Ursa Major, Ursa Minor

Chapter Twenty-Eight:
Kaylee met them as they docked with Serenity—her worry for Jayne bleeding throughout the ship with such density that River started crying again. Zoë had to pinch her arm to snap her out of it.

“We need all hands to carry him to the med bay, River-honey.”

River sucked in a hard breath and lifted Jayne’s shoulders. Kaylee, still worried and now tearing up, folded his arms over his chest and balanced her hands on his broad back.

Simon and Zoë took his legs.

The man was still incredibly heavy between the four of them.

“Kaylee, did you prep the med bay?” Simon asked.

Tears running down her full cheeks, she managed only a short nod and the croaking of a name. “Nara.”

“She’s waitin’ for us.” Zoë clarified—reading the younger woman’s eyes. She glanced behind her and dreaded the thought of tumbling down the stairs with only a hold on Jayne’s bare foot.

Surprisingly, Inara’s client rushed up the last few steps to help out. “Ya’ll looked like you could use some help’n’ out… Ms. Serra got stuff ready fer-for gunshot wounds, though. His head’s bleedin’-g.”

River tuned the girl out and lifted with all her strength. She practically pushed Simon and Zoë completely backwards to get them to their destination faster. That creepy chair had never seemed more like a safe thing than it did now. Jayne would sit there. Simon would fix him. They’d eat some real food that Kaylee had promised to make—a cake out of the flour the Cobbs had stocked them with.

Kaylee was very good at making cake. Pastries in general. Keep her away from the protein meal, though.

It was meant to be a birthday cake for River to make up for the ones they missed. Now it would be for Jayne.

River swiped a hand across her face and watched her brother and Inara triage Jayne. She watched with her peripheral as Kaylee told Georgia to go back upstairs into Inara’s shuttle to wait this out.

This… Not a thing. He can’t be broken. I love him. Please don’t let him be broken…

From that ghastly chair, Jayne cracked an eye open and fixed it on River. “I am not broken, ai ren. Stop thinking that.” With that, he slipped back into that dark realm of unconsciousness.

The floor dropped out of the room and Simon scrambled to find the brain scanner he’d picked up on their stop to Londinium.

*

Mal was brooding on the bridge. Captain Broody-pants, Kaylee might’ve called him—had she not gone down to the infirmary with the others to help put Jayne back together again.

Zoë’s words had yet to lose their sting.

Because they’d been true. He had been planning on returning to Serenity, stowing that cargo sweet as you please, and then maybe enlisting River’s help in bringing Jayne back.

That would have been hours lost.

Jayne would have been dead—from the glimpse he got of his merc when they’d dragged him out of the shuttle.

Mal scrubbed his hands through his hair and dropped his face into his knees. He’d just gotten through telling the man how he’d thought of him like a younger brother and then he goes and does something like this—treating him like a lesser human being.

For cryin’ out loud, man stopped me from gettin’ my head shot off…

Mal felt ill. Felt like he’d just ignored a little brother (he’d always wished he’s had) as he shoved Mal away from a hole forming in the ice on East Ridge pond. He felt like he’d let his little brother drown in icy water.

He kicked the console and knocked loose one of Wash’s dinosaurs. He felt ten times worse.

Jayne had glued those there to “keep Wash company” back when they were putting Serenity back together.

Mal headed for the med bay.

*

River curled up against the wall as Simon worked to find out what was wrong with Jayne.

He was still unconscious.

“His heart stopped. This burn pattern on his chest… His EKG… They resuscitated him.”

Inara smothered her reaction with a hand.

Simon went over the brain scans once again. “Before these last three sections were ruptured.”

“Why ain’t he wakin’ up, bao bei?” Kaylee asked from beside River.

Her hair was hanging over her face like it had when she’d first popped out of that cryo-box. “Self-analysis. Trying to find the broken piece. You were wrong Simon. Stress did not stop his heart. He did. To stop them from finding me.”

Silence ran thick through the room.

Mal walked in on all of this and felt like a supreme heel.

“He, uh, gonna be alright?”

