Title: In the Before

Author: kirby crow

Email: kirbycrow@hotmail.com

Website: http://SlashGirls.tripod.com

Characters: Jayne, Simon, River

Pairing: Jayne/Simon

Crossover?: No

Rating: R

Genre: *slash*

Status: Complete

Summary: Jayne doesn't know if he can.

Archive Permission: Firefly's Glow. Everywhere else, please ask. :-)

Author Notes: Jayne says reflexive pronouns can blow him.

Author's Website: http://SlashGirls.tripod.com

Disclaimer: No sue I.



In the Before
by kirby crow
kirbycrow@hotmail.com



It is warm under the covers when he steals away and stands in front of the window, naked, his arms crossed over his chest to preserve his heat. It's a small window. No bigger than a shoebox, really. A narrow eye peering out at a vast universe. There are few viewports. On a ship like this, they're just one more thing to go wrong.

He looks out and mentally ticks off the places where he most definitely is not: not at medical school, not at the hospital, nor at his parent's estate, nor even en route to some tropical vacation planet. The window is grimy and scratched and the iron deckplates cold under his bare feet. He wiggles his toes, knowing where he is.

The bed creaks and footsteps pad softly behind him. Burly arms slip around his waist and pull him back into warmth.

"C'mon back to bed." Growled against his neck, the soft, deep voice gone dark with promised pleasure.

He shivers, his eyes fixed on the points of light, lost in forgetting. Wanting so bad to forget. "Soon."

He dabs antiseptic on the red lines gouged into his cheek -- quite near his eyes -- and opens the med locker, looking for a dermal weave. Something breakable crunches under his shoes, the aftermath of his sister's latest outburst. It's the kindest word he can find for what happens to her. The crew calls it what it is; a fit.

He doubts that the drugs are doing any good, but they make her sleep. Asleep, she is not suffering. His hand pushes the dark mass of hair from her face and checks to make sure the padded restraints are not too tight on her slender wrists. A stray thought makes him stop and examine his hand, the shape and curve of it, remembering all the things he intended to train it for, all the healing he meant to do.

Sound behind him. He senses someone watching from the outer corridor, a face reflected in the glass from the corner of his eye. He turns and sees Jayne looking in, his eyes gone hard as flint as he takes in the smashed lab, the blood on Simon's collar, the petite berserker strapped into the medbed.

Simon turns away.

He likes being on his back, because it is different. In the muzzy before-time when Serenity was just a word, he was the one who pierced, who rode the smaller body under him, who bit back a cry as he spent himself into yielding flesh.

No longer. Legs wide apart, his hands writhe into fists in the damp sheets and his teeth clench as he moans and arches like a wild thing, abandoning himself to the raw pleasure of it. Here, he can almost lose himself, leave it all behind. All the memories, all the places he's been. Here, where Jayne is moving steady and strong inside him, his whistling breath punctuating the measured slap of skin on skin as he thrusts faster, harder... surges and silently convulses, his lips pressed to the hollow of Simon's throat.

The killer is a cuddler. Who would have guessed? Like most humans, Jayne needs at least one person in the world he can be kind to, one other soul to whom he can offer up truth and expect return. Everything else - treachery, homicide, theft - is somehow outside of that equation. Demented reasoning, Simon thinks dully, and feels no need to question it.

After, he allows himself to be held, to be kissed and stroked into sleep. Jayne needs to give such things as much as he needs to receive them. Before Serenity, he did neither.

About Jayne, he doesn't know. He doesn't ask.

In general, River does not like metal things. Especially small metal things with pointy ends, as if she remembered something terrible committed with them in another life. An era before Serenity.

"You touched him. I saw you touch him. You hurt him." She jabs to demonstrate the motion. "Like this. In and out."

