Fic: The Monster in the Closet
So ironically, despite how exhausted I was, I slept poorly and was up at quarter to six. Rather than begin the ordeal of unpacking, I logged on to see what was up with Multiverse - I'd received a piece of feedback, so I knew it was up. Turns out the authors have been revealed, so I can post the story in my journal! This is...dark. It was going to be quite a bit darker but I made myself sick.
You can also read the story at the Multiverse site here. (Also, apparently there was a probelm with the feedback form, so if you have actually sent a note on this story, I likely didn't receive it. There, that's my sole "woe is me, why does no one like my story?" snivelling.)
The Monster in the Closet
by Shaye
Rating: R
Summary: She doesn't have friends anymore; friends come for you when you need rescuing. She thinks this is how it begins for everyone here. (A Firefly/Stargate: Atlantis crossover)
Notes: Spoilers for all of Firefly including Serenity, and Atlantis through the end of season two. Thanks to sorlklewis for beta. Written for angelsgracie in Multiverse 2006.
+++
They say Reavers don't take prisoners.
Reports of their madness are growing, pushing beyond the Rim, spreading like disease or wildfire. Common wisdom says no one survives a Reaver attack, and now that they've been acknowledged as something beyond a childhood nightmare, there are well-known stories about what you might find if you stumbled upon the aftermath.
Eyewitness accounts of their depravity are necessarily rare and incomplete at best. One story that's often whispered tells of a man who faced down the Reavers with an old laser rifle. When it finally ran out of power, they gutted him with his pocket knife and fed him his own intestines.
Like all modern myths, the stories evolve in short order. What a woman on Osiris tells her grandchildren as a cautionary tale will bear little resemblance to the same story told around a campfire on Sinhon some months later.
The one thing they agree on, the one thing present in all of the stories is just this: they say Reavers don't take prisoners.
The stories are wrong. Even monsters like to have playthings.
+++
It's cold. She didn't think it would be cold. Shepherd woulda said hell was a hot place where sinners burn, but here the only thing that burns is the festering wound on her calf. They cut her once with a jagged piece of metal, deep enough to peel back skin and fat, and they keep reopening it to lick at the blood and pus inside.
She's on her courses, and even though there's nothing to contain the blood other than an old rag she found, she's relieved every month when it happens. It means that she's not pregnant with a crazy mutated baby. A Reaver baby would probably have seven arms and two heads. Then again, they are operating without containment. They're probably none of them fertile. Small favors.
She shivers and huddles into the corner to try to conserve heat. Her swollen calf radiates it, but the air is so cold around her. She can't get warm. Never had this problem on Serenity. Some people said the black was just a damn cold place no matter what you did, but her beautiful girl was never like that. Even in the darkest hours, the hum of Serenity's engines were there to comfort her.
She takes a deep shuddering breath, lays on the floor and presses her ear to the cold metal deck. The cell is large enough, just an old storage room. She lacks for privacy, not space.
Wrapping her arms tight around her body, she listens for the corrupted sound of the ship's engines. This ship is as much a prisoner of circumstance as she.
The hum is there, vibrating low beneath the other tortured noises the ship makes. She closes her eyes, and lets the sound lull her to sleep.
+++
The voice of a Reaver wakes her. They have a weird mumbling, squawking way of talking, barely audible sometimes and painfully loud at others. It never fails to send her skin crawling, to wake her from an exhausted sleep.
The Reaver opens the door of the communal cell. A few other people inside stir at the noise, but none wake up. No one's ever talked to her, not even back at the beginning when she tried to make friends. They just stare, all day long, even when it's their turn to be the plaything.
She doesn't have friends anymore; friends come for you when you need rescuing. She thinks this is how it begins for everyone here.
The Reaver doesn't drag anyone away. Instead the Reaver shoves a man inside, and he falls to the floor, whimpering in pain. They've stuck a spike through his cheek, and the blood tracks slowly down his face to stain his collar.
He's muttering under his breath, even as the Reaver stands over him, surveying the group's handiwork.
The man reaches up to touch the spike and she calls out, "Don't!" She's seen Reavers rip the metal inserts right out of somebody's flesh, if they tried to remove it.
His hand falls back to his side. The Reaver turns and seems to examine her for a few seconds, sending a chill over her skin. Then it leaves the room, door slamming behind.