Zoë shot him a dark look to let him know he wasn’t off the hook (not by a long shot). “We dunno, Mal. Doc said they had to zap him back to life.”

“Four minutes dead,” River choked.

Mal leaned against the wall and let out a whooshing breath. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to set fire to his boots with nothing but his eyes.

“Calm down, Mal… Ain’t dead now…”

Everyone stared in shock at the man laid up in the center of the room.

“All this gorram fuss fer lil’ ole me?” Jayne teased. His voice was still croaking from misuse but there was a smiling edge to it.

River latched onto him like a limpet and sealed her mouth against his. Simon turned away for a moment and laughed tightly to cover up his sudden surge of joy that the big man was still sounding like his old self. That creepy tone he’d had when he’d spoken to River earlier in his delirium was gone.

“River, let him breathe,” he advised.

She broke her kiss, “He has a nose,” she argued and went right back to making out with Jayne. Simon groaned in annoyance and pried his sister away from those honey lips of Jayne’s.

“Well I need to use his mouth, too.”

Mal couldn’t help it. He laughed—high-pitched and hysterical at Simon’s retort. Zoë’s face broke as well and a cascade effect drowned the crew in giggles.

Simon shooed everyone out of the med bay and shouted: “That is not what I meant!” at the tops of his lungs.

*

Jayne downed a fourth coffee cup full of cold water and waited for Simon to finish mumbling to himself. He sighed. His whopper of a headache was diminishing—mostly due to the smoother Simon had injected him with about ten minutes ago.

He was floating.

“Dunno what the hell yer spoutin’ off over there, Doc, but all I can say is I got a bitch of a headache an’ my hand’s a bit sore, but that’s all.”

“Jayne, your brain experienced similar trauma to what I previously recorded from River and yet I can’t seem to find what… What they did to you.”

“’Sides pokin’ them huge ass needles in my head?”

“Jayne, I have your scans from your last physical. They replaced something with that last needle. I just can’t figure out what.”

“Needles,” Jayne corrected. “Three of ‘em,” he pointed to the top of his head. “In a row up here.”

Simon frowned and checked his scans again. “Three…”

“Six in all. Seven, if’n ya include that eye-vee needle.”

Simon watched Jayne refill his coffee mug with water. “And you aren’t feeling any different from before?”

“Just loopy from the go se you shot me up with and sore-throated from all that hollerin’ I was doin’ down there. Promise, Doc, some fie wu goes on with my gorram head and yer the first to know, dong ma?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” Jayne said as he walked barefoot out of the med bay. “First after yer sister. She always knows what the hell I’m thinkin’.”

With that, the large man padded noiselessly out into the hall.

*

River was waiting for him in his bunk—still dressed in his T-shirt and smelling of explosives. He hung by the ladder and watched her carefully use his cleaning tools on Vera. Bertha was already on the wall again and Jayne could see she still had to clean Maggie, Tina, and Laura.

“Goin’ by size, sweetheart?”

She glanced up at him with red-streaked eyes and sniffed her response.

“You been cryin’?” Dumb question, Cobb. “Or just irrigatin’ those pretty eyes of yours?”

River smiled and carefully laid Vera out on the desk in his small quarters. “Done crying. Kissing?”

He grinned. “Ain’t never done there, sweetheart.”

She wound her hands around his back—careful of the dark bruises on his skin. “I choose not to correct your grammar right now.”

Jayne dropped a kiss on the side of her mouth. “Ruttin’ hard, ain’t it?”

River dropped one hand to the front of the scrub pants he wore and ran her knuckles across his arousal. “Not the only thing hard.”

Jayne laughed and worried her lower lip with his teeth. “You’re pretty smutty sometimes, River.”

“Pretty other times, too?”

“Always pretty.”

“No more talking.”

“Right.”

Never let it be said that Jayne was not a man of action. He easily slipped his overly-large T-shirt off of River’s slim body and was tickled to find that the hem of the shirt had hidden a pair of her favorite black stretchy shorts. He moved to pull them off, but River shoved him into his bunk and stripped down to nothing a bit faster than he would have liked.

