filtered no toxins, transferred no oxygen, regulated no pulse. Science offered a path responsive to the tenets of cause and effect. Prayers...went unheeded.
He might have trusted something else, once upon a time – family, perhaps. The rule of law and the Alliance that embodied that rule. The words his sister wrote on a piece of paper.
But time and circumstance had worn all those away, and even the shreds of faith that had survived a year of nights on the floor withered.
The name that can be named is not the True Name, the path that can be seen is not the True Path.
And that was just as well, because sometimes Simon had no words for the sights he saw and no map for the road he traveled.
Names would have been useful. If he could have given a name to the things he had found, out here in the Black, he might have mastered them.
The medacad had been like that – a swirling mass of information and facts, procedures, theories and evidence. When Simon had learned to put a name to things, the facts began to sort themselves into ordered rows, instead of remaining lost and confused.
Sometimes his time on Ariel seemed half a century past. Sometimes the days were as fresh as yesterday, and it was as if he only turned his head right to see the familiar gray doors of the secondary surgical suite, the fall of the lights and the way the brushed metal gleamed.
But now he was crouching beside a patient, not standing at an exam table, and the light was bad and the floor was filthy and the man beside him was a great hulking brute of a soldier for hire and not a skilled medtech with eight years in the trauma floor's operating room. And Jayne wasn't even trying to help him with Kaylee, but instead trading shouts with the stranger they kept calling Wing.
He was not going to look at Wing, or at Inara, held in a chokehold. Or the tiny black gun Wing waved in the other hand.
He had a patient before him. He would focus on the patient before him and let any other injured come to him as they could. He moved his hands over Kaylee's head, feeling for crepidation, for a soft damp notch. Her frontal bone could have been fractured. Perhaps a concussion.
A gun fired directly over his head, breaking through the claxon. Simon bent over Kaylee, his mouth gone dry and far too aware of the insufficient barrier his body would make to shrapnel.
"You're gonna run out of rounds in that popgun pretty quick, dandy!" The whooping alarm competed with Jayne's roar – the rolling echoes chopped the words into fragments. The deck trembled under Jayne's boots as he followed Wing and Inara down the steps.
Simon ducked again when a shot rang off the forward cargo doors. He pushed himself back up on his knees in time to watch a pair of brown boots waver into his field of view. Two pairs. One was Zoe, left arm slung over her captain's shoulders and blood dripping in a thin but steady stream from the other hand.
"She got hit, doc." The captain was furious – face gone white, hands shaking. "Need you to fix her." And like that Reynolds grabbed Zoe by the collar and by the belt and set her down, easy, on the bare grating. Kaylee twitched, half rolled as if she were trying to move aside.
Simon jerked Reynolds down, his voice up.
"She's got pneumothorax and a sucking chest wound! I need an assistant, I can't do this by myself!"
"You fixed Kaylee, now fix Zoe."
Simon felt the deck shimmer, and the guard rails rattled in their brackets. "I can't, I've never had to do this!"
"I got no time to argue with you, doc. Fix her." Mal's coat brushed against Simon's face as the older man stood and headed for the ladder, catwalk shaking under his stride.
Simon's breath went short. Zoe made a soft noise, and reached for his hand where it held her arm. "D-d-don't..." Her fingers were soft on his wrist, fumbling at his fingers. "Hurts – don't..."
Then the preacher's hands were there as well, pulling his hands free. "I've got Kaylee, doctor, it's just a nose bleed, don't worry about her." Simon looked from Zoe to Book and back again. Zoe's hand still patted at his.
"Lemme, lemme up." Book leaned past and put a hand on Zoe's shoulder.
"Lie still, woman." The preacher's voice was just loud enough to carry over the claxon. "Let me help. Tell me what to do."
Pray for us, leapt to Simon's mouth, and he swallowed the words back down. "Press here," he said to Book. "Zoe. Zoe, listen to me. This is going to hurt, but you have to trust me."
***
Wildcard
Trust a tinker, trust a jill, trust a traveling fool,
Trust a dingo, trust a 'ro, trust a sheila who's never been to school...
