AN: Winding down, with only a few more chapters left. The BDR is finally getting started. The next chapter is probably gonna be the longest, as it is the fight scene/climax. Expect that, as well as another chappie with the aftermath :) I just want to take this time to thank everybody who has stayed through my random posting habbits and so forth, and to thank you all for you support!

Disclaimer: not mine

“Well?” “Come on.” Simon wheeled around to match Mal’s stride, his hands jammed in his pockets. “What happened,” Simon pressed. Zoe spoke up from Mal’s right. “We got screams, blood and an answer.” “Bastard ain’t even that far away,” Jayne spat. “He’s got his space station just far enough out atmo that the blast won’t hurt him.” “Blast?” Mal’s lips tightened. “He’s plannin’ on blowing about seven planets to smithereens, Doc.” Simon’s lips parted, and his expression hardened. He’d not participated in the ‘questioning’ of Mr. Tremain, but now he was beginning to wish he had. Anyone who could participate in a plot to kill so many millions… well, they deserved anything that happened to them. Jayne, Zoe, Mal and Simon strode down the streets of Persephone to where they’d left the mule, ignoring the venders and streetwalkers that prowled the late-afternoon city. All around them, men and women walked, talked, shouted, cajoled, spat, cursed and laughed. Children milled around, staying out of the center of the streets, keeping to the edges. Big-eyed street urchins, hunched over poorly-lettered signs reading things like ‘Plees Feed Me’ or other, similar messages in Chinese, watched the four as they passed. They were evaluated, and found wanting. The big-eyed urchins turned their heads and let the grim-looking quatrain slip from memory. Women dressed in bright faux-silk, their lips stained with berry-juice if they couldn’t afford lipstick, eyed Mal, Simon and Jayne hungrily. Their eyes, tired and older than their bodies, narrowed. Their mouths curved in sultry smiles and their long, thin fingers twitched to feel money between the pads. They were, like the street urchins, ignored. Once on the mule, the four remaining members of Serenity’s crew headed for the ship without pause. No one said anything, but Zoe’s hand fell on Mal’s shoulder. He let it lie. Mal was thinking about strategy. Or, rather, the lack of strategy. As had been pointed out (probably more often than he should have allowed), Mal was not the ‘verse’s best tactician. His plans tended to… well, ‘flop’ put it nicely. Not that he wasn’t a lateral thinker, but his ideas were more often than not way outside the box, and pretty much impossible to carry out. He knew this perfectly well. He couldn’t help it. He just had the bad luck of always coming up with the hardest, most complicated way of solving a problem that, in retrospect, could have been snuffed in an instant with the proper gorram strategy. Which, unfortunately, brought his thoughts full circle. Strategy. They needed a strategy. This Saunders, this Dillon Saunders, had a space station. He had lots of bombs. They were not on the space station. There were, however, guards on the space station. With weapons. Whereas Mal and his team had four people, if you counted the Doc, which was pushing it. Well, five, including River, but if Mal had anything to say about it, she would not be risking her hide in this particular battle. Never mind that she’d decimated a roomful of Reavers all by her lonesome. Well, on second thought, maybe he should consider that. All part of the strategy, see? River, now that Mal thought about it some more, was their best chance. However, there was the whole Don’t-Let-River-Get-Herself-Killed thing. It was, he decided glumly, a moral dilemma. It had been a while since Mal had bothered to care about moral dilemmas. Then, Kaylee came along, and Inara, and River herself. Damn it. So there was that. And then, there was Zoe. To be frank, Mal was worried about Zoe. She’d been getting better, but just before they left, she’d… changed, somehow. It was hard to place, but she seemed far more at peace with herself than he’d seen her since Wash’s death. