A Little Faith (Firefly Crossover)--2008 Shieldmaid

Jayne almost choked when the woman slammed through the swinging doors into the tavern saying something that looked like, fucking witch, but he couldn’t be sure since the gorram music was so loud he could barely hear the gorram barkeep asking if he wanted another whiskey.

But he could see just fine and he took every advantage of that fact, running his eyes back and forth over her like a six-seater mule at full throttle, reverse and forward. Forward and reverse.

Damn but she was one shiny, tasty interruption standing there in her desert boots in the middle of the filthy bar floor glaring around at everyone like she owned the damn place, hands on the wide belt holding low-slung black trousers tight to her slim hips. The short little strappy white shirt clinging to her did little to cover either the surprising strength of her bare shoulders or the boundaries of her equally impressive rack, and nothing at all to hide her taut flat belly; Jayne wasn’t positive, but he thought he could see the ripple of muscle there, as well.

And even if her body didn’t promise she had the means to make a hard man humble, the way her big dark eyes flashed around the room said she sure as hell knew how to make one sorry. They were fierce, those eyes, unblinking and surrounded by black eyelashes so long and thick Jayne could see ‘em from his seat at the bar, even around the lock of her long, dusk-colored hair that fell across her face. She was eyeing each person in the tavern in turn, like she was taking a bead on every single soul through a set of crosshairs. A merc, maybe. Or the angriest, scariest whore Jayne’d ever heard tell of. Whatever she was, he was damn sure glad he didn’t owe her money.

When her gaze fell on him, Jayne smiled at her. The smile didn’t last long when she rolled those pretty dark eyes and muttered something that looked , from where he sat, downright unneighborly. But then her attention snagged on the guns at his side, found the knife at his thigh, and her expression changed. She met his eyes full this time, arched an eyebrow and her slick, painted-plum lips twitched in a lopsided little grin of some kind of recognition before her face went all business again and she went on to look at the next guy, some skinny-ass wannabe gunslinger packing both a cheap-shit Grissom semi-auto knockoff and a long stringy mustache.

She definitely bore watching. On counts both professional and personal.

Jayne ordered another whiskey and paid attention.

It didn’t take very long at all.

People started moving again and those who had to move around her--barmaids with trays full of glasses, drunks weaving towards or from the front door--made sure not to get too close because she still looked that fierce. But as soon as the floor became a moving mass of folks once more, Jayne caught from the corner of his eye a movement against the crowd’s grain and turned his head to see a handful of men heading for the back way out.

He frowned; a tavern back-way in the shit end of this sort of town sure as hell wasn’t an open door--even a gorram kid knew it was mostly a way to drag out the bodies to the alley after a busy Saturday night. Like as not there was a guy sitting back there with a sawed-off shotgun to keep folks from sneaking out without paying their bar tab, too.

Either the dark-haired woman saw him notice or she’d reached the same conclusion all by herself when those guys--five of them, Jayne counted--melted into the shadows of the bar’s narrow back hallway. Jayne saw her shoving her way through the crowd; the fact they was slowing her down so much bared her teeth and had her eyes flashing like lighting in a hot summer night sky.

She started knocking people out of her way outright about the same time he heard the shotgun blast over the gorram loud music from the credit-operated songbox; Jayne figured she’d heard it too, and knew it for what it was as well as he did.

When she shoved her way past his barstool Jayne got up, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. He stood there uncertainly and watched her enter that dark little hallway, and part of him thought he ought to go see she didn’t get herself killed. But the other part figured she might just shoot him for thinking she needed his help, so he just stood there, a hand resting on the bigger of his pistols, and waited.

Sure enough--after about three breaths in and out, a guy came flying out of the dark, literally airborne.

It was one of the five, and now that Jayne could see him closer, it surely must have been the ugliest among them, given the guy’s piss-yellow eyes and seriously messed-up face, lumpy as a new bride’s mashed potatoes.

