Firefly - Little Girl Lost
Title: Little Girl Lost
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Character/Pairings: Gabriel, Regan, Jayne/River
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Post BDM
Notes: I made up a model of a ship.
Summary: In the aftermath of Miranda and the downfall of the Alliance, Gabriel sets out to find his daughter.
Little Girl Lost
It has been seven years since Gabriel Tam pecked a kiss on his daughter’s forehead and closed the car door behind her as she left for the Academy. Four years since he last saw his heir, Simon. Four years of living with the shame. First, the shame of knowing that his children were fugitives. Three years of living with the knowledge that Simon had been right all along.
After that horrible broadcast aired, the Alliance had fallen apart. Reports were unearthed from the depths of the file cabinets and given to the public. Horrific reports describing other experiments. Experiments involving children. His child.
Regan was glued to the Cortex screen, her hand caressing River’s cheek as her little girl answered the interviewer’s questions. Her cheeks an attractive pink, as she waxed poetic on her favourite theme: quantum physics.
How many times had Gabriel told her to that children should be seen and not heard just because he hated the fact that his own child was smarter than himself? How many times had River looked away, trying not to cry as she once again failed to make her daddy proud?
“My little girl,” Regan sobs as River smiles and asks for a pen. Her little fingers so innocent and white, then in a split second, so sinister and red.
The screen is smudged with Regan’s fingerprints. It doesn’t matter that the maid wipes it clean every morning. By night, Gabriel can barely read his stock figures.
For an entire week after the R. Tam Sessions were released to the public, Regan refuses to look her husband in the eye. She speaks to him as if she wasn’t even sure he was there, constantly seeking out the figure of her daughter.
Finally, she breaks her silence to ask him where her daughter is.
He tries telling her he doesn’t know and she throws a priceless vase from Earth-that-was at his head.
“You find her.” She tells him. “You find my daughter and you take me to her.”
She leaves him before he can argue that this isn’t his fault, that River begged him to go, that Regan hadn’t believed Simon either.
A day later, there's a follow-up news story with footage from a bar in Maidenhead and there River is.
Regan’s hands are once more pressed up against the screen as she watches her daughter kill a bar full of people.
She laughs and she cries and she tells Gabriel to come and watch his daughter dance. “I told you those dance lessons would come in handy,” she says. “You should have let her continue.”
Gabriel shudders and wishes he had done that. River had been so in love with the art that she had literally danced everywhere she went. It was when the company had offered her a permanent position as the prima ballerina that Gabriel had pulled her out. She was a Tam. Far too important to be a beggar for others' entertainment. He should have left her there where she would never have known that a pen could be a weapon.
He bends down beside his wife and takes her elbow as she refuses to lose touch of River. On the screen, a giant of a man grabs River from behind and tells her it’s him. Regan’s eyes widen and her mouth parts open.
“Oh.” She smiles.
“Regan,” Gabriel shakes her elbow a little to draw her attention.
She hums at him, her mouth twitching in a smile as she watches her daughter dispatch the giant without killing him.
“I’ll bring her back. Simon too.”
Regan turns her head away from the screen and looks up at him through her lashes. “I wonder if it isn’t too late.” She gives him a secretive smile and rewinds the material to watch River and the big man again. “She’s been claimed.”
Gabriel leaves her then, her gift having always made him uncomfortable.
In the silence of her own company, Regan kisses her daughter’s face on the Cortex. “I love you and I’m happy for you, my darling.”
In her mind’s eye, she can see her daughter pausing in the middle of her wedding dance as she feels the brush of her mother’s lips. The young woman’s mouth falls open in shock and the giant of a man who is her groom gently touches her face. River smiles up at him.
“Mother sends us her blessing.”
His eyes soften in a way that Gabriel’s never have when Regan tries to share her gift with him and the mother can’t help but feel a little jealous.
“Tell ‘er thanks fer me.”
River takes his face with her white hands and pulls him down so that she can kiss him in gratitude.
Regan collapses on the floor of the living room, where she is later found by the maid. She’s in a coma for a week, dreaming the entire time of her daughter’s wedding and of their next meeting.
Gabriel leaves for the Rim shortly after she wakes back up. She sends him off with a package for River and tells him not to open it. It is something for mothers and daughters only.
~*~
Gabriel never admits it to Regan, but he procrastinates on finding their children. In truth, he doesn’t want to find Simon. He doesn’t want to see the righteous anger in Simon’s eyes, the triumph as he is forced to admit to his son that he was wrong and Simon was right.
He tries not to think of River too much.
