Month: September 2017

raisedinthesmoke:

Jayne startled visibly, pretty much jumping to his feet as Xander appeared out of nowhere.

Of course, Jayne should have realized he’d come by the shadows again, but it hadn’t registered that in doing so, it would still spook Jayne a little with how strange the whole thing was.

“Uh, hi,” he faltered, his surprise quickly turning to a small amount of embarrassment, like he’d been caught doing something and now had to awkwardly deflect his way out of it.

“I must admit, I thought it would be a few more days before your curiosity got the best of you,” he remarked casually, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He was trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, but he had lost a lot of that ground by literally appearing out of the shadows of the room. 

A small smile touched his lips though, the idea of being able to let Tal know that the boy was doing alright was a good one. The hybrid was going to be beyond enthusiastic when he told her.

raisedinthesmoke:

@ofviolentdeath

Jayne had given it a few days. Taken some time to get his head around what had happened and exhaust all the ways he could try to convince himself that it wasn’t real. At best, some part of it had to be wishful thinking. Still, here he was, trying to shake the feeling that maybe part of him wanted to know more about things his brain kept trying to tell him were impossible.

He walked over to the other side of the room and took one of the feathers Xander had given him out of the pocket of his coat, which was tossed semi-lazily over a threadbare armchair that had splits in the upholstery, but still served its purpose well enough, before returning and sitting down on the edge of his bed, studying the feather for a long moment with a skeptical look on his face, then shrugged, picked up an old Zippo from the table next to the bed and lit it on fire, expecting nothing to happen other than the feather to burn to ash like everything else in the world had done.

Xander had been trying to read one of the old spell books his grandmother had managed to keep safe through everything when he felt it. That weird little tug in his back that let him know one of his feathers had caught fire somewhere. It was enough to cause concern and he closed his eyes, focusing for a moment before bringing himself to where he felt it.

Honestly, he was relieved to see Jayne was unharmed, but he had been expecting it to take a few days more for the boy’s curiosity to get the best of him. “Hello.”