Object of Serenity: Part One
Title: Object of Serenity
Pairing: River/Jayne
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 4100
The crew of Serenity is a bit aimless and unattentive in the months following Miranda. As each member seeks to heal itself and work their way back into the whole, Jayne and River drift together.
’tweren’t no one’s business but theirs. Serenity was a different place and by the same right, he was a different man. Sure he’d tried to sell her off - Mal’d nearly spaced him that time - and he’d tried to scare her off and even at times physically pick her up and throw her off, but that was then. Now things was different and weren’t no one could deny that. Not that he’d thought much on her. Any thinking he’d done had been about how the ’verse had turned itself inside out and how if there was another war he’d fight this time. ’swhat made him know he was different now, really. That burning inside him made him want to fight along side Mal and Zoë, even if it were a losin’ battle.
So no, that night in Serenity’s hold, he hadn’t gone looking for River. She’d just been there, and since he finally accepted her as part a Mal’s crew, he’d let her be and hadn’t tried to run her off. Weren’t her fault she couldn’t sleep. He knew that now. What she’d seen and what she’d finally done to save everyone else, he figured it weren’t his place to chase her off that crate or stop her from crying softly. If’n that’s what she wanted to do, he wouldn’t bother her. But even changed a bit, he still was himself and sure wasn’t going to let a slip of a girl keep him from liftin’ his weights if that’s what he’d had a mind to do.
It weren’t too many nights after that he stopped thinking on the girl as being in his space. She sorta became part of the space, like the crates and mule and such. Her whimpers, fading into soft snores as she cried herself to sleep, no more distractin’ than the hum of the engines. But then she stopped crying. She seemed to come awake and was no longer inanimate, but a living breathing soul in his space. She watched him now, still perched on the same crate, and silent with it. Her awareness of him made him aware of her, and that was unsettlin’. Still, he let her be, clearing his mind with each lift of his weights and soon she fade back into an object of Serenity.
The night he entered the hold and found her dancing, though, it was different yet again. This time he sat on the crate, and just watched. Though she neither spoke, nor acknowledged his presence, it wasn’t a crazy thing. Sure she was in her own mind, but she was present in the same time and space as he. So, knowing, though he couldn’t say how, that she wasn’t going to go off being crazy killer woman, he could sit and appreciate her beauty and grace. The moves deliberate, yet effortless. Her body obeyed the slightest whim of her mind without question, each muscle tuned to perfection.
Her body was damp with sweat when she finally eased out of the strenuous routine and let her muscles relax. He pushed himself off the crate and bent to pick up the cleanest of the towels that he kept on hand for wiping himself off after a workout. Their fingers grazed as she accepted it from him and she did not turn from him as she swiped it across her face and down her neck and shoulders. She let the towel fall when she finished and then took a step closer to him. She was in his personal space now, but not nearly close enough. He snagged her wrists and drew her in closer.
That first time on the wrought iron grating floor of the cargo hold, there hadn’t been any thought involved. No talking neither. Later he laid rest to any guilt with the knowledge that she coulda ended it at any time by tying him up into a human pretzel and tossing him out the airlock. But she didn’t. There had been no pulling back when he’d wrapped his arms around her and his lips around her nipple. She’d even helped him push down his pants and wound her legs tightly around him when he plowed into her. He did wonder if either had really took any pleasure from it. It had been something of a violent storm that had come over them both, leaving them bruised and bloody and out of breath at the end of it.
But no tears. It had to a been her first time and he knew for certain he’d hurt her, but she weren’t giving him any waterworks over it. When he pushed himself off her, she didn’t move. Just lay there with her head tilted back, eyes closed, trying to catch her breath same as he was. He let his fingers graze her arm as he stood up and zipped up his pants. She opened her eyes then and looked at him, but he couldn’t read her expression. It wasn’t sad or angry or hurt or happy, but it wasn’t blank either. She wasn’t hiding herself from him, he just didn’t know her well enough to understand the emotions she did feel. And maybe she didn’t know it herself at that point. He backed away silently, and she let him.
It was when they were preparing for a job the next day that he noticed the blood. The brownish smears blended in with the rusty metal if you didn’t know what you was looking at, but he knew. He looked down at the scrapes on his knuckles that no one had yet to notice. He felt the sting of the gash on his hip. He knew it was his blood on that floor. Mixed with the blood of her virginity and likely matching scrapes on her back. She wouldn’t show those wounds to her brother, so he resigned himself to the responsibility tending to her. Her hair had been straggly and her face smudged with dirt at breakfast, meaning she hadn’t washed up at all. He’d look to it once they had the cargo on board ship.