River the child he loved because she is his daughter even as she exasperated him with her intelligence. One is not supposed to be jealous of his child and yet he is. He’s hated how she’d corrected him, how she’s always been right. He’s hated how she was always doing things she wasn’t supposed to, like dancing or physics. How she had the same infernal gift as her mother.
He’s hated parts of her, but he’s also loved her and would have died for her. Somewhere out there, is his baby who’s become a lab rat. Proof that he failed as a father.
Regan stumbles into his office one day, her legs still unsteady after her sudden and unexplainable coma and she slaps him hard across the cheek. So hard, he cuts the inner muscles of his cheek on his teeth. As he tries to get up from the floor, watching this mad woman as she trashes his office, he can’t help but wonder if River looks anything like her mother. He winces and hopes not. This is a wild woman who looked nothing like the usual poised vision who greets him everyday with a kiss before he goes to work and a kiss when he returns back home.
Regan finds the bottle of brandy in his desk and breaks it on a corner of his desk. She holds the jagged edges up against his neck.
“Get off your ass and find my children.”
She drops the shattered remains of the bottle into his wastebasket and leaves the office.
Gabriel stops procrastinating.
~*~
It takes several months and more money then he’d like to think about, but Gabriel Tam eventually finds the Firefly ship Serenity, where his fugitive children were sheltered for two years.
Even though it really shouldn’t matter, he wastes more time by checking to make sure he’s done up all the buttons on his shirt, that his fly is done up, that he still has his watch, that there's nothing in his teeth.
His mobile chirps and he absently answers it.
“Quit stalling,” snaps his wife.
He jumps and slaps the phone closed.
And then, there’s nothing for it but for Gabriel to walk up the ramp.
He finds Simon, but River is gone.
“Gone?” Gabriel repeats. There is a cold hand clutching at his heart and he thinks it’s Regan and River both. “Oh God.” Sobs escape his throat as he loses control in front of these strangers.
Simon, who has been a statue up till this point, looks startled as if he’d forgotten his father was human.
The two Browncoats exchange glances and their eyes have lost their ice when they look at him.
“I should have listened,” Gabriel cries. “Damn me to Hell.” He reaches into his pocket and with a trembling hand, draws out a tax sheet from back when River was five. It’s filled with corrections made with a purple marker because River had once read that red marker made people feel bad about their mistakes. The paper has grown soft with the amount of times he’s folded and unfolded it.
He unfolds it now as if he might see her face. He doesn’t.
“Was it at least peaceful?” He begs, willing them to lie to him.
Simon’s arms wrap around him and Gabriel is unashamed of the fact that he clutches at him. He’d never known his son was so strong.
“Father,” Simon’s voice is firm. “It’s alright.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “She’s gone.” He wants to lash out at his son, but he can’t when Simon at least gave her a fighting chance.
“Yes,” Simon agrees. “She left with her husband. He finally got enough money for his own boat.”
Gabriel’s hands are shaking as he grabs hold of Simon’s shoulders. Simon doesn’t even flinch. “Truth?”
Simon’s eyes finally soften. “Yes.”
Gabriel proceeds to embarrass Simon by dropping to his knees and thanking him over and over again for not listening to his stupid father and saving River.
That night, he feasts with the crew. He knows that they still judge him, but that’s unimportant because Simon is here and Simon is happy and Simon has finally become a man. Simon has his own shadow now.
He barely eats as he basks in the praise the Captain gives Simon. Simon blushes and ducks his head, but at the same time, Gabriel knows that all that praise is earned.
They talk a little about River too. Not too much as they seem to feel that she is too much of a sore point, but they do tell him that she was the pilot of Serenity for a good three years before leaving to pilot her husband’s ship, Giselle.
“He let River name it,” Simon explains.
Kaylee, his son’s sweetheart, giggles. “Not before he tried to call it River first. You should have seen his face when she told him it was a horrible name for a boat.”
Captain Mal snorts. “Don’t forget his face when she suggested that they name it after him instead.”
“Who could forget that last Jayne-is-a-girl’s-name fight?” asks Simon cheerfully. “We had to get a new table after they made up.”
"And a week's worth of therapy," mutters the Captain.
Gabriel sets out just as dawn is breaking. He hugs Kaylee. Shakes the Captain’s hand and thanks him again. Hugs Simon as if he’ll never let go.
“Thank you for ignoring me,” he whispers in his son’s ear. “Thank you.”
Things aren’t mended and they may never be, but there’s one plank across the water and maybe one day the bridge will be as elaborate and sturdy as it once was.
He gives Simon a letter from his mother and heads on his way.
