damned_institute | Dayshift 22; First Shift; Sun Room

"Shit, she's just a little kid!" Jack shook his head, a look of disgust coming over his features. "Talk about heartless bastards. I tell you, this place is crazy. Completely crazy." He sat down, his expression still a twisted grimace.

"At least she's got you to look out for her." His grimace slipped into an easy grin. Jack was, after all, a relatively pleasant man. And he liked this Simon guy. "So tell me, Simon, what do you do in your not-crazy life?"

He winked, and then glanced up as another guy, closer to his own age, joined them. "I take it this isn't your sister," he said to Simon, eyes twinkling with good humor.

"Only a teenager," Simon agreed, mirroring Jack's grimace and glad for the like-minded company. "I am beginning to think 'heartless' is a term too kind," he remarked, tone dry and a touch scathing.

Jack's grin, however, could not make his words flatter Simon as they may have been intended to do. He had not been doing much of a job of that, and she had been through so much without him. Simon was saved from focusing on that by two things: Jack's question and the Captain's arrival. The latter came right on the heels of the former.

Simon chuckled despite himself, the sound surprising in how unfamiliar it was. "No, this would be Captain Malcom Reynolds. River's much prettier." More surprising than his chuckle: the fact he had jested in return.

Aware of how the Captain had limped over, Simon stood, frowning with concern. "How's your foot? I had only begun to treat their wounds as best I could, and judging from that man's condition, it looks like he's been taken care of. I assume the same has been done for you." Though Mal had made his way there with little problem, Simon had stood up to help, should he need it in sitting.

He offered his hand, gesturing with his other between the two men. "Captain, this is Jack Hall. I've only just met his acquaintance." The question Jack had asked had a complicated answer; it could wait.

"Well, how's that!" Mal exclaimed with a crooked smile. "The doctor's got a sense of humor." It was news to him, really. Simon always had a stick shoved up somewhere unpleasant, and it was surprising to think he could loosen up here of all places.

While he didn't really need Simon's help in sitting down, he figured there was no real harm in taking it. Once he got settled, he nodded to the doctor. "They tended to it. Shouldn't be much of a problem so long as the stitches don't tear." It was definitely something that had happened before, mainly because he pushed himself too hard when he should have been taking it easy, but he was sure Simon would be able to infer that...

Actually, he wouldn't. Mal kept forgetting that as far as Simon was concerned, they barely knew each other. It was disorienting.

Glancing at the other man again, he almost provided his name before remembering that Simon had already done the honors. Instead, he stuck out his hand silently. No "nice to meet you," certainly no "pleased to make your acquaintance." In this place, there was no way it would be sincere. Even in Mal's normal dealings, it hardly ever was. He'd given up on such niceties.

"I'd hope your sister was prettier," Jack joked right back. "And had less stubble. River, huh? Pretty name. I've always liked nature names." He grinned and looked over at the captain, and took the offered hand with the same firm shake. It seemed like he'd picked the right person to be social with. Good.

"Good to meet you, Captain Reynolds. That a military or a ship title? Or just one of those nicknames guys pick up sometimes? I knew this guy, everyone called him General. He never served a day in his life, he just liked to bark out orders. He was a pain in the ass."

Jack was rather chatty.

"I would not get too accustomed to it," Simon retorted to the Captain. There had been so little to take humor or even joy in, with his sister's situation, with being on the run. The comparison made by Jack was so completely absurd that he could not help but be amused. With all the madness of this place, to not find something to smile at might be as fatal as one of those cats. He smiled at Jack, acknowledging, "She carries it well. When she dances--"

But Simon hadn't seen River dance in years, and he caught himself before reminiscing. River, simply River without what the Alliance had done, his sister, loosened his tongue some. "Good," he told the Captain, trusting him to be logical enough to go easy on it, not having the experience to know better.

Simon sat again as Jack spoke to the captain, leaving the answer to the man to whom it had been addressed. Still, he wondered, why would anyone have called that sort of man a General without any service to back it?

A good dancer. Mal knew what she had truly become proficient at, and it was fighting. But she was a girl, he had learned. Not a weapon. An albatross, maybe. But if anyone was forgiving of River, it was Simon. Unfortunately, he was probably going to see what she was capable of if they remained in this place for too much longer.

The captain didn't stay focused on that for very long, however. Not when the military was mentioned. This... Jack didn't know any better, but bringing up something like that around him was never a good idea. He didn't betray it (except perhaps with a small tensing of the shoulders), and instead answered him plainly. "Ship title. I'm captain of a spaceship." Hopefully the man wouldn't be too boggled by that fact.

"Probably doesn't have much reason to dance around here," Jack said, a note of almost sympathy in his voice. He turned to the captain, though, certain he'd already made a friend in Simon.

