Life’s Too Short- Part Nine

These people aren’t mine, they all belong to Joss and co.

Author’s Note: Sorry it took so long to post this chapter. Okay, here we’ve got some tantalizing info on the bidder, but nothing concrete, and we find out more about Mal and Zoe’s war days, and how they know Jennings, and there’s a good bunch of M/I interaction. All things inside asterisks (*) are supposed to be in italics.

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* It’s dark. No point to lights if you’re blind. The room is empty save for a chair and some equipment too hard to make out in the shadows, and a wave screen, currently black. No need for furniture if you have no legs and only half of one arm. There’s only one person in the room. No one else has ever seen this room, and no one else will. Very few people have laid eyes upon the room’s occupant in years. Why show off a broken, burned body and a face so pocked with scars that the nose is nothing but a slight bump in the livid landscape of pain? A thin tube, running from the right nostril to the stand beside the chair, part of that dim equipment, pumps nutrients and oxygen, should it be needed. The mouth has no lips, only scar tissue and teeth, but the tongue is perfect. There is a black box attached to a band around the throat, with a switch and a dial. It is a voice-diffuser, and it is set to ‘flat’. Inside that mutilated body, behind the blind, ruined eyes, the mind is cold and calculating.

Waiting. *

* * * * * Captain Malcolm Reynolds snickered as Jayne finished his joke. Mal was surprised; the big mercenary actually knew a joke that was pretty funny. Not as funny as Wash’s one-liners, but not half-bad. Kaylee was laughing her light, carefree guffaw, and Simon was trying as hard as he could not to smirk. Jayne nodded in appreciation, a look of self-satisfaction on his face. They’d just finished eating dinner, and were basking in an unexpected rush of good feelings. Even Zoe was smiling. Inara stood, ferrying dishes back and forth with River, who was at the sink. Sh