Pounding footsteps alert him to a second presence and he turns around to see Simon and Kaylee behind him panting for breath. Simon holds his mother’s letter and a smaller envelope in his hand. It’s addressed to Kaylee Frye.
No questions are asked, but no answers are given either. The ones who could provide them are not there.
~*~
Gabriel has spent a week on Persephone, looking for Giselle, but no one knows where it’s gone. Instead, he hears horrific stories about the Captain and his wife. Stories that send chills down his bones.
Jayne Cobb, the best Mercenary the universe has ever managed to produce, ruthless and deadly. Weapons were his speciality and Death his lover. Put a weapon he’d never seen into Jayne Cobb’s hands and within seconds he’d know it inside out and all its little tics. Not to mention how deadly he was without a weapon on hand. Also, a tracker of remarkable skill, it was impossible to hide from him. He’d worked for years as a hired gun before finally getting enough money for his own ship, which he had bought after marrying a woman who was Death incarnate.
River Cobb nee Tam: a government experiment gone wrong. A weapon hidden in human flesh. She’d once taken on twenty Reavers by herself and come out alive with barely a scratch. A mind that worked too fast for others to compete and wasn’t quite all there. A woman who can shoot accurately without ever looking at the target.
After another day of searching, he returns to his hotel to find a letter from his wife.
She’s not there. She’s not going to be there. They’re on Hades like your contact said. QUIT STALLING.
She includes a drawing River made for him when she was four. It’s a krypton atom.
Gabriel leaves for Hades that night.
~*~
Despite its name, Hades looks more like a paradise then a hell.
Gabriel walks the streets scanning for his child. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he sees her; he just needs to find River. He can figure out what to do afterwards.
Finally, he gathers his courage and asks one of the Dock Managers. They point him to a ship at the other end of the yard. A Sparrow model, the ship looks more sinister than it should as he approaches.
Gabriel swallows several times over as he tries to summon the courage to take that final step forward.
A large man passes by him, his bright blue eyes glancing at him. Gabriel can’t help but shiver. It’s as if the other man can see his fear. The large man bares his teeth and passes by him toward the ship, his step light.
In the doorway of Giselle, a young woman dressed in a tank top and tight jeans steps into view. She holds out her arms to the sun and the giant catches her up in his arms. The girl who was and is Gabriel’s River laughs in delight as her husband spins her around before placing her back on her feet.
Gabriel edges forward, watching as Jayne Cobb steadies River’s wobbly body and asks her how badly he just scrambled her brains.
Gabriel opens his mouth to tell him off, ready to be his daughter’s white knight once more, but River laughs again. It’s such a joyous sound that Gabriel can’t help but close his eyes to bask in it.
“I believe you have just shaken my sanity to bits yet again, husband.” There’s a lightness Gabriel’s never heard in her voice before and he realizes with a start that she’s teasing. Did she ever joke as a child?
“Good,” her husband nods in satisfaction. “Yer borin’ when yer sane.”
“Trying to make me as insane as you.”
“How else will ya git my jokes?”
“Won’t work.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Confident that she’s steady, Cobb draws River closer. River places her arms around his neck. Both of them lose their smirks as they close their eyes and just lean their foreheads against each other. Cobb pulls up his hand to tangle in River’s long, dark hair, his other hand possessively at her waist. River nudges his nose with hers and he nudges back. He ducks his face a little lower and pecks her lips again and again, until River captures them by biting his lower lip. Cobb chuckles and submits. River's hands are in his hair, as if he'll try to escape if she lets go. Cobb curls more of her hair around his wrist - a willing captive.
It is a peaceful moment in a bustling world. A moment that Gabriel is unwelcome in.
His hands clutching his wife’s parcel, Gabriel edges backward. River does not need him. She’s never needed him. He will not ruin this for her as he’s ruined the rest of her life.
“You’re going to depart without saying goodbye?” River’s voice cuts through the air, and for a moment, she’s fourteen-years-old trying to make her father just a little bit later for his meeting so she can have a proper goodbye.
His lips burn as Gabriel remembers that last kiss on the forehead. He looks at her.
River stands there, all grown-up, holding her husband’s hand as if it were a lifeline and perhaps it is. Cobb glares over her head and with a shock Gabriel realizes that Cobb knew exactly who he was the moment he set eyes on him. He licks his lips. Cobb’s look turns murderous when Gabriel doesn’t speak. He looks away from him and realizes why the large man looks so ready to kill. River is staring at him, so lost and young and fourteen again.
Gabriel shakes his head. “No,” his voice is weak.
