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[firefly] mercenary - multiple ratings (1/10)
Originally posted: 2005/2006
Title: mercenary
Rating: ranges from G to R
Length: 100 drabbles of 100 - 1000 words
Fandom: firefly (jayne cobb)
A/N: Jayne drabbles for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
joss100, set #1, prompts 1-10.
Title: Gray
Rating: G
Prompt: cemetery
Word Count: 194
Skinny gray stones in small gray mounds.
All around him, women are wailing and men are staring with hollowed eyes. Matty slips a gloved hand around his and holds on tight.
The shepherd's saying words and Ma ducks her head, hands clasped in a ball under her chin. Her eyes are squeezed tight and her mouth is moving in time with the preacher's.
The only color in the whole place is in the flower he tucked in his pocket before they came here. Nobody can see it, but he knows it's there. He can feel the faded yellow petals burning against his leg, melting into his skin and bone.
He closes his eyes. He doesn't want them to see the color come bursting out of him, like the scream that's wailing up through his belly only to be trapped behind his teeth.
The preacher's done talking and he feels his ma's cold hand come down on his neck. Matty tugs at his hand, pulling him away.
He opens his eyes and the washed-out hills flare in a sudden rush of color - blues and purples and reds - then quickly fade back to gray.
Title: Blinks
Rating: G
Prompt: blood
Word Count: 225
He blinks.
The six figures standing over him disappear. In their place loom three men, as tall as the sky.
He thinks numbers the same the hits and the men
One. The fist landed on the right side of his head with a gorawful crunch. He thought he heard his ma yelling in the ear on that side, but when he shook his head, it faded into a ringing noise. It sounded like the bell they used to ring on Sundays.
Two. That one pushed all the air out of his body so fast that he thought everything in his stomach was going to come up with it. He can still feel the sick burn in his throat. The whiskey tasted like that going down, only with smoother edges and a fire that kindled in his belly.
Three. The fist flew in his face while he was still doubled over. He felt more than heard the sickening crunch of cartilage giving way. Tasted the crimson gush in the back of his throat. Saw the sky falling away at the edge of the world.
Their laughter slams into his body as hard as their feet.
He thinks stay down don't move 'this too shall pass'
Ears still ringing, he hears his ma again, whispering in his ear. She drowns the laughter in her tears.
He blinks.
Title: Stupid
Rating: G
Prompt: library
Word Count: 191
"Jayne Cobb! I tole ya t' sit yer ass in tha' chair!"
He's almost as tall as she is, but her hand's wrapped in the back of his shirt like an iron claw. He struggles to get away from her and only succeeds in twisting further into her grip.
"But I wanna go outside! That stuff's stupid!" He can't keep the whine out of his voice and he hears Matty giggle somewhere just outside the door.
"Boy, if I'da wanted such a stubborn fool for a son, I'da married a mule." She hauls him back into the kitchen and releases his shirt.
He slumps his shoulders and looks at the floor.
"Sit!" she thunders and he drags his feet over to the table and slouches into the chair.
She stands over him for a minute, thumping her hand against her thigh. He bends his head closer to the book.
"Stupid ruttin' stories... don't care what the hell happened on Earth-That-Was," he mumbles.
She cuffs him on the back of the head. "Watch yer mouth."
He scowls. "Yes'm."
"Them books gotta go back next week. Least ya can do's read 'em proper."
Title: Bitter
Rating: PG
Prompt: first
Word Count: 249
The sixteenth time it happened was in his bedroom late at night. He shook in his narrow bed and waited for the sun to come up and chase away the darkness that smothered him.
It was raining the fourth time. He stood under the defeated little tree by the pharmacy and watched the drops falling from his fingertips.
He doesn't remember the twenty-first time very well. They found him curled in a gutter, moaning with every breath. Matty says he sounded poetical.
Numbers fifteen, eighteen and thirty will never fade from his mind. Blind-drunk, reeling, he could taste and smell and hear everything that happened. He's still not sure they weren't real.
The second time, he could smell the smoke in his nose even though he was swimming ten feet under the surface of the pond.
He packed up his things and kissed his ma goodbye after the twenty-third. Hopped the first transport heading for parts unknown. He thought he might have a chance of losing it, out there in the black.
He can't remember how it began, but he won't have the chance to remember how it ends.