"Oh, spaceship. Yeah, I heard there were people who fly in spaceships around here. What kind of a spaceship? Like a rocket or a ship you'd find on Max Nexus? Which you've probably never heard off." Jack just shrugged, his easy grin still displayed across his face. "I just hope wherever you're from, mankind's taking better care of those other planets than he did of mine."

No, Simon thought, she probably hasn't had much reason to dance in a very long time. The thought was sobering, and left him enough in his own head to have missed the tension even if it had been obvious.

Wherever you're from? Simon blinked, not a little stupidly, and remembered again what that woman, Lust, had told him the first day. Her explanation had said that people came from different times. Simon wrinkled his brow.

"Max Nexus?" he asked, and the rest of it was difficult. "It would depend on your interpretation," he added, wording careful. The Alliance was an impressive government, but with it came intense corruption he had only began to see. He had no experience with the situations on the border planets, the rumors he had heard had been cast off as silly in his youth, and were only marginally more plausible now that he, too, was on the wrong side of the law.

At least this man didn't think space travel hadn't been invented yet. Granted, the words coming out of his mouth made little sense, but it seemed Simon felt the same way. It was good to have one person on the same wavelength as him.

Sort of, anyway. Mal was more than a little aware of how much he and the doctor disagreed on, but now wasn't the time to bring those up.

"It's not like a rocket," he said with a raised eyebrow. "Firefly class. It's... a spaceship." Were Kaylee around, she would have been able to rattle the specifics off like it was nothing, but Mal didn't have the motivation to describe Serenity, much as he loved her.

That last comment deserved a weighted answer, and Mal wasn't sure he wanted to get into it. He sighed and cracked his neck. "Takes care of some. Not others."

"Oh, it's a TV show I was nuts about when I was a kid. You guys got TV in space?" jack leaned back in his chair, one leg folded up over the other. "So it's like a... well, a spaceship, I got you. I understand. Man, imagine that. Traveling through space." he shook his head.

"Some? Where I'm from, we've only got the one. And it's being stripped and burned and laid to waste in the name of human advancement. War, industrialism, empirical rule..." Another shake of his head. "I'm not surprised humans aren't taking care of other worlds. We could never even look after our own, not when technology became the only thing that mattered. Forget curing diseases, build better computers! Screw the kids with cancer, get the rich kids a new phone that does everything...."

Jack trailed off and ran a hand though his hair. "Sorry about that, I can kinda get going if you let me. I do a lot of public speaking on saving the planet."

Jack, then, seemed to be from a place where space travel was not possible. It was difficult for Simon to imagine the opposite, to picture a single planet that lacked the ability to travel through space. He listened to Jack's explanation, and something clicked.

"Oh," Simon began, brightening with the revelation, "Could you be--are you from earth? From the twentieth century, maybe? One of those environmentalists?" He remembered his history books, as well as Timothy, a good friend of his in high school and a lover of history from at least five hundred years before. How bizarre! Yet, so interesting!

"I suppose things have not gotten much better in the future." It was weird for Simon to admit that, to think of the Alliance in such a widely disappointing way. Even with what had been done to his sister, most of his life had been spent as one of those rich kids.

He stood corrected. Jack did believe space travel hadn't been invented, then. He just wasn't as opposed to the idea as some of the other patients seemed to be. When Simon made the connection that he was for a time when Earth-That-Was was simply Earth, the captain wasn't sure what to think.

It wasn't something he'd had to put any thought into. What was the point of thinking back that far, when everything had changed so much? And yet here was a relic of that time.

Still, their business wasn't the same. Saving the planet had never been Mal's intention. In fact, he had never had much of an intention to start with - just to keep on flying.

"At our stage in the game, we've gotta worry more about people than planets. Alliance only worries about what concerns it. If some border planet needs medicine, it ain't their problem. They just string out the people they don't think matter to die." He hadn't want to get into this sort of discussion, especially considering he had one of his less supportive crew members with him.

'Well, yeah. I'm from Earth." Jack nodded. "I keep forgetting... there's people from all kinds of places here, huh? Yeah, Earth, early twenty first century. And... I don't really know what you mean by one of 'those' environemntalists..." He paused.

"I'm not one of those nuts who thinks we should be living off plants and that animals are slaves and shit!" He was quick to correct that idea. If that was the idea Simon had. No, jack wasn't one of those types. "No, I just think we need to take better care of our resources before they're gone. And we ought to respect the land we cultivate for our own needs and the animals we slaughter for food." He glanced over at the captain and nodded, lips twisted in a wry scowl.

"Sounds a lot like the US government. Unless it'll make them a buck, they don't care. Screw the poor and the old and the gays and the immigrants, it's all about the sleek Republicans in their townhouses and...."

And now really wasn't the time for a rant.

"There I go again."