River offers him a tentative smile. “Oh. I’m glad.”
She holds out her hand to him.
Gabriel doesn’t hesitate to take it.
Cobb's hand falls away from the LeMat at his belt.
~*~
Cobb cooks dinner as River busies herself with her mother’s package. Gabriel watches her as she attacks the knots with her small fingers (tries not to think of pens), watches him as he fries large slabs of steak, pausing every now and then to work on the salad.
“You didn’t want to stay with your brother?”
Cobb frowns over his shoulder at him, but instantly relaxes when River shakes her head.
“It has always been Jayne’s dream to have his own ship, to be under his own rule. I could not and I would not ask him to give that up for me.” Her eyes twinkle. “Besides Mal’s orders kept interfering with mine.” She shrieks with laughter as Cobb throws a spoon at her. She catches it and neatly throws it back. Cobb is ready and simply sets it back down on the counter, eyebrow raised. Flirting, Gabriel realizes.
Cobb winks. “I like followin’ yers better.”
“Of course you do. I am a much better employer.” River shoots him a superior smirk and ignores the face her husband makes at her. “I allowed him to be Captain because he complained so much. I, on the other hand, don’t need a title.” A bun hits her in the face.
Cobb is suspiciously busy with the food, his back toward the father and daughter.
River giggles.
Gabriel feels a pang as he realizes the truth. He isn’t bringing her home. He won’t get a second chance to make it up to her.
“Oh,” River breathes. “Jayne, come and see.” The big man was instantly by her side. “It’s my baby blanket.” She hugs it to her body. She stiffens for a moment before relaxing, Cobb’s hand on her back. “Tell mother, we will be at her side for when the baby arrives.” She snuggles the blanket. "I want her holding my hand."
Cobb’s face is soft as he looks at River, and Gabriel knows that he’s seeing an expression that only River has ever seen on this man’s face. Cobb loves his daughter. He watches as every touch the man gives River is filled with gentleness. Gabriel feels a pang of regret that he couldn’t have given River away to him. That pang deepens as Cobb brushes his lips against River’s temple, his hand reaching down to caress her stomach.
River looks up at her father and Gabriel feels a sense of pride as she smiles shyly at him. He’s finally managed to do the right thing.
~*~
The couple walk him back to his boat. Cobb - Jayne walks a short distance behind to allow father and daughter to visit and River holds Gabriel's hand.
How could he have ever not wanted to hold her hand and listen to her chatter away?
“Mother and I knew.” River says suddenly. “We knew our options and we chose.”
Gabriel freezes even as he keeps walking.
“Fourteen and already so many roads blocked. If I tried to return to any of them... Prima ballerina - raped and murdered. Found in the river on Ariel seven months later. They get away. Scientist - mocked and ridiculed for the rest of my life for discovering the effects of PAX. No evidence to back up theory of Reaver’s birth. Found dead in my apartment. Ruled a suicide. Or locked away in asylum. So many possibilities.” She smiles, her eyes glancing over her shoulder to find Jayne. “Only one where I find my soul mate and we survive and we save the world. Mother cried, pleaded for there to be another way, but realized the truth in the end.”
Gabriel closes his eyes as he remembers River begging him to let her go to the Academy. Regan begging on her daughter’s behalf. He’d been considering contracting a marriage between River and one of his partners - more than forty years her age. A man known for beating his lovers.
River kisses his cheek. “Yes, I suffered. But Simon came.”
She doesn't need to tell him that in one possibility, Gabriel led the charge to save her. No wonder Regan lost her faith in him. He, who had insisted it was nothing.
River's eyes find Jayne again and they sadden for an instant. “We all did, but we are all better now. Finally healed.” She leans into her father’s side. “I healed him,” she whispers.
Gabriel doesn’t need to say that Jayne healed her too.
They drop him off at his boat, Jayne warns the Captain what will happen if his father-in-law isn’t taken care of, and the couple walk off into the night. Gabriel watches as Jayne wraps his arms around River’s shoulders and how River leans into him. He can hear their laughter ringing through the night.
~*~
Regan is waiting for him when the ship sets down. She doesn’t even allow him to say hello before she’s kissing him hard and fierce. Just like she used to when they were first married and she was passionately in love with him. Just like she did before Simon came home with his sister's letter.
“Thank you for coming home.”
He stammers as he explains he couldn’t bring River home because she was married now and expecting. There’s a twinkle in Regan’s eye and he knows that she knew all along.
“But you did bring them home,” Regan says, happy tears in her eyes. "You brought everyone home." She kisses him again, and Gabriel Tam takes a page out of his children's book and seizes the moment.
