Fic: The Deal, Mal/River, NC17
Title: The Deal
Author: frannie
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Mal/River
Disclaimer: Not mine. Seriously.
Summary: River convinces Mal to make a deal with her: he would help her catch up on some of the things she’s missed out on.
Authors Note: No idea why I wrote this, its my first fic in eight years. I should be writing my Property essay. Awww, hell.
She is sitting astride his lap - she’d crawled her way up there - and he is having trouble concentrating.
He thinks the conversation started off normally enough, but for the life of him he cannot remember how her ‘Serenity sings for Kaylee’s joy’ turned into ‘Zane - I diddna like his thoughts, they were ugly’ to ‘and that’s why I think you should kiss me’.
She is nuzzling at his jaw, all open mouthed kisses and full lower lip dragging across the stubble - and Mal is not going to move his hands from the armrests and drag her body further down so she fits across him in all the right places. He isn’t.
She is not his for the taking.
He tries to focus on the mess that led to this, waiting for her to be done, and... and that does not sound right but his thoughts are all a-scatter at this point anyway.
Small, nimble fingers are unbuttoning his shirt and her teeth - sharp - are grazing across his adam's apple. He can’t bare to open his eyes and look - to see her small hand at his belly, her hair ghosting against his neck. The seeing would make it real - and he’s not ready to be that kind of monster.
‘Real. No monster. Just woman and man.’ She whispers, and moves to kiss him again.
He knows he should stop her. It’s not a part of their deal, it’s against this whole gorram arrangement in fact, but what’s one more kiss in all this crazy.
When they break apart, Mal’s knuckles are white from gripping the armrest. Almost involuntarily, he presses his forehead against hers, stealing her breath and trying to collect his thoughts.
He shouldn’t have let her kiss him again. He shouldn’t have let her kiss him at all. There is a place in Special Hell for him - he has to believe that because he knows this is wrong and he should burn for it.
‘Not sin, not wrong, Captain.’ She breathes against his lips. This time instead of opening his mouth to her, he turns his head away. In determination she slides her hips closer, clutches tighter at him with her knees, and moves to bite the shell of his ear. This is a new kind of torture.
Before it all got all kinds of complicated he had understood that dancing with the local boy - Zane - had given her a glimpse into the boy’s mind. There she had found images of herself, flat on her belly, tied up, nude and crying. Last they saw of Zane was him sobbing in pain as the locals rushed him across town for a doctor. Simon and Kaylee had just departed for their honeymoon, and so without knowing why his pilot had decided to bodily injure her dance partner, Mal ushered the last unaccounted for of his crew back to Serenity.
As soon as they arrived on board, River had made her way to the bridge. Mal followed at her heals, feeling like a sheep dog with only one sheep to guard. She said nothing for a long time, besides that one comment about Serenity’s joy and Mal almost hoped she was asleep.
When she told him what she had seen in the boy’s mind, he felt the return of all that fierce rage born of seeing her in that gorram box.
‘No. No. He wanted me to hurt, to hurt me, but he wanted me to like it.’
And that's when Mal understood.
He understood her reaction, her confusion, even some of her guilt. She didn’t want to hurt people - she was no weapon.
‘No weapon. Not woman either. I know love. Felt aftershocks of lovein’ from Zoe and Wash.’ She made a face - ‘Kaylee and Simon’.
‘Darlin’ sometimes it’s not about love. Sometimes its just about the sexin’.’
At those words, some kind of bitter hurt flittered through her eyes.
‘Like Inara?’ She asked, face blank and emotionless.
Something in his chest had felt hallow at that point, like an old wound that he just recalled and couldn’t believe he’d ever forgotten. ‘Yeah, like Inara.’
He remembered her getting up, her dress whispering against her legs - and then his legs when she moved to stand in front of his seat.
That same dress was now bunched in his lap, nothing but panties and his own clothes between them.
‘Malcolm, I want you to kiss me again.’ She whispered. Nails dragging across the spot on his neck where she had bitten him. She was very good at thinking of ways to prolong this, he would have thought she would have run out of ideas a while back.
‘Bao Bei, I have. We said only once.’ (What a stupid deal he had agreed to, once for every experience she missed out on so she could catch up. She was a gorram genius. She was going to be the death of him.)
She rose a little on her knees, then settled down further against him. He couldn’t help but buck towards her. This was getting down right embarrassing.
‘Not with your hands in my hair. Captain, put your hands on me.’
And so he did. After all, he couldn’t fault her logic.
He may have lost his mind, a little, with that. Her skin was like liquid heat beneath his hands.
Beneath his mouth.
He marked her over and over. She bruised surprisingly easy and since he was already going to gorram hell, he took care to make her moan and whimper for it.
Her dress now pooled entirely at her thighs. She stood astride him on her knees so that Mal could take to her breasts with lips and teeth.
She mewled ‘Please’ and ‘Mal’ and ‘Please’ over and over.
And then: ‘I felt your hands on her, in the brothel, I loved her because you loved her. I want to feel your hands on me, like that.’
And so, mouth against her feverish skin, Mal touched her, and when her tights quivered, he let her skin onto his hand.
When she came, her eyes were open, and his. He kissed her then, again, on his own accord, his fingers still inside her. And again, when he moved his hands to the straps of her dress and begun to slowly lift it up.
‘Captain. Don’t make me leave. Ple...’
‘I won’t.’ He interjected, before he could be undone. She was never to say ‘please’ in his hearing again.
He slowly, almost mournfully, kissed each of her breasts, tugging at the nipples then gentling against them with his tongue. Saying goodbye to them as he slipped her dress back over her shoulders.
She caught a glimpse of something in his mind.
‘Mal, you are still... should I?’ But she was already yawning and he was a bastard for even thinking it.
‘No, no more of this, River.’ At that she settled her head against his shoulder, her weight slight but unmistakable in his arms.
A woman astride him, and dawn spilling across Serenity’s bridge. Earlier that evening, such a suggestion would have been heaven.
He was still hard.
This was hell.