The ninety-eighth time, Jayne knows it's for real. He can't hear or see or smell. There's no texture to it, no sensation racing through his body. He tastes it, though. It's bitter and cool, like the lemonade Ma used to make during the summer.
He's seen his death nearly a hundred times over, but he's never believed it until now.
Title: Blasts
Rating: G
Prompt: dawn
Word Count: 285
The sun that trickles through the heavy clouds doesn't do much to brighten anything at all and the nights are hardly darker than the days. They rely on the banged-up old horn that blares at every shift change - once in the morning, twice in the afternoon and three short blasts in the middle of the night.
He thinks he hates the night warning the most. That's the one that's supposed to tell Pa to come home.
Ma waits up every night, sitting in her chair by the fireplace. He's got more hats and gloves and scarves and socks than anybody else he knows.
The two bursts of the horn in the afternoon aren't so bad. When he was little, it meant that Matty was coming home from the little schoolhouse where they got to eat fresh fruit sometimes.
Now that he's older, it means a chance to escape the staring and the laughter that follows him to every corner of the little building. There's never any fresh fruit, not even a wormy apple, now that they've got the new teacher. Just whispers of 'dummy' and 'fatty' that stick to his skin until he runs long and hard enough that they slide off.
The horn in the morning means a hot breakfast and his pa sleeping on the couch and Ma, humming under her breath if it was a good night and giving him hugs when it wasn't.
Sometimes he gets up just before the horn goes off and sneaks outside to watch the men walking across town.
He wonders what it's like in Other Places. Ma remembers waking to the sun, warm on her face.
He wonders if anything here ever feels like that.
Title: Paid
Rating: G
Prompt: alley
Word Count: 127
Her name was Mei Waters and she cornered him behind the pharmacy after school one day.
He remembers the feel of the bricks against his back. A drop of icy water fell from the roof and trickled down his neck into the collar of his coat. A crumpled up poster for Blue Sun Ice Cream rustled under his feet.
She tasted like fruit. He doesn't recollect if he kissed her back, but he saw the look in her eyes when she turned away.
He'll never forget the sound of her voice.
"I did it. Pay up, Charlie."
He pretends he doesn't see it, but her eyes stare at him out of all of their faces until he hands over the credits.
None of them taste like fruit.
Title: Dive
Rating: G
Prompt: water
Word Count: 170
Matty taught him how to swim one summer day when the sun actually broke through the clouds long enough to warm up the world. Ma sat on the bank of the pond and laughed while they splashed and dunked each other.
He taught himself how to dive one day after he'd run all the way home from school. Didn't bother to take off his clothes, just climbed up on the rocks and jumped and jumped until he thought he'd never get it right. The skin under his clothes burned from dozens of belly-floppers. One last time, he scurried up the side of those rocks and trembled at the peak. He stared down at the dark pond and held his breath, held his hands over his head, held his hope in his throat.
He sliced through the water head-first, arms outstretched, feet kicking. He swam all the way to the other side of the pond. When he climbed out, he wiped the hair out of his eyes and grinned and ran home.
Title: Lenore
Rating: G
Prompt: fire
Word Count: 361
Grammy taught him how to shoot when he was eight. She let him use the little pearl-handled derringer she kept under her pillow at night and made him promise not to tell Ma. She said when he got big enough, she’d show him how to clean the revolver.
Every Sunday, he ran to her house after church while Ma and Matty and Pa went home to make supper. Sometimes, she gave him cookies she baked her own self and let him play with Grampa's old toy soldiers.
The best days were the ones they spent tramping down weeds in her backyard and chasing rabbits and squirrels out of the bushes. The first time they brought meat for supper, he couldn't tell anybody but he would swear he'd never tasted anything better - not even the orange Matty brought home from school once.
When she died, he was seventeen. He didn't spend Sunday afternoons at her house anymore. As soon as the preacher closed up his book, he took off for the roughest end of town and mingled with the pilots who drank there. They slapped him on the back and bought endless rounds of beer or whiskey and told him stories about worlds he'd never even heard of.
She left him a letter on her best paper. He opened and read it in the backyard where only the squirrels and the rabbits could see him cry. When he was done, he folded it up neatly into the envelope and tucked it in his shirt. He carried it with him until the night he got rumbled on Persephone.
He walked through her house, running his hands over her pictures and gewgaws and stirring up dust. The derringer was under her pillow, right where she left it that last night. The revolver was at the back of the drawer where she kept the family Bible.