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Character/Pairings: Gabriel, Regan, Jayne/River
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Post BDM
Notes: I made up a model of a ship.
Summary: In the aftermath of Miranda and the downfall of the Alliance, Gabriel sets out to find his daughter.
Little Girl Lost
It has been seven years since Gabriel Tam pecked a kiss on his daughter’s forehead and closed the car door behind her as she left for the Academy. Four years since he last saw his heir, Simon. Four years of living with the shame. First, the shame of knowing that his children were fugitives. Three years of living with the knowledge that Simon had been right all along.
After that horrible broadcast aired, the Alliance had fallen apart. Reports were unearthed from the depths of the file cabinets and given to the public. Horrific reports describing other experiments. Experiments involving children. His child.
Regan was glued to the Cortex screen, her hand caressing River’s cheek as her little girl answered the interviewer’s questions. Her cheeks an attractive pink, as she waxed poetic on her favourite theme: quantum physics.
How many times had Gabriel told her to that children should be seen and not heard just because he hated the fact that his own child was smarter than himself? How many times had River looked away, trying not to cry as she once again failed to make her daddy proud?
“My little girl,” Regan sobs as River smiles and asks for a pen. Her little fingers so innocent and white, then in a split second, so sinister and red.
The screen is smudged with Regan’s fingerprints. It doesn’t matter that the maid wipes it clean every morning. By night, Gabriel can barely read his stock figures.
For an entire week after the R. Tam Sessions were released to the public, Regan refuses to look her husband in the eye. She speaks to him as if she wasn’t even sure he was there, constantly seeking out the figure of her daughter.
Finally, she breaks her silence to ask him where her daughter is.
He tries telling her he doesn’t know and she throws a priceless vase from Earth-that-was at his head.
“You find her.” She tells him. “You find my daughter and you take me to her.”
She leaves him before he can argue that this isn’t his fault, that River begged him to go, that Regan hadn’t believed Simon either.
A day later, there's a follow-up news story with footage from a bar in Maidenhead and there River is.
Regan’s hands are once more pressed up against the screen as she watches her daughter kill a bar full of people.
She laughs and she cries and she tells Gabriel to come and watch his daughter dance. “I told you those dance lessons would come in handy,” she says. “You should have let her continue.”
Gabriel shudders and wishes he had done that. River had been so in love with the art that she had literally danced everywhere she went. It was when the company had offered her a permanent position as the prima ballerina that Gabriel had pulled her out. She was a Tam. Far too important to be a beggar for others' entertainment. He should have left her there where she would never have known that a pen could be a weapon.
He bends down beside his wife and takes her elbow as she refuses to lose touch of River. On the screen, a giant of a man grabs River from behind and tells her it’s him. Regan’s eyes widen and her mouth parts open.
“Oh.” She smiles.
“Regan,” Gabriel shakes her elbow a little to draw her attention.
She hums at him, her mouth twitching in a smile as she watches her daughter dispatch the giant without killing him.
“I’ll bring her back. Simon too.”
Regan turns her head away from the screen and looks up at him through her lashes. “I wonder if it isn’t too late.” She gives him a secretive smile and rewinds the material to watch River and the big man again. “She’s been claimed.”
Gabriel leaves her then, her gift having always made him uncomfortable.
In the silence of her own company, Regan kisses her daughter’s face on the Cortex. “I love you and I’m happy for you, my darling.”
In her mind’s eye, she can see her daughter pausing in the middle of her wedding dance as she feels the brush of her mother’s lips. The young woman’s mouth falls open in shock and the giant of a man who is her groom gently touches her face. River smiles up at him.
“Mother sends us her blessing.”
His eyes soften in a way that Gabriel’s never have when Regan tries to share her gift with him and the mother can’t help but feel a little jealous.
“Tell ‘er thanks fer me.”
River takes his face with her white hands and pulls him down so that she can kiss him in gratitude.
Regan collapses on the floor of the living room, where she is later found by the maid. She’s in a coma for a week, dreaming the entire time of her daughter’s wedding and of their next meeting.
Gabriel leaves for the Rim shortly after she wakes back up. She sends him off with a package for River and tells him not to open it. It is something for mothers and daughters only.
~*~
Gabriel never admits it to Regan, but he procrastinates on finding their children. In truth, he doesn’t want to find Simon. He doesn’t want to see the righteous anger in Simon’s eyes, the triumph as he is forced to admit to his son that he was wrong and Simon was right.
He tries not to think of River too much.
