DISCLAIMER: The Firefly/Serenity
characters are the property of Mutant Enemies, Fox, Universal, and probably someone
else I'm forgetting. The story contents are the creation and property of Djinn
and are copyright (c) 2005 by Djinn. This story is Rated PG-13.
Old Soldiers Never Die
by Djinn
You can't bear to visit the
cockpit anymore. Everything's wrong
because Wash is gone. Even though his
dinosaurs still sit on the pilot's station.
Even though the smell of him is still there if you bury your face hard
enough into the fabric of his chair. Even
though there's still an image of you, tucked into a far recess where he could
see it when he was underneath the panel working on the controls. He was crazy that way. Said he wanted you near him no matter where
he was.
Now, you're nowhere near
him. How could you have left him on
Haven? You feel like you left more than
just your heart there. You feel like
most of your soul stayed back, too.
A lot of people didn't get
you and Wash. They thought he was too
silly, too weak, for you. But he was the
strong part of you. He was the part that
never gave up on people, that never gave up on life. He was the thing that kept you wishing you'd
never been to war. That made you want to
have a baby so that, between the two of you, you could teach that child everything
he or she would ever need to know—both about the good and the bad of
folks.
Now, there won't be a
baby. Not ever. Not with Wash. The future's another thing you left on Haven.
You wander down to the
galley. Only Jayne's there. He's sitting at the table, hunched over as
if guarding his bowl of soup. He looks
like some kind of mutant hawk, if hawks bristled with guns and bandoliers
instead of feathers.
"There's more soup. I'll get you some." Jayne's up before you can tell him you don't want
any soup. He's been unusually kind to
you. It's unnerving, and you wish he'd
flip back to normal. As long as he
treats you like you might break, you know you might just be on the verge of
that.
Everything that was normal
and strong about you seems to have stayed down on Haven, too.
You definitely left your
appetite there. You stare at the soup
Jayne puts on the placemat across from his, feeling no inclination to taste it.
"Sit down,
Zoe." His voice is calm. Almost soothing. The thought of Jayne being soothing is just
plain wrong.
"Not hungry," you
mutter.
"Don't much
care." He takes you by the
shoulders, pushes you down into the chair.
The thing that tells you that
you're not right is that you let him do this.
You pick up the spoon, just like you would have when you were a kid, and
start to ladle the soup into your mouth.
You can't taste it, don't want it, but you eat it because you have a
feeling Jayne brought all those guns to deal with you, not with some big bad to
come.
"There you go," he
says, "don't that taste good?"
You think this is how Jayne
might sound with a baby, and the thought makes you want to laugh and cry and
also to throw your soup across the room.
You decide just to keep on eating.
It's been a long time since you ate, and you know your clothes are
starting to hang on you. Mal's been worried.
Hell, all of them are worried about you.
They think you're
family. They think they have a right and
a responsibility to care for you. But
they don't. The part of you that they
needed to care for is buried on a dusty world that holds too many dead friends
and not enough live ones.
"Mal says we'll have
work soon," Jayne says, his voice so perky he sounds like he's on happy
pills.
You nod.
"Mal says we'll be real busy."
You nod again.
"Mal says—"
"Does Mal say to shut up
and let a body eat in peace?" You
know your tone is mean. Sharp and
brittle like your insides are now. You think
if you move wrong you might cut yourself from all the broken glass it feels
like you ate.
"No, he didn't say
that." Jayne looks miserable, but,
since you're miserable, you don't mind sharing the emotion. Besides, you know he'll get over his feeling
bad soon as he sees a new gun or a pretty piece of tail.
You left sex down on Haven,
too. You've tried to touch yourself the
way Wash did. During sleeptime,
when the ship is silent. You've tried to
pretend he was back. But you never get
very far because he's not back, and he never will be, and your body doesn't
respond to you the way it did to him.
You wonder if you'll ever want sex again. Sex that isn't with him.
You see Kaylee and Simon
together, and it hurts you as it brings back memories of the time you and Wash
finally buried the hatchet—and he buried something else inside you. It wasn't just his body; he filled you with
his love. And his hope. With his silly manner of being and with the
way he couldn't get enough of loving you.
As if you were a thing that God had made just for him.
You think that he was the
only thing God made just for you...and you let him die.
In your nightmares, you see the
Reaver harpoon coming through the cockpit, jamming through your husband's
body. In your nightmares, he doesn't die
instantly. He looks over at you, hand
outstretched. "Why? Why did you let this happen?"
