Disclaimer: Firefly isn't mine either, but I don't think it's Madonna's or Peggy Jean's.
"That's mine," he says and glares at her from the ground. Why the ground? Because the girl appears to have climbed up the rigging in storage and is hanging from the oversized metal tube they use for basketball.
Hanging and /swinging, making a mockery of that fake mask of innocence by letting her hair swing around like that, her skirt fly, and singing like anything more than a whisper will call the reavers. She glances at him when he speaks, dark eyes falling on him, and she grins. It transforms her face - still innocent, still unnaturally sweet, but not quite as... haunted.
For a moment he thinks she's going to say something. She's been speaking more, and speaking intelligibly, for a while now and she thinks she might do it again. And he doesn't want her to. Lately she'd been taking more and more of an interest in him: his shirt, his vodka bottle. Maybe it didn't sound like much, but it was enough to bother him.
If she didn't have his gorram music player and headphones, he wouldn't be talking to her at all.
"Never know how much I love you."
He starts, eyes wide as he stares at her, mouth gaping like the fish he doesn't know she compares him to. How do you respond to that? She's cracked, she's crazy, stupid little girl who stole his gorram headphones and-
"Never know how much I care..."
His eyes narrow. Wait, that sounded like-
"When you put your arms around me, I get a fever that's so hard to bear..."
Oh /gorram it, she's just singing. He sighs, lets it out in a half-growl as he glares at her. "That's /mine," he calls again, louder this time. Maybe she'd give it back if he just got through that white-noise brain of hers.
Her eyes settle on him, dark on dark, wide and innocent on narrowed and angry - and nervous but he won't admit, never admit it - and he lets an inaudible sigh out again. When she looked right at him, she tended to be more sane, focus more on his words.
"Sun lights up the daytime, moon lights up the night..."
Or maybe she was just going to keep singing until he found a way to get up there and wring her neck.
She's still swinging, too, back and forth, hair and skirt twirling around her. It's not a bad voice, but not trained and he's heard better. It's... quiet. A high, feminine voice. Talented, beautiful, a little eerie but that could just be because she doesn't take her eyes off him when she sings.
"/I/ light up when you call my name, and you know I'm gonna treat you right, you give me fever..."
Now might be a good time to look away. But he can't - or doesn't want to. Or something.
"When you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight... fever- in the morning, fever all through the night..."
With another growl, his eyes narrow, frustrated, annoyed and... well. "Keep it," he growls without looking back, trusting her to read his mind like she knows he hates rather than to actually hear him.
"...I'll be in my bunk."