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be something to worry about, but… it just put him off, somehow. Maybe it was this foolish rescue thing. That must be it, Mal said to himself. Back to strategy. Zoe herself was thinking about what her dead husband had told her. ‘Don’t blame the girl’. Did he mean River? If so, why hadn’t he said River’s name? Or maybe it was just some kind of ghostly code or something? And the choice. The choice she’d have to make. Zoe already knew, she was pretty certain, what that would be. Live, or die. And, she was pretty certain, she knew what she’d choose. But he’d said it would be a hard choice, hadn’t he? And that was easy. Mal had Inara now. He’d forgive her. He’d be okay. Zoe knew Wash was waiting for her. She wanted to go. So that choice was easy. She was prepared to die. But what if that wasn’t the choice he was talking about? She couldn’t think of anything else it could be. As for the other thing, the girl, there were a few possibilities. River, or Kaylee, or Inara, or some other girl they hadn’t met yet. It seemed a powerful strange choice of words for a warning, and Zoe wouldn’t quite put it past her man to do that just to annoy her. Alive or dead, Wash delighted in seeing her worked up. In that moment, Jayne and Zoe shared a mental kiss. Just as Zoe thought Wash’s name, Jayne did the same. He, of course, was not thinking about his dead husband. He was thinking about the way Wash had died: in his pilot’s seat, before the big battle, but after his own struggle. It had taken a while for Jayne to realize this: that Wash, despite having died before the fight with the Reavers, had fought his own, private battle to land Serenity safely. And he had won. So he had, in fact, died victorious. Jayne was glad of this. He had always expected to go out fighting, and he expected anyone he respected to go out fighting, so it had been bothering him that Wash hadn’t. Because, oddly enough, the mercenary did respect Wash. He respected Wash’s good humor, Wash’s steely resolve when it came to those he loved, Wash’s talent at flight. Though he had never told the pilot this, and would never tell another soul, the child Jayne had always wanted to fly. So now that Jayne had heard about the plot to blow up half the ‘verse, and how the four of them plus River were supposed to stop it, Jayne was trying to tie off loose ends in his mind. The only other loose end he could think of, after the problem of Wash’s death, was River. And that would have to wait. Simon, on his part, was trying not to think about anything at all. He kept having visions of his beautiful sister, tied down and forced to detonate devices that would kill millions of innocent people. Then, he’d see himself, rushing in to save her with Mal, Zoe and Jayne right behind him, and they’d be just a millisecond too late. Simon had a morbid fear of being just a bit too late, of trying so hard and then failing. It was part of the reason he was such a perfectionist: he was terrified of looking something over only to see that he’d missed something, the one crucial thing, and in his line of work, that crucial thing was often the line between life and death. When they reached Serenity, the four congregated around the pilot’s seat where Mal dropped himself. “What’s the plan, sir?” Zoe hitched her hip against the console, keeping her dark gaze steadily on Mal’s face. “We don’t have time to make a complicated plan like we did with Ariel,” Mal mused. “So any ideas would be appreciated.” “Ideas? We need to just go! Every second we waste here, River could be getting a step closer towards death! All these planets could be gone, poof, any minute!” Simon’s raised voice was the only indication of his anger. Otherwise, he appeared perfectly composed from where he stood near Zoe. “We need to figure out what to do,” Mal said firmly, staring Simon down. Beside him, Jayne opened his mouth, then closed it. “What else can we do?! This is my SISTER out there! We’re going now!” “Don’t you EVER tell me what to do on my own ship,” Mal thundered dangerously, echoing what he’d once said to Inara. “If you have any ideas, any GOOD ideas, you tell me now. But don’t you dare try and order me about.” Simon fell into silence. “Boy’s got a point,” Jayne said reluctantly. “What else can we do? There’s four of us, Mal.” “Five, counting River,” Zoe put in. “What? River is not going to be fighting.” “River’s the best fighter of any of us here,” Mal told Simon. “And besides, can we really stop her?” Grudgingly, Simon shook his head. Then, he held up a hand. “Wait! Did you take Tremain’s creds?” “What?” Mal frowned. “Tremain, did you take his credentials? His cards?” “Yeah,” Zoe said, reaching into her pocket. “I’ve got ‘em. Why?” “Because,” Simon began, taking the proffered cards and looking them over. “I can… hack into his files with these, and access Saunders’ accounts. How he’s been contacting Tremain, I mean. With that, I can contact Saunders myself and tell him we’re working for Tremain. That we’re… I don’t know, oh! Yes! That we’ve captured me, and we’re bringing me to him to serve as collateral for River.” Jayne voiced the popular