Part 1

[walk_ins]

There's a bump and a lurch felt through the entire Academy as Serenity docks, unwelcome. Claxons blare. In the main dining hall the Students stir and murmur, confusion more than ever writ large on their face. The Advanced Students in their special cafeteria have less of a reaction; the outside world matters less and less for them.

In the staff dining hall, the doctors, teaches and nurse exchange looks and outbursts of confusion and consternation themselves. Theories fly around; a meteorite, maybe, or an unexpected docking. Or something gone wrong with whatever madness the Doctor is up to. Only Dr. Sergio Lin actually bothers to leave the room.

In the Special Wing, the Doctor and the Graduates wait for their door. Whatever it is, the guards will take care of it.

It only takes a few of the Blue Hands to guard the dining halls, under normal circumstances, and the rest are here in the Security Lounge. It's a narrow space, with a sterile stink to it; some indefinable imprint of their inhabitancy. Crowded tonight; there're guests in town. The room is decorated with watercolor paintings, all turned upside down. When Serenity arrives, their heads all swivel as one in the direction it came from, and as one they stand and move towards the doors, drawing pistols and slim blue wands from their jackets. They meet Dr. Lin as they come out, and he confuses the situation with semi-hysterical and self-contradictory orders.

And at the docking point, the doors burst open, and with no further ado quite a lot of heavily armed people burst into the skyplex.

Things have begun.

Comments

[badinlatin]

Feet apart, and Mal's gun has left his holster awhile back. Soldier's stance, every inch of him prepared.

Eye contact with Faith and Inara. Sometime later, Mal will wish that he could have given them some sort of look of hope or encouragement.

Nothing like that now is on Mal's face. Only the soldier.

The claxons begin to ring
and Mal yells "Follow me!" to those with him. The others know their jobs. They'll be fine.

Mal's first target - a creature? gloved man - goes down quickly, wound to the chest.

[ff-ambassador.livejournal.com]

As the claxons begin, Inara takes one last glance at Mal, the steel in his expression focusing her. She runs behind him, keeping her gun low, scanning the hall for more guards.

She runs around the first body, avoiding looking at the blood pooling on the ground.

[faithful-slayer.livejournal.com]

Faith's expression is a mask. Slayer Face. It's the face of somebody who makes a career out of going into situations that might kill them.

It's probably not so very different from Mal's.

Her gun - and that's two words she never thought to string together in her subconscious, for sure - is held at her side, deceptively casual, and all her superhuman senses are honed, seeking out people to hunt.

No - not people. Vampires. She's the Slayer, and they're vampires - and that means their lives are hers to take.

[simon_doctor]

The gun still feels foreign to Simon's hand, but he grips it with an assurance he doesn't feel.

Mal in the lead of their group, Cuthbert bringing up the rear, Faith and Inara and Ted around him -- River's with her group, stop looking for her, stay focused.

There's something in all this chaos that's oddly familiar ... oddly like a Code Blue moment in an emergency room. Sudden danger, and the job to do, and a team of competent people around him all knowing their own roles in it.

He holds on to that as hard as he's holding onto the gun. They're here to save lives. They're here to save an entire universe's life. There's an abrupt bizarre mental image of himself and the others as antibodies fighting an infection, there and then gone.

Code Blue. Go. Go. Go.

[key-youth-bert.livejournal.com]

His friends are around him, his enemies are in front of him, and the guns of his father are in his hands.

There's a brief thought of Susan--in the engine room, doing her job as he does his--and then any thoughts of anything other than the job at hand fall away, leaving him cold and efficient.

A weapon set to the purpose it was made for.

Guns at the ready, he follows the others.

[righthandwoman.livejournal.com]

Full body armor, rifle in hand, two pistols in shoulder holsters and the gun she always wears in its place at her hip.

It had been suggested she let the gunslinger go first, make herself less of a target. Hell with that.

Zoe gives a brief, silent nod to Alain and Kitty in turn, and then moves out, gun at the ready.

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Kitty next, throwing knives at the ready -- there's one now, a pinwheel of silver that resolves into a handle sprouting from the eye of a fresh-made corpse, and the next spinning after. Sharp-eyed and silent and on the razor's edge of battle-alertness, as they all are.