Enough people saw him incoming that they scrambled away and back, opening a clear spot on the dance floor. The creepy ugly guy hit ground hard--and damned if the dark-haired woman wasn’t right there on him by the time he’d scrambled back to his feet.

Jayne tuned out the background chaos of screaming to watch the fight; even in the midst of kicking the ugly guy’s ass the dark-haired woman moved like she was dancing, like she knew what her body could and couldn’t do so exactly that she didn’t need to think about such trifling limitations as gravity and muscle and bone.

Jayne watched her punch the guy in his ass-ugly face so hard the hwundan reeled back. When she followed up the blow with a smooth side-kick to the gut; the guy went down like a sack of cement and Jayne wanted to cheer, it was that gorram poetical. She leapt to straddle the guy with an upraised knife in her hand and Jayne grinned at the pure beauty of her savagery.

But then his attention was drawn by peripheral movement behind him.

Turning, he saw the other four guys come boiling out of the back hall now that the crowd had shrunk back into the corners. The odds were off; five on one was going to be damned hard for her to survive, given the damn crowd and the close space, and that’d be a crying shameful waste of some finely made woman.

And just maybe she’d be grateful to him in a way she'd be willing to demonstrate later on if she didn’t die and he had a hand in it.

Jayne sighed and drew steel.

The first two got past him somehow--he didn’t rightly see them move, hardly--but the next two caught his bullets right between their eyes and went down in a heap of flopping arms and legs. Jayne turned back to see how the woman was faring with the others.

The ugly one must have gotten away from her; there was no sign of him at all and Jayne looked hard into the faces of those people shoved up against the walls, those that hadn’t been able to get out the door fast enough, watching the action all pale with their mouths hanging open. But the ugly guy wasn’t among them. Not there at all. Maybe he’d found a back way out after all. Shrugging Jayne turned back to the woman, who was now being set upon by the missing guy’s remaining two friends.

The biggest one, a big man with unmanfully long hair, was mixing it up with her hard while his little buddy, a weasely guy with spiky black hair and a long knife, circled for an opening.

Now, Jayne could move faster and more quietly than most people thought a big lummox like him able if the need called, and it was calling loud and clear right now. He crept up behind the weasely little bugger, grappled with him briefly--for such a scrawny pipsqueak, he was astonishingly strong--and snapped his neck, taking the knife as the body went limp. Then, because he could and because the noise was powerfully distracting, Jayne hefted the body, gauged for distance, and heaved it directly at the gorram songbox. After that initial satisfying crash of breaking glass, it went thankfully silent.

Jayne stood a moment to take stock of the situation and almost went to his knees when without any warning someone hit him from behind and leapt on his back.

Turning his head as much as he could, Jayne saw another ugly-ass disfigured face gazing back at him through slitted pisshole-in-the-snow yellow eyes. There was a bullet hole dead square between them.

And then his assailant opened his mouth.

Jayne swore loud and long when he saw the guy’s teeth, long and sharp and open to take a chunk of some prime Jayne Cobb between them, and he wondered if maybe this was some new kind of Reaver or some other gorram godawful thing. He struggled frantically to dislodge the freak while the back of his mind worked the question of how a dead man he’d personally plugged in the frontal lobe with a dead-center .45 bullet could possibly be on his back trying to eat him.

He stabbed back with the dead weasely guy’s long knife, burying the full 12 inches of sharp into belly, legs, ribs, whatever he could reach--but while the thing on his back grunted with each blow, it held on and didn’t die! Not only didn’t it die, it was now actively trying to rip off his head. It was damned unsettling and definitely not right. And kind of painful, too.

“Gorram son of a bitch,” Jayne choked as the world started to sparkle. He staggered and went down on one knee.

And then suddenly the weight of his attacker was gone. Jayne rose fast, turned around and around to see where he’d got to, but the yellow-eyed, pointy-teethed freak was just... gone.

Wherever it actually got to, it must have walked through sand flats to get here--Jayne had thick, heavy dust down his neck, in his hair and clothes. He paused to shake it off.

