Beneath the white uncaring sky - Firefly, Inara/Kaylee, R - for jae_w
Title: Beneath the white uncaring sky
Author: gloss
Recipient: jae_w
Medium: Firefly (post-series, no movieverse)
Pairing: Inara/Kaylee
Rating: R
Word count: 3,400
Summary: It was all Kaylee's fault; she knew that, thanks very much, and didn't need reminding.
Disclaimer: Whedon & Minear et al., not me.
Notes: Title, cut-text and in-text quotations from Sara Teasdale's poem. Beta by thenotoriousg.
When Inara's shuttle crashed on Methymna, it was all on Kaylee's head.
She knew that, thanks very much. How could she not?
The shuttle's thruster crank had been sparking and moaning for damn close to a *month*. Inara had told her, she'd told Mal, and Mal had done his usual "not now, little Kaylee, got work callin' to be done" rigamarole. So Inara'd gone to Mal, and he'd been all cow-eyed and "well, now, Miss Inara, I don't rightly know when we'll get to fixing that" and Kaylee could only roll her eyes. And Inara'd gone back, three or four times, until Mal exploded right on schedule --
"Woman, I got *work* to be done here!"
Inara stood straight and tall, elegant as the day she assumed the House mantle, and said, "This affects *my* work, Captain Reynolds."
Mal grumbled and growled, tossed around some empty cargo crates and stubbed his toe on a full one.
"Well?" Inara asked. One lock of her shiny hair fell over her face as she cocked her head.
"Soon as this job's in the clear," Mal said sulkily, sitting down to massage his hurt foot, "we'll get you back to your whoring, don't you worry."
In the meanwhile, Kaylee had done what she could with the crank, cannibalizing parts and screws from her collection of machinery, urging it to run just a little longer, a little smoother.
But the shuttle only lived *with* Serenity. It wasn't a part of it, and it didn't listen to her like the bigger ship did.
*
So when Inara's shuttle disappeared, it was mostly likely all over.
After all, everyone knew what Methymna's outer atmo was like. "Like breathing on Methymna" was a byword on almost every world for bad weather and choking fog. One of the earliest experiments in terraforming, Methymna was the rare enclosed moon, dirt dumped into its roiling seas to form continents and a web of chemicals woven around its stratosphere to repel the virathene winds and keep them out of breathing range.
The shuttle had screamed, off-kilter and off-course, through the net. Inara probably choked to death in the atmo, or else drowned in the seas.
This was all Kaylee's fault.
"We're bound to go after her," she announced over the morning meal and stabbed at her protein-gooed rice.
Book nodded serenely, bless him, but hardly anyone else responded.
Well, Mal *snorted*, but that hardly counted.
"Pass the snot," Jayne grunted and Zoe handed him the squeeze bottle of liquid protein.
"Language, language." River twirled on her seat, Simon tried to hush her, and Jayne snapped one of his chopsticks in two.
Kaylee took a deep breath and slapped her hand on the edge of the table. Oh, that *hurt*. "She's our friend, she's --" She could hardly bear to think about the shuttle falling off the wave screen, Inara's voice calling tinny and frantic for help, Wash's sharp intake of breath, the way Methymna's atmosphere closed around the shuttle's trail and sucked it up. "We need to get her."
"At the very least, it would be humane to recover the --" Simon blanched and pursed his lips when River stabbed his hand with a chopstick. "Remains?"
Kaylee glared at him as River tipped her head back and forth and sang a song about a broken doll left out in the snow. Simon at least had the decency to look away.
To think she ever thought he had a sweet bone in his body --.
"There's the Athos job in the works," Zoe said as gently as Zoe ever said anything to someone not Wash. Kaylee shook Zoe's hand off her shoulder and shoved the bench back. "I'm sure when that's all finished --"
"Athos job!" Kaylee knew she was screaming, could feel the prickling heat all over her face and down her neck, and clenched her fists at her side. "All y'all care about is, is --"
"Making a living?" Mal's tone was flat and *mean* as he set down his food and leaned back. "Survivin', sure, that's just whimsy on my part."
"Thieving and greed." Kaylee held her head high and stared Mal down. When he finally blinked, she nodded, like that confirmed *anything*, and stomped down to the engine room.
Serenity spluttered a little while Kaylee checked her valves and inputs. The noise was soothing, a little sympathetic, and even though Kaylee was still blinking away the sting of tears, Serenity, like always, helped her feel a little better.
