BLUE SUN ROOM FAN FICTION - GENERAL

ELVENBOOKWYRM

From the Outside In
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Pistol!verse. The crew of Serenity consider Pistol and the Saint, from the outside in.


CATEGORY: FICTION    TIMES READ: 2157    RATING: 9    SERIES: FIREFLY

I own nothing.

----

River was talking to Badger, with Jayne standing next to her. Or rather, it was Pistol who spoke, with Saint standing beside her. Inara was starting to be able to tell the difference by sight alone. River was constantly moving, even if it was just around in circles, even if it was just her eyes. Pistol could stand still for hours. Similarly, Jayne was always putting his foot in his mouth, whether he noticed it or not, whereas Saint only spoke when it profited them both. Inara thought that they looked like a painting of Lancelot and Guinevere that she'd seen as a child. Jayne - or rather, Saint - was the knight errant, falling slowly in love with the woman he could never have, hardly realizing it, perhaps in this case never realizing it; after all, Jayne was hardly a young man anymore, and he tended to think awfully slowly. Pistol was the beautiful, untouchable Queen, promised to Arthur (and who, she wondered, would Arthur be?) but willing to spend her time with his first knight until he returned home. It was all rather tragic, she thought to herself, as she walked by Mal on her way to her shuttle.

Mal found it all manner of unnatural, truth be told, but he knew that when Jayne shut up and River stood still, generally, there was money to be had. (Recently, they had gone on a series of jobs and brought nothing back but secret smiles. Mal seriously hoped that they weren't doing what he thought that implied, but if they were, he was thankful they were keeping it off his boat.) Thing was, many of their jobs as Pistol and Saint were more profitable than his own smuggling jobs. He sometimes wondered if he shouldn't just trade careers. 'Course, he'd have to find another Reader to tell him which jobs were the right ones, and if River was any indication of what Readers were like, another one on board would be more trouble than it was worth. He'd stick to smuggling, he decided as Kaylee drove the mule back on board.

Kaylee paid no attention to River and Jayne's conversation with Badger. River was wearing the gun, after all, and that meant she was Pistol right now, which also implied that Jayne wasn't Jayne, but Saint. Not that long ago, this was the very future she'd been afraid of for River. She knew perfectly what River and Jayne - or, Pistol and Saint - did for their job. Plain and simple, they were mercenaries. But because of River, they could turn down the jobs that would be too dangerous, either to their lives or their consciences. Why, if River had already decided to turn down the job, whoever was giving it might never find them at all. And wasn't that just the shiniest thing? Jayne actually listening to somebody, that is. As she passed Simon's box to him, she thought to herself, they were good friends for each other, River and Jayne.

Simon was glad to have the bags of plasma that Kaylee had picked up for him, because River and Jayne were talking to Badger and, whether by chance or by betrayal, somebody always ended up being shot when they took a job for Badger. Shot or stabbed, he amended, thinking about the first job he remembered with the unpleasant seeming man. Of course, since starting their side business, River and Jayne had been lucky enough not to suffer more than some fairly minor burns to date, and that was because Jayne had gotten too impatient to wait for his dinner one evening. Of course, this would be the acid test of what was stronger, their luck or what he'd come to think of as "Badger's Curse". What a funny thing it was, him believing in luck. Back on Osiris he'd been one of the few doctors with no traditions or superstitions - just skill. Now... well, he didn't ever blow out the candles on his birthday cake, for starters, and some of his habits that had been bred in medical school had become more like rituals. He wasn't the only one who had superstitious habits on board. Inara kept practicing her Companion traditions even after leaving the Guild. Zoë bought another dinosaur every time they found them for sale and finances allowed. Kaylee talked to the engine, for goodness sake! Sometimes it seemed that Mal, Jayne and River were the only ones who didn't have traditions. Mal, of course, had given up on them after the war. Perhaps Jayne didn't, or couldn't, see the point of them. River... it was impossible to say why River did the things she did in the way she did them, at least until that particular hand had been played out. It didn't matter, though. He was well prepared for whatever fortune or misfortune the meeting of Badger and Pistol and Saint would bring, he thought to himself as he passed Zoë on his way to the med bay.

Zoë, believe it or not, was better at keeping secrets than anybody else on the ship. For that reason, and for her tactical experience, she had been told what River and Jayne were planning as Pistol and Saint's master stroke. It had been largely River's idea, of course, but once she'd explained to Jayne how much black market prices would go up and reassured him that he'd still get a percentage if he helped out with the jobs, he had some surprising insights to add. She supposed that there were some problems you needed to hit with a hammer, and Jayne was fairly good at knowing which problems those were. He certainly knew which ones you couldn't just use brute force against, probably from experience; Zoë had taken to thinking about those problems as land mines. It was interesting, but not particularly surprising, how many weapons analogies she'd come up with during the planning stages. She now thought of Jayne as a battering ram - powerful, but not very good at changing directions in the middle of something. She herself was more like a knife, perhaps, because she usually looked for the most direct path to whatever she was looking to do. River, as Pistol, had strategy unlike anyone or anything she'd ever seen, though. She'd find out everything there was to know about the system, find all of the weakest points, and find a way to hit them all simultaneously, with both minimal risk and minimal personnel. Her strategy had its share of holes in it - she'd probably have carried it out already if she hadn't known that - but it didn't matter what changed, who changed it, or how suddenly; it never took her more than a minute to plug up the hole. She very much hoped that she'd never be part of what the Pistol was aiming at.

Jayne turned to River as Badger walked back into the depths of the Persephone underworld. "You sure we can trust him?"

"To do his part, yes. Beyond that? He's torn. He's well aware of how profitable this could become, but he's scared of the risk."

"Yeah? Well, he messes things up for us, he's gonna not be scared of the risk no more. He's gonna not do nothin' no more, if you catch my drift."

"Oh, don't worry about that. He knows just enough to be more scared of us than of the risk."

"Yeah, but we should still keep an eye on him. Reckon the Captain's ready to go?"

"He's been ready to go for the past fifteen minutes. Look."

Jayne did so. "Well whaddya know? Better get goin', then, Pistol. Time's a-tickin' away."

"Don't I know it, Saint."

COMMENTS

Thursday, July 3, 2008 7:48 AM

JANE0904


I hope this is just the start of something, rather than the thing itself.

One suggestion, though. Perhaps you could break up the paragraphs a bit more. It isn't necessary to keep the text together once we know who's thinking, and it would make it easier to read.

But, whatever, I like it!

Friday, July 4, 2008 10:50 AM

JOLY


I'm with Jane0904, I like it, but the paragraph thing is making it a tad hard to read.

Ready for more.


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