In your nightmares, you never
know what to tell him.
Pushing the bowl away, you
get up. Jayne starts to say something,
but then he catches sight of the expression on your face and his mouth closes
back up as he looks down at his soup.
You aren't sure where you
want to go, so you pace through the ship.
You head toward the engine room but can hear Simon and Kaylee in there,
so you turn and make double time back to the aft stairwell that will take you
down to the infirmary. With Simon gone,
the room seems especially empty. He has
a calming way about him—or used to, before making love to Kaylee became his
whole reason for being.
"He's not
here." River's voice has changed
since the fight with the Reavers. She
doesn't seem like a little girl anymore.
She's grown up and calmed down all at once.
"I know." Zoe doesn't want to look at River. River—who could have killed the Reavers,
every last one of them, and made it so that Wash never had to die. If Wash had just gotten out of the ship.
"Timing's all
wrong. No Reavers for me to kill before they
killed him," River murmurs. "I
wish..."
In the past, River would have
just blurted out what you don't want to hear.
But now, she knows better.
Although whether that's a factor of growing up or of just being able to
read your mind, you're not sure.
"Not your fault,"
you mumble, knowing your thoughts won't be unclear the way your words are.
River follows you as you
leave the infirmary. You haven't seen
Mal, but you imagine he might be in the cargo bay, fighting with Inara.
"He's with her. Fighting...?"
You look over at River. She shrugs and looks meaningfully up at the
shuttle that was Inara's and is again. Girl's back in business. Or maybe not if the captain has anything to
say about that.
"Come sit with
me." River takes you by the hand,
and the shock of contact makes you realize that nobody has touched you lately.
Most probably because you're
scary and prickly and as likely to shoot them for the gesture as smile.
"You're not scary."
"Coming from you, girl,
I'm not sure that's a comfort." But
you follow River, knowing where she's taking you. Knowing it will be hard and your heart—what's
left of it, anyway—will break a little bit more if you have to see where your
man sat. Where River sits now.
River doesn't say anything,
just pushes you into the copilot seat and takes Wash's chair. How much longer are you going to think of it
that way? It's not your husband's chair,
anymore. Just like your bed isn't his,
and the toilet isn't something you have to argue over whose turn it is to
clean.
Hitting dials in an eerie
echo of the way Wash would have done it, River looks over at you. "Did you like him when you met
him?"
You think she knows this, but
she doesn't want to just steal it out of your mind. And you like that about her. It's a choice to live like a normal
person. To give people a chance to put
into words what she can see so easily at a glance.
"Nope." You say it, and you can see that silly
mustache he wore. The cocky way he
carried himself. How exasperated he'd
get when your no-nonsense manner interfered with you laughing at the funny
things he'd say.
River touches one of the
dinosaurs. "Where did he get
these?"
She can't get that from your
mind; you never knew for sure.
"Prison, I think. He sat out
most of the war."
River nods—she'd probably
picked that up from him even without the special mind-reading talent. Didn't need to be a killing machine to see
that Wash didn't have a whole lot of fight in him. Not that he was weak. You'd made that mistake when you first met
him. Decided easy meant weak and
optimistic meant stupid. They didn't.
You'd give up a limb to have
just a moment of him spouting something full of his easy optimism.
"He died because of
me." River sounds strange, and you
look over and realize she's crying. Not
just a few tears, either, but big, streaming tracks of them. "I'm sorry, Zoe. He died and Book died and I didn't mean for
this to happen. I didn't know it would
happen, and what good is being a psychic if you don't know what's going to
happen?"
She looks at you, and you
feel something melting, and suddenly you're crying because it's all right to
cry for her even if you won't cry for yourself.
You're not sure how it happens, but she's crawling into your lap, and
you're cradling her in your arms, and you remember that this poor woman-child
was someone's little girl. And that she
never asked for this, and if they'd just left her alone, she might have ended
up like Wash—happy and optimistic and ready for a future.
A future that would get
ripped away because good people fall and you never know why.
River sobs, and you can feel
the sounds tear through her. She
trembles in your arms, and you realize you've never held her, never really
offered her comfort. That was for Inara, or Book, or Simon to do. Hell, even Mal was kinder to her than you
were.
"You weren't unkind to
me. I just wasn't really here to
you." River doesn't sound like
she's holding any grudges over that.
It's just the way things were.