Over the course of the day, there was something of a procession into the engine room. Kaylee ignored them as best she could.
"Way I figure it," Jayne said, shifting his weight uneasily and fingering a wrench, "Inara's a resourceful kitty. Probably landed on her feet."
"Once we bag Athos," Mal said, staying outside the door, speaking so low he could hardly be heard over the ship, "All's we need to do is swing back and..."
He trailed off as Kaylee banged at a recalcitrant shaft.
"Sometimes a group's got to make the hard decisions," Zoe said and squinted hard at the far corner. Kaylee knew she was talking about the war and looking to Kaylee to make the connection, but just now, Kaylee was a little too riled up to be fair. "You think on that, hm?"
"Oh, I'll think on it," Kaylee muttered under her breath. She waited until she was sure Zoe was gone; she might have been spitting mad, but she wasn't *stupid*. No way would she answer back to Zoe. She tightened a bolt until her knuckles glowed white. "I'll surely *think* on it. Fang xin. "
River drifted in and out of the room all day. Kaylee gave her a bit of wire and some circuits to play with.
It was well past dinner when Wash slid past the gearshaft and placed a mug of noodles in tea sauce by her hand.
Kaylee did her best impression of Jayne and grunted her thanks.
Wash didn't say anything, just dropped down to one knee and set to checking the gauges.
She'd never known Wash to be without a word on the tip of his tongue.
They worked together on the engine's heart, passing tools back and forth, Kaylee sipping her meal every so often.
"Seems to me," Wash said as he replaced the shield over the external gauges, "this ship's got two shuttles."
Kaylee swiped the sweat off her forehead and sat back on her heels. "Shi ma?"
"That's a fact." Wash's face was strawberry-spotted with exertion and the heat off the engine. He grinned when he caught her eye and shrugged.
"Mm-hmm." Kaylee slurped the last of her noodles, lukewarm now, and chewed them slowly. "You don't say."
"Seems to me, further-like, that we got one shuttle left," Wash continued, and slipped his arm around her shoulder. "And it's just waiting to fly."
Just like that, the plan came to her. Maybe this was how Mal felt whenever he dreamed up one of his lunatic schemes -- maybe he got flushed and felt lighter than air.
She could do this. She could fly that shuttle back to Methymna and rescue Inara.
It was simple as *anything*.
They waited until everyone was asleep; Jayne sacked out over his guns, the Shepherd resting peacefully on his back, a sweet little smile on his face, River twitching fitfully and Simon snoring like an ox, Mal facedown on his bunk, fist in his mouth, and Zoe crosswise over hers, naked as the day she was born. So many curves and nearly as many scars on her burnished skin.
"Avert those straying eyes, mei mei," Wash whispered as they closed the door. "You got your own woman to look to."
"Ain't like that," Kaylee protested as they tiptoed down the corridor to the spare shuttle.
"Ain't it?" he asked with a wink.
Inside, the shuttle was bare, nothing like the sumptuous nest that Inara had made of hers. Just curved walls and a tilting floor, functional and spare.
"Nah," Kaylee said. What she felt for Inara was, maybe, something like Wash's slackjawed admiration for his wife, but that was just to be expected, wasn't it? Inara was as stately and impressive as Zoe, just in a completely *different* way, and Kaylee admired them both. "Nothing like that."
Wash shook his head, like he was trying to bite back a joke, get it off his mind, and bumped his shoulder against hers. "You keep telling yourself that, maybe it'll stick."
"It's the truth --"
He grinned and Kaylee felt the enthusiasm for this damn fool errand shift into something a little slower, a lot sadder.
"Well," she added. "Maybe a little."
"Little in the sense of Jayne's a *little* backwards, sure," Wash said.
She stuck her tongue out at him and Wash laughed loud enough to raise the dead.
"Controls're easy," he said, still chuckling, pushing her into the cockpit. "Nothing you ain't seen before. Trick of it's gonna be entering the atmo --"
She listened, and nodded, and before she knew it, she was strapped in and Wash was kissing her forehead.
"You be safe," he said and smoothed down her hair. "Come back to us in one piece, or I'll have your hide."
*
Because the shuttle was running on siphoned fuel, the trip back to Methymna took several hours. Kaylee had more than enough time, a lot of time, *too much* time, to think as she floated backwards.
Kaylee knew she wasn't ever going to have Inara's refinement, that crook of her pinky and slender twist to her neck, that knowing look in her eyes as she took in the world and planned its pleasure.
