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Badger was not entirely lying about his roots in the community. There was the shady side, with the smuggled goods and the stolen spaceships and the indenture contract brokering, but the man also had contacts in retail leasing and restaurant critique magazines and real business ventures.
It’s why Jabir started working for him.
Jabir's sister; Noora, the little one, had always had a gift for cooking. She started off by making holiday meals and birthday cakes for extended family and soon managing to book catering gigs and wedding cake commissions and working in kitchens, and Jabir knew that one day she wanted to have her own restaurant, and he wanted to see it happen.
Jabir had never had the sort of kid who had an obvious talent like his siblings. He'd scraped through school, done a bit of modeling both on the runway and in store windows, and then landed a few good security guard jobs before Badger saw him working a bouncer gig. It was the luck of timing that Jabir found himself turning away one of Badger's rivals as the man himself walked by, and once Badger had done his own private research, he offered Jabir work with the sort of connections and pay that only a fool would turn down.
Noora hadn't liked it. She'd begged Jabir to stay at the business complex's parking garage, to keep stepping in for window modelling when he could get calls, but he knew that this could be the ticket to seeing her face in a spread about trendy new eateries near the Eavesdown Docks.
Frankly, one of the best things about working as Badger's detail over a formal security guard position at a legit Persephone business was that Badger seemed to appreciate a bit of style. He wore the same dusty bowler hat every day, sure, but the man had a frankly staggering amount of jeweled brooches and array of little silky scarves that he wore as both ties and pocket squares. He liked flair. He liked panache.
So he liked Jabir's dreads, and he liked Jabir's choker rotation, and he particularly liked the wide bracelets that Jabir wore at the bouncer gig. The bracelets were real gold, a family heirloom with an origin completely lost to time. The only reason Jabir got away with wearing them not only out and about but in the districts he worked in was because they were so big that most folks assumed they were fake. Jabir was happy with that. What was the point of keeping those bracelets around if they weren't being worn? Noora certainly couldn't wear them in the restaurant's kitchen, and Sheena's neighborhood was just upscale enough that it was somehow more likely that she'd get robbed if she wore them.
None of the other guys who worked security in Badger's office had any dress sense, and Jabir wasn't sure that Ricky, the transcriber, even showered. Jabir supposed it was par for the course when it came to men willing to wield guns for a semi-legit business mogul, but it meant that Jabir was almost always the first one visible, just to make an impression. He was happy to do it. He got to meet the clients and contractors and usually stand in on meetings. Though he had no desire to start brokering deals of his own one day, it was fascinating to listen to the people who did that sort of work.
One of those people was Captain Reynolds.
To be honest, Jabir thought Captain Reynolds was kind of funny. A lot of ship captains and gang leaders and business owners treated Badger like he was the king of the planet, and Reynolds sure loved to poke right back when Badger poked at him. It made for a more entertaining time, with all the back and forth and attempts at physical intimidation and sarcasm.
Jabir and Badger stumbled upon Captain Reynolds and one of his workers at the market one morning during the same week Badger was losing sleep over the Harrow deal and making it everyone's problem. The negotiation meeting was very quick, despite Reynolds's incessant need to argue, and soon enough, tickets were being handed over and plans were being made, and then Badger was snapping his fingers towards where Jabir was sitting.
"Jabir," Badger said. "Gonna need you to take Cap'n Reynolds to that department store with the window models. Says he needs a dress there for a girl so he don't show up to the ball alone. You got connections there still, right?"
"Sure do," Jabir said with a nod, left his gun in the weapons locker, and escorted Reynolds to the department store, where the man immediately picked out an enormous pink monstrosity, let Jabir haggle a discount, and then lugged it back to wherever it was he lurked when he was on Persephone.
The rest of the evening was uneventful for Jabir until it was almost time for him to head home and Badger stormed through the headquarters, shouting up a storm about a duel and a social disaster, and Jabir and Ricky and a few more of the guys had to get on their biggest mule and drive to Birdsong Hall.
Once there, they confirmed that yes Malcolm Reynolds was slated to duel Atherton Wing the next morning, and that Kaywinnet Lee Frye, the girl he'd brought to the ball, would need to come with them back to the ship, where Badger would hammer out details of their emergency plan. The pink ballgown was hard to miss, and Jabir herded her over to the rest of the gang once he spotted her.
"Kaywinnet, right?"
"Yeah. You can call me Kaylee, though," she said, sounding more disappointed than scared. It was a bit of an ordeal to get her and the entire dress onto their mule, and Ricky ended up holding onto the side of the vehicle.
They were at the docks and stopping in front of a busted up old Firefly model and Badger ordered them all off the vehicle.
"Where'd she come from?" Jabir asked Badger as everyone scrambled off, gesturing at Kaylee with a nod of his head.
"She's on that ship with him."
Jabir wasn't entirely sure what this little girl would be doing on a ship like the one Reynolds ran. She had almost the same sandy hair as the captain, so maybe she was his daughter or his much younger sister. If their folks were dead (and Reynolds did give off a sort of single and orphaned energy) it would stand to reason that he'd brought her with him as he worked jobs to keep an eye on her. She'd probably seen worse than her guardian getting into fights at parties. He helped heft her and all her skirt ruffles back off the mule before taking her by the upper arm and hefting his gun to his side. She didn't seem too bothered by the situation, and went easily as they waited for Badger to get the door open.
"I like your necklace," Kaylee said. Jabir had heard plenty of flattering comments over the years, but Kaylee sounded genuine.
"Thank you."
It was sort of neat, to see the inside of the ship that brought them cargo shipments. Unsurprisingly, there were more crew members on board, and Jabir tried his best to catalogue them while also getting the lay of the land. Jabir had only ever met two of Reynolds's crew: Zoe and the guy with the goatee. Jabir liked Zoe best out of the three of them, but it wasn't exactly a close race. She was smart, she was levelheaded, and she also had a pretty sweet sense of style. There were three men on the crew that Jabir had never seen: one in a tropical print shirt, one in a stripey waistcoat, and one that was clearly a Shepherd. Reynolds didn't seem like the type to keep a chaplain, but the old man was certainly talking to Badger like a crew member, rather than a passenger.
They let they crew settle themselves on crates and start up a game of cards once they'd briefed them on the situation, and while there were a few disgruntled whispers, everyone seemed to have settled uneasily into waiting.
A commotion at the back of the cargo bay caught Jabir's attention.
There was another little girl on the ship. Jabir didn't want to tell Reynolds how to run his business but that felt like two too many. Ricky and Jabir looked at each other and knew they'd be getting chewed out later for just trusting the crew's word and not making the effort to check for other folks on board. Thankfully, Badger seemed distracted by whatever the girl was saying to him. Jabir tuned the whole thing out. He was tired and he didn't need another distraction. The girl was harmless, anyway. The man in the stripey waistcoat was probably her brother and he seemed incredibly stressed over her, which checked out, seeing as the way she acted made Jabir think she may have needed some extra care. She was eventually shuffled back to wherever she'd come from, and it was just a few hours later that Reynolds limped back to the ship while Jabir was really wishing Badger would let him ask these people if they had a coffee maker he could use. There was a very beautiful woman with him and Jabir found that he wasn't entirely sure how Reynolds's whole operation worked whatsoever.
"What do you think of them?" Badger asked thoughtfully once they finally got back to the headquarters and Jabir decided he would just take a nap on the office couch.
"I think he's got too many kids on that boat," Jabir said, exhausted. "One of them's bound to get shot."