For lgbtfest.

Title: Counting
Author: puritybrown
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Pairing/characters: Jayne/Simon
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: This story uses characters and a setting created by people other than me. I claim no rights to them, nor do I intend to infringe on the rights of their creators.
Prompt: "Firefly: Jayne Cobb. "I may be gay, but I'm not a sissy!" or dealing with effeminate stereotypes."
Summary: When Jayne takes Simon to his home town, he finds it harder to ignore the things he learned when he was growing up.
Author's Notes: Technically this is a sequel to my earlier story Making God Laugh. It's not necessary to read that story to understand this one, but you do need to know that a) Jayne and Simon have been sleeping together for a while; and b) the warrants for River and Simon's arrest were recently revoked by the Alliance.
The description of Jayne's home town was inspired by angstslashhope's wonderfully sad AU Stroke of Luck. I went in a slightly different direction with it, but that fic was my starting point.
Finally, my apologies for the lateness of this fic. It grew in the telling, and also I suck at time management.

Counting


There was no real need for either Simon or River to stay on the ship while the others were picking up the mail, but Simon found he preferred not to pretend, any more, that there would be a letter or a parcel waiting for him at the depot. After the warrants had been revoked, he'd sent both digital and hand-written letters to their parents, but there had been no response: as far as their parents were concerned, they might as well have been dead. It stung a little more than he was willing to admit, and so to forestall the inevitable disappointment he had decided that this time he would stay behind and catch up on some reading.

He had just got settled in with a hot cup of tea and a trashy novel when Jayne burst in to the lounge like a hurricane and thrust a tattered piece of paper in his face. "Read that," said Jayne.

Simon considered objecting, but the look on Jayne's face was well beyond serious. He scanned the paper: it was a letter, written in cramped Roman print on the back of a scrap torn from a flourbag. Dear Jayne, it said, Matty is sick with the damplung again and there is no doctor in the town until next month. We have asked the bosses to send someone round special but they say no. Matty wants to see you again before he dies.

Simon looked up from the letter. "Is Matty your brother?"

Jayne nodded. "Only one still living. Can you cure the damplung?"

"I -- " Damplung? That had to be some sort of colloquialism for... well, no way to be sure, but probably a lung ailment with a wet cough as a symptom; pneumonia, or possibly tuberculosis. "Maybe," he said. "Depends on what you mean by 'damplung'. I've never heard of it before."

"Everybody gets it, more or less. Some worse than others."

"And do they die of it?"

"'Less they pay the doctor."

"Well, medicine isn't magic. If the doctors in your home town can cure this 'damplung', I should be able to cure it too, if I have the right drugs... and I resupplied two weeks ago, so I should have everything Matty needs."

"So, you'll come?"

Simon nodded, surprising himself with his own certainty. Maybe he wanted to see a real family again, with parents who cared about their children. Maybe he wanted to know what kind of mother and father could have produced Jayne Cobb, and all his contradictions.

Or maybe he just didn't want to see Jayne hurt.

"I'll come," he said, patting Jayne's arm. "I'll come."

*

(The only train that went into or out of Jayne's home town was the freight carrier that transported the coal out of the town once a day, and brought in fresh supplies once a week. There were no roads, and the haze of pollution around the mining facility made it too dangerous to land aircraft.

One way in; one way out. You left with the coal or you never left at all. Even the company bosses, when they bothered to visit, just attached a passenger carriage to the same old train. God only knew how much they spent on that; the cost of hitching a ride with the driver was more than most of the townspeople could afford. Whores came and left, after they'd figured out that even in a town with ten men for every woman, a disapproving Shepherd and a smokey atmosphere could make a whore's job too hard to be worth her pay; doctors came and left, as soon as their one-year contracts came to an end and they were free to go back to the Core where they'd never again need to treat a case of black lung.