The man looks up at her, his eyes flashing cold blue in the light from the corridor. His expression goes slack with relief; for some reason they've never chosen to mutilate her face.
"We got lost," he says, mouth widening as tears drip off his chin. "We got to Earth, and there was nobody there. Trans-dimensional harmonic rift. They were furious, they killed Ronon right in front of me. They kept me, though, needed me of course, to get back. And then we came here, and this ship attacked, and I thought, I thought..."
"You thought your friends were coming for you," she says kindly.
And he says, "Yes! No, no, that would be impossible. I thought I was saved."
"But they weren't your friends, they were Reavers."
He looks back at her, bewildered, and she can't believe how good it feels to talk to someone.
"We got so lost," he sobs.
She pulls him awkwardly against her body, and they lie there as he continues to cry. "That's okay," she says. "We all get a little lost sometimes."
+++
"Do you know," he says, staring at her in horror, "do you know what that is?"
She takes another mouthful. It's been days since she ate, and as far back as she can remember, she hasn't had the luxury of being picky about her food. It's particularly disgusting today, but it fills her belly. She shrugs.
"It's Wraith!" he shouts, tossing his bowl across the room. He'll regret that, she bets, in a day or so. "You're eating Wraith!"
She licks her fingers and wonders if that's a kind of bug.
Not an hour later, the Reavers come for her. They strap her down, chains biting into her flesh. One of them digs filthy fingers into the cut on her leg, and she bites the inside of her mouth as the meal she just ate roils heavily in her stomach.
She can't lean over, but she manages to turn her head as her gorge rises. She vomits all over her face and neck, into her hair, but she doesn't choke. She still can't make herself regret eating whatever it was that sent the man into a panic.
+++
She wakes up to find him hovering over her, the spike in his face angled down toward her as he frowns. "Are you okay?" he asks anxiously.
"I don't...I don't even remember falling asleep."
"That's because you passed out!" he says, spitting the last words. "While they were gang raping you."
"Oh," she says. "That." She takes a shaky breath. "There's a rag, over in the corner. Could you get it for me?"
He brings it back to her, face wrinkled at the blood. "What is this thing?"
She unfastens her jumpsuit all the way, watching his eyes widen with every button. "I can't hardly move. I need you to..."
"What, to what?" he asks frantically.
She explains what she needs and watches patiently while he struggles with embarrassment and disgust. But in the end, he reaches into her jumpsuit and places the rag for her, buttons her back up all nice and cozy.
The Reavers must be especially bored today, because even as she feels herself drift off again, they drag him kicking and screaming out of the cell. She hopes they use lube.
When they return him, he's missing part of his ear. Not the whole thing, just a portion of the shell-shaped bit on one side.
"They cut it off," he says, shaking, "and ate it right in front of me."
She shrugs. "Musta needed a snack," she says.
He looks at her sharply. "You're sick." Then, peering closer, he sas, "Wait, you really are sick."
"Prob'ly." She tries to sit up, but the screaming pain just from clenching her stomach muscles makes her lie back again. She gestures at the leg of her jumpsuit. "Go on, pull it up. Take a look."
He frowns, but touches her gently, pulling the cuff past her swollen calf with care. He gasps.
"Oh my God." She can see him gag, but he hadn't eaten, so he doesn't throw up all over her. "Maggots," he chokes out. "It's infested with maggots."
"Oh," she says faintly, "good."
"Good? Good? They're maggots!"
"They, they..." She trails off, remembering the look on Simon's face when he had to resort to primitive medical techniques. "They eat dead flesh," she finally says, with some difficulty.
He closes his eyes, but just for a moment, then pulls down the leg of her jumpsuit again. He lays down facing her, good ear to the ground, hand barely resting on hers. She falls asleep with him watching over her.
+++
The next time the grayish oozing meat gets passed out to each of them, he stares at his dish for a long time. The hunger in his face has gotten sharper over the last few days, and he's complained almost constantly. Finally he mutters something about irony and chokes down a handful, careful to avoid the array of metal his face has slowly been collecting.
He's starting to look like one of them.
Still gagging, he glances up at her and says, "Soylent Green is people!"
Then he laughs until he cries.
She doesn't blame him for not wanting to eat it this time - the meat's gone rancid since their last meal. But she's damned if she'll let him throw it away like he did before. She takes the bowl from his hands and holds it cradled against her body.
She hardly feels the cold at all anymore. He's constantly shivering in his short-sleeved shirt; she thinks that she's lucky she's got her jumpsuit.