Certainly, she does not like the thing she is pointing at Jayne, the flat, silver-shiny thing with an edge like the thin shine of a fingernail moon, sharp, so sharp. And red. She has already cut him once. He has a gun and doesn't use it. She wonders why as she sketches another quick red gash on his forearm, and he hisses and his hand IS going for the weapon...

River smiles joyfully in anticipation and steps back to give Jayne a clear shot, and that's when Zoe tackles her from behind, inadvertently slamming her forehead on the deck and knocking her out cold.

"You were going to shoot my sister?"

"She was gonna kill me!" Jayne presents his bloodied arm for evidence, but the doctor is unconcerned as he mutely offers a long strip of dermal weave. His posture and attitude say what he will not; that he's bled for River before and would do it again. Instantly. Without question.

Jayne realizes that Simon expects the same from him. He stares. "Well. That's a helluva lot to ask."

Especially from me, goes unsaid. Too, there is the niggling truth, shredding away at him with spiteful little fangs, that Simon would rather see him shot than River. Perfectly understandable, yet bitter all the same. Not that they had ever agreed on terms anyway, and the word love had yet to take the stage and make a bow, but it hurts to see yourself ranked and fall short.

He nods slowly, his mouth curled in, the lower lip tucked in his teeth as if retreating from harm. "I gotta think about this."

"I can't..." The short protest dies. Simon's shoulders move in a useless gesture, fatalistic acceptance of what he can't change. "She's why I'm here."

He whispers it like it explains everything, then sees that Jayne needs more, needs words, memories, fragments of a past he's trying to bury.

Again, he turns away, ignoring the rasp of Jayne's surprised intake of breath. That is, until Jayne seizes the edge of a surgical tray and sends it spinning across the lab, smashing, leaving glass shards and strewn metal implements in its wake. There is success in rage -- something a mercenary already knows -- because it does make Simon turn back.

Jayne breathes hard as he gazes down on Simon, scanning his features for any trace of emotion. Finding none. His hand half-clenches into a fist and the moment seesaws on the edge of becoming dark and ugly, and then Jayne spins on his heel and stumps out.

Later, the ship grows quiet, drifting in the black. He slips into bed beside the larger body, not nestling close, not keeping his distance either. A sighing breath escapes his lips as Jayne reaches for him, and he is happy to be stroked and roughly comforted, not knowing if it's for the last time.

Suns swirl in galaxies and planets around stars and seasons around people. Humans whirl around each other, too. They dance in a complicated rhythm, back and forth, turbulent and calm, full and sere. Often, they retreat and hide, yet never lose the step. The beat tap-taps with every movement, every thought, and only when one is gone forever does the music cease.

River thinks it's a lonely dance. She wonders why Jayne drifts like a blown leaf around her brother, removing his stray possessions from Simon's room, avoiding the mess hall, filling his hours with the new weapons system parked in the hold, still in crates and padded boxes.

Jayne hunches over a newly-opened crate, extracting the fragile mechanism and wiping imagined dust from one gleaming, hexagonal side. The CS-2488 firing mechanism he gingerly cradles in his hands she knows and dismisses. Cohn-Shimada manufacturing corp, some part of her brain intones. *Merc Colony 12. Series 2488/D.*

She ignores it. There are more interesting things to read in the line of Jayne's body, the way his shoulders bow inward, the bending of his neck, the bone-deep tension in his spine. Hurt speaks from every pore, if one only knows how to look.

River chews on her thumbnail as she watches him. He thinks he was mistaken, or worse; deceived. He can't see that Simon is offering him exactly what he wants, can't see it because it's all tied up in her and her peculiar lunacy and Simon needing to know that she's safe in Jayne's hands before he puts his heart there, too.

Jayne thought Simon never cared at all.

Her head tilts in puzzlement as she processes this. Data inaccurate, she concludes. Amend.