~ : ~ : ~
As it happens, the captain did notice the scrapes on his merc’s knuckles. He also noticed the faint bruises on the girl’s jaw that she’d attempted to conceal with dirt. The two of them were especially silent at the breakfast table and took pains to avoid one another. Before Miranda, River had often gone to great lengths to annoy Jayne. For his part, Jayne had been his most asinine as pertained to anything involving the Tams. But that had changed since battling the Reavers. Not that Jayne was bringing her tea and dumplings, but neither were there any hostilities. In fact, Mal had observed that they both seemed to take their nightly refuge in the hold. Separate corners, to be sure, but still in the same room. Looked like maybe their amicable ignoring had come to an end, but they weren’t causing a fuss at the breakfast table and he didn’t have time to sort out the personal grievances of his pilot and his merc at this juncture.
~ : ~ : ~
River got the Serenity back into the Black with a minimum of fuss and then settled herself in the galley with a cup of tea. The doc and Zoë were occupied with the captain in the infirmary. He’d had a nasty run in with a cactus and Jayne figured they’d be pulling needles out of him for a good long while. Kaylee was taking advantage of the captain’s indisposition to sit in the shuttle with Inara. That left Jayne free to fill up a basin with warm water and gather soap and a towel and gesture to River with a jerk of his head that she ought to follow him to his bunk - which she did. He dropped the soap and the towel down the ladder and climbed down with the water, careful not to spill any.
River lowered herself down after him and stood in the middle of his bunk, staring at him with her curious eyes. She didn’t ask him anything and he didn’t offer any explanations. Let her read his mind if’n she really wanted to know his intentions, though good luck to her. Jayne didn’t know his own self what he was doing or why, and he wasn’t one to question himself. Since he didn’t have any words, he didn’t bother trying to say any. He just gently peeled River’s clothes off of her and set himself to bathing her as thoroughly as he could with just a bowl of water and a single towel. And she let him.
When he finished, he pulled back the blankets on his mattress and guided her into the bed. Once she’d burrowed under the covers, he turned to pour out the water and take off his own clothes. He’d showered right after he got the cargo loaded up proper, while River was still on the bridge, so he wasn’t worried on that score. Her clothes were filthy and he tossed them onto the pile of his dirty laundry, so there might be a bit of a problem if she was needed quickly, but he solved that by laying out a clean t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants that had a drawstring she could use to keep them tight about her slender waist. Naked but for his shorts, he climbed in next to her.
“I’ll go down to your bunk and get ya some of your own clothes after the rest is sleepin’. Don’t need to be answering any questions just now. ’tain’t no one’s business but our own anyhow.”
He felt her nod her assent, and took that as sign it was okay to go to sleep. And that’s just how it was for a while. More and more of River’s things drifted into his bunk, and no matter where she started out, she always ended up in his bunk to sleep. Didn’t take much adjusting, really, she was just like another blanket or a pillow - a part of the whole. Came so he shivered a little and couldn’t quite get warm until her body was tucked in next to his. More than one night he’d set off on search of her to drag her to bed so’s he could get some sleep.
With everyone else lost in their own grief and with the Doc taking up with Kaylee and trusting that his sister was finally mostly clear in the head, no one noticed the change in sleeping assignments. Well, there wasn’t anything happening during the day to suggest anyone look for a change. River was still mostly their silent pilot. Coming outta her shell a bit as the captain would talk at her on the bridge, but she was still too new to this version of herself to be comfortable. Jayne was still minding his guns and the most profitable angle of every job. If they was both pulled to be in the same room more often than not, it weren’t like they were in each others laps. Just company. Kinda like at night. He’d never just slept with a woman before, but that’s all they did. No kissing or touching or any sexin’ - just sleep. And if that seemed kinda odd to Jayne, well he didn’t think on it much.
And then things changed again.
River turned over in the bed to face him as he was getting undressed. It was one of those times when he’d had to go an find her and he wasn’t happy about it neither. She knew it’d had been a bad day and that he was needing his sleep, but she hadn’t come to bed and she hadn’t been easy to find neither. And now this. She was looking at him. She never did that.
“I apologise,” she blurted out. “It was not my intent to disrupt your slumber. I just needed some time to think.”
“Then do your thinking in here,” he growled, pushing his pants down too forcefully and scraped against the long gash from a jagged knife that the doc had stitched up earlier. He grunted with pain, adding another layer to his irritation. Gorram girl could think all she wanted so long as she was silent and in his bed so’s he could sleep.
“But you won’t like my thoughts,” she explained.
“So don’t think ’em out loud,” he grumbled as he lifted the covers to get into bed.