When he shudders to silence, she holds the bowl out in his direction, but not close enough for him to knock it from her hand. "After awhile you don't even notice the taste, honest," she says.
He glares over at her, eyes bloodshot. "That's the fever talking," he says. Suddenly she wonders if that's why he's been curling up to her side every night. She kind of likes it, the coolness of his body aligned with hers. She likes it so long as she turns her head away, so she doesn't have to see his face.
But he takes the bowl from her anyway. He closes his eyes and scoops up a mouthful with his hands, chews lightly.
His eyes snap open, and he spits it back out into his palm. She sighs, but he doesn't make a disgusted face. His eyes are alight, and he spreads the meat out on his hand, separates a strange amber globule from the mass. She's never gotten one of those before.
"Oh my God," he says.
"What is it?" she asks. She doesn't see how he could think the meat was worse than he already did.
"They don't know what it does. They don't know." He stares at it for awhile, then rips one pocket out of his pants and wraps the globule carefully before stashing it in his other pocket.
"Aren't you gonna tell me what it is?"
He eats the rest of his bowl without complaining, looks over at her with rancid grease smeared over his wide mouth. "It's how I'm going to get out of this," he says.
+++
She doesn't find out what he means for days. They take him once more during that time, and he fumbles the package over to her. She unwraps it, takes gentle hold of the blob and examines it in the weak light from the corridor.
When they bring him back, he's got a line of pins stuck through one eyebrow, fanning out over his eye like enormous eyelashes. He lays on the floor, and his heavy, panting breath hitches once when she presses the rewrapped package back into his hands.
The next time they're fed, he falls on his bowl of rotten meat ravenously, combing through it first with his fingers, but there isn't another little blob in either of their bowls. He glances at the others, but their dead eyes ward him off.
He stares into his empty bowl when he's done, absently patting his pocket. "Can you walk?" he asks suddenly.
"I don't know," she says. "I suppose we could find out." She holds out her hands for him. He stands and pulls her to her feet. She tries to take a step, but pitches forward, grasping frantically at him to catch herself. Her infected leg won't hold her weight.
"I guess not," she says, and that's when they hear the Reaver coming back to get their bowls.
He takes a deep breath and holds it, mouth set in a thin frown. "I don't know how you did this without a needle, Ford, but I hope this works," he says, and takes the amber blob from his pocket. He puts it in his mouth and bites down, swallowing even as he makes a face at the taste.
When the door opens, he rushes forward, leaving her to try to regain her balance.
+++
"Hurry," he snaps at her. They round a corner and press themselves into a wall.
"I'm trying," she whispers. "Could ya just carry me?"
"Right, because then I'd have all of my hands free to fight off the Reavers!" He's sweating like a pig going to slaughter, and he's bleeding in at least three places, but he seems not to notice.
Another Reaver passes and he snaps its neck before it even sees him coming. Fresh dots of blood well up on his hands from the row of nails adorning one of the Reaver's ears.
They pass through a room piled high with all sorts of junk, and his eyes go wider. "I don't believe it!" He pulls a flat tablet from the bottom of a pile.
"Yours?" she asks, and he nods, pushing buttons.
"It still has power," he says when it lights up. "Oh, today, little girl, we are very lucky indeed."
He pushes a few more buttons, eyes moving over the screen, then shoves it at her. "Don't break it," he says, and grabs her arm. She limps after him, supporting as much of her weight on him as she can.
"That way," she says when they come to an intersection in the corridor. "Engine room's gotta be that way. I can hear her."
The hum of the ship leads them right to the heart of her, and he quickly spins the locking mechanism on the door. The poor engine is such a mess, she's surprised the ship still runs.
"Okay, first thing we need is control of the--"
"Containment," she says, and he stops.
"What?"
"Reavers run their engines without containment. We stay in here too long and we'll cook ourselves from the inside out. We gotta do that first."
"We're being irradiated?" he yelps. He immediately surveys the engine, and to her surprise, finds the first thing he needs to do right away.
She stumbles over to the engine and says, "Hand me that spanner, will you?" She tightens the converter cover and flips the switch, and before she can ask him to spin the engine so she can reach the other side, he's already finished the repair.
"My name's Kaylee," she says, and wonders why she never did before.
"Huh? Oh, Dr. Rodney McKay."