And she certainly wasn't ever going to have Zoe's coiled strength, that grace in the face of danger that didn't need to spare a smirk to send it running, tail between its legs.
What she *did* have, she was happy enough with.
Didn't mean she couldn't admire what women could *really* be, given the right blood and training.
Inara had disputed that, the one time Kaylee raised the point that, if things had been different, she could've been the Companion.
"No, no," Inara said and slid her palm upward from the nape of Kaylee's neck into her hair. "I don't think so, sweetheart."
"But I *like* loving and messing about," Kaylee had protested. She wanted to twist around, look Inara in the eye, but the hand held her still, Inara's fingernails rasping lightly over her scalp. Kaylee sighed, enjoying the sensation despite herself. "Momma used to say maybe I enjoyed it too much."
When Inara laughed, Kaylee felt her chest pressing close; she dropped her chin and pressed back. Inara's arm circled Kaylee's waist and she whispered into Kaylee's ear, "Being a Companion isn't so much about the loving, táng."
Kaylee giggled. "Suppose it's about serving tea, then?"
"At times." Inara rested her cheek against the crown of Kaylee's skull; when she sighed, her breath tickled over Kaylee's ear. "Pleasure frequently has very little to do with love."
"I know how to have a good time!" Kaylee protested, and she did turn then, pulling herself up to her knees and glowering until Inara met her eyes. "It's been much too long, but I know what I'm doing."
"Of course you do, mei mei," Inara said and kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose.
Kaylee snorted and twisted away. "Don't see why you're all fancy-schmancy about this. Hose off the dust and scrub away the oil, I'd make a mighty fine Companion."
"You love so easily," Inara said, tugging her back, and her embrace felt so warm and good that Kaylee let herself be held.
After that conversation, Kaylee was left feeling discomfited and not a little *antsy*. Inara was rarely patronizing with her (with Mal, sure, that was another story, and he gave just about as good as he got besides).
But Kaylee didn't like the sound of Inara's voice, talking about pleasure like only a Companion knew what it was. As if Kaylee needed some hoity-toity Central Core Companion to educate her on the ways and wherefores of having a good time -- with a man, or another girl, or her own left hand.
She told Inara as much then -- it was the last conversation they ever had -- and she repeated herself now. She had to find her spunk *somewhere*, and staying mad was a lot harder than Mal made it look.
"Ha!" she said aloud now, as Methymna swam into view. The planet was an aqueous green of swirling storms and Kaylee repeated herself a little more quietly, willing herself to be brave. "Ha."
Her brave, bold plan shimmered away, went insubstantial, once she saw the moon. Somehow, she'd have to make it through the stratosphere, through the atmo's anti-virathene net, and land on one of the few archipelagos fit for habitation. From there, she would look for Inara.
For what remained of the shuttle.
*
Kaylee clutched the controls and fought to keep her eyes open as her shuttle screamed through Methymna's strato. The shuttle's nose steamed and bubbled under the virathene's assault while its body rocked side to side, up and down, through the gales. The nav system, its coordinates locked in by Wash, flickered and hooted alarms at her before finally seizing up, sputtering sparks, and going dark.
She hurtled blindly downward, murmuring as many prayers as she could remember as fast as her lips could form the words, poisonous clouds streaking up to meet her, devour her, swallow her whole.
*
A tree was leaning over her. Roughly-patched bark like tiles on a tilting floor, leaves sprouting from the top in flat circle like a rich lady's Sabbath hat. The leaves were green, she thought, green and black against an endless blue expanse bright as a booster shield when the engine was running full throttle.
It wasn't any tree Kaylee'd ever seen in life, and the blue burned so bright she rolled over to shield her skin from its heat.
Someone was singing. At first she thought it was River.
River would surely pad into the afterlife as easily as other people rolled off their bunks, sit next to Kaylee and braid her hair while singing a lullaby.
The voice was too rich, however, slightly too low, to be River's sweet soprano. The lyrics blurred and buzzed, music rather than words, until Kaylee turned over again. She shielded her eyes with her hand and blinked, carefully, awake.
Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands
And cried to Love, from whom the sea is sweet...
Kaylee closed her eyes again; the sky burned green behind her lids.
*
When she woke again, the shade of the strange tree had found her. Kaylee wiggled her toes and tried to sit up on one elbow.