Then there were the drifters, who came into town with a pile of dirty money, exchanged it for scrip at the company store, dug up coal for six months and lived on hardtack and protein stew while they waited for whatever trouble they'd stirred up elsewhere to die down. Jayne had always liked the drifters best, and no matter what his Ma said, it wasn't because they were thieves and murderers. It was because they did man's work -- the same back-breaking work the other men in the town did -- but they didn't let it break them. They weren't afraid to get their hands dirty, but they didn't let the dirt sink in. Best of all, they left. They weren't women, or the sissified Core doctors who might as well have been women, even when they were men. No, the drifters were always as much men as Jayne was, or Jayne's Pop, but they left all the same.

When Jayne left, all of sixteen years old, it was with a drifter's knife in his pocket and a drifter's money paying his fare, and in his ears his father's words: Don't you be living off nobody, you hear, Jayne? Anybody can't find work ain't looking hard enough. You look, and you'll find what needs doing. Can't call yourself a man if you ain't got work to do.

Jayne had never called himself a man before. He tried the idea out while the train zipped away from the town. I'm Jayne Cobb, and I'm a man. My name's Jayne, and I'm a man.

It didn't fit quite right, but maybe all he needed was practice.)

*

Jayne handed him a breather before they got off the train. "Wear this," he said, pulling one just like it over his own nose and mouth. Simon stared at it dubiously, but followed suit; as soon as they got off the train, he understood. The air was thick with some kind of smut or smoke, black enough to cut down on visibility.

"What did you say they mine here?" he said.

"Coal," said Jayne, his voice clipped and his eyes distant.

Simon followed his gaze: whatever he was looking at was so shrouded in pollution that Simon couldn't see it. "Shall we -- "

"Yeah," said Jayne, the word coming out as little more than a grunt as he shouldered their one pack and trudged away from the train station.

Simon followed him, peering through the hazy air at what he could see of the town. The smoke grew thinner the further they were from the station, and it occurred to him that perhaps the train ran on coal; it had jerked and rattled for the entire length of their journey, like something out of ancient times. It made him wonder just how poor the people of this town must be, or how stingy their masters, that they couldn't spring for an electricity plant big enough to power a maglev. Or did they have power in the town at all? Maybe the boss's house had a private generator, and the workers had to shift for themselves. That might explain why the place was so smoky; coal would be cheap, electricity expensive.

Simon could feel particles of dust settling on his skin.

A few minutes' walk away from the town along a narrow dirt track winding through scrub, the dust and smoke had thinned out to the point where Jayne took off his breather, sniffed the air experimentally, and nodded at Simon, who took his own off after a moment's hesitation. The air wasn't clean, exactly, but it wasn't going to harm them. "Your family lives outside the town?" he said, more to break the silence than because it needed to be said.

"Over yonder," said Jayne, pointing to a rise with a house on it and a stand of trees, not so high that you could call it a hill, but high enough that even when the wind was blowing from the town, the smoke would stay below breathing level for the people living there.

"That's a good spot," said Simon, revising his previous ideas about Jayne's family. They must have been relatively well off if they could afford what looked like desirable real estate, for a podunk mining town.

"Mnh," Jayne grunted, not looking at Simon. He rummaged in their pack, pulled out the ridiculous woollen hat his mother had knitted for him, jammed it on the top of his head, and tied the strings under his chin. Simon tried very hard not to smile.

*

(By the time Jayne turned fifteen, he'd given up on getting folks to call him "Jay", and gotten into enough fights to prove that he was no girl, no matter what his name was. He hadn't got his dick wet, though not for lack of wanting to -- but there just weren't many chances to be had. Matty'd done a count once, and he'd figured that unless they made a play for one of the married women, there were maybe nineteen prospects in the whole town -- five whores that neither of them could afford to pay, and fourteen girls around their own age with watchful fathers.

It was a small town, but that wasn't why there were so few girls: mostly when a girl got born in the town, their parents would send her away when she was very young, to relatives or adoption centres, and who could blame them? It was a rough town, a nasty town, a town full of coaldust and bad luck. For a boy there was some hope of growing up to be a miner and maybe saving enough for the train out; but the mine didn't hire women and never had. A girl could hope to marry a machinist, maybe, like Jayne and Matty's Pop, or she could hope that her brothers would earn enough to take her with them when they left.