Alain in drogue. Rearguard. His guns are in his hands, and their thunder fills the corridor, competing with the shrilling alarms and the swiftly receding sound of the others' guns. He reloads as he goes, and the can-toi die, bleeding their foul lives away on the tiles of the Academy's unhallowed halls.

Weapons, all three of them, right now. Alain is doing the work he was made for, fast hands and killer's heart, and there is a cold curtain of satisfaction and a throbbing pulse of battle-rage that together dampen all other thoughts.

Down the corridor, swiftly.

[book-moshi.livejournal.com]

As the alarms ring and the groups file out of Serenity, two people remain in the cargo bay of the ship.

Shepherd Meria Book is armed with a heavy semiautomatic pistol from Serenity's copious store. His position is familar--it's the same one he took during the assault on Niska's skyplex--but his conscience is infinitely more troubled. The feeling of the pistol in his hand is familiar, too, in a way that has nothing to do with Adelai Niska.

He glances at the dark woman in the bay with him, another of Serenity's common-use pistols in her left hand and her heavy, somehow barbaric and ancient widowmaker in the right. She doesn't look relieved to be staying on the ship, in a defensive posture that makes it seem a little less like Breaking And Entering. She looks, in fact, a little pissed (maybe righteously pissed) that the designers of the Academy didn't see fit to make it wheelchair-accessible.

From further back in the ship he can hear Wash hustling towards them. Won't be long now, he thinks. He'd feel a fool actually saying it aloud, though, so he thumbs the safety off his gun. And waits.

[shadowsusannah.livejournal.com]

No maybe about it.

Susannah isn't happy at all about being left behind. But it's the plan. And Roland is her dinh...and it's a good plan. Mostly because she hasn't seen Wash or Book shoot, and Susannah Dean is a gunslinger.

There have been crates set up -- stacks of them -- for cover. Two closer to the door, and one further behind.

Susannah wheels herself behind this last one and waits for Wash to take his position. Better to have her in the back than Book.

She tilts her head back and closes her eyes, hearing Wash come closer, interspersing a familiar rhythm between the steady speed of the pilot's footfalls.

Come-come-commala.

Her eyes snap open, then, and she turns, and then raises her guns in the guard position, back straight. Let's get this party started.

Their party might be simpler than the one going on inside the Academy. But Susannah's will do.

She knows all the steps.

[flybywash]

The first time Wash did something like this, he'd been consumed by fire: scorched and shaken, hauled back from the volcano's edge. It passed in a blur of noise and heat that never quite registered.

The second time, Kaylee had been with him, and he'd only fired several shots -- none of which connected -- before they ran.

There's a very good reason Susannah's never seen him shoot.

Wash unholsters his gun as he jogs down the stairs, as much in preparation as to get rid of the uncomfortable weight of it. It feels like his hands should still be shaking, but they're not. There's a gunslinger down there beside the Shepherd; and if all fails, and this is to be their ending, he'd rather be here than listening through the upstairs comm units as they fall.

He takes his position on the upper catwalk and pushes the safety to OFF.

Hell of a day for a last stand.

[gonna_live]

The paint's been chipped for who knows how long, and you can see the other colors under the warm pink-red of the walls of the engine room.

Kaylee's striped hammock in the corner is empty, and she's not there to brush the wind chime as she does sometimes.

There's a pair of feet sticking out from under the belly of the engine. The feet turn into legs. The legs give way to a torso, and then finally Kaylee is out from under anything that might clunk her on the head.

She places the screwdriver back in her tool chest, reaches for a rag, and begins to try and get some of the excess grease off of her hands. "That oughta do us for now."

[sai_delgado]

From the other side of Serenity's engine, Susan looks up from the gauges she's been monitoring carefully while Kaylee works.

"Ye say true, I wot." She's pale and worried, but clearly determined to do her part.

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

In River's bed, in the otherwise-empty dorm room, Anthy Himemiya wakes with a start.

She's too drained to think clearly, so instead of wondering what could be causing a commotion, Anthy slides out of the nice warm bed and pads toward the bathroom, rubbing her eyes.

[walk_ins]

Once again, a nurse and a blue-handed guard wait in the hallway. The impact comes just as one of the Graduates--slim, blonde Maggie--appears to fetch River.