"There you are," the woman's voice said. A hand pressed carefully atop Kaylee's, then squeezed. "I've missed you."
"Am I dead?" Kaylee tried to ask, but her mouth was dry, and all she could do was cough. A jar of cool water came to her lips and she lapped it like a cat, craning after it as it withdrew.
"Easy, easy," the woman sing-songed and Kaylee spluttered a bit.
When her coughing eased, she tried again. "I'm dead, aren't I? Wo cao, wo cao."
"You're not dead, Kaylee-girl." The woman laughed and gave her more water. "Though I can't vouch for your state when Mal comes after you."
*
When she next woke, Kaylee was more herself. Her eyes could focus, she could move without wanting to be sick to her stomach, and she had Inara next to her. The big tree shaded them nicely, and Inara had opened her shuttle's bay doors to catch the southeastern breezes.
They weren't dead, but this was pretty close to the kind of paradise the Shepherd liked to muse about. Fruit clung heavily to the low-growing bushes and, once she could move again, Kaylee rolled up her trousers and set to fishing in the shallows.
At night, they built fires big enough for a whole town to dance 'round and wrapped up in several of Inara's heavy silk tapestries.
Kaylee fiddled with repairing both shuttles, trundling parts back and forth until she'd gotten a low, harsh whine from the wave port in Inara's cockpit.
"The winter storms are blocking everything," Inara told her, taking her hand and leading Kaylee back out into the open. "Give it a week or two. We'll wave them first thing."
"But --" Kaylee glanced over her shoulder. Inara's shuttle had landed right on its belly; the blistered streaks from its entrance into atmo were the only sign of its travails. "I should try --"
"No," Inara said firmly, and steered Kaylee back to the firepit. "Try later."
Kaylee had never been able to say no, not to the people she loved. Out here under the purple sky, salt in her hair and fruit in her belly, she couldn't even remember the word.
Inara pushed her hair back and twined her arm in Kaylee's. She was naked as a babe, turning nut-brown under the strange, strange light, and Kaylee rested her head on Inara's shoulder.
"I was so mad at you," she said. Her anger was only a memory by now, bleached out by the light and sunk under the shifting waves that fingered their beach. "*So* mad, bao bèi."
"I expect you were," Inara replied. "I deserved worse."
When she kissed Kaylee, her hair blew around them and tangled up the sky.
"You did," Kaylee almost said, but her thigh was working itself nice and easy between Inara's knees, and she had one hand full of breast, the other of floating hair.
*
Kaylee would never have expected that she could live very long off Serenity. She worried, of course, about her darling girl, and about the crew. Even Jayne, if truth be told.
All the same, she couldn't go backward if she tried. And she didn't want to, not yet.
Their argument seemed to be forgotten. Or, if it was not quite out of memory, at least forgiven.
She tried to treat Inara nice, the way she ought to be treated -- clearing sand off the blanket for her, fetching her fresh water, kissing her gentle-like -- but Inara laughed at her. And when Kaylee scrunched up her face and tried to explain that, far as she knew, this was how you treated a lady, Inara laughed even harder.
At night, with the firelight painting calligraphy strokes over their skin, or during the day, under the tree, flower petals squashing beneath them, Kaylee treated Inara just as nice and respectful as she could.
And every time Inara caught her by the wrists and pulled her up, sucked Kaylee's lower lip between her teeth, and said, "Jian ruì," in a low, hoarse voice. So Kaylee tried her gorram hardest to go sharp and fast.
"Just be yourself," Inara said.
Kaylee grinned, her mouth numb with kissing. "Don't know any other way."
She didn't quite understand why Inara arched at that, why her head fell back and she melted against Kaylee, but Kaylee couldn't exactly *complain*. Not when Inara tasted like *this*, moved like *that*, and cursed like an ironsmith's bastard son when Kaylee tried *that*.
Their last night on the beach, Kaylee knelt with a pillow between her legs, its seam lined up with her yin bù just right. Her mouth was open, pressed to Inara, tongue moving in the spirals she liked best, while she worked three fingers inside the front hole and two in the back until she could rub her fingertips together, spark friction on and through the tender silk wall, and Inara hooked her arm around Kaylee's shoulder, moved like the tides around and atop Kaylee's questing fingers, and for a moment, as the night-bugs glimmered and flickered and the fire died in a shower of sparks, everything made sense.
It all came together, texture and sound and *sense*, the best kind of system, the hand of some smiling Creator, and Kaylee lost her breath at the wonder.
