Disclaimer: They belong to Joss. I just want to let them out to play and make them happy.

Rating: Pg-13

Pairing: R/J; M/I; S/K

Time period/Spoilers: Post BDM

Notes: This little story had been sitting on my desktop, only 3 pages long until I did the music video ‘River In The Wings’. It inspired me, thank goodness. Two paragraphs of this story dovetail with my Mal/Inara story ‘Walking With The Dead’.

Beta: TamSibling

Enjoy!

Precious Commodity

By

Lattelady6

Ch 1 Echoes

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Lawrence Dobson, Alliance mole said to Jayne Cobb, mercenary, in ‘Serenity’ the ‘Firefly’ pilot – “That girl is a precious commodity. They’ll come after her.”

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1 year later:

Jayne Cobb fought the need for sleep and the throb of pain in his shoulder. He was the hired gun, the muscle, so it was his job to watch over the others. The med tent the Alliance had set up for the wounded crew of Serenity was small, dark and drafty. The Tech who had been assigned to tend their wounds and see to it that they survived the night, sat comfortably in a small attached tent, with the only warming unit turned on high. It had been the Operative’s order that these people live and the Medic had done all he could for them surgically, but he wasn’t going to share his only means of warmth with a boatload of scum his friends had been trying to kill hours earlier.

The sound of someone entering their tent put Jayne on the alert. Vigilance had kept him alive for years and bein’ in the gorramn care of the Alliance just made him plum twitchy. He could tell by the quiet movements that it wasn’t the heavy-footed medic. A stench of blood tickled his nose and ran along his senses. It sent his hand quietly searching for Vera, only to come up empty.

The big mercenary carefully peeked through a screen of lashes. It was a trick he’d learned long ago and one that had saved his life on more t