Girls from the town never went in for whoring. Jayne had wondered about that, but not for long. Once he let himself think about touching one of the girls he knew -- really touching her -- he felt downright strange, as if everyone in the town was watching. Any time they got to spend with the girls in the flesh, everyone in the town really was watching, especially the Shepherd. It got downright tedious even for him; he couldn't fathom how bad it must be for the girls. He'd never asked, but he figured the girls who didn't get sent away usually ended up wishing they had been.

Hell, a person'd have to be crazy to want to stay there. Girls were strange, but most of them weren't crazy.)

*

When Simon came out of Matty's room, Jayne looked up at him, his eyes fierce. He was sitting on the bench next to the stove, his mother leaning against him, staring at her hands. They were strong hands, for all that they looked bony and raw; they had clutched Simon's with desperation an hour before, saying all the things Jayne's face had said when he'd got her letter: save him, save him, please, please, save him!

"He'll be fine," he said.

Mrs Cobb looked up and stared -- not at him; not at anything, it seemed, but her own relief. She blinked, and tears welled up at the corners of her eyes; she took two deep, gulping breaths and dashed the tears away. "I -- don't know how to thank you," she said. "You've -- "

"Can we talk to him?" said Jayne, interrupting.

Simon frowned at his rudeness, but nodded anyway. "If you go in one at a time. And only for a few minutes. He needs to rest."

Jayne glanced at his mother, who waved a hand at the door. "You ain't seen him in years," she said, and Jayne muttered something unintelligible and bolted for Matty's room, not even gifting Simon with a single word of thanks. If Mrs Cobb hadn't been sitting right there in front of him, Simon would have made some sort of cutting remark about his upbringing.

"Matty was talking about going back to work," he said instead, leaning against the kitchen table, "but he should stay in bed for another week at least, and two would be better. Can you persuade him to do that?"

Mrs Cobb smiled, her eyes still glistening a little. "Oh, he'll rest if I tell him to. He knows better than to try and cross me when he ain't even healthy."

Simon smiled. "I'm sure he does."

"He's a good boy. Not like Jayne. Oh, I know he's your friend and all," she added hurriedly when Simon opened his mouth to protest, "and I love him with all my heart, but I know a little something of what he's done since he left home." She sighed. "It ain't my place to tell him what to do now he's left, but I worry. Can't help it. That's just what being a mother means."

Simon felt a sting in his eyes at that. He was going to embarrass himself if he let this topic run its course. "Tell me something," he said, to give himself time to think of a new subject, "I've always wondered..." (ah, of course) "...why 'Jayne'? Isn't that usually a girl's name?"

Mrs Cobb laughed out loud. "Ain't it, though! Oh, he hated us for that! Got him into more fights than his own ornery temper. Was for his own good, though."

"How's that?"

She looked him up and down and nodded, as if confirming something to herself. "It would've been before you were born, I guess, and a Core type like yourself wouldn't've heard... there was a draft, the year Jayne was born. This was before Unification, when there was little baby wars atween planets all the time. Lord knows why the officers come here, but they did, and they took some of the young men away that was healthy enough, and they took the names of all the boy children, too. Said they'd come back when they was old enough to fight."

"And did they?"

"No! By the time Jayne was old enough, it was the big war, and there wasn't no need for nobody to come scrabbling to a backwoods place like this to find soldiers; the Browncoats had more volunteers than uniforms. Still... I didn't like to think of my boy being took away like that. So I named him Jayne, to make 'em think he was a girl and not worth looking at."

"Why wouldn't they come for the girls? Some of the best soldiers I've known were women."

"Oh, sure! Give a woman a gun and she can shoot as straight as any man. I'm a handy shot with a rifle myself. But there ain't no conscription officer in the 'Verse that'd dare take a girl away from this town. He'd be lynched before he made it to the train."

"I... don't think I understand."