[end]
Author: gloss
Recipient: jae_w
Medium: Firefly (post-series, no movieverse)
Pairing: Inara/Kaylee
Rating: R
Word count: 3,400
Summary: It was all Kaylee's fault; she knew that, thanks very much, and didn't need reminding.
Disclaimer: Whedon & Minear et al., not me.
Notes: Title, cut-text and in-text quotations from Sara Teasdale's poem. Beta by thenotoriousg.
When Inara's shuttle crashed on Methymna, it was all on Kaylee's head.
She knew that, thanks very much. How could she not?
The shuttle's thruster crank had been sparking and moaning for damn close to a *month*. Inara had told her, she'd told Mal, and Mal had done his usual "not now, little Kaylee, got work callin' to be done" rigamarole. So Inara'd gone to Mal, and he'd been all cow-eyed and "well, now, Miss Inara, I don't rightly know when we'll get to fixing that" and Kaylee could only roll her eyes. And Inara'd gone back, three or four times, until Mal exploded right on schedule --
"Woman, I got *work* to be done here!"
Inara stood straight and tall, elegant as the day she assumed the House mantle, and said, "This affects *my* work, Captain Reynolds."
Mal grumbled and growled, tossed around some empty cargo crates and stubbed his toe on a full one.
"Well?" Inara asked. One lock of her shiny hair fell over her face as she cocked her head.
"Soon as this job's in the clear," Mal said sulkily, sitting down to massage his hurt foot, "we'll get you back to your whoring, don't you worry."
In the meanwhile, Kaylee had done what she could with the crank, cannibalizing parts and screws from her collection of machinery, urging it to run just a little longer, a little smoother.
But the shuttle only lived *with* Serenity. It wasn't a part of it, and it didn't listen to her like the bigger ship did.
*
So when Inara's shuttle disappeared, it was mostly likely all over.
After all, everyone knew what Methymna's outer atmo was like. "Like breathing on Methymna" was a byword on almost every world for bad weather and choking fog. One of the earliest experiments in terraforming, Methymna was the rare enclosed moon, dirt dumped into its roiling seas to form continents and a web of chemicals woven around its stratosphere to repel the virathene winds and keep them out of breathing range.
The shuttle had screamed, off-kilter and off-course, through the net. Inara probably choked to death in the atmo, or else drowned in the seas.
This was all Kaylee's fault.
"We're bound to go after her," she announced over the morning meal and stabbed at her protein-gooed rice.
Book nodded serenely, bless him, but hardly anyone else responded.
Well, Mal *snorted*, but that hardly counted.
"Pass the snot," Jayne grunted and Zoe handed him the squeeze bottle of liquid protein.
"Language, language." River twirled on her seat, Simon tried to hush her, and Jayne snapped one of his chopsticks in two.
Kaylee took a deep breath and slapped her hand on the edge of the table. Oh, that *hurt*. "She's our friend, she's --" She could hardly bear to think about the shuttle falling off the wave screen, Inara's voice calling tinny and frantic for help, Wash's sharp intake of breath, the way Methymna's atmosphere closed around the shuttle's trail and sucked it up. "We need to get her."
"At the very least, it would be humane to recover the --" Simon blanched and pursed his lips when River stabbed his hand with a chopstick. "Remains?"
Kaylee glared at him as River tipped her head back and forth and sang a song about a broken doll left out in the snow. Simon at least had the decency to look away.
To think she ever thought he had a sweet bone in his body --.
"There's the Athos job in the works," Zoe said as gently as Zoe ever said anything to someone not Wash. Kaylee shook Zoe's hand off her shoulder and shoved the bench back. "I'm sure when that's all finished --"
"Athos job!" Kaylee knew she was screaming, could feel the prickling heat all over her face and down her neck, and clenched her fists at her side. "All y'all care about is, is --"
"Making a living?" Mal's tone was flat and *mean* as he set down his food and leaned back. "Survivin', sure, that's just whimsy on my part."
"Thieving and greed." Kaylee held her head high and stared Mal down. When he finally blinked, she nodded, like that confirmed *anything*, and stomped down to the engine room.
Serenity spluttered a little while Kaylee checked her valves and inputs. The noise was soothing, a little sympathetic, and even though Kaylee was still blinking away the sting of tears, Serenity, like always, helped her feel a little better.