He left the derringer with his ma when he was nineteen and bound for the black. He promised himself that the revolver wouldn't leave his side until he saw his Grammy again. It was the least he could do for the woman who taught him everything he knew.
Title: Smarts
Rating: G
Prompt: school
Word Count: 310
He knows he's not smart. He hears the whispers - even the ones that aren't meant to reach his ears.
When he has to read out loud, he stumbles over the words. His voice trembles like a leaf and a flush of shame colors the skin from his face to his toes.
Matty says, "He's my brother! Don't you say nothing bad about him!" and tells him stories that they can't read in books.
He's hopeless at math. He's all right with sums and subtractions 'cause he just pretends it's money and if he doesn't get it right, he won't have any to buy food. Anything more complicated than that and his brain shrinks up like a cobweb.
Pa says, "Don' worry none - jist know 'nough so's ya don' git cheated," and ruffles his hair with the hand that's not holding a bottle.
Sometimes he pretends that the class is just a race and he's the tortoise and if he just keeps plodding along, he'll beat all those kids who point and laugh at him.
Ma says nothing, but she hugs him close and whispers, "My precious baby," in his hair.
He can field-strip Grammy's revolver in less than a minute and he's getting faster all the time but that's not any kind of learning that makes you smart.
Grammy says, "There's all kindsa learnin' an' not knowin' how t' take care o' you and yours is just plain dumb."
When a man offers him a job a week after his fourteenth birthday, he tells the teacher he's done and walks away. He holds his head high and uses the money to buy cotton yarn in all the colors of the rainbow.
He knows he's not smart, but all the books in all the worlds couldn't do what he does. If there are whispers now, he never hears them.
Title: First
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: heart
Word Count: 119
The first time he dressed one of his own kills, he thought he was going to throw up all over his hands. The blood and sweat made the knife too slippery to hold and he dropped it on the ground at his feet.
The first time he went hunting by himself, he crouched in a tree and stared down the scope of the rifle until tears ran down his face. He aimed for the chest but didn't pull the trigger until long after the buck had bounded away.
The first time he shot a man, he was dry-eyed and iron-bellied. He watched the man's life pump out of the hole in his chest and counted credits in his head.
Title: mercenary
Rating: ranges from G to R
Length: 100 drabbles of 100 - 1000 words
Fandom: firefly (jayne cobb)
A/N: Jayne drabbles for
joss100, set #1, prompts 1-10. Title: Gray
Rating: G
Prompt: cemetery
Word Count: 194
Skinny gray stones in small gray mounds.
All around him, women are wailing and men are staring with hollowed eyes. Matty slips a gloved hand around his and holds on tight.
The shepherd's saying words and Ma ducks her head, hands clasped in a ball under her chin. Her eyes are squeezed tight and her mouth is moving in time with the preacher's.
The only color in the whole place is in the flower he tucked in his pocket before they came here. Nobody can see it, but he knows it's there. He can feel the faded yellow petals burning against his leg, melting into his skin and bone.
He closes his eyes. He doesn't want them to see the color come bursting out of him, like the scream that's wailing up through his belly only to be trapped behind his teeth.
The preacher's done talking and he feels his ma's cold hand come down on his neck. Matty tugs at his hand, pulling him away.
He opens his eyes and the washed-out hills flare in a sudden rush of color - blues and purples and reds - then quickly fade back to gray.
Title: Blinks
Rating: G
Prompt: blood
Word Count: 225
He blinks.
The six figures standing over him disappear. In their place loom three men, as tall as the sky.
He thinks numbers the same the hits and the men
One. The fist landed on the right side of his head with a gorawful crunch. He thought he heard his ma yelling in the ear on that side, but when he shook his head, it faded into a ringing noise. It sounded like the bell they used to ring on Sundays.
Two. That one pushed all the air out of his body so fast that he thought everything in his stomach was going to come up with it. He can still feel the sick burn in his throat. The whiskey tasted like that going down, only with smoother edges and a fire that kindled in his belly.
Three. The fist flew in his face while he was still doubled over. He felt more than heard the sickening crunch of cartilage giving way. Tasted the crimson gush in the back of his throat. Saw the sky falling away at the edge of the world.
Their laughter slams into his body as hard as their feet.
He thinks stay down don't move 'this too shall pass'
Ears still ringing, he hears his ma again, whispering in his ear. She drowns the laughter in her tears.