She closed her eyes and sighed wearily. “I can’t help it. I wish to quantify this.”
“Does that involve talking?”
“I believe it does, yes.”
“Then save it for morning, Moonbrain, it’s been a long day.”
She blinked. “Of course,” she said, and turned over and went to sleep.
Jayne groaned, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “I ain’t much on the talking, little one, or thinking on questions as don’t rightly have answers, but you can talk at me all you like once I’ve had some sleep.”
River turned back over so that she faced him and, tucking her head into his shoulder, she wrapped her arms around him and tangled her legs with his. “Thank you,” she whispered and promptly went to sleep.
The girl was often awake and out of bed long before he woke up, and even on those rare circumstances that she chose to sleep in, she was always just lying on her part of the mattress. Weren’t a large mattress, so sleeping together involved a great deal of touching, but they still managed to be in two separate places. This time, though, when Jayne started to drift awake, he also gradually noticed that River was in his arms. She wasn’t just another piece of the bedding no more, she was wrapped around him like a woman. He moaned and ground his erection against the crotch that was pressed invitingly against his own. He could feel her - gorram girl was already wet for him. Her arms tightened around him and she shifted slightly so that he could press into her.
“You sure about this, girl?” She’d mentioned something about wanting to talk, and it was something they’d forgot to do the last time.
She didn’t answer as such, but pushed his shoulder so’s he was lying down and she could straddle him. He lay still as she slowly eased herself down upon him. She was as tight as he’d remembered and he fisted the sheets to keep from using his hands to grasp her hips and press himself more forcefully into her. She bit her lip and he ground his teeth. It was agony, but he let her do it. Let her rock herself gently against him, stretching herself out slowly and then working herself into a steady rhythm. Mentally disassembling and reassembling the parts of his guns in his head, he held out while she worked herself up to the same fevered pitch at which he’d begun.
When he finally felt her muscles spasm around him, he wrapped his arms tightly around her and flipped them over so that he could work himself in her at the more intense pace he preferred. She tilted her hips up to accept him and grasped his buttocks to pull him into her. Her head tossed and she whimpered with pleasure and that sent him over the edge more quickly than just feeling her wet heat clamped so tightly around him.
Many breathless minutes later, he had leveraged his weight on his arms, though he hadn’t lifted himself from her completely. “You wanted to talk?”
“Talk is cheap,” she muttered as she leaned up to take on of his nipples into her mouth.
“Ungh,” he agreed.
~ : ~ : ~
Mal had made it a point in the months since Miranda, to let his crew manage their grief as they saw best. He didn’t try to cajole his already stoic first mate out of her dark brooding. He didn’t taunt the Companion, even though Inara still managed to cloud his mind with things he’d rather not feel. He didn’t censure Kaylee and the doc even though the entire ship was more than a little sickened by the profuse amounts of affection they displayed without regard to witnesses. And when he noticed that the tiny crazy person turned pilot was sleeping in the merc’s bunk, he didn’t say anything, nor tell anyone. Weren’t no one’s business but theirs and there was a whole pile a dead Reavers what gave lie to the girl’s seeming innocence.
But this was a bit much.
“Jayne know you’re raiding his wardrobe, Lil’ Albatross?”
“Hmm,” was all she replied, and that without looking up from the course she was plotting.
“Your brother is a mite too involved in his own woman to notice that his sister don’t exactly make much use of her bedroom, but that don’t mean he ain’t gonna notice Jayne’s distinctive taste in fashion on your back.”
“All of my shirts were dirty.”
Mal shook his head at that. It was difficult to imagine anything of Jayne Cobb’s as being cleaner than even the girl’s dirtiest laundry. “I’m just saying as I prefer peaceful quiet on my boat, and unless you’re serious about this, you might want do a better job of keeping your laundry clean.”
She looked up at him then, wide-eyed and shocked. “Serious?”
He blinked. “Well, yeah. I mean, I could put up with my medic and my merc going after each other’s throats if’n he was gonna marry you, or something. I’m not saying as I think it’s a shiny idea, but Zoë’d have my head if I tried to stop ya. But I doubt there’s anyway you’re going to convince that merc to do right by ya, so I’d really rather your brother didn’t find out. And don’t go getting your heart broken neither. I don’t hold with lovesick crazy girls piloting my boat.”
“Hunh,” she replied and turned back to her work.
Mal lowered his face to the palm of his hand. That went well.
Later he was sitting in the galley sipping at a cup of tea while Inara cooked dinner and Zoë sharpened a knife. River strolled through on her way from the hold to the bridge, pausing to grab an orange from the bowl on the table. Zoë, who hadn’t strung together more than a couple of words that weren’t related to business in months, stared after her and said, “Is that Jayne’s shirt?”