Over the course of the day, there was something of a procession into the engine room. Kaylee ignored them as best she could.
"Way I figure it," Jayne said, shifting his weight uneasily and fingering a wrench, "Inara's a resourceful kitty. Probably landed on her feet."
"Once we bag Athos," Mal said, staying outside the door, speaking so low he could hardly be heard over the ship, "All's we need to do is swing back and..."
He trailed off as Kaylee banged at a recalcitrant shaft.
"Sometimes a group's got to make the hard decisions," Zoe said and squinted hard at the far corner. Kaylee knew she was talking about the war and looking to Kaylee to make the connection, but just now, Kaylee was a little too riled up to be fair. "You think on that, hm?"
"Oh, I'll think on it," Kaylee muttered under her breath. She waited until she was sure Zoe was gone; she might have been spitting mad, but she wasn't *stupid*. No way would she answer back to Zoe. She tightened a bolt until her knuckles glowed white. "I'll surely *think* on it. Fang xin. "
River drifted in and out of the room all day. Kaylee gave her a bit of wire and some circuits to play with.
It was well past dinner when Wash slid past the gearshaft and placed a mug of noodles in tea sauce by her hand.
Kaylee did her best impression of Jayne and grunted her thanks.
Wash didn't say anything, just dropped down to one knee and set to checking the gauges.
She'd never known Wash to be without a word on the tip of his tongue.
They worked together on the engine's heart, passing tools back and forth, Kaylee sipping her meal every so often.
"Seems to me," Wash said as he replaced the shield over the external gauges, "this ship's got two shuttles."
Kaylee swiped the sweat off her forehead and sat back on her heels. "Shi ma?"
"That's a fact." Wash's face was strawberry-spotted with exertion and the heat off the engine. He grinned when he caught her eye and shrugged.
"Mm-hmm." Kaylee slurped the last of her noodles, lukewarm now, and chewed them slowly. "You don't say."
"Seems to me, further-like, that we got one shuttle left," Wash continued, and slipped his arm around her shoulder. "And it's just waiting to fly."
Just like that, the plan came to her. Maybe this was how Mal felt whenever he dreamed up one of his lunatic schemes -- maybe he got flushed and felt lighter than air.
She could do this. She could fly that shuttle back to Methymna and rescue Inara.
It was simple as *anything*.
They waited until everyone was asleep; Jayne sacked out over his guns, the Shepherd resting peacefully on his back, a sweet little smile on his face, River twitching fitfully and Simon snoring like an ox, Mal facedown on his bunk, fist in his mouth, and Zoe crosswise over hers, naked as the day she was born. So many curves and nearly as many scars on her burnished skin.
"Avert those straying eyes, mei mei," Wash whispered as they closed the door. "You got your own woman to look to."
"Ain't like that," Kaylee protested as they tiptoed down the corridor to the spare shuttle.
"Ain't it?" he asked with a wink.
Inside, the shuttle was bare, nothing like the sumptuous nest that Inara had made of hers. Just curved walls and a tilting floor, functional and spare.
"Nah," Kaylee said. What she felt for Inara was, maybe, something like Wash's slackjawed admiration for his wife, but that was just to be expected, wasn't it? Inara was as stately and impressive as Zoe, just in a completely *different* way, and Kaylee admired them both. "Nothing like that."
Wash shook his head, like he was trying to bite back a joke, get it off his mind, and bumped his shoulder against hers. "You keep telling yourself that, maybe it'll stick."
"It's the truth --"
He grinned and Kaylee felt the enthusiasm for this damn fool errand shift into something a little slower, a lot sadder.
"Well," she added. "Maybe a little."
"Little in the sense of Jayne's a *little* backwards, sure," Wash said.
She stuck her tongue out at him and Wash laughed loud enough to raise the dead.
"Controls're easy," he said, still chuckling, pushing her into the cockpit. "Nothing you ain't seen before. Trick of it's gonna be entering the atmo --"
She listened, and nodded, and before she knew it, she was strapped in and Wash was kissing her forehead.
"You be safe," he said and smoothed down her hair. "Come back to us in one piece, or I'll have your hide."
*
Because the shuttle was running on siphoned fuel, the trip back to Methymna took several hours. Kaylee had more than enough time, a lot of time, *too much* time, to think as she floated backwards.
Kaylee knew she wasn't ever going to have Inara's refinement, that crook of her pinky and slender twist to her neck, that knowing look in her eyes as she took in the world and planned its pleasure.
