PART 9 – Exposing Brokenness

The cries raked through Jamie’s soul so hot that he couldn’t feel the world. He was vaguely aware of Emily hugging him and speaking soothes in his ear, and he felt the coolness on his skin when she pulled away.

“Papa!” Emily shouted.

Jamie tensed, scooted to the corner quickly, and hugged his knees, hiding his face long enough to dry his tears with his sleeve.

“This is our time,” he warned quietly. “No secrets leave us.”

Emily reached out and patted his head gently, pressing his face against her chest and dropping her voice. “You tell me the truth so I can hear. I can tell you the truth, but you won’t hear it from me. Not about this.” Then she shouted again, “ Papa!”

“Yesu, girl! Keep your voice down,” Jayne hollered, trotting over to them. “People will think you’re dying.”

Jayne knelt beside them, going quiet as he sensed the mood, and Jamie cringed again, fighting a shudder. He hadn’t been this close to Jayne since he broke his arm and it was a hundred percent intentional. Too afraid to speak, he clung to Emily and searched for an excuse to leave. They must’ve looked like quite a pair, her being half his age and half his size, but keeping her arms wrapped protectively around him. He felt like such a coward.

Emily looked sternly at her father. “You need to tell Jamie that you’re sorry.”

“Come again?” Jayne asked. Jamie had the same reaction, but didn’t speak it. He had no desire to converse with Jayne.

“You’re sorry,” Emily explained, “for breaking his arm and for scaring him and for letting him think that it’s his fault Momma died.”

“Tian sha de,” Jayne swore, his voice shaking.

Hearing Emily say those things brought a fresh wave of grief and emotion, but Jamie bit his lip and held back.

“I know you don’t like words,” Emily said gently, patting her father’s shoulder as if he were the child. “But you need to tell him so he believes it.”

“I’m fine,” Jamie finally managed, releasing Emily and looking squarely at Jayne. His stomach was knotting and he didn’t have the strength to move, but he could muster enough of a glare to send Jayne away. He could finish this.

Jayne looked at him, lost and confused, like he wasn’t quite sure why his prized bottle of scotch was shattered and spilled on the floor. “Emily, give us a moment.”

Emily swallowed raggedly, looking from her father to Jamie. She cradled Jamie’s face tenderly and said, “I’ll stay if you want me to.”

She was so sweet and filled with so much love. Shaking his head, he took her hands off his face and sent her away. He’d always been the invincible hero to her and he didn’t want her to see him broken. More than anything, he wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear, but he couldn’t do that either. When she left, Jayne circled him a moment, then sat down in the chair next to him. Jamie turned his back and pulled his knees to his chest, bracing his arm against his chest as though it were broken again.

“Jamie.”

“I know. It’s not my fault,” Jamie said coldly, looking firmly at his knees. His parents had made him repeat that phrase often enough that he could say it without feeling it.

Jayne stood up and for a moment, Jamie thought he’d won, but then Jayne came around so they were face to face. Squatting next to the chair, Jayne touched Jamie’s arm as he tried to balance. When Jamie flinched, Jayne winced sympathetically.

“Would it make you feel better if you broke my arm?” Jayne asked.

Jamie made a face. He’d forgotten how irritatingly simple Jayne could be. “No.”

“Good,” Jayne said, looking somewhat relieved. “Sorry don’t seem …”

He trailed off and looked over toward Emily. Then he squared his shoulders, bounced a little on his heels, and patted Jamie’s arm. With a deep breath he tried again, speaking slowly, giving purpose to every word. “Sorry I broke your arm. Sorry I scared you. And it don’t matter what you know now, I never should’ve let you believe for a second that you were to blame for Sky’s death. Weren’t no one’s fault. If it were, I’d’ve found him and shot him by now.”

“Chuiniu. You broke my arm,” Jamie pointed out, his voice quaking. He could still hear Jayne tearing about and screaming that someone had to be to blame. It haunted him so, because it came right before the sound of cracking bone. “Seemed to send a similar message.”

“Then I spoke out of turn,” Jayne said simply. “There’s nothing you did to cause her harm and there was nothing you could’ve done to save her.”

Jamie blinked, sending a fresh cascade a tears running down his cheek. He felt so helpless. Jayne wasn’t asking him to set things right. He was saying that everything Jamie had done at the time was as right as he could have been.

“Boy, I love you like you were my own son,” Jayne said, his voice thick with emotion. “I didn’t come out all this way expecting to find you broken, but if I can patch you up somehow ... I can’t undo it. Forgive me if you can.”