She frowned, as if she were trying to figure out how to explain something simple to a foreigner -- which he was, in truth; every Rim world was its own culture, and most of them baffled him. "Every girl and every woman in this town," she said at last, "is somebody's wife or somebody's daughter. Except the whores, but they don't come from here and they don't stay long. There's men here that don't belong to nobody but themselves -- hell, that's most of the men here. But the women, the girls? They're claimed. There ain't many of 'em, and each one of 'em's got a dozen men looking out for her."

Simon stared. "That... that sounds really..."

Her mouth twisted into something like a smile. "Safe?"

"I was going to say..." He paused. It would be rude to say what he was thinking, but she was the one who'd brought it up, and besides, he'd just saved her son from a possible death by pneumonia. "Oppressive," he said, and braced himself for a sharp reaction.

But Mrs Cobb just sighed and nodded. "Some days, this whole town feels like a prison cell. Mind, some days it feels that way for Mr Cobb, too. You must've seen how it ain't easy to get here? It ain't easy to leave, either, for anyone. Leastways, anyone that was born here."

Simon opened his mouth to ask how Jayne had managed to leave, if it was so hard, but before he could speak Jayne came out of Matty's room and slammed the door behind him. At the sight of his face and the fists clenched at his side, Simon stood up and took a step towards him. "Are you -- is Matty all right?"

Jayne nodded, a swift jerk of his head. "You can talk to him, Ma."

Mrs Cobb stood up slowly, glancing from Jayne to Simon. "Be civil to Dr Tam, now, Jayne," she said as she crossed over and went into Matty's room.

Simon watched Jayne for a moment after the door closed behind her. He was breathing audibly through his nose, his fists clenching and unclenching, not looking at Simon or anywhere near him. "Jayne?"

Jayne shook his head as if he was trying to dislodge cobwebs, and picked up his coat from where he'd left it on the bench. "I'm going to town," he said, marching past Simon towards the door. Simon grabbed his arm as he was passing, meaning to ask him what was wrong, what had Matty said, could he help -- but Jayne just shook off his hand and backhanded him in the face.

"Don't touch me, you -- "

He broke off, suddenly looking directly at Simon. "What?" said Simon, touching the swollen place on his lower lip where Jayne's knuckles had connected. "What am I?"

Jayne ducked his head, then, something like shame in his eyes. "I'm going to town," he mumbled, turning away.

He stopped at the threshold, the doorknob in his hand. "Don't -- don't you follow me," he said. "I ain't fit for company."

"That much is blindingly obvious," said Simon to the closed door.

*

(When he was fourteen, Jayne figured out that one way or another, he was going to Hell.

There was the stealing, for starters, and taking the Lord's name in vain, which he couldn't seem to stop no matter how hard he tried. There was the jerking off, and the times he'd missed Sunday meeting, and the fights. The fights he'd ended he could maybe get away with, but the fights he'd started? They were all his fault, and he couldn't claim otherwise. There was a handful of sins that didn't interest him much, but all the ones that tempted him he'd committed, or if he hadn't, it was because he hadn't had a chance.

So, since he was going to Hell no matter what happened, he might as well have some fun along the way.

Once he'd made this decision, his life suddenly became much simpler. It didn't matter any more what he did as long as he didn't get caught. He gave up figuring out what the folks he stole from could afford to lose, and made judgments instead as to whether they'd raise trouble if they found out. He'd figured he'd make more money this way, and that he'd soon have enough to get a ticket out of town, but it turned out different. Oh, sure, there was more money coming his way, but now that he didn't care about sinning, he had a lot more things to spend that money on. It wasn't until he'd killed his own one stone dead that he found out a conscience was good for something other than spoiling everybody's fun.

By the time he was sixteen, he'd made enough enemies in the town that he was getting desperate. People got wary when they saw him coming; they spat on the floor when he came close. The saloon still took his money, but they checked it under a lamp before they'd give him any liquor. So when a new drifter came into town one month and he didn't pay the customary visit to any of the current crop of whores, Jayne listened to the rumours he overheard and thought them over instead of laughing at them.

The drifter gave him most of the price of a one-way ticket out of town. Jayne took the knife when the drifter had his back turned; it was a good knife, sturdy and sharp. He could make up the rest of the price himself.