River the child he loved because she is his daughter even as she exasperated him with her intelligence. One is not supposed to be jealous of his child and yet he is. He’s hated how she’d corrected him, how she’s always been right. He’s hated how she was always doing things she wasn’t supposed to, like dancing or physics. How she had the same infernal gift as her mother.
He’s hated parts of her, but he’s also loved her and would have died for her. Somewhere out there, is his baby who’s become a lab rat. Proof that he failed as a father.
Regan stumbles into his office one day, her legs still unsteady after her sudden and unexplainable coma and she slaps him hard across the cheek. So hard, he cuts the inner muscles of his cheek on his teeth. As he tries to get up from the floor, watching this mad woman as she trashes his office, he can’t help but wonder if River looks anything like her mother. He winces and hopes not. This is a wild woman who looked nothing like the usual poised vision who greets him everyday with a kiss before he goes to work and a kiss when he returns back home.
Regan finds the bottle of brandy in his desk and breaks it on a corner of his desk. She holds the jagged edges up against his neck.
“Get off your ass and find my children.”
She drops the shattered remains of the bottle into his wastebasket and leaves the office.
Gabriel stops procrastinating.
~*~
It takes several months and more money then he’d like to think about, but Gabriel Tam eventually finds the Firefly ship Serenity, where his fugitive children were sheltered for two years.
Even though it really shouldn’t matter, he wastes more time by checking to make sure he’s done up all the buttons on his shirt, that his fly is done up, that he still has his watch, that there's nothing in his teeth.
His mobile chirps and he absently answers it.
“Quit stalling,” snaps his wife.
He jumps and slaps the phone closed.
And then, there’s nothing for it but for Gabriel to walk up the ramp.
He finds Simon, but River is gone.
“Gone?” Gabriel repeats. There is a cold hand clutching at his heart and he thinks it’s Regan and River both. “Oh God.” Sobs escape his throat as he loses control in front of these strangers.
Simon, who has been a statue up till this point, looks startled as if he’d forgotten his father was human.
The two Browncoats exchange glances and their eyes have lost their ice when they look at him.
“I should have listened,” Gabriel cries. “Damn me to Hell.” He reaches into his pocket and with a trembling hand, draws out a tax sheet from back when River was five. It’s filled with corrections made with a purple marker because River had once read that red marker made people feel bad about their mistakes. The paper has grown soft with the amount of times he’s folded and unfolded it.
He unfolds it now as if he might see her face. He doesn’t.
“Was it at least peaceful?” He begs, willing them to lie to him.
Simon’s arms wrap around him and Gabriel is unashamed of the fact that he clutches at him. He’d never known his son was so strong.
“Father,” Simon’s voice is firm. “It’s alright.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “She’s gone.” He wants to lash out at his son, but he can’t when Simon at least gave her a fighting chance.
“Yes,” Simon agrees. “She left with her husband. He finally got enough money for his own boat.”
Gabriel’s hands are shaking as he grabs hold of Simon’s shoulders. Simon doesn’t even flinch. “Truth?”
Simon’s eyes finally soften. “Yes.”
Gabriel proceeds to embarrass Simon by dropping to his knees and thanking him over and over again for not listening to his stupid father and saving River.
That night, he feasts with the crew. He knows that they still judge him, but that’s unimportant because Simon is here and Simon is happy and Simon has finally become a man. Simon has his own shadow now.
He barely eats as he basks in the praise the Captain gives Simon. Simon blushes and ducks his head, but at the same time, Gabriel knows that all that praise is earned.
They talk a little about River too. Not too much as they seem to feel that she is too much of a sore point, but they do tell him that she was the pilot of Serenity for a good three years before leaving to pilot her husband’s ship, Giselle.
“He let River name it,” Simon explains.
Kaylee, his son’s sweetheart, giggles. “Not before he tried to call it River first. You should have seen his face when she told him it was a horrible name for a boat.”
Captain Mal snorts. “Don’t forget his face when she suggested that they name it after him instead.”
“Who could forget that last Jayne-is-a-girl’s-name fight?” asks Simon cheerfully. “We had to get a new table after they made up.”
"And a week's worth of therapy," mutters the Captain.
Gabriel sets out just as dawn is breaking. He hugs Kaylee. Shakes the Captain’s hand and thanks him again. Hugs Simon as if he’ll never let go.
“Thank you for ignoring me,” he whispers in his son’s ear. “Thank you.”
Things aren’t mended and they may never be, but there’s one plank across the water and maybe one day the bridge will be as elaborate and sturdy as it once was.
He gives Simon a letter from his mother and heads on his way.