And she certainly wasn't ever going to have Zoe's coiled strength, that grace in the face of danger that didn't need to spare a smirk to send it running, tail between its legs.
What she *did* have, she was happy enough with.
Didn't mean she couldn't admire what women could *really* be, given the right blood and training.
Inara had disputed that, the one time Kaylee raised the point that, if things had been different, she could've been the Companion.
"No, no," Inara said and slid her palm upward from the nape of Kaylee's neck into her hair. "I don't think so, sweetheart."
"But I *like* loving and messing about," Kaylee had protested. She wanted to twist around, look Inara in the eye, but the hand held her still, Inara's fingernails rasping lightly over her scalp. Kaylee sighed, enjoying the sensation despite herself. "Momma used to say maybe I enjoyed it too much."
When Inara laughed, Kaylee felt her chest pressing close; she dropped her chin and pressed back. Inara's arm circled Kaylee's waist and she whispered into Kaylee's ear, "Being a Companion isn't so much about the loving, táng."
Kaylee giggled. "Suppose it's about serving tea, then?"
"At times." Inara rested her cheek against the crown of Kaylee's skull; when she sighed, her breath tickled over Kaylee's ear. "Pleasure frequently has very little to do with love."
"I know how to have a good time!" Kaylee protested, and she did turn then, pulling herself up to her knees and glowering until Inara met her eyes. "It's been much too long, but I know what I'm doing."
"Of course you do, mei mei," Inara said and kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose.
Kaylee snorted and twisted away. "Don't see why you're all fancy-schmancy about this. Hose off the dust and scrub away the oil, I'd make a mighty fine Companion."
"You love so easily," Inara said, tugging her back, and her embrace felt so warm and good that Kaylee let herself be held.
After that conversation, Kaylee was left feeling discomfited and not a little *antsy*. Inara was rarely patronizing with her (with Mal, sure, that was another story, and he gave just about as good as he got besides).
But Kaylee didn't like the sound of Inara's voice, talking about pleasure like only a Companion knew what it was. As if Kaylee needed some hoity-toity Central Core Companion to educate her on the ways and wherefores of having a good time -- with a man, or another girl, or her own left hand.
She told Inara as much then -- it was the last conversation they ever had -- and she repeated herself now. She had to find her spunk *somewhere*, and staying mad was a lot harder than Mal made it look.
"Ha!" she said aloud now, as Methymna swam into view. The planet was an aqueous green of swirling storms and Kaylee repeated herself a little more quietly, willing herself to be brave. "Ha."
Her brave, bold plan shimmered away, went insubstantial, once she saw the moon. Somehow, she'd have to make it through the stratosphere, through the atmo's anti-virathene net, and land on one of the few archipelagos fit for habitation. From there, she would look for Inara.
For what remained of the shuttle.
*
Kaylee clutched the controls and fought to keep her eyes open as her shuttle screamed through Methymna's strato. The shuttle's nose steamed and bubbled under the virathene's assault while its body rocked side to side, up and down, through the gales. The nav system, its coordinates locked in by Wash, flickered and hooted alarms at her before finally seizing up, sputtering sparks, and going dark.
She hurtled blindly downward, murmuring as many prayers as she could remember as fast as her lips could form the words, poisonous clouds streaking up to meet her, devour her, swallow her whole.
*
A tree was leaning over her. Roughly-patched bark like tiles on a tilting floor, leaves sprouting from the top in flat circle like a rich lady's Sabbath hat. The leaves were green, she thought, green and black against an endless blue expanse bright as a booster shield when the engine was running full throttle.
It wasn't any tree Kaylee'd ever seen in life, and the blue burned so bright she rolled over to shield her skin from its heat.
Someone was singing. At first she thought it was River.
River would surely pad into the afterlife as easily as other people rolled off their bunks, sit next to Kaylee and braid her hair while singing a lullaby.
The voice was too rich, however, slightly too low, to be River's sweet soprano. The lyrics blurred and buzzed, music rather than words, until Kaylee turned over again. She shielded her eyes with her hand and blinked, carefully, awake.
Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands
And cried to Love, from whom the sea is sweet...
Kaylee closed her eyes again; the sky burned green behind her lids.
*
When she woke again, the shade of the strange tree had found her. Kaylee wiggled her toes and tried to sit up on one elbow.
"There you are," the woman's voice said. A hand pressed carefully atop Kaylee's, then squeezed. "I've missed you."