consensus. “Huh?” Simon, excited now, gestured with the cards in his hand. “I can pretend to be someone working for Tremain. I’ll tell Saunders that River Tam’s brother, Simon, has been captured, and is being brought to him so that he can use him to make River do what he wants. It’s our own Trojan horse.” “Our what?” “Tro- oh, never mind.” He started off towards the nearest netbase, and Mal caught his arm. “Wait. Are you sure you can do this? You make any mistakes and we’re’s good as dead.” Simon nodded. “I used to do this all the time to my father’s files, sending fake messages to people under his name. When I was a kid, I mean. I can do this.” He sounded almost desperate, and Mal let him go. He knew how the boy must feel: Simon would be no help with the actual fighting, in all probability, and he wanted to help in any way he could. Besides, this was actually… well, actually, it was a damn fine plan. Compared to what Mal would have come up with. It took a real man to be able to admit somethin’ like that. So they had an in. Now, they just had to come up with something to do once they were in Saunders’ little House O’ Hell. * * * * “Clever little dollies, all in a row,” River whispered. In her mind, she knew exactly how to say it. It just came out all crazified. “Are you coming to save me?” At least she wasn’t talking in the third person anymore. “Too late for that, dollies,” she continued, “as this little doll is made of dry, dry straw. She’s begging for the fire.” Or not. River hated talking sometimes. She hated how lucid she thought she was, and then how insane she sounded. And she hated how sometimes, it was the opposite, and sometimes, the madness flew all inside her and rumbled things around until her parts were upside-down and all confused. Her hands were cold, as were her knees through her trousers. She was crouched, motionless, in a little tube. Four-by-four went the walls, steel, all so very chilly. Her right palm stung from where she’d scraped it on a vent opening, but she made no sound as she slowly, carefully, eased forward. The madness wanted to scream and explode out of this narrow little corridor, but the sane part of her wouldn’t let it. She had to be silent, she had to be careful, she had to move like the air this duct was supposed to carry. She didn’t, however, block out the madness. It helped her sometimes, despite how much she hated it. She wasn’t entirely sure how she’d gotten here. The madness had given her the idea, and had moved her body until she was here, crawling through the ventilation system, hunting Dillon Saunders. Her feet ached at the toes. She was hungry. But none of that really mattered. She was close, which was what was important. There was time, River felt, to rest a little. She closed her eyes, and refocused on the other threads connecting to her heart: they were tugging just a little closer, four of them were, letting her know that the mice on the end were eating up the strings and would soon be right there with her. They were excited about something. She didn’t concentrate hard enough to figure out what. She was not glad they were coming, but she wasn’t un-glad, either. They were supposed to come. It was all supposed to happen like this, something told her. The madness, she guessed. Things were falling into place. The rational side of River, which had grown stronger after the festering wound that was the Miranda cover-up had been cut out, translated the ravings into logic: things were definitely falling into place. It was like a giant puzzle, with pieces missing and pieces fitting in. The picture this puzzle made was not something River particularly wanted to see, but she couldn’t stop the pieces from sliding home. River wasn’t sure what she was going to do once she found her quarry. She trusted the madness to show her. Simon didn’t understand this, that the madness was something River could separate out and view from outside herself, and that it told her things. He thought she could find out things, but that was wrong. She was * told * things, and she couldn’t control them. Some things she could control, with practice, like following the little strings. But most of them, the flashes of thoughts that weren’t her own, were thrust upon her without warning. So she expected that she’d know what to do when she found Dillon Saunders, whose dark, unhappy little thread she was following now. His thread was like a dried up bit of catgut, too worn to be made into a violin string. It was gnarled and twisted and sick, and her mental hands tugged at it greedily as she followed. She was almost there.

TBC: only two or three more chapters, folks!