FicWad

-I-I-I-

A bare moment later Mal saw another, smaller shadow come forward to grasp the girl by the hand. The lighting in the bar wasn't the greatest, but even so he could have spotted Harry's mess of hair from a mile away. Not many already inside noticed them, except for a few men who shot appraising looks at the young woman. And a couple at Harry, he saw with disgusted anger.

Mal turned his eyes towards the entrance, then, and waited. /Gorramit/, where the hell was the Doc? If that little shit had let those two wander off on their lonesome in a bad place like this, he was going to...

He didn't have time to think of an appropriate threat, though, because Fanty was rambling on, thinking he still had his guest's full attention. "You're unpredictable, Mal, which is the single worst thing to be in this business. Mingo and me, we're greedy. Could set your watch by our greed. It wavers never. But you, you run when you oughta fight, fight when you oughta deal. Makes a businessperson twitchy."

Mingo nodded agreement. "Adding in the fact that your ship's older than the starting point of time and you can see you's charity cases to the likes of us."

A suspicion was beginning to work its way up Mal's spine. "Well, here's a foul thought," he mused out loud. "I conjured you two were incompetent. Sent us out not knowing there were Reavers about. Now I'm thinking you picked us out because you /did/."

To his outrage, Mingo just shrugged. "That were a sign of faith, boy. And it doesn't affect our forty per. Danger is, after all, your business."

Jayne looked about to start tearing throats out, with his bare hands if need be. "Reavers ain't business, double dickless."

Trying to push down his anger- what he needed right now was a clear head- Mal turned a bit to check on the children again. They'd picked their way through the Maidenhead to stand before the big CorVue screen that dominated that side of the room. There was an ad showing at the moment, a bumbling little number about Fruity Oaty Bars that had made Mal's teeth grind the first time he'd seen it, a couple of months ago. River was staring up at the bright, oscillating colors with such a rapture he had a feeling the bar could be pulled down around her ears and she wouldn't notice.

All of a sudden, though, the girl seemed to tense. She said something, then; Mal saw her lips move, forming a single word. Beside her, Harry flinched and opened his mouth. What happened then could only be described as all hell breaking loose.

As River moved with a sinister grace towards the nearest table, occupied by two men and their drinks, Harry screamed, and every screen and light in the room exploded all at once in a shower of sparks.

Mal would always remember the next few minutes as flashes of light and darkness as the destroyed electronics sparked erratically. He was up out of his seat before the shards of plastic hit the ground, Jayne beside him, as shouts of confusion filled the pitch-black bar. They could hear crashing sounds and cries of pain mixed in there, too, all overshadowed by Harry's continuing screams, a wail of grief and anger that made Mal's gut clench in response.

"What the hell's goin' on?" the big mercenary shouted through the darkness. Then there was a brief shower of sparks, and his question was answered.

Two men were closing on either side of River, who was near surrounded by bodies. They each had a knife and looked capable of using them, but the girl didn't turn and run like any sane person would've. Instead, as they lunged with blades outstretched she fell into a graceful split, reaching over her head to grasp their wrists and pull until they'd stabbed each other.

The sparks winked out, and they were plunged back into a decidedly noisy darkness.

The next flash was of River using the bouncer's own shockrod against him. Then a few moments later she was kicking around a corner and connecting with a running man's face. It was only when the sparks had ended after that one that Mal realized she couldn't possibly have seen the poor bastard before lashing out.

Then Jayne was gone from his side, and in a longer waterfall of sparks the stunned Mal watched him approach and grab River from behind. "/Gorrammit/, girl, it's /me/!"

The blackness was back before the captain could see what her reaction to that was, but he could make a pretty good guess of it from Jayne's subsequent howls of pain. Mal started groping his way towards the gun holder as the shock began to wear off. With the girl gone this crazy and this good at tussling- and where the hell had that come from- he had a horrible feeling the only way he was going to be able to stop her was with a bullet.

Then Harry's wail was abruptly cut off, and Mal glanced towards the last place he'd seen the boy, worried. He waited impatiently for light to appear, however briefly, and almost growled when it finally did. One of the men River had injured had managed to crawl a bit towards the exit and escape from the deathtrap the bar had suddenly become, before collapsing. Unfortunately, he'd collapsed on top of Harry.

Mal cursed under his breath. The man was more than big enough to crush the boy, still fragile from the Alliance's tender ministrations. He hesitated for a second, casting a longing look at the gun holder, and then shook his head. Harry didn't have that much time, and Jayne was tough. He was used to violence.

Though not so used to being beaten up by an underweight, seventeen-year-old girl, he'd bet.

Mal fumbled his way over to the area, his progress hampered by the dark. After a moment of searching his outstretched hands met rustling cloth, and he grabbed onto the unconscious man's jacket. A quick, forceful heave later, Harry was free, and before Mal could blink he felt the boy hit his chest like a speeding bullet.

"Shh," he murmured to the silent, shaking twelve-year-old. "It's all right..." It wasn't, really, and he doubted Harry could hear him over the continuing din, but he needed to at least try to reassure him.

There was suddenly light again, light that didn't fade after a brief second, though it was still a fairly dim one. Mal looked up to see that the clothes of one of the men on the floor, hopefully an already dead man, had caught fire.

He could see more than flashes of the fight now. River had evidently finally gotten tired of playing with Jayne, and the merc was a groaning heap in the middle of a smashed table. Even as Mal watched, someone who had managed to sneak a gun past the bouncer pulled it out and took aim at the girl.