Yee soo, but he loved taking clothes off of her.

He moved to rid himself of the scratchy hospital pants, but River’s hand shoved him back again. She reached behind her and pulled Binky off the floor in a move she had to have learned in dance school. Before he could ask what she was up to, River split the seams of the horrendous pants with the Bowie knife and yanked the offending fabric out from under him.

Jayne had to chuckle a little at that.

River hushed him up with a kiss full of tongue, heat, fear, and love and Jayne felt so above the pain in his back right now that he swore he could do anything.

She safely returned Binky back where she found her and moved to glide those thin hands of hers up his body. Jayne stopped her and yanked a pinky around the waistband of her shorts—gesturing “off” with his eyes.

Nope, no panties today.

River grinned and sucked at her favorite spot on his jaw—right where the curve started below his ear.

Slightly woozy off the drugs Simon gave him and drunk off the euphoria River was feeding him, Jayne totally missed the prickle of some sort of awareness that was building in his skull.

Instead, he watched with hooded eyes and large pupils as River slicked him up three times with her tongue and dragged him inside her warmth. She threw her head back and unconsciously put herself on complete display for him and Jayne leaned forward far enough to pull her down onto the thin mattress with him.

They lay side-by-side and Jayne ignored that awareness once again—in favor of focusing one half of his attention on keeping a steady rhythm and the other half on how to get her nipples to stand out against her breast like dark pink pearls.

His tongue worked pretty well.

Neither of them had said a word—a feat worthy of some kind of reward later. Jayne splayed his hands across River’s lower back and deep in her mass of gun oil and caustic explosive scented hair and he moved her in a gentler pace. Her hips glided to meet his slower than she wished, but she’d been so turned on while cleaning his guns and feeling residual emotions from him in his bunk that she wasn’t too far away.

Those bright white spots of light were just within reach for both of them.

Jayne didn’t think he’d ever been this keyed up. He thrust into River twice more before she fluttered along his length and tightened.

He could practically see what she was seeing when his own climax blew the top of his head off. Flashes of images intertwined with the general natural high sensation and ear-ringing that usually accompanied an orgasm.

Breathing hard and sweating enough to actually worry River, Jayne focused on the last image and frowned open-mouthed against her breast.

That was a surgery…

River stiffened against him. The image she’d gotten from his mind on Sihnon pummeled him in his mind’s eye—a child with his mouth and eyes and her nose and brow, crying tears of pain that a child should never have to cry because she couldn’t exist.

Jayne tightened his hold on River and straightened to prop his chin against her head. He pulled her tight against his body and shifted so her hips could be more comfortable as they lay still intertwined in every sense on his tiny little bunk.

Some surgeries can be fixed, right? He pushed the thought at her, hitting a mental rewind on her memory.

Depends.

He soothed his hands across her back, feeling her shake with unshed tears. He felt a bit of his heart break for her and that selfish bit was cracked as well. Jayne had nieces and nephews that he loved to spoil. He remembered how happy his ma and pa were with so many young’ns running around the ranch. He knew what a gift children were. Think top three per-cen-tile is good enough to do somethin’ like that? And how’re we talkin’ to each other in our heads?

He doesn’t know about it… It’s possible. Probable. Might work. As for the talking… River sighed out loud against his chest. They broke down your wall around me. Can’t keep anything from me now. I can’t keep anything from you. Didn’t have time to finish the experiment—you still have your amygdale and can keep others’ feelings out except mine.

Jayne thought a moment about being worried about this new development, remembered that gorgeous shower of dirt in the wake of their landmine-slash-grenade bomb, and shrugged. It was frightening to say the least that he’d been altered in the brain pan, but with River… Love you, ai ren.

River smiled through her tears. I love you too, zhang fu. Simon can fix us.

Jayne drifted off into a restful sleep and snored deeply against her skin. River dragged the afghan over top their nude bodies and wished for the first time in her life that she could snore. Then they could have a contest…

TBC

Translations:
Fie wu: junk
Ai ren: sweetheart/spouse
Zhang fu: husband