Pounding footsteps alert him to a second presence and he turns around to see Simon and Kaylee behind him panting for breath. Simon holds his mother’s letter and a smaller envelope in his hand. It’s addressed to Kaylee Frye.
No questions are asked, but no answers are given either. The ones who could provide them are not there.
~*~
Gabriel has spent a week on Persephone, looking for Giselle, but no one knows where it’s gone. Instead, he hears horrific stories about the Captain and his wife. Stories that send chills down his bones.
Jayne Cobb, the best Mercenary the universe has ever managed to produce, ruthless and deadly. Weapons were his speciality and Death his lover. Put a weapon he’d never seen into Jayne Cobb’s hands and within seconds he’d know it inside out and all its little tics. Not to mention how deadly he was without a weapon on hand. Also, a tracker of remarkable skill, it was impossible to hide from him. He’d worked for years as a hired gun before finally getting enough money for his own ship, which he had bought after marrying a woman who was Death incarnate.
River Cobb nee Tam: a government experiment gone wrong. A weapon hidden in human flesh. She’d once taken on twenty Reavers by herself and come out alive with barely a scratch. A mind that worked too fast for others to compete and wasn’t quite all there. A woman who can shoot accurately without ever looking at the target.
After another day of searching, he returns to his hotel to find a letter from his wife.
She’s not there. She’s not going to be there. They’re on Hades like your contact said. QUIT STALLING.
She includes a drawing River made for him when she was four. It’s a krypton atom.
Gabriel leaves for Hades that night.
~*~
Despite its name, Hades looks more like a paradise then a hell.
Gabriel walks the streets scanning for his child. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he sees her; he just needs to find River. He can figure out what to do afterwards.
Finally, he gathers his courage and asks one of the Dock Managers. They point him to a ship at the other end of the yard. A Sparrow model, the ship looks more sinister than it should as he approaches.
Gabriel swallows several times over as he tries to summon the courage to take that final step forward.
A large man passes by him, his bright blue eyes glancing at him. Gabriel can’t help but shiver. It’s as if the other man can see his fear. The large man bares his teeth and passes by him toward the ship, his step light.
In the doorway of Giselle, a young woman dressed in a tank top and tight jeans steps into view. She holds out her arms to the sun and the giant catches her up in his arms. The girl who was and is Gabriel’s River laughs in delight as her husband spins her around before placing her back on her feet.
Gabriel edges forward, watching as Jayne Cobb steadies River’s wobbly body and asks her how badly he just scrambled her brains.
Gabriel opens his mouth to tell him off, ready to be his daughter’s white knight once more, but River laughs again. It’s such a joyous sound that Gabriel can’t help but close his eyes to bask in it.
“I believe you have just shaken my sanity to bits yet again, husband.” There’s a lightness Gabriel’s never heard in her voice before and he realizes with a start that she’s teasing. Did she ever joke as a child?
“Good,” her husband nods in satisfaction. “Yer borin’ when yer sane.”
“Trying to make me as insane as you.”
“How else will ya git my jokes?”
“Won’t work.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Confident that she’s steady, Cobb draws River closer. River places her arms around his neck. Both of them lose their smirks as they close their eyes and just lean their foreheads against each other. Cobb pulls up his hand to tangle in River’s long, dark hair, his other hand possessively at her waist. River nudges his nose with hers and he nudges back. He ducks his face a little lower and pecks her lips again and again, until River captures them by biting his lower lip. Cobb chuckles and submits. River's hands are in his hair, as if he'll try to escape if she lets go. Cobb curls more of her hair around his wrist - a willing captive.
It is a peaceful moment in a bustling world. A moment that Gabriel is unwelcome in.
His hands clutching his wife’s parcel, Gabriel edges backward. River does not need him. She’s never needed him. He will not ruin this for her as he’s ruined the rest of her life.
“You’re going to depart without saying goodbye?” River’s voice cuts through the air, and for a moment, she’s fourteen-years-old trying to make her father just a little bit later for his meeting so she can have a proper goodbye.
His lips burn as Gabriel remembers that last kiss on the forehead. He looks at her.
River stands there, all grown-up, holding her husband’s hand as if it were a lifeline and perhaps it is. Cobb glares over her head and with a shock Gabriel realizes that Cobb knew exactly who he was the moment he set eyes on him. He licks his lips. Cobb’s look turns murderous when Gabriel doesn’t speak. He looks away from him and realizes why the large man looks so ready to kill. River is staring at him, so lost and young and fourteen again.
Gabriel shakes his head. “No,” his voice is weak.
River offers him a tentative smile. “Oh. I’m glad.”