She hummed to herself as she went down the side of the cargo bay, between the wall and the cargo stacked across the floor. There was shouting at the other end of the bay, up were everyone lived. She counted as she went - counted the deck panels, counted the boxes in heaps along the deck. Two, four, sixty-eight. The boxes were full of things that were not girls. The numbers were not right. The wind was too loud, inside. It was making her cross. She would have to go back and count again. Tricky numbers.
The meter of atomic particles is called Avogadro, and its number is 6.022 x 1023. The words are a whisper. That's twenty-four digits –sixzerotwotwozero right after each other up to twenty four - counted in base ten - but expressed in eight digits. And two symbols. Which is ten. Tricky numbers. Not a simple solution.
A sharp crack behind her. A pause in the shouting. Were they done now? Another crack and something hit the overhead walk, hit the opposite bulkhead. River stopped, computing the angles, counting the echoes. The voices began again, quieter but still angry. Another crack.
No touching guns, she said, mouthing the words, careful not to lose any. It's a gift to be simple, a gift to be free. No time for simple.
The spare skins hung in the lidded hole by the aft door. She ran her hands over them, tapped with a fingernail at the clear craniums. They had no hair. Perhaps it made them smarter. She picked the brightest one and pulled it on. This little piggie goes to market. All the others stay home. We're going to take the high road to the low road. Serenity shuddered under her, made the skins dance. No, no, not yet. No waltzing.
She had the skin on over her own, but the great doors would not open. So she went to speak to the smaller door. It thought she was Kaylee, speaking cantaloupe juice, so it slid aside, winking at her. The wind tried to slip in past her. It wanted to dance around inside Serenity. She shook her head at it, even though it could not see her behind the glass cranium. She shuffled outside and worked the outer control. While the door shut, she scolded the wind - wicked, wicked.
And it was wicked. It shrieked and stomped and snatched at the skin. She knelt, let the palms kiss Serenity's metal skin as the curve of her feet did. Close to the ship, the wind was confused, and lost her against the metal. River grinned. Silly wind - can't find me, must mind me.
Hand over hand, she made her way back and up, over the great curve of the hull and past the humming, roaring engines. Every little way, she had to stop and lean over, watch the ground spinning away. At the very top of the ship she stopped to stare at the sky behind them. Great black birds were following them. The birds flew faster than Serenity.
Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.
Then she was over the high curve, and coming down the steep side of the ship. The great engine was humming and wailing, gasping for air. Below her, the docking port outer wall was only half-closed, the very tip of the shuttle's lifting vane sticking out.
She sat for a bit, letting her hands play out in the rough slipstream while the rest of her clung tight-wedged between the engine and the ship. The wind made her hands waver back and forth, slapping at the wind. Tag, she thought. The wind tagged right back.
She didn't stop until the blackbirds came along side and wanted to dance.
Dancing would be fine, but Serenity needed her doors all shut. Otherwise she could not spin. She would fall down. River crawled over the forward panels. The engine was very close, here - not firing full, but still loud as the 'verse. She wondered how hot the engine was, inside the plasma core. Perhaps if she leapt into the furnace, she could tell.
Preacher man had a story in his symbol about men in a furnace, but she couldn't remember the words.
She clung to the side of the ship, and Serenity clung to her. Someplace, someone was making a small, frightened sound. Simon would make a sound like that, he knew, if he could see River out here, with the wicked wind and the ground going past so swift. If she could see River, she would make that sound, too. But she was here, on the outside with the wind.
High road to the low road, she thought, and turned her hands over, breaking the connection to the ship's skin, and then she was sliding fast and straight for the tip of the shuttle's vane. Down she went, and hit the vane just there, and the wicked wind turned kind and shoved her hard, tag, so that she fell through the dark hole and into the cramped space of the shuttle port.
Inside the cubby, it was even louder, but a different sort of noise. The engine was not so close. The wind was outside, but still wanted in. The blackbirds were mean to the slipstream, and bit at it with shiny teeth.
One blackbird danced close and River snarled back at it. Grandmother, what great eyes you have...
The shuttle wall was not straight and smooth, but bent into ripples. There were many panels inside, but she was not inside. Inside Serenity, not inside the shuttle. There was one panel outside the shuttle-that-was-inside-Serenity.