He blinks.
Title: Stupid
Rating: G
Prompt: library
Word Count: 191
"Jayne Cobb! I tole ya t' sit yer ass in tha' chair!"
He's almost as tall as she is, but her hand's wrapped in the back of his shirt like an iron claw. He struggles to get away from her and only succeeds in twisting further into her grip.
"But I wanna go outside! That stuff's stupid!" He can't keep the whine out of his voice and he hears Matty giggle somewhere just outside the door.
"Boy, if I'da wanted such a stubborn fool for a son, I'da married a mule." She hauls him back into the kitchen and releases his shirt.
He slumps his shoulders and looks at the floor.
"Sit!" she thunders and he drags his feet over to the table and slouches into the chair.
She stands over him for a minute, thumping her hand against her thigh. He bends his head closer to the book.
"Stupid ruttin' stories... don't care what the hell happened on Earth-That-Was," he mumbles.
She cuffs him on the back of the head. "Watch yer mouth."
He scowls. "Yes'm."
"Them books gotta go back next week. Least ya can do's read 'em proper."
Title: Bitter
Rating: PG
Prompt: first
Word Count: 249
The sixteenth time it happened was in his bedroom late at night. He shook in his narrow bed and waited for the sun to come up and chase away the darkness that smothered him.
It was raining the fourth time. He stood under the defeated little tree by the pharmacy and watched the drops falling from his fingertips.
He doesn't remember the twenty-first time very well. They found him curled in a gutter, moaning with every breath. Matty says he sounded poetical.
Numbers fifteen, eighteen and thirty will never fade from his mind. Blind-drunk, reeling, he could taste and smell and hear everything that happened. He's still not sure they weren't real.
The second time, he could smell the smoke in his nose even though he was swimming ten feet under the surface of the pond.
He packed up his things and kissed his ma goodbye after the twenty-third. Hopped the first transport heading for parts unknown. He thought he might have a chance of losing it, out there in the black.
He can't remember how it began, but he won't have the chance to remember how it ends.
The ninety-eighth time, Jayne knows it's for real. He can't hear or see or smell. There's no texture to it, no sensation racing through his body. He tastes it, though. It's bitter and cool, like the lemonade Ma used to make during the summer.
He's seen his death nearly a hundred times over, but he's never believed it until now.
Title: Blasts
Rating: G
Prompt: dawn
Word Count: 285
The sun that trickles through the heavy clouds doesn't do much to brighten anything at all and the nights are hardly darker than the days. They rely on the banged-up old horn that blares at every shift change - once in the morning, twice in the afternoon and three short blasts in the middle of the night.
He thinks he hates the night warning the most. That's the one that's supposed to tell Pa to come home.
Ma waits up every night, sitting in her chair by the fireplace. He's got more hats and gloves and scarves and socks than anybody else he knows.
The two bursts of the horn in the afternoon aren't so bad. When he was little, it meant that Matty was coming home from the little schoolhouse where they got to eat fresh fruit sometimes.
Now that he's older, it means a chance to escape the staring and the laughter that follows him to every corner of the little building. There's never any fresh fruit, not even a wormy apple, now that they've got the new teacher. Just whispers of 'dummy' and 'fatty' that stick to his skin until he runs long and hard enough that they slide off.
The horn in the morning means a hot breakfast and his pa sleeping on the couch and Ma, humming under her breath if it was a good night and giving him hugs when it wasn't.
Sometimes he gets up just before the horn goes off and sneaks outside to watch the men walking across town.
He wonders what it's like in Other Places. Ma remembers waking to the sun, warm on her face.
He wonders if anything here ever feels like that.
Title: Paid
Rating: G
Prompt: alley
Word Count: 127
Her name was Mei Waters and she cornered him behind the pharmacy after school one day.
He remembers the feel of the bricks against his back. A drop of icy water fell from the roof and trickled down his neck into the collar of his coat. A crumpled up poster for Blue Sun Ice Cream rustled under his feet.
She tasted like fruit. He doesn't recollect if he kissed her back, but he saw the look in her eyes when she turned away.
He'll never forget the sound of her voice.
"I did it. Pay up, Charlie."
He pretends he doesn't see it, but her eyes stare at him out of all of their faces until he hands over the credits.
None of them taste like fruit.