When he could move again without raising a dust devil, Jayne took a step toward where the dark-haired woman was grappling hard with another of the undead-yellow-eyed Reaver-things Jayne had already shot in the head. But he stepped on something that rolled under his tread and his foot slipped hard enough to nearly dump him sprawling right there on his ass. Looking down, Jayne frowned.

It was a rutting stick--a gorram wooden stick with one end whittled down into a sharp point.

Shaking his head, he drew back his foot to kick it out of the way.

"No, dumbass!" The woman's shout flew over and slapped Jayne in the face; he froze and frowned over at her.

"Use it!" She hollered at him. And after a pointed glance to make sure he was watching her, damned if she didn't stab the guy she was beating on with her upraised knife, right in the chest. Only this time Jayne saw it wasn't a knife she was wielding after all--it was another gorram pointy stick.

And instead of flopping to the ground bleeding and screaming and shitting and twitching, the guy just... vanished.

There was a mighty impressive cloud of dust from somewhere, and when it cleared the guy's body was gone.

Jayne looked from the place where the guy's body should have been and most definitely was not, to the stick by his foot. "Huh," he noted.

When he was bent over, picking it up, someone else jumped on him.

This assailant was lighter than the last, and when Jayne threw him off over a shoulder he saw why--it was the weasely little hwundan whose neck he'd just snapped a couple minutes ago before sending the body into the songbox. His off-kilter face was every bit as disfigured as the other guys’--Jayne could see it plenty up close and plain even though he would have sworn on his smaller pistol that the little creep looked pretty normal before he killed him--and he had the same yellow eyes and snapping Reaver teeth. Jayne shoved him away a few feet across the floor and contemplated the pointy stick in his hand. When the little guy flew at him again, Jayne shrugged and stabbed him with the stick as though it were an actual proper and manful weapon, aiming for the ticker. And in the space of a drawn breath, the little hwundan just came apart in a fountain of dust.

Jayne stood there a moment, looking around his feet, then he stepped carefully right out of his footprints, framed as they were by thick dust. “Huh,” he noted again, thinking how some things in the ‘verse just weren’t right and never would be no matter how much whiskey a man drank to make ‘em seem so. Then he glanced up to see what the score was with the dark-haired woman.

“Can’t hide here, dirtbag.” She was grinning as she and the last freak circled each other, waiting to see who would screw up and flinch first. “Nice try, though.”

“Slayer.” The freak smiled back; the way his long teeth hung past his upper lip creeped Jayne right the hell out. “It was the witch, wasn’t it? It had to be magicks that took you across. You couldn’t have followed me otherwise. Not here. Not now.”

She managed to shrug one shoulder without missing a step. “What can I say—she’s wicked strong now. It creeps me out, too—but it sure makes chasing down you twisted fucks a whole lot easier.”

The freak feigned a pass at her; the woman leaned out of reach easy as breathing and he smiled wider. “The witch, then--thanks. Now I know who to kill first, when I get ba—“

But whatever he was going to say next was cut off as he exploded into a shimmering curtain of dust.

Jayne looked down at his own empty hand and shrugged; who’d have guessed a damned pointy stick could stick a target as true as a throwing blade once a man found its balance? Learn and live, his ma’d always said. Learn and live.

The dark-haired woman stood frowning down at the mounded circle of dust around her feet for a long moment before she kicked at it viciously. “Dust to dust, motherfucker,” she spat. And then she raised her head and found Jayne through her narrow eyes. She considered him standing there for another long moment and then she crossed the suddenly silent span of floor between them with a few long strides.

Her face was so dark with intensity that it took Jayne an actual effort not to back up as she neared him. And then there she was, standing right in front of him, eyes traveling him up and down with a lookful of hands. So Jayne returned the favor.