He rose from the table grunting and headed for the hold to check on the cargo. He needed this drama like a bullet in the brainpan.
“Just asking,” came Zoë’s amused voice from behind him.
When he passed the infirmary, he was comforted to note that Simon and Kaylee were in their usual tangle of limbs and obviously the doc still hadn’t noticed what his sister had taken to wearing.
Sitting on the mule, Mal found himself in a bit of contemplation. The jobs came and went with lucrative frequency. Alliance interference was next to non-existent. And his crew was mostly content. He couldn’t say as they was happy, but they weren’t fighting neither. The landscape of his life had changed a great deal since Miranda. Some for the better, a lot for the worse, but still he was living his life on his own terms. It pained him, worse than the losses of Serenity Valley, just how many good folk had had to die so’s he could float around the Black with his crew, but it didn’t eat at his soul in the same manner. Despite the cost, they’d done what was right and good and the almighty power of the Alliance was being chipped away by the trusting citizens who now knew what atrocities good intentions were capable of. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before the spheres of influence that the Core planets held over the rim faded away of their own accord. They were spread too thin and there wasn’t the foundation of belief that had existed before. People weren’t willing to lay down their lives for a civilisation that could gas thirty million people for the sake of scientific experimentation.
~ : ~ : ~
Life is a series of unending complications. That was the one constant that River had been able to grasp in the past year and a half. Certainly the anguish that was Miranda had left her, and the fear that had been her constant companion had subsided. The Academy held nothing over her now. She could trigger and let go of her training by her own will. There truly was no power in the ‘verse that could stop her. Not when she was Serenity.
But now there was the man they called Jayne. A series of complications in and of himself. She had not intended to intrude upon his space. The crate in the hold had called to her with it’s solid simplicity of containment. She had only noticed the man’s inclusion in her surroundings by slow degrees. She observed him as he studiously ignore her and then not so studiously. She had become a comfortable object in his surroundings. She found if she shifted just slightly, he would be wary. If she shifted back, he would relax, but if she maintained the shift, he would adjust. The intricate ties between them fascinated her and moved her to dance to the hum of their music.
The dance that had brought him into her awareness. The dance that had brought further complication. Sexual Intercourse was no longer a matter of theoretical knowledge, but a painful and bloody, yet exhilarating experience. And he hadn’t intended to hurt her. There had been no intention at all. He was simply as driven as she was to see what the next moment held and he’d been as affected as her. She’d been a little lost in her own body for a few hours, but then he’d pulled her back out and soothed the hurts and settled her into another space of his being. She was no longer a piece of cargo in the hold. Now she was a blanket.
And that had been nice. A blanket is a warm and soft and comfortable thing. But a girl who has to quantify every element of being soon had to see that being Jayne Cobb’s blanket was of more significance than simply being an object. That had terrified her and she’d moved herself back down to the hold where she could be cargo, nice and simple. But he hadn’t allowed that. She should have known he wouldn’t, though she was so focussed on her internal equilibrium, she had neglected his variables. Like a toddler, he hadn’t been able to sleep until he’d found his favourite bed-thing and held it to sooth him to sleep.
And when they awoke entangled, he’d shown her that sexual intercourse, while still painful and messy, could also be quite pleasurable. She hadn’t wanted the memory of his touch to fade away in the chaos of her mind and all its many thoughts and voices, so she’d worn his shirt. The constant caress of fabric against her skin reminded her of feeling his skin so intimately against hers. Jayne was going to be wary for a while, because things had shifted again. But it wasn’t until the captain had said the word ‘serious’ that she’d begun to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.
This was serious. River was having sexual relations with Jayne. In and of itself, not serious, though Simon would certainly disagree. River was sleeping in Jayne’s bunk. Again, she was an object and where the object rested was of little significance - if the object was only resting. River was spending a great deal of time in the presence of Jayne. No one could blame her for that, though - not knowing how affected she was by the thoughts and moods of others. Jayne’s simplicity of emotion and deliberate lack of introspection, made him an easy companion. River was wearing an article of Jayne’s clothing. That made it serious.
River lowered herself into Jayne’s bunk and for the first time took note of how many of her things were scattered about, mixed in with his. He looked up from his gun magazine with a look of interest, though not shock. Though she only ever entered the bunk at night, to have her enter unannounced mid afternoon only mildly surprised him. He was that comfortable with her presence in his space.
River’s eyes widened with the shock she thought he ought to feel.
“Jayne,” she whimpered. “I think this is serious.”