Title: Dive
Rating: G
Prompt: water
Word Count: 170
Matty taught him how to swim one summer day when the sun actually broke through the clouds long enough to warm up the world. Ma sat on the bank of the pond and laughed while they splashed and dunked each other.
He taught himself how to dive one day after he'd run all the way home from school. Didn't bother to take off his clothes, just climbed up on the rocks and jumped and jumped until he thought he'd never get it right. The skin under his clothes burned from dozens of belly-floppers. One last time, he scurried up the side of those rocks and trembled at the peak. He stared down at the dark pond and held his breath, held his hands over his head, held his hope in his throat.
He sliced through the water head-first, arms outstretched, feet kicking. He swam all the way to the other side of the pond. When he climbed out, he wiped the hair out of his eyes and grinned and ran home.
Title: Lenore
Rating: G
Prompt: fire
Word Count: 361
Grammy taught him how to shoot when he was eight. She let him use the little pearl-handled derringer she kept under her pillow at night and made him promise not to tell Ma. She said when he got big enough, she’d show him how to clean the revolver.
Every Sunday, he ran to her house after church while Ma and Matty and Pa went home to make supper. Sometimes, she gave him cookies she baked her own self and let him play with Grampa's old toy soldiers.
The best days were the ones they spent tramping down weeds in her backyard and chasing rabbits and squirrels out of the bushes. The first time they brought meat for supper, he couldn't tell anybody but he would swear he'd never tasted anything better - not even the orange Matty brought home from school once.
When she died, he was seventeen. He didn't spend Sunday afternoons at her house anymore. As soon as the preacher closed up his book, he took off for the roughest end of town and mingled with the pilots who drank there. They slapped him on the back and bought endless rounds of beer or whiskey and told him stories about worlds he'd never even heard of.
She left him a letter on her best paper. He opened and read it in the backyard where only the squirrels and the rabbits could see him cry. When he was done, he folded it up neatly into the envelope and tucked it in his shirt. He carried it with him until the night he got rumbled on Persephone.
He walked through her house, running his hands over her pictures and gewgaws and stirring up dust. The derringer was under her pillow, right where she left it that last night. The revolver was at the back of the drawer where she kept the family Bible.
He left the derringer with his ma when he was nineteen and bound for the black. He promised himself that the revolver wouldn't leave his side until he saw his Grammy again. It was the least he could do for the woman who taught him everything he knew.
Title: Smarts
Rating: G
Prompt: school
Word Count: 310
He knows he's not smart. He hears the whispers - even the ones that aren't meant to reach his ears.
When he has to read out loud, he stumbles over the words. His voice trembles like a leaf and a flush of shame colors the skin from his face to his toes.
Matty says, "He's my brother! Don't you say nothing bad about him!" and tells him stories that they can't read in books.
He's hopeless at math. He's all right with sums and subtractions 'cause he just pretends it's money and if he doesn't get it right, he won't have any to buy food. Anything more complicated than that and his brain shrinks up like a cobweb.
Pa says, "Don' worry none - jist know 'nough so's ya don' git cheated," and ruffles his hair with the hand that's not holding a bottle.
Sometimes he pretends that the class is just a race and he's the tortoise and if he just keeps plodding along, he'll beat all those kids who point and laugh at him.
Ma says nothing, but she hugs him close and whispers, "My precious baby," in his hair.
He can field-strip Grammy's revolver in less than a minute and he's getting faster all the time but that's not any kind of learning that makes you smart.
Grammy says, "There's all kindsa learnin' an' not knowin' how t' take care o' you and yours is just plain dumb."
When a man offers him a job a week after his fourteenth birthday, he tells the teacher he's done and walks away. He holds his head high and uses the money to buy cotton yarn in all the colors of the rainbow.
He knows he's not smart, but all the books in all the worlds couldn't do what he does. If there are whispers now, he never hears them.
Title: First
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: heart
Word Count: 119
The first time he dressed one of his own kills, he thought he was going to throw up all over his hands. The blood and sweat made the knife too slippery to hold and he dropped it on the ground at his feet.
The first time he went hunting by himself, he crouched in a tree and stared down the scope of the rifle until tears ran down his face. He aimed for the chest but didn't pull the trigger until long after the buck had bounded away.
The first time he shot a man, he was dry-eyed and iron-bellied. He watched the man's life pump out of the hole in his chest and counted credits in his head.