She doesn't know what kind of doctor knows how to fix a ship but can't fix a person, but he's already at the junction panel, uncoiling wires from his tablet and hooking them into the system. She thinks of telling him that her husband's a doctor, but she doubts it would be helpful under the circumstances.
"Uh," he says, "I need help." He turns to her, wire held out, and she sees that his hands are shaking. The sweating, if possible, is worse.
She drags herself over to the box, and he helps her stand again. She hooks the wires in where he tells her to, and when she's done, struggles back to the engine to undo all the horrible things the Reavers have done to her.
"Oh," he says, and when she looks over at him, he's staring at the screen. "I've got control of the airlocks."
She glances at the door. "Vent the ship to space," she says. That door's airtight, it'll hold just fine. "How's the oxygen?"
His fingers fly over the screen. "Half capacity?" he guesses.
She spares a thought for the other prisoners in the cell, with the door probably half open and no way of keeping in the oxygen even if it weren't. A gruesome face suddenly appears in the door's porthole, and the Reaver shrieks at them.
"Do it," she says, and he punches in a few commands. The hiss of the oxygen venting is soft at first, then becomes a roar. The screams of the others reach them for only a moment; after that, there isn't enough air to carry the sound.
After the oxygen has finished venting, the silence is almost complete, save the soft noises of the running ship. They stare at one another, and she notices that the engine sounds better already.
He snaps his fingers, says, "Life signs, life signs," and turns back to his tablet. A new screen comes up, and his eyes meet hers. "We did it," he says. "They're gone."
She beams up at him, and he comes toward her, still shaking badly. "They're gone, the ship is ours!" He sets the tablet aside and grips her upper arms in his hands. His smile is manic, his eyes are sparkling, but despite the metal in his face, he doesn't look like a Reaver at all. He kisses her suddenly, presses his lips to hers. She tastes salt and copper, sweat and blood, and the metallic tang of the ring in his lip.
She's never given any thought to what she'd do if she got out of this. She's never considered it a possibility. But she knows, suddenly, that she can never go back to Simon after this. Even if he wasn't the one that left her for dead, she couldn't stand the look on his face if he saw her now.
Rodney talks about his home while he punches more buttons on the tablet, about a whole city that's a ship, that's almost alive. When he gets another harmonic space rift set up, or whatever he calls it, he offers to take her with him. Kaylee accepts.
Her first love was always the beauty of machinery in motion.
--
end
You can also read the story at the Multiverse site here. (Also, apparently there was a probelm with the feedback form, so if you have actually sent a note on this story, I likely didn't receive it. There, that's my sole "woe is me, why does no one like my story?" snivelling.)
The Monster in the Closet
by Shaye
Rating: R
Summary: She doesn't have friends anymore; friends come for you when you need rescuing. She thinks this is how it begins for everyone here. (A Firefly/Stargate: Atlantis crossover)
Notes: Spoilers for all of Firefly including Serenity, and Atlantis through the end of season two. Thanks to sorlklewis for beta. Written for angelsgracie in Multiverse 2006.
+++
They say Reavers don't take prisoners.
Reports of their madness are growing, pushing beyond the Rim, spreading like disease or wildfire. Common wisdom says no one survives a Reaver attack, and now that they've been acknowledged as something beyond a childhood nightmare, there are well-known stories about what you might find if you stumbled upon the aftermath.
Eyewitness accounts of their depravity are necessarily rare and incomplete at best. One story that's often whispered tells of a man who faced down the Reavers with an old laser rifle. When it finally ran out of power, they gutted him with his pocket knife and fed him his own intestines.
Like all modern myths, the stories evolve in short order. What a woman on Osiris tells her grandchildren as a cautionary tale will bear little resemblance to the same story told around a campfire on Sinhon some months later.
The one thing they agree on, the one thing present in all of the stories is just this: they say Reavers don't take prisoners.
The stories are wrong. Even monsters like to have playthings.
+++
It's cold. She didn't think it would be cold. Shepherd woulda said hell was a hot place where sinners burn, but here the only thing that burns is the festering wound on her calf. They cut her once with a jagged piece of metal, deep enough to peel back skin and fat, and they keep reopening it to lick at the blood and pus inside.
She's on her courses, and even though there's nothing to contain the blood other than an old rag she found, she's relieved every month when it happens. It means that she's not pregnant with a crazy mutated baby. A Reaver baby would probably have seven arms and two heads. Then again, they are operating without containment. They're probably none of them fertile. Small favors.
