I've been working on a Firefly fic despite the fact that I have eighty jillion other pieces of work to do.
Title: Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1,566 words
Summary: Mal pounded down the hallway from the bridge, making it to the kitchen in about ten strides, fetching up on the door with a little bounce on the balls of his feet. Kaylee knew he was happy about something, but from the pulled-tight serious look on his face, he'd set it by 'till he could spring it on somebody. It was just her and River right now; she'd been up since before breakfast, chasing a series of minor electrical outages back to a nest of mice they'd picked up by accident on Osiris. One of the first things anybody'd noticed was down were the heating elements in the kitchen, and the first that Kaylee'd fixed by rerouting it, but then while everybody ate she had to see what else was wrong.
Jayne was off killing the rats now. He was going to stir-fry them for dinner, since her Cap'n had put his foot down about keeping them as pets, seeing as there wasn't much for the people on board to eat, much less rodents. Simon'd tried to back her up, since rats were lucky, but nobody else was behind the idea.
So Kaylee was wondering if maybe he'd tell her they had a cage all set up ready in her room, but instead he said, "River," all serious-like, and River put down her reader and got up, like she'd already got her orders, and pushed past him up to the bridge.
"What is it?" Kaylee asked, not really liking them sharing secrets plain as day, and the smile broke over Mal's face.
"Your old man called. He's got a job for us, if we head over his way."
Kaylee stood stock-still for a moment, as her blood dropped out and ice flushed through her system for a moment, then everything clicked back over to normal again; then she pushed away from the table and took three steps to wrap her arms around Mal and land a kiss on his cheek. "Oh, Cap'n! I ain't never seen him in years!"
She managed to bounce back, since he was being all standoffish, and River said from the top of the stairs to the bridge, "You'll have to introduce him to Simon."
She started to grin, but got cut off by an impending sense of doom, namely that of Simon on Beylix; and then Jayne came up the stairs from the cargo bay, holding a bunch of dead rats by their tails. Kaylee reached out to squeeze Mal's arm, then turned around to grab her breakfast and head into the engine room with it.
It was still overpowering force of habit to inventory the infirmary every day; it stood at the centre of ever-widening rings of chaos. Simon was more than aware that as a castaway in this ship, it was the only real power he had. Money and resources, influence, friends, were all gone, and he'd finally stopped running into the mental wall in his plans or daydreams that said he couldn't do such-a-thing because he no longer had an ident card or credit chip, necessities of life until you suddenly didn't have them, because he'd stopped daydreaming about things that would require them.
But if he was slowly making the mental transition that left him permanently rootless, relying on what fit in a ship, or a bag, or a pocket, then other than this he had nothing. He was a bad shot, an indifferent liar, nothing of an entrepreneur; all Simon Tam was was a very good doctor. Which mattered, if nothing else did, so he couldn't let it slip.
"There are babies," River said from the doorway, as Simon's hand hovered over a curiously empty spot in his tray of tools. He looked over, and frowned. She had one arm wrapped around herself and looked sober, but he couldn't tell if there was anything more than that. Since Miranda, it was hard to tell what kind of day it would be; she was incalculably better than before, but so much of the damage was purely biological and possibly permanent. He couldn't be lulled into wishful thinking that she was entirely okay, because that made it worse for him when she wasn't.
"Babies? Whose babies?"
"The mother's babies. You won't be able to tell. Reprocessed, repackaged, made less identifiable. They're edible that way." There was a pause, and her voice lost its vague sound. "He took your scalpel to do it."
He knew what to do when she stepped back, and as he took the stairs two at a time he cursed Jayne in the name of every rat to have ever lived. Even here, there had to be some rules of civility, or they'd all end up--eating rats.
He was running out of levels of depravity to which they had yet to stoop.
"The best part is the tails," Jayne was saying, looking up from his work at Zoe, who leaned against the kitchen table and took another swill of Kaylee's moonshine. "Grill 'em up-" and then they both looked at Simon.
Without any real clue how this would go, he said, "River said you had babies."
Old news to Zoe (he was belatedly thankful, suddenly aware of how badly that might have gone now that it hadn't) and Jayne just gave a wry grin. "Protein's protein, doctor. You gonna turn your nose up at real meat?"
With the implied not like a real man but Simon was used to ignoring that; old and new arrogance both said he didn't need to pick his bones with the teeth of his enemies, even out here; being a doctor carried its own weight. "You are not going to use my instruments to slice up rat babies and feed them to us for dinner."
"It's the only blade in the whole ship that can do the job, unless I fry them whole."
"No," Zoe said. "Jayne, I am not eating a whole one. I have to be able to pretend it's something halfway decent." Simon saw an opening and extended his hand for the scalpel. He saw Jayne eye them both, and do a quick mental count of the rest of the ship--Inara, no, too fancy; Kaylle, hell no; River, who knew, and Mal wouldn't unless Inara did.
"Not worth the effort anyway," he said, throwing the scalpel down on the counter.
Simon cleaned the scalpel and returned it to its rightful place, deposited the babies into the incinerator chute with little twists of yellow paper River had made, and went to check up on Kaylee.
She was in her hammock, picking at the remains of a protein bar with her nails. She looked up and smiled when he came in and sat sideways on the end of the hammock, but was obviously painted a mild shade of glum today.
So--talk about what made her happiest. "How much damage was done to the wiring?"
She flicked her hand dismissively--no big deal--but came more present. "Not much important. I just had to jimmy everything around to make some of the shorter wires fit now." A reflective pause. "Wish I knew how they got in there. We haven't had rats before. I hope Jayne got them all out."
Simon resolved not to mention the babies. "Did the captain say we had a course yet?"
Her face dropped back as close to melancholy as Kaylee ever got, and she looked up sidelong at him through her eyelashes. "Beylix."
"That's where your family is, isn't it?"
She wriggled her toes, and he took the hint to start rubbing her feet. "Yep. After I took up in Serenity, they got to thinking that maybe they could do better. I seen 'em once since I left home, and they're doing all right on Beylix. They'll be glad to see me again."
He was still sorting through things; fluid life out here, bouncing from one planet to the next in the black, until one suddenly had roots, suddenly meant something. Like testing water, he ventured, "I think I'd like to meet your family."
Which was obviously something she'd been worried about, because she lit right up at that (he cringed a little inside at how obviously she'd been expecting him to say something stupid) and grinned at him. "That'll be nice."
Eventually, she went to work doing routine maintenance on finicky bits of Serenity's engine, and a while after that he went back downstairs, and lost valiantly to River for three games of checkers.
Then lunchtime rolled around. They might have made some kind of stand--had there been many options, most of them might. Had Shepherd Book been there, Simon thought, they might have reconsidered. He'd never noticed then how much of a civilizing influence the Shepherd had until now, when he was gone and the world had changed again.
But by now they were all starving for something remotely different, and by now they only opened cans every third day, so in the end, Serenity's crew sat down around their kitchen table and ate rat.