"You're here
now." You look at Wash's
chair. River's chair now. Mal's chair, too,
some of the time. Every time you look
for your husband, you'll see this child you ignored. Or the captain you've proven too many times
and at too much cost that you'd follow into hell. "If only we'd said no." You've replayed it in your mind. If you'd only told Mal no. If you'd only let him misbehave on his own.
"You wouldn't do
that. No isn't something you'd say to
the captain. Or something Wash would
have said, either." River pushes
out of your arms and walks back to the dinosaurs. She lifts one of them, making it talk, her
voice nothing like Wash's, yet you think you hear something of him in her.
She turns to meet your
eyes. Her smile is a brilliant thing to
behold. "That's the nicest thing
you've ever said to me."
"Didn't say it,
River." You're trying to tell her
to get out of your head.
She smiles, and, for a
moment, you wonder if that is what your child might have looked like. Innocent and goofy, with your pain
underneath.
You see River stop, but she
doesn't comment this time. She took the
warning to heart, even if she probably can't stay out of your head. But she can keep herself from commenting, and
that's all you're really asking for, anyway.
Taking a deep breath, you
curl yourself up in the copilot seat, while River walks to the storage cabinet
and pulls out the blanket, laying it about you.
It smells faintly of your husband's cologne and you close your eyes,
breathing it in, surprised that it smells of him when he'd hated it because it
was so scratchy. If you'd known it had
his scent on it, you'd have taken it down to your quarters and curled up with
it.
"There's a lot of things
recorded in here," River says, tapping the console. "His voice. I could put something together for you...if
you want?"
You want very much. But you can see yourself listening to it over
and over until memory becomes obsession.
Until the past takes over a future that promises only emptiness.
It breaks your heart to say
no, but you know you have to.
"Soldiers fall, River. You
bury them. And then you leave them
behind."
"He wasn't a soldier,
Zoe. And someday you may want to share
his voice." River looks at your
belly, a sadly beautiful smile lighting her face. "Someday, I know you will."
You look down, too; the
blanket covers whatever River thinks she sees inside you. "I had Simon check." It was the first thing you did after burying
Wash. You had Simon check to see if
there was life inside you—some bit of Wash that would go on. Some small part of him that you hadn't killed
by being reckless during the fight with the Reavers.
"Simon's been a little
distracted." River's smile is a
serene one. Woman to woman. Understanding. Old.
"Better have him check again."
"I will." You push yourself out of the chair.
"Better give him some
time before you do," River says, laughing, as she makes the universal
finger signs for two folks becoming one flesh.
"Oh. Right."
You feel a hope fill you. A hope
you haven't felt since Wash died. A
feeling that used to need your husband's touch and laugh and his soft, gentle
smile. Maybe you'll see that smile
again. Maybe you'll hold some part of
him again.
For the first time, the
cockpit seems a welcoming place. A
fitting place. Wash's child will want to
be here. Your baby will want to play with
those dinosaurs and crawl all around under the console. Will he or she laugh when your image comes
into view?
You suddenly know you need to
add a picture of Wash, so that when your child looks up and catches sight of
those images for the first time, both of you will be smiling down.
You look over at River. "How long have you known?"
"Just felt it now. Feels like you and him and something new,
too." She smiles again. It's such a new expression for her, this
easy, open smile. As if River is coming
to terms with herself, finally. Or just
channeling your husband from the chair she's claimed as her own.
And you're all right with her
in that chair. You're just fine with
that—or you're getting there, anyway.
"You two taking good
care of my boat?" Mal's voice is a little tentative, as if he's unsure that
River should be steering or that you should be up here, at all.
"We are, sir." River smiles, a different smile than the one
she's been giving you. One that's just Mal's.
"Well, carry
on." And he leaves you, heading
rather quickly back the way he'd come.
"Are they...?" It's suddenly important to you that he be
happy, that he get to find out that love can be sweet when it's not ripping
your heart out.
"Soon, I
think." River gives you what must
be the "happy for Mal and Inara" smile
because, again, it is slightly different than the ones you've seen before. You imagine you'll catalog your child's
smiles the same way.
River turns away, piloting
the ship well. Not as well as your man,
but then, no one ever will. For a
moment, he's sitting in the chair, again.
In your mind, he has a bright, silly shirt on, and is wearing a big
goofy smile as he makes one of the dinosaurs proposition you.
"I don't know what he
called them," you say, looking at the dinosaurs, realizing their names
might be important.
River gives you the smile
that's just for you. "That's all
right. I do."
FIN