Author Index
Pairing: River/Jayne
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 4100
The crew of Serenity is a bit aimless and unattentive in the months following Miranda. As each member seeks to heal itself and work their way back into the whole, Jayne and River drift together.
’tweren’t no one’s business but theirs. Serenity was a different place and by the same right, he was a different man. Sure he’d tried to sell her off - Mal’d nearly spaced him that time - and he’d tried to scare her off and even at times physically pick her up and throw her off, but that was then. Now things was different and weren’t no one could deny that. Not that he’d thought much on her. Any thinking he’d done had been about how the ’verse had turned itself inside out and how if there was another war he’d fight this time. ’swhat made him know he was different now, really. That burning inside him made him want to fight along side Mal and Zoë, even if it were a losin’ battle.
So no, that night in Serenity’s hold, he hadn’t gone looking for River. She’d just been there, and since he finally accepted her as part a Mal’s crew, he’d let her be and hadn’t tried to run her off. Weren’t her fault she couldn’t sleep. He knew that now. What she’d seen and what she’d finally done to save everyone else, he figured it weren’t his place to chase her off that crate or stop her from crying softly. If’n that’s what she wanted to do, he wouldn’t bother her. But even changed a bit, he still was himself and sure wasn’t going to let a slip of a girl keep him from liftin’ his weights if that’s what he’d had a mind to do.
It weren’t too many nights after that he stopped thinking on the girl as being in his space. She sorta became part of the space, like the crates and mule and such. Her whimpers, fading into soft snores as she cried herself to sleep, no more distractin’ than the hum of the engines. But then she stopped crying. She seemed to come awake and was no longer inanimate, but a living breathing soul in his space. She watched him now, still perched on the same crate, and silent with it. Her awareness of him made him aware of her, and that was unsettlin’. Still, he let her be, clearing his mind with each lift of his weights and soon she fade back into an object of Serenity.
The night he entered the hold and found her dancing, though, it was different yet again. This time he sat on the crate, and just watched. Though she neither spoke, nor acknowledged his presence, it wasn’t a crazy thing. Sure she was in her own mind, but she was present in the same time and space as he. So, knowing, though he couldn’t say how, that she wasn’t going to go off being crazy killer woman, he could sit and appreciate her beauty and grace. The moves deliberate, yet effortless. Her body obeyed the slightest whim of her mind without question, each muscle tuned to perfection.
Her body was damp with sweat when she finally eased out of the strenuous routine and let her muscles relax. He pushed himself off the crate and bent to pick up the cleanest of the towels that he kept on hand for wiping himself off after a workout. Their fingers grazed as she accepted it from him and she did not turn from him as she swiped it across her face and down her neck and shoulders. She let the towel fall when she finished and then took a step closer to him. She was in his personal space now, but not nearly close enough. He snagged her wrists and drew her in closer.
That first time on the wrought iron grating floor of the cargo hold, there hadn’t been any thought involved. No talking neither. Later he laid rest to any guilt with the knowledge that she coulda ended it at any time by tying him up into a human pretzel and tossing him out the airlock. But she didn’t. There had been no pulling back when he’d wrapped his arms around her and his lips around her nipple. She’d even helped him push down his pants and wound her legs tightly around him when he plowed into her. He did wonder if either had really took any pleasure from it. It had been something of a violent storm that had come over them both, leaving them bruised and bloody and out of breath at the end of it.
But no tears. It had to a been her first time and he knew for certain he’d hurt her, but she weren’t giving him any waterworks over it. When he pushed himself off her, she didn’t move. Just lay there with her head tilted back, eyes closed, trying to catch her breath same as he was. He let his fingers graze her arm as he stood up and zipped up his pants. She opened her eyes then and looked at him, but he couldn’t read her expression. It wasn’t sad or angry or hurt or happy, but it wasn’t blank either. She wasn’t hiding herself from him, he just didn’t know her well enough to understand the emotions she did feel. And maybe she didn’t know it herself at that point. He backed away silently, and she let him.
It was when they were preparing for a job the next day that he noticed the blood. The brownish smears blended in with the rusty metal if you didn’t know what you was looking at, but he knew. He looked down at the scrapes on his knuckles that no one had yet to notice. He felt the sting of the gash on his hip. He knew it was his blood on that floor. Mixed with the blood of her virginity and likely matching scrapes on her back. She wouldn’t show those wounds to her brother, so he resigned himself to the responsibility tending to her. Her hair had been straggly and her face smudged with dirt at breakfast, meaning she hadn’t washed up at all. He’d look to it once they had the cargo on board ship.