Simon was looking at Jack as if he were a new breed of tumor, a revolution in medical science. "I must be insane," he murmured, not sounding too perturbed by the news. Trying to imagine the reactions of his professors, of Timothy, his parents, his co-workers--well, it did not matter, as he had proved himself crazy in another fashion.

If not for the other irregularities of Landels, Simon might have thought Jack legitimately mad. As it was, his immediate taking to the man lead to his accepting this as truth, with little qualm. It was strange, but little about this Landels mess wasn't. The Captain's talk of the border planets surprised Simon--there had been protests on such things, but Simon had never really paid attention. His research into them, while looking for a place to hide with River, had not yielded much like that. He couldn't begin to comment on that.

"That certainly sounds logical," he replied to Jack's defensive explanation, a touch of amusement in his voice, and it was a touch condescending. Jack seemed a saner sort of environmentalist than typically depicted in the books, but really, why care about the animals?

Simon cleared his throat after Jack's cut-off rant, his smile a little indulgent at this point. "You may be disappointed to hear that the United States government, if that's what you meant by U.S., was one of two to survive as a world power. Along with China. They joined to form the Alliance. Captain Reynolds and I, we come from the year two-thousand, five hundred and seventeen. The Alliance has moved well-beyond Earth-that-was."

He sounded, it could not be denied, like an insufferable know-it-all. But this was basic history, and was necessary, at least, to familiarize one another with their different pages.

While Mal couldn't say he agreed with Jack on all of the points he was making, he could relate on a general level. The point was that he didn't like what the government was doing - how it generally got far too involved in the lives of common folk - and he seemed to get similarly riled up about it.

Simon's small comment about insanity wasn't one the captain felt the need to respond to. Whenever the doctor had said something like that, it was usually when he was pulling his I'm-rich-and-therefore-better-than-you act. At the moment, he was in the mood for a fistfight, so he wasn't going to get into it.

After the history lesson, all the captain did was nod. "And from what you're saying, things haven't changed much. The Alliance is always getting involved in a man's business when it shouldn't." Look what had happened with Miranda, after all. Mal had to wonder how Simon would respond if he told him about that. He doubted he would be believed, and it was that fact that made him realize how much he had ended up changing. It was tiring to know they were back to phase one, but at least he was the one with the upper hand.

Jack was quiet for a bit, his hand up over his lips as he glanced around the room. He seemed almost jittery now.

"You're young," he finally said, leaning forward with his wrists on his knees, leaning in towards Simon. "You're young, and I get the feeling you're privileged. You've got that air about you, that's okay, I was privileged once to. But the thing is...."

He paused. He needed to choose his words carefully. There was no reason to cause a fuss. "Privilege? Power? Money? It doesn't really matter. It just gives people swelled heads unless they use it right. And most of them don't. But if you're young, you can excuse it. Because what do you know? What you've been taught. Who've you been taught by? Wealthy parents, most likely. You don't see anything outside of your own world. You don't see the little old ladies dying in the street, you don't see the kids so sick and hungry that they're blind and having seizures behind a dumpster somewhere. You don't see the crippled freezing to death because gas has been wasted to the point that there's hardly any left and it costs more than a normal person can afford. You don't see it, it isn't real, it doesn't touch you."

Jack leaned forward, gripping Simon's arm. "But when it does touch you... when something happens and you really see what the rich government and the pompous politicians have done, the veil falls away and you see the world for what it really is. A festering waste where a man is judged not by the content of his character, not by his mind, but by his wallet. And when you're the one who's sick and crippled and starving, or when your sister's the one who needs help..." He squeezed Simon's arm and sat back.

"You know, don't you Captain?"

Simon blinked as Jack leaned in and called him young, young and privileged. He blinked again, then stopped entirely, as the other man launched into a speech that felt more like a sermon.

Much as Simon disliked to be told he was an ignorant rich kid, he could not deny the logic, or clever emotional appear, in what Jack said. After all, he had learned just what could lurk beyond his bubble of privilege, hidden within that bubble, when the Alliance had used his sister. He liked Jack, so he was willing to be taken by what he would have otherwise rolled his eyes at. That like did not keep him from leaning back as Jack grabbed his arm, only just resisting the urge to pull free.

Jack, obviously, was very serious about this. Simon maintained eye-contact to be polite. That same courtesy kept him from brushing off his arm when Jack finally let go and sat back. He was a little wide-eyed, goggling at Jack as he addressed the Captain, but first, Simon was impressed. The man sure knew how to talk.

However, those warm feelings clammed up into something colder. As much as Simon might have deserved the speech, the reference to his sister hit too close to home.

"I am very glad you think you know my particular circumstances, Jack," Simon said, pressing his mouth into a thin line. He felt no inclination to explain. His irritation was tempered by the knowledge that of course, there was no way Jack could know what happened. It was ridiculous to any sane person's mind.

Dayshift 22; First Shift; Sun Room

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