He never told anyone what he'd done to get the fare; folks out of town didn't give a good goddamn, and none of the folks in town were talking to him. Except his family, Ma and Pop and Matty. But he couldn't tell them.

Besides, it didn't count if you only did it once.)

*

Simon sat on the bench outside the Cobbs' house and watched a small figure approaching the rise along the road that led into the town. Or out of it, depending on your perspective. He'd gone through shock, anger, hurt feelings, confusion, and curiosity; now he felt nothing but a kind of bitter calm.

"Are you going to tell me what's going on in your head," he said as Jayne slowed to a halt a few paces away, "or am I going to have to crack open your skull and dissect your brain?"

Jayne flinched, raising one hand to his head automatically, then scowled and lowered it. "You told Matty," he said.

"Told him -- oh. You mean, about us? Well, he asked. It seemed courteous to answer truthfully." Jayne didn't respond, unless a brief twitch of his eyebrows counted as a response. "Is that what's bothering you? Jayne... are you ashamed of me?"

For answer, Jayne scuffed the ground with his boot and shrugged, muttering something unintelligible. Simon sighed and stared at the sky, which was just beginning to grow darker; the pollution in the air was going to make the sunset really spectacular. "You are ashamed of me," he said quietly.

"That ain't it," said Jayne. Simon looked at him. He scratched the back of his head, still not looking directly at Simon.

"Then what is it?" said Simon.

*

(The first time he saw a woman soldier, Jayne didn't know where to look. He knew the way he was staring was going to mark him out as a rube and maybe get him beat if he wasn't lucky, but he couldn't help himself. Where he came from, men did the fighting and women were fought about, and that was just the way it was.

He'd always known that things were different on other worlds, but he'd never really known.

He was lucky that time and didn't get beat, and the next few times he stared less, until it got so he didn't stare at all. It never quite seemed natural until he joined Mal's crew and found himself working along of a woman tougher than most of the men he'd known -- but even then there was Kaylee, who needed watching and looking after as much as any of the girls from the town, and Inara, who was a whore like any other even if her clothes were a mite more fancy. Zoë was a woman, sure enough, and a fighter, and after a few little misunderstandings Jayne learned not to say the things that would get her mad at him, like that she was almost as good as a man, or that he sometimes wondered if she really was a man underneath. She never told him why she hated him to say things like that, and Jayne didn't figure it would do any good to ask. He just kept his mouth shut when he felt the urge to pay her a compliment, since she never took it the way he meant it.

The first time he had sex with Simon, he was drunk off his head on medical alcohol. The second time, he wasn't off his head, but he was still drunk, on the bottle of fancy whisky Mal had been so gorram gracious as to share with the crew. Then there'd been a long space, and times when he'd started looking at Simon, and thinking, maybe... But if you thought about it, that was different. Wasn't it? If it just happened, you couldn't be to blame for it.

Jayne tried not to think too much. It just made things complicated.)

*

Jayne stood there, silent, not looking at Simon, or looking at him briefly, for less than the space of a blink, before looking away again.

Simon sighed and rubbed his forehead. "I really thought we... had an understanding. I admit I never said anything, and neither did you, but -- "

"Damn right," said Jayne. "I ain't a woman!"

The way he said the word -- almost spat it, as if it were a curse -- made Simon wince. Would it be so bad if you were? he wanted to say, but he shyed away from that. This was a delicate business, brain surgery rather than woodcutting. If he said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, Jayne would run --

But Jayne was still there, which had to mean something.

"I'm not a woman either," he said. "Does that bother you?"

Jayne's eyes snapped to his, shining with pride and defiance, and something else Simon had never seen there before.

Simon let out a breath he hadn't realised he was holding. "Come here," he said, patting the bench beside him.

*

(It didn't count if you only did it once. It didn't count if you were drunk. It didn't count if it was a dare. It didn't count if it was the other guy's idea.

After a while, Jayne ran out of excuses, and he couldn't find it in him to care. It was just so good, laying with Simon, skin on skin, not so much the rutting as what came after, his hand curled up against Simon's stomach, his nose pushing up against Simon's neck, that soft, dopey look Simon got on his face when he thought Jayne was asleep.