She shivers and huddles into the corner to try to conserve heat. Her swollen calf radiates it, but the air is so cold around her. She can't get warm. Never had this problem on Serenity. Some people said the black was just a damn cold place no matter what you did, but her beautiful girl was never like that. Even in the darkest hours, the hum of Serenity's engines were there to comfort her.
She takes a deep shuddering breath, lays on the floor and presses her ear to the cold metal deck. The cell is large enough, just an old storage room. She lacks for privacy, not space.
Wrapping her arms tight around her body, she listens for the corrupted sound of the ship's engines. This ship is as much a prisoner of circumstance as she.
The hum is there, vibrating low beneath the other tortured noises the ship makes. She closes her eyes, and lets the sound lull her to sleep.
+++
The voice of a Reaver wakes her. They have a weird mumbling, squawking way of talking, barely audible sometimes and painfully loud at others. It never fails to send her skin crawling, to wake her from an exhausted sleep.
The Reaver opens the door of the communal cell. A few other people inside stir at the noise, but none wake up. No one's ever talked to her, not even back at the beginning when she tried to make friends. They just stare, all day long, even when it's their turn to be the plaything.
She doesn't have friends anymore; friends come for you when you need rescuing. She thinks this is how it begins for everyone here.
The Reaver doesn't drag anyone away. Instead the Reaver shoves a man inside, and he falls to the floor, whimpering in pain. They've stuck a spike through his cheek, and the blood tracks slowly down his face to stain his collar.
He's muttering under his breath, even as the Reaver stands over him, surveying the group's handiwork.
The man reaches up to touch the spike and she calls out, "Don't!" She's seen Reavers rip the metal inserts right out of somebody's flesh, if they tried to remove it.
His hand falls back to his side. The Reaver turns and seems to examine her for a few seconds, sending a chill over her skin. Then it leaves the room, door slamming behind.
The man looks up at her, his eyes flashing cold blue in the light from the corridor. His expression goes slack with relief; for some reason they've never chosen to mutilate her face.
"We got lost," he says, mouth widening as tears drip off his chin. "We got to Earth, and there was nobody there. Trans-dimensional harmonic rift. They were furious, they killed Ronon right in front of me. They kept me, though, needed me of course, to get back. And then we came here, and this ship attacked, and I thought, I thought..."
"You thought your friends were coming for you," she says kindly.
And he says, "Yes! No, no, that would be impossible. I thought I was saved."
"But they weren't your friends, they were Reavers."
He looks back at her, bewildered, and she can't believe how good it feels to talk to someone.
"We got so lost," he sobs.
She pulls him awkwardly against her body, and they lie there as he continues to cry. "That's okay," she says. "We all get a little lost sometimes."
+++
"Do you know," he says, staring at her in horror, "do you know what that is?"
She takes another mouthful. It's been days since she ate, and as far back as she can remember, she hasn't had the luxury of being picky about her food. It's particularly disgusting today, but it fills her belly. She shrugs.
"It's Wraith!" he shouts, tossing his bowl across the room. He'll regret that, she bets, in a day or so. "You're eating Wraith!"
She licks her fingers and wonders if that's a kind of bug.
Not an hour later, the Reavers come for her. They strap her down, chains biting into her flesh. One of them digs filthy fingers into the cut on her leg, and she bites the inside of her mouth as the meal she just ate roils heavily in her stomach.
She can't lean over, but she manages to turn her head as her gorge rises. She vomits all over her face and neck, into her hair, but she doesn't choke. She still can't make herself regret eating whatever it was that sent the man into a panic.
+++
She wakes up to find him hovering over her, the spike in his face angled down toward her as he frowns. "Are you okay?" he asks anxiously.
"I don't...I don't even remember falling asleep."
"That's because you passed out!" he says, spitting the last words. "While they were gang raping you."
"Oh," she says. "That." She takes a shaky breath. "There's a rag, over in the corner. Could you get it for me?"
He brings it back to her, face wrinkled at the blood. "What is this thing?"
She unfastens her jumpsuit all the way, watching his eyes widen with every button. "I can't hardly move. I need you to..."
"What, to what?" he asks frantically.
She explains what she needs and watches patiently while he struggles with embarrassment and disgust. But in the end, he reaches into her jumpsuit and places the rag for her, buttons her back up all nice and cozy.