He didn’t deserve it. Jamie couldn’t think through the hurt and he’d lost sense on what was truth and what was mercy in Jayne’s words. He couldn’t forgive or be forgiven.

“Kao,” Jamie whispered, too confused to think. “Please go.”

Jayne watched him a moment longer, then took his hand off Jamie’s arm. With a grunt, he switched from squatting to sitting on the floor, and he leaned his back against the chair Jamie was sitting in. “You always did like being alone with your thoughts. But it seems your thoughts are lying to you on this subject. How about I just sit quiet ‘til you have something to say.”

Jamie shuddered and felt his arm breaking all over again. He saw the rage, and then he saw the peaceful man sitting quietly next to him. There was no threat and no blame. Jayne looked up at him, his eyes filled with guilt and remorse.

“You sure you don’t want to break my arm?”

*~*

The skin on Michael’s knuckles was raw from pounding at the building, and his face throbbed from getting smacked by River earlier. He’d helped River develop that defense after she got possessed by that crazy Frankenstein man who killed readers, but it was a lot more forceful than he remembered it being. Now that he’d gone up against his father’s mental shields, he understood why. It was difficult to induce physical side-effects from a psychic interaction, and it was those things that made being a reader both dangerous and scary. He was glad, though – glad his father knew it was a curse and not a gift. They’d come inside, and Baba had told him to wait in the hall, because he had to get Zoë, and Michael paced.

There was something else lingering in the back of Michael’s mind that he couldn’t quite put a finger on. It was the same sense he’d gotten from River, but it kept moving about like an apparition. It was close and it drew him to her room.

He hated the feeling that someone else was whispering suggestions to him and making him go places he didn’t want – especially knowing the Ward was here on the seventh floor. But unless someone was cheating his eyes, he was only going to the same room where all his family had been going the whole evening. In the event that someone was cheating his eyes, he had bigger worries than a lingering apparition. Aunt River had told him about that time she was possessed and they’d both worked hard to make themselves invulnerable to that kind of attack.

Suddenly getting chills, Michael stopped outside of Aunt River’s door and rubbed his arms. He could still feel. Reaching down, he grazed his fingers over the butt of his gun. He wished Cole were here.

Steeling his nerves, Michael leaned sideways and cracked the door.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“Yes,” River answered. “But no.”

Michael recognized the second answer as a mind thing, so he made a conscious effort to stay out of River’s head. It was a hard thing to do when he was looking right at her, but when he entered, he wasn’t looking at her at all. Uncle Simon and Aunt Kaylee were cuddled up on the bed, sleeping, barely fitting in the small space, but stable since they had years of practice. River sat on the floor next to the bed, drawing on a legal pad that someone must have acquired for her. She was a good artist and it always soothed her to draw.

Michael looked nervously from River to Simon and Kaylee. “You didn’t … make them fall asleep, did you?”

River eyed him quizzically. “Is that something you can do?”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Michael remembered that that was trick he hadn’t tried until after they parted ways. “On occasion.”

“That’s not nice,” River said disapprovingly. He wondered how she kept such a firm moral boundary, given her history.

Michael shrugged. “If it’s someone you’d knock out with a blow to the head anyway, I don’t see there’s much difference. You told Uncle Jayne once you could kill him with your brain.”

“Wasn’t serious.”

“Yeah, well, he doesn’t know that,” Michael laughed. It was a threat he’d wanted to use a hundred times, but the secret was too closely guarded. Michael could knock people out using only his mind, one in every twenty tries. Killing them was just the next step. If knocking out that night guard on Athens had been an option – if he’d been able to move at all…

“I’m sorry I hit you,” River said.

“I was meddling,” Michael said distractedly. He could hear the apparition again.

“You were concerned,” she said simply. “You were right. And nothing justifies violence against –”

She stopped talking and looked at Michael. “You can hear her, can’t you?”

Michael nodded and cocked his head, trying to source the sound, wishing mental ears localized things as well as physical ones. There was something calming about the apparition that made him want to listen, like a Siren’s song.

River reached out her hands and Michael pulled her to her feet. She tottered unsteadily, and he held her at the elbows until she stabilized. He decided he had to focus on what was real, and that was Aunt River. She needed him to hold her steady, and he needed to get the others out of her bed so she could lie down.

“She lingers like a new reader,” Michael told her. “She thinks she’s dying.”