When the gunshots start, Nurse Todd flees--away from the noise, with no clear destination. The Blue Hand strides away, heading towards the firefight, drawing his pistol smoothly as he moves.

Leaving Maggie standing in front of the door.

[walk_ins]

Maggie's head turns sharply. She pauses, for a moment, looking after the Blue Hand.

But she has her orders. Has her programming. And the Blue Hands will take care of things. It'll be over quickly.

She opens the door.

Her movements are quick and silent and efficient, with no wasted motion. Almost eerily so.

[walk_ins]

Doctor Sangshun and his prodigies are still waiting on the door, patient, even as the noises of battle continue--and grow closer. From time to time the Graduates stir and look towards the rest of the skyplex, but the Doctor still holds their discipline.

[walk_ins]

As time passes, however, even the doctor grows nervous; especially when the explosion comes from the skyplex control center.

This is not supposed to be happening. Who the hell could it be? Enemies of the Alliance? Even agents of Tet?

He reaches out with his mind; some force is opposing him, but dimly he feels some of them moving towards the station core.

If they reach it before the door opens---

"Stay here," he growls, and, feet not touching the ground, glides away.

[walk_ins]

They do wait, a long time; eventually the door finishes its long, mechanical cycling, and aligns with End-World.

With no orders, they stare at it for a time.

In the distance, the gunfire continues, and they can hear the shouts of the wounded and dying.

They are machines, made for a specific purpose, perfect in their single-minded utility.

A perfect machine wants to be used.

In time, as one, they move towards the battle.

[swinging-cod.livejournal.com]

*Eyes narrowed to slits, Jayne exits Serenity with a cat-like grace and a simplicity of movement that no one who had seen him sprawled on the kitchen bench shovelling molded protein surprise into his mouth and talking a mile a minute about the joys of guns and whores would believe.

The rest follow, but he stays in front, the biggest and most obvious target.

It's his job, and he knows it, and he does it well. That's how you get paid.

Not that anyone

(thing thing anything)

'll get a chance, oh no.

He blasts one to the edge of the clearing and continues.*

[aj_crawley]

Crowley's next, behind Jayne, bootheels clicking as he drifts lightly across the docking bay, and into the corridor.

Jayne's picked off the vanguard - second right, turn, down the hall - but reinforcements soon start to arrive. Gun already sliding down from its position against his shoulder, Crowley swings out from behind the big man to

(canda)

the other side of the corridor, and takes aim.

One - head.

Two - throat.

Three - shoulder, and another to the bridge of the nose as they pass by.

He steps over a mis-shapen hand, and crushes a screamer under his boot.

[lastgunslinger]

Roland stalks in, brown duster swirling. His gun is in the guard position, resting in the hollow of his right shoulder.

"Where will she be? The dormitories?"

If River's so bent on going after Anthy -- he sees the wisdom in it. Grudgingly.

Just as long as he keeps River safe.

[river_meimei]

Her arm trails at her side, gun clutched loosely. Not quite like a stick, though; right now, the thunder of gunfire is receding in the distance and the walls vibrate with periodic explosions and River

(aims with her mind)

is holding a gun.

A quick glance at him, but she doesn't answer. Just keeps going, slipping from one bit of cover to the next, eyes darting as she choses each turn with certainty. Her face twists, now and then, but she keeps moving steadily.

[walk_ins]

Head Nurse Susan Todd prowls quickly through the smoking wreck that was once her precious white Academy.

How could this happen?

She hears muffled crying from inside one of the surgeries and steps inside.

[walk_ins]

Nurse Shatori Juri is sitting on one of the operating table, her cap gone, hair dissheveled, face streaked with tears.

There's a gun in her hand, one of the Hands's.

[walk_ins]

In the Staff Dining Hall, the teachers and doctors and nurses and technicians of the Academy wait, for someone to come and tell them it's over.

Eventually, as the gunfire and explosions get louder, they lock themselves in.

Yet they never lose hope, even up to the moment that the power core explodes and incinerates them. This chaos and confusion, they know, is no more than a superficial disruption in the fundamentally ordered nature of their lives. A few of the disquieting blue handed men may die, dealing with...whatever is happening out there. But they'll be okay.

Of course they will. Nothing really bad could ever actually happen to them.

They're the good guys, after all.