The Reavers must be especially bored today, because even as she feels herself drift off again, they drag him kicking and screaming out of the cell. She hopes they use lube.
When they return him, he's missing part of his ear. Not the whole thing, just a portion of the shell-shaped bit on one side.
"They cut it off," he says, shaking, "and ate it right in front of me."
She shrugs. "Musta needed a snack," she says.
He looks at her sharply. "You're sick." Then, peering closer, he sas, "Wait, you really are sick."
"Prob'ly." She tries to sit up, but the screaming pain just from clenching her stomach muscles makes her lie back again. She gestures at the leg of her jumpsuit. "Go on, pull it up. Take a look."
He frowns, but touches her gently, pulling the cuff past her swollen calf with care. He gasps.
"Oh my God." She can see him gag, but he hadn't eaten, so he doesn't throw up all over her. "Maggots," he chokes out. "It's infested with maggots."
"Oh," she says faintly, "good."
"Good? Good? They're maggots!"
"They, they..." She trails off, remembering the look on Simon's face when he had to resort to primitive medical techniques. "They eat dead flesh," she finally says, with some difficulty.
He closes his eyes, but just for a moment, then pulls down the leg of her jumpsuit again. He lays down facing her, good ear to the ground, hand barely resting on hers. She falls asleep with him watching over her.
+++
The next time the grayish oozing meat gets passed out to each of them, he stares at his dish for a long time. The hunger in his face has gotten sharper over the last few days, and he's complained almost constantly. Finally he mutters something about irony and chokes down a handful, careful to avoid the array of metal his face has slowly been collecting.
He's starting to look like one of them.
Still gagging, he glances up at her and says, "Soylent Green is people!"
Then he laughs until he cries.
She doesn't blame him for not wanting to eat it this time - the meat's gone rancid since their last meal. But she's damned if she'll let him throw it away like he did before. She takes the bowl from his hands and holds it cradled against her body.
She hardly feels the cold at all anymore. He's constantly shivering in his short-sleeved shirt; she thinks that she's lucky she's got her jumpsuit.
When he shudders to silence, she holds the bowl out in his direction, but not close enough for him to knock it from her hand. "After awhile you don't even notice the taste, honest," she says.
He glares over at her, eyes bloodshot. "That's the fever talking," he says. Suddenly she wonders if that's why he's been curling up to her side every night. She kind of likes it, the coolness of his body aligned with hers. She likes it so long as she turns her head away, so she doesn't have to see his face.
But he takes the bowl from her anyway. He closes his eyes and scoops up a mouthful with his hands, chews lightly.
His eyes snap open, and he spits it back out into his palm. She sighs, but he doesn't make a disgusted face. His eyes are alight, and he spreads the meat out on his hand, separates a strange amber globule from the mass. She's never gotten one of those before.
"Oh my God," he says.
"What is it?" she asks. She doesn't see how he could think the meat was worse than he already did.
"They don't know what it does. They don't know." He stares at it for awhile, then rips one pocket out of his pants and wraps the globule carefully before stashing it in his other pocket.
"Aren't you gonna tell me what it is?"
He eats the rest of his bowl without complaining, looks over at her with rancid grease smeared over his wide mouth. "It's how I'm going to get out of this," he says.
+++
She doesn't find out what he means for days. They take him once more during that time, and he fumbles the package over to her. She unwraps it, takes gentle hold of the blob and examines it in the weak light from the corridor.
When they bring him back, he's got a line of pins stuck through one eyebrow, fanning out over his eye like enormous eyelashes. He lays on the floor, and his heavy, panting breath hitches once when she presses the rewrapped package back into his hands.
The next time they're fed, he falls on his bowl of rotten meat ravenously, combing through it first with his fingers, but there isn't another little blob in either of their bowls. He glances at the others, but their dead eyes ward him off.
He stares into his empty bowl when he's done, absently patting his pocket. "Can you walk?" he asks suddenly.
"I don't know," she says. "I suppose we could find out." She holds out her hands for him. He stands and pulls her to her feet. She tries to take a step, but pitches forward, grasping frantically at him to catch herself. Her infected leg won't hold her weight.
"I guess not," she says, and that's when they hear the Reaver coming back to get their bowls.
He takes a deep breath and holds it, mouth set in a thin frown. "I don't know how you did this without a needle, Ford, but I hope this works," he says, and takes the amber blob from his pocket. He puts it in his mouth and bites down, swallowing even as he makes a face at the taste.