It was the same sense – the same thought that had leaked in when River drove him away before. Was he reading the voice through River? Was this another one of those resurfaced memories come to haunt her?

“You read her more clearly than I do,” River said mournfully.

“Does that surprise you?” Michael often wondered if there were different levels of psychic intuition or if the Alliance had damaged River’s abilities by cutting into her brain. “She’s curled up some place safe. I can’t tell where. She’s so fleeting.”

“Michael,” River said with a patronizing chuckle. She took his hand and placed it on her belly. “She’s right here.”

Michael’s jaw dropped and his eyes went wide.

*~*

Mal walked down the hall next to Zoë’s bed as they rolled her from recovery into her own room, which technically she would be sharing with River if the Doc decided River needed overnight staying. Mal kept making faces at Little Zoë, because she had her eyes open and it was more fun making her giggle than filling the time with one-sided conversation. Simon had threatened to paralyze her vocal cords if she made another sound, but she’d said her words to Cole and didn’t seem keen on forcing anything beyond that. As if Michael and Zoë hadn’t been enough on his plate, now Cole worried him some. Mal had heard through the grape vine (i.e., Genny) about Zoë’s request, and Cole had been off brooding by himself ever since.

Zoë reached out and poked his nose. Her fingers twitched slightly like she was trying to pinch it. Mal took her hand and pressed it over his heart. She seemed to have lost some dexterity in her hands, which was why she’d tried talking instead of signing. It hurt his heart thinking about it. Between all the writing and gunplay, Zoë was always using her fingers. Simon said that once they shrank the tumor on her spine, she’d be okay again. Knowing didn’t help any, because it still meant she couldn’t talk to them now.

Zoë opened her hand and her thumb went to her chin – the sign for Mama. That one was easy enough for her gimped hands. Mal followed Zoë’s gaze and smiled too as Inara trotted to catch up with them. She looked clean and refreshed, like she’d gotten a little sleep. When Inara came up beside him, he couldn’t help himself. His feet stopped, his eyes closed, and he leaned in to kiss her lips.

“How is everyone?” she asked socially, reaching down and caressing Zoë’s face. When they got to Zoë’s room, Mal checked to make sure Michael was inside, then he let the nurse wheel the bed in and he pulled Inara aside for a quiet chat.

“Cole is looking a little down,” Mal said, and then he updated Inara on Zoë’s mission for their son. Inara leaned against him as she listened. They all knew that Cole had been resisting Zoë’s invitations, but the mere fact that she’d forced the words after her surgery would weigh on him. If the hospital had a weight room, Cole would be in there right now, bench pressing until he sweated his thoughts out through his skin. “Do you think we can talk Jayne into one of their infamous arm-wrestling matches?”

“Jayne might not be available,” Inara said. “I saw him talking to Jamie.”

Mal inhaled sharply and groaned. Jamie and Jayne had a lot of hurt to patch up between them. Jamie didn’t even say ‘Uncle’ anymore; he just called him Jayne. “Maybe I should do some mediating.”

“You worry about your own son for now,” Inara said assuredly. She radiated peace and he loved her for it.

“I am worried. That’s why I suggested the arm-wrestling.”

Inara smiled and patted his arm. “I’m sure Cole would much rather wrestle you.”

“No,” Mal said, ducking his head bashfully, partly worried by the notion that his son could beat him without a fight. “That was their thing – him and Jayne.”

“Not originally,” Inara said and he looked at her quizzically. “You don’t remember? From the time he was three years old, every day before lunch, you’d call him to the table. He’d be standing on that chair pulling your one arm with both of his, and he’d say “I’m gonna beat you today, Baba.” I don’t know why you never let him win. Then when you broke your hand, he called on Jayne because he needed to keep his strength up for when you got better.”

“Really?” Mal asked, breathing softly. He had no memory of that, but now that she mentioned it, he did remember a day, after Zoë had run away and he’d broken his hand a second time, Cole came in, rested his cheek on Mal’s shoulder, and asked ‘How come you don’t want to play with me anymore, Baba?’ It broke his heart at the time, because he knew he’d been neglectful on account of the search for Zoë. In retrospect, it seemed Cole had been searching for something much simpler. Mal’s throat closed up, and he cleared it loudly, fighting back emotion.

“I was always jealous of him and Jayne having that time together,” he confessed to Inara. “You’re saying that all this time, he’s been waiting for me to call him back.”

Inara smiled encouragingly. “It’s not too late.”

*~*

Chapter 10