A Life So Huge By Belasera For my Big Damn Hero

An ending of sorts to the life I wrote for Jayne and Kaylee

…………………………………………………………………… The casket is enormous, but no way can it hold the man inside. I’ve seen him wriggle out of alliance cuffs, slam open solid doors. Once, he cut through reavers to get back to me. No way can death hold him, not Jayne. ……………………………………………………………………… He was 62. Ancient for a mercenary. And his name is legend, not just on Canton anymore. Hero of the People, he’d smashed out of more Alliance prisons for them than I care to remember. Jayne, Mal and Zoe. Their names are everywhere, and millions fight for them. They aren’t just independents, anymore. They are independence itself. We, Inara and Wash and me, we were there too, of course. But our names aren’t songs on a hundred planets. I don’t care, don’t think they did either. I was happy to fix Serenity, fix Jayne some too after Simon was gone. Never did kill a man, a fact which oddly seemed to please my husband. Husband…oh…I should have known it would be like this, Jayne lived every day like it was the last, but I never could. I thought he was indestructible.

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It was after Simon was captured that things changed aboard Serenity. After River told us with cold certainty that he was dead, that he’d died with our secrets intact and his mind open only to her. We all changed, then, Mal the most. We flew right out from under Alliance radar and became the most wanted outlaws in the ‘verse. Seemed Mal’d decided that the war hadn’t ended after all, and no one was inclined to argue. Our old life passed away, I think I knew that the first time I saw Inara in a jumpsuit, or maybe when Shepard Book began to put his previously unknown assassin skills to work. Or the first time I saw River bring Mal back from the brink of death, looking so much like her brother that Jayne had to rock me to sleep that night. I sometimes felt like I was the only one not to change into someone else. Still fixing my ship, except now I was fixing a warship. She took to it, too. Like her sole purpose in being built was to seek our vengeance with us. Took me about a year to see that we were actually starting a war. Suddenly, our contacts weren’t low life middle men, but revolutionaries and saboteurs, guerilla soldiers. Independents. We weren’t just flying anymore. Weren’t just fighting for cash and food. Never after Simon’s death did I hear Jayne grumble about his share. I think he would have fought solely for the pleasure of seeing the mayhem we caused, but Mal had a plan, a mission. It took over our lives and threatened them, every day. Jayne and me, we lived for each other, literally, we survived every day just to be together every night. There were days I couldn’t believe we’d all made it out alive. And there were days that we didn’t… When Wash was killed, I swear even Serenity mourned him. I watched Zoe become hard and cold and deadly, like that shotgun she carries. Not slowly, not over time but in an instant. Like when her husband closed his eyes, she closed herself, for good. I watched Wash’s casket pulled out into the black with Jayne’s hand tight in mine and I couldn’t stop thinking ‘how long?’ Saw River and Zoe, two halves each missing their mate and I wondered how long I would be whole. But days passed, and years and Jayne remained. Kept coming back to me, bloody and shot and stabbed and grinning. Every Alliance plan sabotaged, every hell hole colony gifted with stolen Alliance goods, every space station blown to bits, every jailbreak, every near miss. They always came back a little less wealthy, a little less healthy, but grinning. Because the mighty Alliance was crumbling, and nothing taken from us could make that less true.

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I married Jayne with only an inkling of who he was, and he never stopped surprising me. Became a hero, though I don’t think he ever saw it was true. He was quick to shrug off praise to Mal or Zoe, liked to refer to himself as ‘just a hired gun’. But it snuck into him, he became huge inside, there was nothin’ in the ‘verse could stop him. And he was my hero, for twenty years, mine. I can’t watch as they put that box in the ground, can’t think on how small my life is gonna be without him filling it. Can’t think on how I’ll sleep without his strong arms around me, how I’ll make it through tomorrow without seeing his grinning face. Instead I watch River watching the clouds, think how she looks younger and clearer with every passing year. Watch Zoe stare at the casket for me, I know her eyes would be full of understanding if she could look me in the face. Feel Mal and Inara, like a wall holding me up on either side. Book is speaking, trying to put an end to the massive life we’re burying. A lifetime of fighting Alliance and everyone else, and how does he die? On our own homestead, us lying by a lake like twenty years never passed and some hwoon dahn comes to shoot my husband in the back. Jayne killed the man’s father, somewhere, sometime, but I found myself not giving a good gorram about the details. Everyone has a grudge. I wonder if Jayne would be disappointed, to know I finally killed a man.