Fic: Of Dreams, Mal/River, R
Title: Of Dreams
Author: frannie
Rating: R
Pairing: Mal/River, Mal/Inara (kind of but not really)
Summary: She thinks this girl-River may love Mal, but had forgotten that they are meant to love back.
Men love women. It’s a fact, its truth, but River sometimes forgets. Simon loves her, but thats different - thats family. She is used to women loving men, because despite what ever else she may be, she is female. River has always known this, always identified herself easily in any setting, she is not-Simon, she is a girl. She thinks this girl-River may love Mal, but had forgotten that they are meant to love back.
She remembers that men love women when she sees Mal loving Inara. Not for real, not in flesh, but in his dreams, Mal loves Inara and pushes her onto the cold metal grating of Serenity and Inara lets him. Thats how Mal and River know its a dream, Inara would never bed down on a walkway, not even for Mal.
Mal’s hands are in Inara’s hair, knotted and unscented. He is moving above her, inside her. Mouth open wet, and panting, against her skin. Inara’s eyes are open, but Mal can’t seem to meet them, because they aren’t hers and there is a truth there he is refusing to acknowledge.
In her bunk, River is crying into her pillow. It hurts, but she can’t look away, can’t close her eyes to this. Mal is loving Inara in her head and she can’t change his dream and wishes she could. Wishes she was a better River, so she could, and that she was a better River and that she wouldn’t care.
River can feel Mal’s arousal as he sleeps, and also his hands ghosting along Inara’s dream belly, and Inara beneath her, and also the sheets and River’s bed and River’s hands touching River and its all so confusing.
Inara’s nails are digging into Mal’s shoulder, pulling him closer, biting at his hand when he presses it across her mouth to keep her quiet. The part of Mal that knows this is a dream knows that Inara wouldn’t lose control like that, not in this.
Still, still, he wishes it and so the Inara beneath him screams as she comes, screams and clutches at him hard enough to bruise and mark.
‘Oh, Captain’ she sighs and lets her head fall back and raises her hips to meet him again and again. Her voice sounds different, and Mal almost falters in his movements, but her hands are against his arse, firm and insistent, and her legs are wrapped around him, tight, as if she can’t bear to let him go.
River’s hands are touching, but she must be broken because it doesn’t work the way it does for Kaylee. Whatever she, and Zoe, and even Inara herself can achieve with this, River can’t, and it’s enough to make her scream.
Mal feels himself tethering at the edge of consciousness, at the edge of orgasm, the edge of the black, of abyss, of reality. He has a small, supple breast beneath his left hand, the nipple pebbled under his thumb, and a smooth pale expanse of neck beneath his teeth. He grips, pinches, bites, grunts, comes, and then:
‘River.’ he whispers, into her skin. ‘River’, and sleeps.
In her room, River falls out of bed in surprise.