~ : ~ : ~
As it happens, the captain did notice the scrapes on his merc’s knuckles. He also noticed the faint bruises on the girl’s jaw that she’d attempted to conceal with dirt. The two of them were especially silent at the breakfast table and took pains to avoid one another. Before Miranda, River had often gone to great lengths to annoy Jayne. For his part, Jayne had been his most asinine as pertained to anything involving the Tams. But that had changed since battling the Reavers. Not that Jayne was bringing her tea and dumplings, but neither were there any hostilities. In fact, Mal had observed that they both seemed to take their nightly refuge in the hold. Separate corners, to be sure, but still in the same room. Looked like maybe their amicable ignoring had come to an end, but they weren’t causing a fuss at the breakfast table and he didn’t have time to sort out the personal grievances of his pilot and his merc at this juncture.
~ : ~ : ~
River got the Serenity back into the Black with a minimum of fuss and then settled herself in the galley with a cup of tea. The doc and Zoë were occupied with the captain in the infirmary. He’d had a nasty run in with a cactus and Jayne figured they’d be pulling needles out of him for a good long while. Kaylee was taking advantage of the captain’s indisposition to sit in the shuttle with Inara. That left Jayne free to fill up a basin with warm water and gather soap and a towel and gesture to River with a jerk of his head that she ought to follow him to his bunk - which she did. He dropped the soap and the towel down the ladder and climbed down with the water, careful not to spill any.
River lowered herself down after him and stood in the middle of his bunk, staring at him with her curious eyes. She didn’t ask him anything and he didn’t offer any explanations. Let her read his mind if’n she really wanted to know his intentions, though good luck to her. Jayne didn’t know his own self what he was doing or why, and he wasn’t one to question himself. Since he didn’t have any words, he didn’t bother trying to say any. He just gently peeled River’s clothes off of her and set himself to bathing her as thoroughly as he could with just a bowl of water and a single towel. And she let him.
When he finished, he pulled back the blankets on his mattress and guided her into the bed. Once she’d burrowed under the covers, he turned to pour out the water and take off his own clothes. He’d showered right after he got the cargo loaded up proper, while River was still on the bridge, so he wasn’t worried on that score. Her clothes were filthy and he tossed them onto the pile of his dirty laundry, so there might be a bit of a problem if she was needed quickly, but he solved that by laying out a clean t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants that had a drawstring she could use to keep them tight about her slender waist. Naked but for his shorts, he climbed in next to her.
“I’ll go down to your bunk and get ya some of your own clothes after the rest is sleepin’. Don’t need to be answering any questions just now. ’tain’t no one’s business but our own anyhow.”
He felt her nod her assent, and took that as sign it was okay to go to sleep. And that’s just how it was for a while. More and more of River’s things drifted into his bunk, and no matter where she started out, she always ended up in his bunk to sleep. Didn’t take much adjusting, really, she was just like another blanket or a pillow - a part of the whole. Came so he shivered a little and couldn’t quite get warm until her body was tucked in next to his. More than one night he’d set off on search of her to drag her to bed so’s he could get some sleep.
With everyone else lost in their own grief and with the Doc taking up with Kaylee and trusting that his sister was finally mostly clear in the head, no one noticed the change in sleeping assignments. Well, there wasn’t anything happening during the day to suggest anyone look for a change. River was still mostly their silent pilot. Coming outta her shell a bit as the captain would talk at her on the bridge, but she was still too new to this version of herself to be comfortable. Jayne was still minding his guns and the most profitable angle of every job. If they was both pulled to be in the same room more often than not, it weren’t like they were in each others laps. Just company. Kinda like at night. He’d never just slept with a woman before, but that’s all they did. No kissing or touching or any sexin’ - just sleep. And if that seemed kinda odd to Jayne, well he didn’t think on it much.
And then things changed again.
River turned over in the bed to face him as he was getting undressed. It was one of those times when he’d had to go an find her and he wasn’t happy about it neither. She knew it’d had been a bad day and that he was needing his sleep, but she hadn’t come to bed and she hadn’t been easy to find neither. And now this. She was looking at him. She never did that.
“I apologise,” she blurted out. “It was not my intent to disrupt your slumber. I just needed some time to think.”
“Then do your thinking in here,” he growled, pushing his pants down too forcefully and scraped against the long gash from a jagged knife that the doc had stitched up earlier. He grunted with pain, adding another layer to his irritation. Gorram girl could think all she wanted so long as she was silent and in his bed so’s he could sleep.
“But you won’t like my thoughts,” she explained.
“So don’t think ’em out loud,” he grumbled as he lifted the covers to get into bed.