One for a boy, two for a girl. Not a girl any more. No simple solutions. Cut off the hand that pains you. River touched the panel and it opened, slamming back in the wind.
Serenity shifted, tilted. The wind howled, tugging at River, making the flight vane shudder. It must be lonely out there, with only the blackbirds to play with it.
The control pad glowed red like a sun and gold like a flower. River touched the pad, sixzerotwotwo and gave the wind the company it wanted.
The port hatch slammed shut, and it was silent inside the cubby.
***
Killjoy
He didn't trust anyone, even himself, any further'an he could toss 'em. Especially himself. No way to know which way a man was going to jump until you saw him stand on the edge of the cliff. His daddy had said that, along with a heap of other wise things. And Jayne had stood on the edge of enough abysses, looking down into darkness, to learn the truth of that.
So Jayne knew, sure as the sun made cracks in mud, that the crazy fancy pants was going to cut Inara as soon as he had the chance, promise or no promise. The only question was when.
So he paid no more mind to the jawing going on behind him than he had to, keeping his weapon on Wing and something between the fancypants and himself all the way down. The deck beneath him kept twisting, and if Wash didn't stop rutting around and fly the crate proper, Jayne was going to tear his head off.
The tread behind him told Jayne Mal was no more than half a meter behind, and from the look on Wing's face, not in a good mood.
"I'll kill her! You know I will, Reynolds."
And wasn't that just...shiny. As if it wasn't Jayne himself standing there with an AP pointed right at Wing.
Well, at Inara, then the fancypants. But close enough.
A bit of Wing edged past the Companion's shoulder. Jayne's finger tightened, relaxed again. "If you gonna do it, go ahead and do it already, I'm tired of your yapping." That didn't go too good - Inara was glaring at Jayne like he was a bug crawled out of her ricebowl and, worse yet, Wing actually stopped walking for a beat. "I'm about fed up with her mouth and her to-da walk, anyhow."
"Jayne." Mal sounded like he had enough pissed-off to leave more than a bit for people that weren't Wing. Not like having Mal mad over something or other was anything new.
"How much good will she do you if she's dead, Reynolds?" Jayne was getting real tired of that flapping jaw. Wing started walking again, though, tugging at Inara's shoulder to keep her with him. Jayne followed them and Mal tagged his steps.
"You won't be able to get away with this, Reynolds! I'll have your ship tagged as a kidnapper's vessel from here to the Core! You'll end your days scuttling from port to port, a fugitive even from the lowlife scum of your associates!"
"Watch who you're calling scum, you fancy-shoed maggot, or watch me put a big hole through her so's I can put a bigger hole in you." And there Jayne'd gone and quit keeping his mouth shut. Inara quit dragging her feet and started backpedaling, her eyes spitting fire.
Halfway into the kitchen step-down, Inara - her eyes still on Jayne - tripped over her fancy slippers and started to fall. Wing jerked her up, that's gonna leave a bruise - even though it was sheer stupidity to start thinking of the Companion and all her cream-colored skin at just this moment. Jayne swallowed and kept his hands light on the gun.
She fell again in the kitchen proper. Jayne held fire as Wing dragged Inara back to her feet. Wing's eyes were darting around like he was tracking flies, like he hadn't expected the galley to be quite so small. Behind Jayne, Mal was a pocket of silence - a nasty, furious, menacing silence.
Mal went left and Jayne went right around the dining table. No idea if it was Jayne's gun or the close quarters or Mal's face, Wing was starting to break. The hand with the knife started to shake - wearing a line into the Companion's neck. She caught her teeth in her lip, maybe to hold the sound in, because she never whimpered, even when the skin opened.
Mal's voice was huge and angry but what ever he was about to say was swallowed up by a goram loud crash from the sta'b'dside. The rumbling roar of the engine changed into a fast scream and the claxon started up again. Wing started at the noise, the whole goram ship shifted again and Inara did something fast and effective, twisting out of Wing's grip.
Jayne stepped left, a fast crab-wise move that kept Wing focused on him even as the man shoved Inara aside. She fell straight into Mal. The silver-handled knife fell, and hell if the goram dandy didn't have a belly gun. But that was no matter, because Jayne was already firing. Two shots went past Jayne's ear into the bulkhead, but that was all.