Her hair was mussed in that damned sexy way violence made and her lips were full, painted with some lip-stain the color of ripe dark plums, and shiny-slick. There was a scrape on the side of her throat, under an ear—one of those Reaver guys must have come a lot closer than Jayne’d guessed to taking a bite out of her. But other than that, the long column of her throat traveled uninterrupted smooth as calm water to the curve of her shoulders, one of which moved in an unbroken span of smooth tan skin to show a whole lot more of one fine breast than he’d ever expected to have the pleasure of laying eyes on, since one of the little straps holding her shirt up had torn clean through in the fighting. Beneath the shirt, her flat belly hollowed, curved, hollowed again with heavy breaths, the only sign she’d just been in a pretty good dust-up.

He cut away his interest quick; it was only wise, he told himself, given she was still clutching a pointed stick and shaking from the fight. So Jayne frowned down on her instead. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

But instead of stabbing him, she took a step closer and contemplated him with a head cocked to one side. “Well, no shit, Sherlock.” Even beneath her lowered eyelids her dark eyes smoldered.

She tucked the pointed stick into her back waistline and a thumb behind her low-slung belt, dragging it even lower until the entire curving length of her left hipbone was revealed. It was impossible for Jayne not to look and, looking, not to imagine he could glimpse the shadow of crisp nether hair glistening darkly against the creamy skin of her flat lower belly. The woman reached out her other hand. It came to rest on Jayne’s arm, but it didn’t stay there long; that hand slid up his shoulder and then down again to rest on his hip.

He cleared his throat when she hooked a couple fingers through the belt loop riding one of his hips. “Jayne,” he told her.

She froze at that, eyeing him like he’d sprouted another head, so he explained, “Name ain’t Sherlock. It’s Jayne.”

She chuckled. “’Jayne’? C’mon--you’re screwing with me.” And before Jayne could say what he was thinking-- which was mostly with his john thomas at this point and went like this, Any time, place and way you want it, sweetcheeks--she smiled slow and warm as a dollop of real butter on a piece of fresh-from-the-oven bread. This close, Jayne could smell how hot she was, like fresh gun oil. “You handle yourself pretty well, soldier.”

He had to clear his throat again. “You too.”

Those two fingers twitched, tugged at his belt loop a little.

“Damn, Jayne, tell me the truth. Doesn’t a good fight just make you wanna...? “ She grinned, arched a black eyebrow and let the question dangle. She took the last little step between them, enough that Jayne could have been all sorts of up close and personal with her by simply taking a deep breath. She grinned at him again. The fingers at his hip tugged gently.

Then again, not so gently.

Then, damned if she didn’t just grab the belt loop on his other hip and pull him sharply against her.

With a groin-tightening clarity Jayne found himself both a little startled and wanting with a vengeance to try the strength of those arms and legs by getting himself tangled all in amongst them.

Without looking away from the smoldering fire in her gaze, he told her as honestly as Jayne ever said anything in his life, “Hell--I always wanna. A good knock-down drag-out just limbers me up first.” And because her hands dragging at his hips were asking for it, he leaned into her, let her get a good feel of what he was carrying around down there, hard.

Damned if she didn’t pull more fiercely at him, drawing him even closer. Damned if she didn’t lean close; damned if she didn’t say, “Rock on, soldier,” and release his belt loops so she could take his hand instead. ********************* She pulled him down that dark back hallway, unguarded in the furor immediately following the big fight, and busted the lock off a door opening into an even darker room. Before his eyes adjusted, Jayne’s nose told him the small room smelled sharply of old beer but not old piss and Jayne was glad of it—while he was beyond the point of objecting much, there was just something downright tawdry about a fast hump in a barroom’s shit-closet and a guy like him had standards.

A few moments later his eyes confirmed it was a storeroom but by then he didn’t have much inclination to dwell on it. Once she’d dragged him in and shut the door behind them, the dark-haired woman pushed Jayne up against it and the list of things that mattered to him became singularly flesh-specific. Damn, she was strong and she was shaking like she had a hard fever on her; her fingers quivered in his hair as she reached up to take his face between her hands. But when she went to kiss him, Jayne shook his head.