She closed her eyes and sighed wearily. “I can’t help it. I wish to quantify this.”
“Does that involve talking?”
“I believe it does, yes.”
“Then save it for morning, Moonbrain, it’s been a long day.”
She blinked. “Of course,” she said, and turned over and went to sleep.
Jayne groaned, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “I ain’t much on the talking, little one, or thinking on questions as don’t rightly have answers, but you can talk at me all you like once I’ve had some sleep.”
River turned back over so that she faced him and, tucking her head into his shoulder, she wrapped her arms around him and tangled her legs with his. “Thank you,” she whispered and promptly went to sleep.
The girl was often awake and out of bed long before he woke up, and even on those rare circumstances that she chose to sleep in, she was always just lying on her part of the mattress. Weren’t a large mattress, so sleeping together involved a great deal of touching, but they still managed to be in two separate places. This time, though, when Jayne started to drift awake, he also gradually noticed that River was in his arms. She wasn’t just another piece of the bedding no more, she was wrapped around him like a woman. He moaned and ground his erection against the crotch that was pressed invitingly against his own. He could feel her - gorram girl was already wet for him. Her arms tightened around him and she shifted slightly so that he could press into her.
“You sure about this, girl?” She’d mentioned something about wanting to talk, and it was something they’d forgot to do the last time.
She didn’t answer as such, but pushed his shoulder so’s he was lying down and she could straddle him. He lay still as she slowly eased herself down upon him. She was as tight as he’d remembered and he fisted the sheets to keep from using his hands to grasp her hips and press himself more forcefully into her. She bit her lip and he ground his teeth. It was agony, but he let her do it. Let her rock herself gently against him, stretching herself out slowly and then working herself into a steady rhythm. Mentally disassembling and reassembling the parts of his guns in his head, he held out while she worked herself up to the same fevered pitch at which he’d begun.
When he finally felt her muscles spasm around him, he wrapped his arms tightly around her and flipped them over so that he could work himself in her at the more intense pace he preferred. She tilted her hips up to accept him and grasped his buttocks to pull him into her. Her head tossed and she whimpered with pleasure and that sent him over the edge more quickly than just feeling her wet heat clamped so tightly around him.
Many breathless minutes later, he had leveraged his weight on his arms, though he hadn’t lifted himself from her completely. “You wanted to talk?”
“Talk is cheap,” she muttered as she leaned up to take on of his nipples into her mouth.
“Ungh,” he agreed.
~ : ~ : ~
Mal had made it a point in the months since Miranda, to let his crew manage their grief as they saw best. He didn’t try to cajole his already stoic first mate out of her dark brooding. He didn’t taunt the Companion, even though Inara still managed to cloud his mind with things he’d rather not feel. He didn’t censure Kaylee and the doc even though the entire ship was more than a little sickened by the profuse amounts of affection they displayed without regard to witnesses. And when he noticed that the tiny crazy person turned pilot was sleeping in the merc’s bunk, he didn’t say anything, nor tell anyone. Weren’t no one’s business but theirs and there was a whole pile a dead Reavers what gave lie to the girl’s seeming innocence.
But this was a bit much.
“Jayne know you’re raiding his wardrobe, Lil’ Albatross?”
“Hmm,” was all she replied, and that without looking up from the course she was plotting.
“Your brother is a mite too involved in his own woman to notice that his sister don’t exactly make much use of her bedroom, but that don’t mean he ain’t gonna notice Jayne’s distinctive taste in fashion on your back.”
“All of my shirts were dirty.”
Mal shook his head at that. It was difficult to imagine anything of Jayne Cobb’s as being cleaner than even the girl’s dirtiest laundry. “I’m just saying as I prefer peaceful quiet on my boat, and unless you’re serious about this, you might want do a better job of keeping your laundry clean.”
She looked up at him then, wide-eyed and shocked. “Serious?”
He blinked. “Well, yeah. I mean, I could put up with my medic and my merc going after each other’s throats if’n he was gonna marry you, or something. I’m not saying as I think it’s a shiny idea, but Zoë’d have my head if I tried to stop ya. But I doubt there’s anyway you’re going to convince that merc to do right by ya, so I’d really rather your brother didn’t find out. And don’t go getting your heart broken neither. I don’t hold with lovesick crazy girls piloting my boat.”
“Hunh,” she replied and turned back to her work.
Mal lowered his face to the palm of his hand. That went well.
Later he was sitting in the galley sipping at a cup of tea while Inara cooked dinner and Zoë sharpened a knife. River strolled through on her way from the hold to the bridge, pausing to grab an orange from the bowl on the table. Zoë, who hadn’t strung together more than a couple of words that weren’t related to business in months, stared after her and said, “Is that Jayne’s shirt?”