Hell. That look. That sweet look. It made him go hot and soft inside. It made him think that maybe --

But it didn't count if nobody else knew about it.

But then Simon was leaving, or everybody thought he was, and Jayne got himself all knotted up inside trying not to think about it, because there wasn't a thing he could do to stop him. And then Simon wasn't leaving, and Jayne kissed him, on the mouth, right there in the kitchen in front of everyone, and didn't give a good goddamn what they knew or thought they knew.

But.

But Simon was... well, Simon was one of those sissified Core doctors. Might as well have been a woman, even if he wasn't.

So it still didn't count.)

*

Jayne moved slowly, as if he were being dragged towards the bench against his will. "I ain't a woman," he muttered.

"I know," said Simon.

"I ain't a sissy, neither."

"That much is very obvious."

"But -- " Jayne scratched his head. Simon suppressed a smile. There was something very cute, almost childlike, about the perplexity on Jayne's face, even though it was shadowed by misery.

"What did Matty say?"

Jayne scowled and clenched his fists.

*

(Call a boy a bastard and he'd shrug it off. Say his mother was a whore and he'd probably come back with yeah, and you could never afford her! Say he was a thief, say he was a murderer, say he couldn't shoot the broad side of a barn -- that might be the start of a fight, if you were both in a fighting mood. But it probably wouldn't. Mostly, he'd let it slide, and the next day you'd both be the best of friends.

Call him sly, or a sissy, or a faggot, or a cocksucker, and then you were in trouble. Jayne'd had to beat the tar out of a dozen or more boys, and men, stupid enough to think that having a girl's name meant he couldn't fight for himself.

He'd've done it to Matty, too, except Matty was sick in bed, and Matty was his brother, and Matty knew him better than anyone else, and Matty had never said that before, and maybe if Matty said it it was true. And that made him want to pound somebody's face into a wall.)

*

Simon reached for Jayne's hand tentatively, taking courage when Jayne let him twine their fingers together. "This -- " doesn't change anything, he started to say, but it did; it changed everything, and that was the problem. "You're not remotely effeminate," he said. "That's... that's why I find you so attractive. You're..." He felt a flush creeping up his throat. There was no way to say this that wouldn't be embarrassing. They didn't talk about it; he'd always assumed they never would. "You're ridiculously masculine. Actually, sometimes it's annoying. You could sharpen your knives without spitting on them, you know."

"No, I couldn't."

Simon laughed. No, he couldn't; not if Simon asked him to. "See? You're still the same stubborn hwoon dahn you were before we started -- "

"Matty don't think so."

"Matty... doesn't know anything beyond this town. The 'verse is bigger than that. Jayne. Look at me." Jayne looked up, reluctant again. Simon kissed him briefly, just a quick brush of lips. "There. Are you less of a man now than you were ten seconds ago?"

Jayne frowned. "I ain't the same as I was," he said. "This town don't know me no more. I'm a stranger now."

"Well, you were just a kid when you left," said Simon. "You're a man now."

Jayne blinked, and the perplexity cleared, as well as the misery. "Yeah," he said. "I'm a man." He let go of Simon's hand and put his arm around him, burying his nose in Simon's neck. He has a weird fascination with my neck, Simon thought distractedly amid a rush of relief. "I'm a man, and I ain't got nothing to prove to nobody," Jayne murmured into Simon's ear, his warm breath making Simon shiver.

*

(What he's never told anyone and thought he never would was that he liked Simon for being different from him, liked the way Simon didn't live the way Jayne lived and didn't see why he should. It infuriated him at first, the way Simon stared at him with baffled contempt when he said or did something that just plain made sense -- but he'd never had to spend so much time with somebody so fancy before, and though it took a while, it got so he started thinking maybe there was more than one way for things to make sense.

Now he thinks: maybe he will tell Simon that, one day, if he can find the words. Because he ran out of excuses months ago, and he can't pretend any more that it doesn't count.)

[end]