“Not on the mouth,” he declared in the firmest whisper he had. “I don’t do that.”

She smiled in the dark. “Bullshit.” And before he could tear his hair from her grasp she was all over him like a rash, her slick lips moving over his, her tongue in his mouth, her teeth teasing at his bottom lip.

It had been so long. How had it been so long?

Holy Mary, Mother of Holy Bleeding Jesu, it seemed a forever time since someone had tasted Jayne’s mouth, taken his breath deep into her lungs and breathed her own back into him, crushed herself against him to devour and be devoured just a little harder, a little deeper. She tasted good and dirty, like cigarette smoke and beer and cinnamon; while he couldn’t say why, Jayne found himself kissing her back with a bruising hunger instead of shoving her away.

She twisted and rippled, hard and soft against him, and suddenly her hands were up under Jayne’s shirt, clutching at his shoulders, scratching at his back. And then his shirt was hitting the floor, dragged off over his head and for that one moment it covered his face his mouth mourned the loss of her with a powerful woe.

But then she was kissing him again, and he, her, and one of her legs was up over his hip as he spun and bore her against the door instead, slammed her there hard enough to make it jump woodenly in its frame, hard enough to feel like he could maybe break through the fabrics separating them with the strength of his wanting her, alone.

“God, soldier,” she gasped roughly, her hands tracing his skin with frantic fire, “Hurry up--I’m ready to pop.”

Jayne needed no translation; he reached down between them to work the buckle of her belt until her hands impatiently brushed his away to do it themselves, and then he worked his own.

There was a rush of heat, of motion, of slickness and upthrust and throated noises, and there they were, her with her long legs twined around his waist, and him pinning her against the door by more than the strength of his arms and weight alone. She was hot, she was humid, and she squeezed him tight as a friendly hand; Jayne about lost his mind.

But only for a moment. Then Jayne found her rhythm, as fast and hard as a train wreck, and they made that old wooden storeroom door stutter and groan on its hinges.

She hadn’t been fooling; in practically no time at all, the dark-haired woman bit down hard on Jayne’s shoulder and wailed a harsh banshee’s cry through her clenched teeth as her nails scored him red right down the length of his back to his ass. Her legs tightened around him until he thought they just might snap his spine as she clenched around him tight as a fist and then it was pretty much over for him, as well.

God almighty, she had muscles he’d never dreamed of, and even as she went rigid and cried out her own good end, she proved she surely knew how to use those muscles on a man, making Jayne go off like a ruptured fuel line. And she kept him going, too, until Jayne shuddered and moaned like a man gut-shot, until he was barely able to brace his arm in time to take his weight instead of crushing her flat when he fell against the door, gasping and seeing stars.

He leaned his head against the old stale beer-smelling door and closed his eyes, trying to catch his raggedy breath a moment. And then someone was shoving at him.

Someone was shoving at him, saying, “Get off me.”

Someone shoved him harder. “Get the fuck off me, soldier!”

And then again, really hard this time. “Get off or I’ll move you in fucking chunks!”

Jayne opened his eyes reluctantly.

The dark-haired woman was caught between him and the splintered door, and she looked pissed. Jayne couldn’t allow as he blamed her but there was little he could do about it for a few more dizzying boneless moments lest his knees give way. As quick as he could, he shifted his weight and shuffled a shaky step backwards, hobbled a little by the trousers pooled around his ankles.

She slid out from between him and the door, and bent to retrieve her low-slung pants from where she’d kicked them away. Holding them in her hand, she considered Jayne with a cocked head and that dirty grin. “Damn. You got the job done, soldier.”

Groggily, Jayne pulled up his own trousers, tried to work the buttons with hands of lead while looking around for his shirt. “You ain’t no slouch in that department yourself,” he rasped.

