No, your eyes don't deceive you: This is a non-NC17 fanfic even though it comes from me. Future parts to this will creep right back to the pervy 'verse, but for now, it's just setting you up for the payoff. Feed me back. I'm nervous about being here.

The Way of Jayne, Part 1 (or it can stand alone)

Ma Cobb’s boy Jayne looked up from the one-room schoolhouse wooden desk to glower with all the hatred fourteen years of torture had writ large on his features. Girls. Always girls, scrawny authors of his destruction, demented perpetrators of misery. The little pig-tailed brat who acted as his whip most recently was a freckled urchin named Tawny who he’d had a crush on for weeks.

Although Tawny was winsome enough in just the rosy-cheeked dumpling kind of way he liked, his standards in liking a girl didn’t have much to do with how pretty they looked. Had to do with them not making fun of the biggest thing about the big boy Jayne: the huge barrier of his glorified girlified name. When she asked him why he weren't wearing a pretty dress today to match his pretty name, Tawny dropped slap-dab out of Jayne’s heart. With only a few words, one sentence, she'd joined the evil happy cadre of name-callers that were the bane of his short existence.

He could be grateful, he guessed, for the fact that he was large for his age, had known it since he was old enough to see his height and girth dwarfed even his oldest sibling. At 12 he had towered over ma, and this year he was nigh as high as pa’s ear, helped by his sire’s beginning to hunch over from too much work and even more toxic home brew that made the work bearable.

If not for his size, the painful teasing Jayne got as an unwholesome daily snack woulda been served by schoolboys as well as girls. As it was, the employing of fisticuffs upside the head or gut of any male child unwise enough to make fun had the good effect of letting him bond alright with other boys his age. The ones pummeled served as examples, sparking an admiration laced with heal