She needs to correct the erroneous datum and the words never come out the way they're supposed to. Blue has thirty-seven meanings, and only she hears them all at once. There are times, yes, when she can be lucid, though she can't predict when that will be. Hazards seem to drive her to sanity better than Simon's drugs, but as much as her brother fears the opposite, Jayne is not a danger to her. She grins suddenly. Jayne would have aimed for her legs.

There is a way to tell Jayne what he needs to know, a way without the chain-heavy weight of words, but that road frightens her. She stands silently behind him, undecided. Despite running over several permutations, no alternative solution presents herself, so she creeps like a mouse as he works. The light is not at her back and Jayne is intent on his work, doesn't feel the fingertip touch to the side of his temple until it's too late.

And then he doesn't want to stop her.

She shows him Simon sitting stiffly on his empty bed, his face directed to the wall. He looks at nothing. Only his fine-boned hands move. They caress a piece of cheap, worn fabric cut to fit a shape that would hang comically on him, much too big. Jayne's shirt, left behind on his rapid exit from Simon's quarters. His sensitive fingers move over the material, learning the rips and worn places, worrying over them. He lifts it to his mouth and smells it, closing his eyes.

No outbursts. No tears. That isn't like him. There's a hardness to Simon. Not like Jayne, who wears everything on the outside. The others -- Mal and Zoe and Wash -- they think her brother is brittle. Foolish. Simon is like Persephone bone china. It looks like the most fragile, delicate porcelain ever made, but you can't break it with a sledgehammer.

She lets Jayne see how he's dented Simon, how he's touched him. How he's hurt him. The jabbing motion she made with the scalpel is correct, the stabbing pain of loss she foretold very similar to what has happened. Jayne was a threat at first, something coming between them and leaving a hollow ache behind. Now she sees that she needs to pull him closer for Simon to be whole.

"Like this," she murmurs, and puts her arms around the startled man, pressing her cheek to his short hair. He stiffens for an instant, then hugs her back rigidly.

"You're just full of little surprises, ain't you?" he grumbles, smoothing her hair. He pushes her back a little to look at her. "Yeah." His eyes are wide, like he's caught a glimpse of something far in the distance, something beautiful, and he's straining to see it again. "I guess there's a whole lot to you and him I ain't seen."

Then Simon comes into the hold, looking for her. He sees their closeness and freezes, suddenly on alien ground, but Jayne pats her arm in a brusque fashion and gently pries her off.

"She's just being neighborly... I think," he says with an abashed smile. "You shouldn't let her wander down here. It's dangerous."

Jayne shepherds her back to Simon, who takes her hand. "I can't watch her every second." It sounds defensive. She moves to put her hand over his mouth, laughing, trying to hush him before he chips away at everything she's just repaired.

"Yeah, well." Jayne looks at the deck, the bulkheads, his shoes, anywhere but at Simon. "I could help out with that, you know."

Simon's lips part to say... something, but he just nods, his eyes lingering on the outline of Jayne's jaw, the curve of his throat.

Jayne finally looks at him. Clears his throat. "I'm not sayin' I'm signing on permanent or anything, just..."

Simon nods. "Just. Yeah."

Jayne eyes River speculatively. "She might even be able to help me out."

She nods eagerly. "Cohn-Shimada manufacturing corporation," she pipes. "Merc Colony twelve. Series twenty-four-eighty-eight slash dee."

Simon looks at her like she's grown a third eye. Jayne shrugs. "See?"

It's difficult for Simon, who's grown so accustomed to pain that he barely registers its presence. In his experience, when something is lost it never comes back. But he's willing to try. She can see he's willing. So does Jayne, who smiles shy-scared and trails his fingertips over Simon's cheekbone.

They make an odd trio. As a family unit they pass quirky at light-speed and teeter on the bizarre, which is fine with River. Simon is all the reminder she wants of the past.

"Ere," she says, knowing that it's still the wrong word. "Prior to."

And claps her hands together in sheer glee when -- for once! -- Simon understands her perfectly.


### The End ###
kirbycrow@hotmail.com