Her eyes traveled him and came to rest down low. She looked at her wrist chron and back at him, raising an eyebrow. “I got a little more time before the witch jerks my leash back home. Think you could go again?”

Jayne took a quick inventory and looked her over, standing there near to naked without a thread of shame or self-consciousness on her. Only a man who was branchless, unequivocally sly and numb from the waist down would turn aside the offer she was making him; hell, he was still throbbing. He gave up on fastening his pants, held them up with one hand. “Damn straight. Might kill me, though.”

“No guts, no glory,” she grinned and winked.

He let her lead him to a pile of pallets stacked badly in the closest corner, and then balked. There was no way Jayne was going to set down on those gorram things bare-assed, top or bottom; no rutting way in hell he was going back to Serenity with his ass or knees full of splinters for the gorram doc to pick out and laugh over, no matter how hard and well the dark-haired woman could bring him off again. So they dug around until they found a box full of some dusty, torn up fabric that might have been tablecloths once upon a time before nesting rodents discovered and then abandoned them, and dumped some on the pallets.

Without any fanfare but that damn wicked smile again, she pushed Jayne down on them and pulled off first his boots and then his pants a leg at a time. “This time I’m driving,” she announced, and climbed on top of him, tossing the remnants of her little strappy shirt off and into the sour-beer-smelling dimness around them. Completely unapologetically naked in the dimness of the storeroom, she was a dark and dirty angel, a slut-goddess carved out of sleek degrees of shadow, and Jayne lay reverent under her, waiting to find out what came next, literally and figuratively.

Guiding his hands with her own, she showed him exactly where to touch her and how, and he obliged while she kissed him until he was hard again. And then she sheathed and rode him until Jayne bucked and snorted under her like a bee-stung racing horse while she galloped them both to what promised to be a very memorable finish line.

Jayne crossed that line just a split second before she did, her clutching clenching muscles working at him and his hands full of her, full of the hard and soft and hot and cool and smooth and curved and wet of her. And then she crossed that threshold herself and rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell and fell and fell until she was so full of him so deep in her that Jayne felt for a wild moment that he might just be splitting her in two and it felt so gorram good he didn’t care if he was. He just lay there shuddering, holding her on him by the hips so hard he bruised her skin while she gripped him, swallowed him, rippled around him as he went and went and went and she went with him.

He was so wrung out by the time she collapsed forward on his chest he barely heard her whisper brokenly into his ear, “God damn, soldier, that was straight-up rock’em-sock ‘em. Holy shit,” before she rested her head on his shoulder. He was so wrung out he could barely lift the one arm he threw around her before he dozed off. ************************** When Jayne woke up, he was alone. He wasn’t surprised; she hadn’t struck him as a bed-and-breakfast-pleasanties kind of girl. Likely she had places to go and people to kill, just like he did. Jayne yawned and sat up on the creaking pile of pallets, scratched his chest thoughtfully and looked around in the dimness for his pants, socks and boots. Finally he located them all fetched up at the bottom of some leaning shelves where she’d thrown them after pulling ‘em off. The memory made him grin.

And he kept grinning right up till he realized she’d stolen his shirt; then he cussed her out roundly. His ma’d sent him that shirt, gorram it. But when he found the remnants of her torn strappy shirt in a heap and raised it to his nose to find he could still smell her on it, he stuffed it into his pocket and grinned again.

Still, he didn’t much fancy walking back out into the brightness of the bar bare-chested and covered with stinging scratches and love-bites--especially not knowing how much time had passed and who might be out there waiting for him. Could be Mal. Could be Zoe. Could be Feds. So he began to dig through that musty old box of fabric for a solution. ***************************** “Was he here?” Zoe raised her eyebrows as Mal came back from the bar. Beside her Wash gazed wide-eyed at the bouncer sweeping shattered glass and dust into a large heap.

Mal was frowning. “Barkeep says he was. Or someone looked like him anyhow. Apparently there was some trouble early on and he went out the back way with a woman a couple hours ago. Says he ain’t seen either of ‘em since.”