She holds out her hand to him.
Gabriel doesn’t hesitate to take it.
Cobb's hand falls away from the LeMat at his belt.
~*~
Cobb cooks dinner as River busies herself with her mother’s package. Gabriel watches her as she attacks the knots with her small fingers (tries not to think of pens), watches him as he fries large slabs of steak, pausing every now and then to work on the salad.
“You didn’t want to stay with your brother?”
Cobb frowns over his shoulder at him, but instantly relaxes when River shakes her head.
“It has always been Jayne’s dream to have his own ship, to be under his own rule. I could not and I would not ask him to give that up for me.” Her eyes twinkle. “Besides Mal’s orders kept interfering with mine.” She shrieks with laughter as Cobb throws a spoon at her. She catches it and neatly throws it back. Cobb is ready and simply sets it back down on the counter, eyebrow raised. Flirting, Gabriel realizes.
Cobb winks. “I like followin’ yers better.”
“Of course you do. I am a much better employer.” River shoots him a superior smirk and ignores the face her husband makes at her. “I allowed him to be Captain because he complained so much. I, on the other hand, don’t need a title.” A bun hits her in the face.
Cobb is suspiciously busy with the food, his back toward the father and daughter.
River giggles.
Gabriel feels a pang as he realizes the truth. He isn’t bringing her home. He won’t get a second chance to make it up to her.
“Oh,” River breathes. “Jayne, come and see.” The big man was instantly by her side. “It’s my baby blanket.” She hugs it to her body. She stiffens for a moment before relaxing, Cobb’s hand on her back. “Tell mother, we will be at her side for when the baby arrives.” She snuggles the blanket. "I want her holding my hand."
Cobb’s face is soft as he looks at River, and Gabriel knows that he’s seeing an expression that only River has ever seen on this man’s face. Cobb loves his daughter. He watches as every touch the man gives River is filled with gentleness. Gabriel feels a pang of regret that he couldn’t have given River away to him. That pang deepens as Cobb brushes his lips against River’s temple, his hand reaching down to caress her stomach.
River looks up at her father and Gabriel feels a sense of pride as she smiles shyly at him. He’s finally managed to do the right thing.
~*~
The couple walk him back to his boat. Cobb - Jayne walks a short distance behind to allow father and daughter to visit and River holds Gabriel's hand.
How could he have ever not wanted to hold her hand and listen to her chatter away?
“Mother and I knew.” River says suddenly. “We knew our options and we chose.”
Gabriel freezes even as he keeps walking.
“Fourteen and already so many roads blocked. If I tried to return to any of them... Prima ballerina - raped and murdered. Found in the river on Ariel seven months later. They get away. Scientist - mocked and ridiculed for the rest of my life for discovering the effects of PAX. No evidence to back up theory of Reaver’s birth. Found dead in my apartment. Ruled a suicide. Or locked away in asylum. So many possibilities.” She smiles, her eyes glancing over her shoulder to find Jayne. “Only one where I find my soul mate and we survive and we save the world. Mother cried, pleaded for there to be another way, but realized the truth in the end.”
Gabriel closes his eyes as he remembers River begging him to let her go to the Academy. Regan begging on her daughter’s behalf. He’d been considering contracting a marriage between River and one of his partners - more than forty years her age. A man known for beating his lovers.
River kisses his cheek. “Yes, I suffered. But Simon came.”
She doesn't need to tell him that in one possibility, Gabriel led the charge to save her. No wonder Regan lost her faith in him. He, who had insisted it was nothing.
River's eyes find Jayne again and they sadden for an instant. “We all did, but we are all better now. Finally healed.” She leans into her father’s side. “I healed him,” she whispers.
Gabriel doesn’t need to say that Jayne healed her too.
They drop him off at his boat, Jayne warns the Captain what will happen if his father-in-law isn’t taken care of, and the couple walk off into the night. Gabriel watches as Jayne wraps his arms around River’s shoulders and how River leans into him. He can hear their laughter ringing through the night.
~*~
Regan is waiting for him when the ship sets down. She doesn’t even allow him to say hello before she’s kissing him hard and fierce. Just like she used to when they were first married and she was passionately in love with him. Just like she did before Simon came home with his sister's letter.
“Thank you for coming home.”
He stammers as he explains he couldn’t bring River home because she was married now and expecting. There’s a twinkle in Regan’s eye and he knows that she knew all along.
“But you did bring them home,” Regan says, happy tears in her eyes. "You brought everyone home." She kisses him again, and Gabriel Tam takes a page out of his children's book and seizes the moment.