He rose from the table grunting and headed for the hold to check on the cargo. He needed this drama like a bullet in the brainpan.
“Just asking,” came Zoë’s amused voice from behind him.
When he passed the infirmary, he was comforted to note that Simon and Kaylee were in their usual tangle of limbs and obviously the doc still hadn’t noticed what his sister had taken to wearing.
Sitting on the mule, Mal found himself in a bit of contemplation. The jobs came and went with lucrative frequency. Alliance interference was next to non-existent. And his crew was mostly content. He couldn’t say as they was happy, but they weren’t fighting neither. The landscape of his life had changed a great deal since Miranda. Some for the better, a lot for the worse, but still he was living his life on his own terms. It pained him, worse than the losses of Serenity Valley, just how many good folk had had to die so’s he could float around the Black with his crew, but it didn’t eat at his soul in the same manner. Despite the cost, they’d done what was right and good and the almighty power of the Alliance was being chipped away by the trusting citizens who now knew what atrocities good intentions were capable of. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before the spheres of influence that the Core planets held over the rim faded away of their own accord. They were spread too thin and there wasn’t the foundation of belief that had existed before. People weren’t willing to lay down their lives for a civilisation that could gas thirty million people for the sake of scientific experimentation.
~ : ~ : ~
Life is a series of unending complications. That was the one constant that River had been able to grasp in the past year and a half. Certainly the anguish that was Miranda had left her, and the fear that had been her constant companion had subsided. The Academy held nothing over her now. She could trigger and let go of her training by her own will. There truly was no power in the ‘verse that could stop her. Not when she was Serenity.
But now there was the man they called Jayne. A series of complications in and of himself. She had not intended to intrude upon his space. The crate in the hold had called to her with it’s solid simplicity of containment. She had only noticed the man’s inclusion in her surroundings by slow degrees. She observed him as he studiously ignore her and then not so studiously. She had become a comfortable object in his surroundings. She found if she shifted just slightly, he would be wary. If she shifted back, he would relax, but if she maintained the shift, he would adjust. The intricate ties between them fascinated her and moved her to dance to the hum of their music.
The dance that had brought him into her awareness. The dance that had brought further complication. Sexual Intercourse was no longer a matter of theoretical knowledge, but a painful and bloody, yet exhilarating experience. And he hadn’t intended to hurt her. There had been no intention at all. He was simply as driven as she was to see what the next moment held and he’d been as affected as her. She’d been a little lost in her own body for a few hours, but then he’d pulled her back out and soothed the hurts and settled her into another space of his being. She was no longer a piece of cargo in the hold. Now she was a blanket.
And that had been nice. A blanket is a warm and soft and comfortable thing. But a girl who has to quantify every element of being soon had to see that being Jayne Cobb’s blanket was of more significance than simply being an object. That had terrified her and she’d moved herself back down to the hold where she could be cargo, nice and simple. But he hadn’t allowed that. She should have known he wouldn’t, though she was so focussed on her internal equilibrium, she had neglected his variables. Like a toddler, he hadn’t been able to sleep until he’d found his favourite bed-thing and held it to sooth him to sleep.
And when they awoke entangled, he’d shown her that sexual intercourse, while still painful and messy, could also be quite pleasurable. She hadn’t wanted the memory of his touch to fade away in the chaos of her mind and all its many thoughts and voices, so she’d worn his shirt. The constant caress of fabric against her skin reminded her of feeling his skin so intimately against hers. Jayne was going to be wary for a while, because things had shifted again. But it wasn’t until the captain had said the word ‘serious’ that she’d begun to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.
This was serious. River was having sexual relations with Jayne. In and of itself, not serious, though Simon would certainly disagree. River was sleeping in Jayne’s bunk. Again, she was an object and where the object rested was of little significance - if the object was only resting. River was spending a great deal of time in the presence of Jayne. No one could blame her for that, though - not knowing how affected she was by the thoughts and moods of others. Jayne’s simplicity of emotion and deliberate lack of introspection, made him an easy companion. River was wearing an article of Jayne’s clothing. That made it serious.
River lowered herself into Jayne’s bunk and for the first time took note of how many of her things were scattered about, mixed in with his. He looked up from his gun magazine with a look of interest, though not shock. Though she only ever entered the bunk at night, to have her enter unannounced mid afternoon only mildly surprised him. He was that comfortable with her presence in his space.
River’s eyes widened with the shock she thought he ought to feel.
“Jayne,” she whimpered. “I think this is serious.”
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