“Don’t that just figure,” Zoe muttered under her breath. At Mal’s puzzled looked, she elaborated. “It ain’t like Jayne to miss a fight or a whore, is all.”

Looking carefully around the bar, Mal frowned, “Yeah, but it ain’t like him to miss a rendezvous, neither.”

Wash took one long look around and turned back to Mal. “I don’t know. They drunken townspeople seem pretty spooked.”

“I don’t like it.” Mal’s eyes went far away as he stared into the dark corners of the bar. “Something ain’t natural here.” ********************************* Sure as shit, they were there when he walked out of the back hall and into the bar proper--Mal, Zoe and Wash lined up against the bar looking around the place close. Shit. Mal and Zoe looked pretty pissed, but at least Mal hadn’t left yet. Jayne set his jaw and stepped into the watery light of the bar lamps. Shit, shit, shit.

“Hey,” he smiled, but dust or something caught in his throat. Jayne cleared it and started again. “Hey. Been here long?”

“A fair sight longer than we agreed on,” Mal’s eyes caught hold of him as Jayne neared them, and they darkened. “Gorram it, Jayne, you’re damn close to finding yourself a permanent resident of some dunghill moon, you keep this up…”

As Mal reamed him upside and down for being late again, Jayne’s mind wandered. He wondered where she was. Jayne spared her a brief hope that none of those yellow-eyed Reaver freaks got behind her any time soon; it’d be a sorrowful waste of killing grace and dirty bad fun if they did, that’s for sure.

Damn, but gorram Wash and Zoe wouldn’t quit staring at him! “Blink, why dontchya?” Jayne growled at them as Mal paused to take a breath.

“Nice shirt, Jayne.” Wash’s face was innocent as a lamb. A lamb with a gorram smartass mouth.

In the bottom of that old broken-down box Jayne’d found a bunch of old dusty t-shirts folded up in there; he couldn’t make out the fancy script across the front of ‘em in the crap light of the storeroom, but one had fit him so he’d put it on and problem solved. A free shirt is a free shirt, after all. But watching Wash’s mouth twitch in that way he had when trying not to laugh made Jayne think perhaps he should have looked at the shirt a little closer.

If a person knew Zoe that person’d know she was trying not to smile when she observed, “You were wearing blue when we dropped you off.”

Jayne looked down and frowned. “What? A guy can’t get a new shirt once in a while?”

Now Mal was doing it, looking at him with a face full of wanting to laugh. “Looks like you got more than a new shirt there, Jayne.”

That was just damned uncanny; Jayne looked down to see if there were any marks on him to give it away but there weren’t any he could see. So what was Mal talking about?

The captain pointed; Jayne followed the line and found himself staring down at his own chest, covered in the pale yellow fabric and flowing purple script. Damn, but it wasn’t any easier to read upside down in the light than in the dark.

Didn’t matter for long, though, because Wash read it out loud, “I got Faith at the Belts and Bibles Club Spring Picnic,” and busted out laughing. “It’s a bona fidey miracle!” Zoe cleared her throat and looked away, her shoulders shaking suspiciously.

Jayne growled “Bizui,” and gave the pilot his best hard-eyed warning look, but Wash just laughed harder. “Can I touch it?” He reached a hand towards the hem of Jayne’s new shirt and Jayne swatted it away.

Gorramit, now Mal was grinning too. “I reckon Book’ll be right happy to hear it,” he laughed and turned away. “Let’s go--you two will have lots to talk about.”

Jayne didn’t think so, not with the kind of pictures running through his head or the remnants of strappy shirt stuffed into his pocket he couldn’t wait to take back to his bunk. But he sure as hell wasn’t about to say so. Besides--a free shirt was still a free shirt when all was said and done, and there wasn’t anything wrong with this one at all.

He tasted the fleeting ghost of cigarette smoke and beer and cinnamon on his tongue and followed Mal out of the bar into the darkness where Serenity waited for them all.