He went across the kitchen in three fast strides and kicked the gun away from Wing's hand, just in case. And then went down on one knee and set his thumb on Wing's wide open eye, and pressed down hard. No response.
He looked up at Mal, standing there in the doorway, as white as though he'd been the one bleeding out through the gaps in the grate. The gun in his hand was steady, though, and still pointing right at Wing.
Jayne stood up and stepped back, putting the safety back on. "Inara okay?" Behind Mal, Inara was coming to her feet, a red line weeping scarlet onto her yellow dress.
Mal nodded, gestured at the body. "Yeah. How's he?"
Jayne shrugged, holstered his gun. "He ain't okay. I was just making sure."
***
Skypilot
He trusted God, he told himself, and tried to believe it. Only God, not the weak mortal flesh nor even the solid comfort of a firearm. He trusted God, and the Lord he followed would not be so slighting as to betray that faith. All things for the glory of God. And God will glorify everything.
Despite his surety, Book lay on his bunk for a long time, his thoughts drifting everywhere except to sleep. Not that an unusual thing, on a day following a set of miracles.
He didn't like to use the word lightly. But nothing else seemed to fit so well. At least not to describe River's hand, wedged through the crack between Serenity and the shuttle. Most of the shuttle, the girl explained, while Book and Mal had taken panels loose and displaced wiring and cut a hole in the bulkhead.
"Part of the shuttle went away. Serenity drank the wing up. She was thirsty."
Serenity's engine had a new note. Took some getting used to. Kaylee had gone back down to the engine room, a plaster across her nose and leaning on the Shepherd's arm the whole way. There the mechanic had spent nearly an hour checking and rechecking the main drive, fretting but unable to articulate her unease.
"She sounds different," Kaylee said. "Her heartbeat's changed."
Book had paused in the midst of some meaningless platitude, the words giving him pause.
"It's a ship," he had said, "not a living creature."
Kaylee had looked at him as though he had claimed the gift of breathing vacuum. "She's talking to me, I have to trust her when she does that."
Her voice had risen again, trembling on the raw edge of hysteria. It had taken more platitudes - better meant than his earlier, unfinished thought - and another run through every gauge and check Kaylee could think of, before she had relaxed and allowed herself to be led away. A warm cup, heavily laced with rum, and Book had tucked her into her bed. He was not certain she had not been asleep before he pulled the covers over her.
Now he lay on his own bunk and stared up at the ceiling. The noise - it was not so much a new noise, he decided, as a change in the vibration. Easy enough to adjust to. The other events the day had wrought, well, that was a different story. A man - several men - were dead, less alive now than the ship. The bodies had gone out the air lock, so much carbon-based space debris by this point. Zoe lay in the medbay, having sent her husband away. She would have another set of scars. Their galley had pockmarks across the stenciled ivy leaves and two holes in the bulkhead above the heating unit -
Book did not remember sliding the door open. Later, he could not even remember swinging out of bed. He had opened the door - of course he had, the impact jarred the paper-paneled frame off its tracks and splintered the stop. Book found this out later, though, hours after he ran down the corridor and half leapt, half-fell down the steps into the galley, snatched up the fire suppressor on the way and used it on the flames licking up from the melted tea kettle while he jerked the breaker box open with the other and fumbled for the off switch.
Inara found him there, some time later, leaning carefully against the kitchen table and staring sightlessly at the stove that might have killed them all. Her eyes took in the empty suppressor bottle, the scorch marks on the wall, and the trio of ragged bullet holes that had destroyed the heat detection system. Her eyes went wide.
“Are you, are you all right?”
He shook his head, rubbed his face. “I should be asking you that, I think.”
“I'm fine. Or, I will be.” She tugged her shawl closer. “It takes more than a little thing like near death to set me to swooning.”
He laughed. “I never thought otherwise.”
She smiled, but it faded when she looked about the galley. Book watched her gaze follow the evidence of violence around the room. Her fingers brushed over the back of the chair at the head of the table, tracing the dark stain. “Besides, I knew that Ma - that you, that all of you, would come for me. Bring me back to Serenity. I trusted you.”
And to that he had nothing to say.
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The Floating World (The Murphy's Law Remix)
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