His elbow was broken with a sickening 'crack'/, and turned in a direction it wasn't meant to go in until the weapon was pointed at the man's own stomach. He squeezed the trigger in what must have been a pain-driven reflex, and as he collapsed River relieved him of the gun with a quick vertical kick. She spun then to drop a charging patron, and Mal /knew the instant she saw him cradling Harry, because for the first time since the fight had started he saw an actual expression upon her face:

Anger.

River reached out an arm behind her, catching the gun with a daunting negligence. As the muzzle came up, pointed at the sweet spot just between his eyes, Mal knew with all certainty that, after surviving Serenity Valley, Reavers, countless raids and the members of his crew, he was about to die at the hands of a pubescent girl. He could swear time slowed down to just a trickle, as her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Eta kooram nah smech!"

River folded almost gracefully to the ground, and against his chest Harry had gone worryingly still. Mal stared at the gun for nearly a minute, lying harmlessly on the ground bare centimeters from the girl's fingertips, before raising his gaze to see a very pale Simon Tam standing at the entrance stairs.

-I-I-I-

Twenty-four hours ago, Mal would have felt guilty about dumping a child in a storage locker after chaining her to the wall. But then, twenty-four hours ago Mal hadn't seen River Tam tear through a bar of the Rim's toughest without breaking a sweat.

"May I see her?" was the first thing the Doc asked when the captain walked into Serenity's dining room.

"She's still napping just now," Mal replied coldly. He directed a glance towards Kaylee, who shook her head. She was holding the still nearly-comatose Harry in her lap, upright to make sure he didn't simply stop breathing. The sleep he'd fallen into at the unusual phrase was far deeper than River's peaceful slumber, and for obvious reasons, Mal was reluctant to let Tam examine him to find out why. Speaking of which... "And I believe you've got some storytelling to do."

Wash tapped almost timidly on the doorframe. "Uh, we're out of atmo," he said as all eyes turned towards him. "Shouldn't be too long to Haven, and the scanners aren't picking up anyone following."

Kaylee's smile almost, but not quite, erased the worry in her eyes. "Haven? We're going to see Shepherd Book?"

Mal gave her a nod. "Figure after that little performance back there lyin' low would be a good thing. 'Least until we see what the Alliance's response will be." He looked hard at the Doc. "Now, what the hell happened back there?"

"Start with the part where Jayne gets knocked out by a ninety-pound girl," Wash said with a grin, sitting down next to his wife at the table. "'Cause I don't think that's ever getting old."

Jayne, who had been sitting pointedly across the room from Tam, looked up from prodding his bruises and glared daggers at the pilot. Irritated by the delay, Mal slashed his hand through the air. "Enough! Now, Doctor, /if you would/."

Simon's face was as composed as ever, though faint lines of worry traced his forehead. "Where would you like me to start?"

Oh, just about anywhere would be nice. Anything that help to straighten out this tangle and let Mal know just what kind of mess his ship had landed in. "That gobbledygook you spouted that put the kiddies to sleep."

The doctor took a deep breath. "A safeword. /Eta kooram nah smech/. The people in the underground who helped me break River out, they had intel on just what the Alliance was doing to the people in those labs. Part of that was imbedding the subjects with words and phrases that caused certain automatic reactions. They taught it to me in case something happened. I hadn't realized Harry had received the same behavioral modifications."

Mal focused in on one particular bit of that. "'In case something happened'," he repeated slowly. Tam gave him an uncertain look. "Care to elaborate on what that 'something' might be?"

"They never said just what-"

"Did you even ask/?" Mal slammed his hands down on the table. "Eight months! Eight months she's been on my ship, and /not once did you ever say she might go monkeyshit on us if we said the wrong word! My ship. My /crew/! Did you ever once think of them? What would've happened if she'd gone off in the middle of dinner, or in bunk with Kaylee?"

That was the first thing he'd said that appeared to make an impression on the man, who paled and flickered a glance at the mechanic. Kaylee didn't meet his eyes, her arms wrapped around the sleeping boy in her lap. "I... I thought she was getting better," Simon offered, his voice not nearly as confident as it had been at the start of the interrogation.

"An' I thought they was gettin' /off/!" Everyone looked up at Jayne's outburst. "Didn't we have an intricate plan how they was gonna not be here anymore?"

Kaylee frowned at him. "We couldn't leave 'em /now/!"

"An' why not? What, we're supposed to be bringin' 'em tea and dumplings now that the girly's a, a killer woman?"

Part of Mal agreed wholeheartedly with Jayne. It jumped up and down at the back of his mind, shouting at the top of its lungs to go as fast and as far from Beaumonde as Serenity's engines could take her, with the Doc and his wards eating dust planetside. But...

But. Mal would sleep a lot easier if he could only figure out that 'but.' Was this what Fanty and Mingo had meant by his unpredictability?

"May I see her?" Simon asked again when the silence had stretched on. This time the captain nodded, and the Coreworlder rose and vanished into the bowels of the ship.

Jayne scowled as Mal sat down at the table, suddenly bone-weary. "She goes wooly again, we're gonna have to put a bullet in her."

"The thought's crossed my mind," Mal admitted. His eyes and thoughts had drifted back to Harry, though. There was something about the boy, something about that fiasco at the Maidenhead that was tugging at him, but he was damned if he could pull it up out of his subconscious.

Wash coughed and raised his hand, further enforcing the image Mal had always had of him as an eager schoolboy. "Can I make a suggestion that doesn't involve violence? Or is this the wrong crowd?"

Mal raised an interested eyebrow and waved him on. Right now, something without violence that didn't involve the good doctor sounded rather good.

"Fanty and Mingo might be coming down hard on us, or the laws, or maybe nobody could be bunged about our little social brawl. We need to get our bearings."

He paused, and Mal had a feeling he wasn't really going to like this suggestion after all.

"I think we need to talk to Mr. Universe."