When the door opens, he rushes forward, leaving her to try to regain her balance.
+++
"Hurry," he snaps at her. They round a corner and press themselves into a wall.
"I'm trying," she whispers. "Could ya just carry me?"
"Right, because then I'd have all of my hands free to fight off the Reavers!" He's sweating like a pig going to slaughter, and he's bleeding in at least three places, but he seems not to notice.
Another Reaver passes and he snaps its neck before it even sees him coming. Fresh dots of blood well up on his hands from the row of nails adorning one of the Reaver's ears.
They pass through a room piled high with all sorts of junk, and his eyes go wider. "I don't believe it!" He pulls a flat tablet from the bottom of a pile.
"Yours?" she asks, and he nods, pushing buttons.
"It still has power," he says when it lights up. "Oh, today, little girl, we are very lucky indeed."
He pushes a few more buttons, eyes moving over the screen, then shoves it at her. "Don't break it," he says, and grabs her arm. She limps after him, supporting as much of her weight on him as she can.
"That way," she says when they come to an intersection in the corridor. "Engine room's gotta be that way. I can hear her."
The hum of the ship leads them right to the heart of her, and he quickly spins the locking mechanism on the door. The poor engine is such a mess, she's surprised the ship still runs.
"Okay, first thing we need is control of the--"
"Containment," she says, and he stops.
"What?"
"Reavers run their engines without containment. We stay in here too long and we'll cook ourselves from the inside out. We gotta do that first."
"We're being irradiated?" he yelps. He immediately surveys the engine, and to her surprise, finds the first thing he needs to do right away.
She stumbles over to the engine and says, "Hand me that spanner, will you?" She tightens the converter cover and flips the switch, and before she can ask him to spin the engine so she can reach the other side, he's already finished the repair.
"My name's Kaylee," she says, and wonders why she never did before.
"Huh? Oh, Dr. Rodney McKay."
She doesn't know what kind of doctor knows how to fix a ship but can't fix a person, but he's already at the junction panel, uncoiling wires from his tablet and hooking them into the system. She thinks of telling him that her husband's a doctor, but she doubts it would be helpful under the circumstances.
"Uh," he says, "I need help." He turns to her, wire held out, and she sees that his hands are shaking. The sweating, if possible, is worse.
She drags herself over to the box, and he helps her stand again. She hooks the wires in where he tells her to, and when she's done, struggles back to the engine to undo all the horrible things the Reavers have done to her.
"Oh," he says, and when she looks over at him, he's staring at the screen. "I've got control of the airlocks."
She glances at the door. "Vent the ship to space," she says. That door's airtight, it'll hold just fine. "How's the oxygen?"
His fingers fly over the screen. "Half capacity?" he guesses.
She spares a thought for the other prisoners in the cell, with the door probably half open and no way of keeping in the oxygen even if it weren't. A gruesome face suddenly appears in the door's porthole, and the Reaver shrieks at them.
"Do it," she says, and he punches in a few commands. The hiss of the oxygen venting is soft at first, then becomes a roar. The screams of the others reach them for only a moment; after that, there isn't enough air to carry the sound.
After the oxygen has finished venting, the silence is almost complete, save the soft noises of the running ship. They stare at one another, and she notices that the engine sounds better already.
He snaps his fingers, says, "Life signs, life signs," and turns back to his tablet. A new screen comes up, and his eyes meet hers. "We did it," he says. "They're gone."
She beams up at him, and he comes toward her, still shaking badly. "They're gone, the ship is ours!" He sets the tablet aside and grips her upper arms in his hands. His smile is manic, his eyes are sparkling, but despite the metal in his face, he doesn't look like a Reaver at all. He kisses her suddenly, presses his lips to hers. She tastes salt and copper, sweat and blood, and the metallic tang of the ring in his lip.
She's never given any thought to what she'd do if she got out of this. She's never considered it a possibility. But she knows, suddenly, that she can never go back to Simon after this. Even if he wasn't the one that left her for dead, she couldn't stand the look on his face if he saw her now.
Rodney talks about his home while he punches more buttons on the tablet, about a whole city that's a ship, that's almost alive. When he gets another harmonic space rift set up, or whatever he calls it, he offers to take her with him. Kaylee accepts.
Her first love was always the beauty of machinery in motion.
--
end