"Am I dead?" Kaylee tried to ask, but her mouth was dry, and all she could do was cough. A jar of cool water came to her lips and she lapped it like a cat, craning after it as it withdrew.
"Easy, easy," the woman sing-songed and Kaylee spluttered a bit.
When her coughing eased, she tried again. "I'm dead, aren't I? Wo cao, wo cao."
"You're not dead, Kaylee-girl." The woman laughed and gave her more water. "Though I can't vouch for your state when Mal comes after you."
*
When she next woke, Kaylee was more herself. Her eyes could focus, she could move without wanting to be sick to her stomach, and she had Inara next to her. The big tree shaded them nicely, and Inara had opened her shuttle's bay doors to catch the southeastern breezes.
They weren't dead, but this was pretty close to the kind of paradise the Shepherd liked to muse about. Fruit clung heavily to the low-growing bushes and, once she could move again, Kaylee rolled up her trousers and set to fishing in the shallows.
At night, they built fires big enough for a whole town to dance 'round and wrapped up in several of Inara's heavy silk tapestries.
Kaylee fiddled with repairing both shuttles, trundling parts back and forth until she'd gotten a low, harsh whine from the wave port in Inara's cockpit.
"The winter storms are blocking everything," Inara told her, taking her hand and leading Kaylee back out into the open. "Give it a week or two. We'll wave them first thing."
"But --" Kaylee glanced over her shoulder. Inara's shuttle had landed right on its belly; the blistered streaks from its entrance into atmo were the only sign of its travails. "I should try --"
"No," Inara said firmly, and steered Kaylee back to the firepit. "Try later."
Kaylee had never been able to say no, not to the people she loved. Out here under the purple sky, salt in her hair and fruit in her belly, she couldn't even remember the word.
Inara pushed her hair back and twined her arm in Kaylee's. She was naked as a babe, turning nut-brown under the strange, strange light, and Kaylee rested her head on Inara's shoulder.
"I was so mad at you," she said. Her anger was only a memory by now, bleached out by the light and sunk under the shifting waves that fingered their beach. "*So* mad, bao bèi."
"I expect you were," Inara replied. "I deserved worse."
When she kissed Kaylee, her hair blew around them and tangled up the sky.
"You did," Kaylee almost said, but her thigh was working itself nice and easy between Inara's knees, and she had one hand full of breast, the other of floating hair.
*
Kaylee would never have expected that she could live very long off Serenity. She worried, of course, about her darling girl, and about the crew. Even Jayne, if truth be told.
All the same, she couldn't go backward if she tried. And she didn't want to, not yet.
Their argument seemed to be forgotten. Or, if it was not quite out of memory, at least forgiven.
She tried to treat Inara nice, the way she ought to be treated -- clearing sand off the blanket for her, fetching her fresh water, kissing her gentle-like -- but Inara laughed at her. And when Kaylee scrunched up her face and tried to explain that, far as she knew, this was how you treated a lady, Inara laughed even harder.
At night, with the firelight painting calligraphy strokes over their skin, or during the day, under the tree, flower petals squashing beneath them, Kaylee treated Inara just as nice and respectful as she could.
And every time Inara caught her by the wrists and pulled her up, sucked Kaylee's lower lip between her teeth, and said, "Jian ruì," in a low, hoarse voice. So Kaylee tried her gorram hardest to go sharp and fast.
"Just be yourself," Inara said.
Kaylee grinned, her mouth numb with kissing. "Don't know any other way."
She didn't quite understand why Inara arched at that, why her head fell back and she melted against Kaylee, but Kaylee couldn't exactly *complain*. Not when Inara tasted like *this*, moved like *that*, and cursed like an ironsmith's bastard son when Kaylee tried *that*.
Their last night on the beach, Kaylee knelt with a pillow between her legs, its seam lined up with her yin bù just right. Her mouth was open, pressed to Inara, tongue moving in the spirals she liked best, while she worked three fingers inside the front hole and two in the back until she could rub her fingertips together, spark friction on and through the tender silk wall, and Inara hooked her arm around Kaylee's shoulder, moved like the tides around and atop Kaylee's questing fingers, and for a moment, as the night-bugs glimmered and flickered and the fire died in a shower of sparks, everything made sense.
It all came together, texture and sound and *sense*, the best kind of system, the hand of some smiling Creator, and Kaylee lost her breath at the wonder.
[end]