A Life So Huge

By Belasera

For my Big Damn Hero

An ending of sorts to the life I wrote for Jayne and Kaylee

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The casket is enormous, but no way can it hold the man inside. I’ve seen him wriggle out of alliance cuffs, slam open solid doors. Once, he cut through reavers to get back to me. No way can death hold him, not Jayne.

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He was 62. Ancient for a mercenary. And his name is legend, not just on Canton anymore. Hero of the People, he’d smashed out of more Alliance prisons for them than I care to remember.

Jayne, Mal and Zoe. Their names are everywhere, and millions fight for them. They aren’t just independents, anymore. They are independence itself.

We, Inara and Wash and me, we were there too, of course. But our names aren’t songs on a hundred planets. I don’t care, don’t think they did either. I was happy to fix Serenity, fix Jayne some too after Simon was gone. Never did kill a man, a fact which oddly seemed to please my husband. Husband…oh…I should have known it would be like this, Jayne lived every day like it was the last, but I never could. I thought he was indestructible.

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It was after Simon was captured that things changed aboard Serenity. After River told us with cold certainty that he was dead, that he’d died with our secrets intact and his mind open only to her.

We all changed, then, Mal the most. We flew right out from under Alliance radar and became the most wanted outlaws in the ‘verse. Seemed Mal’d decided that the war hadn’t ended after all, and no one was inclined to argue.

Our old life passed away, I think I knew that the first time I saw Inara in a jumpsuit, or maybe when Shepard Book began to put his previously unknown assassin skills to work. Or the first time I saw River bring Mal back from the brink of death, looking so much like her brother that Jayne had to rock me to sleep that night.

I sometimes felt like I was the only one not to change into someone else. Still fixing my ship