Title: Of Burning Temples and Pirate Lovers
Ship: Mal/Inara
Rating: Very K+
Timeline: Sometime during the BDM
Word Count: 816

Disclaimer: I do not answer to the name of Joss Whedon. I own nothing. Please don't sue me.

A/N: Just a tiny, tiny little thing for friend, who wanted back story for this:

Sheydra:I'm not the one who had a torrid affair with a pirate.

Inara: A who? With a what?

Sheydra: The girls all trade stories in the dormitory. In one of them, you make love in a burning temple. I think that one's my favourite.

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She froze, certain that she'd heard footsteps. After a minute went by soundlessly, she relaxed, and started to creep forward once more. Even as she did so, she shook her head at the folly of her actions.

What on earth would she say if any of the instructors--or Buddha forbid, the Priestess--were to come across her?

But she had to know.

She stopped outside the door to the dormitory, and pushed it so that it opened a crack. And then she held her breath and listened.

They were talking about shoes.

Inara rolled her eyes. She'd sneaked out of her bed in the middle of the night to hear a roomful of fourteen year olds talk about shoes.

Damn her curiosity. Just one little remark from Sheydra...

And tomorrow, her friend would look at her, and she'd know. Sheydra would know that she had been hanging about the dormitories, hoping to find out for herself if what the older woman had said was true.

And then she heard it.

'Who did you have in the morning?' A voice asked.

'Inara,' another girl answered. 'We had archery lessons with her.'

'She was in an awful mood,' a third voice added. 'She kept glaring at the targets quite viciously as she shot the arrows.'

She felt her brows rise in mingled surprise and anger. She had been perfectly fine at the lesson! She had just been concentrating on the target!

'Maybe she had another wave from her pirate,' a voice giggled, and all of sudden, Inara felt quite ill.

Pirate? Merciful Buddha, then it was true…

'They must have had another fight,' the first voice said sagely.

'They have a very…passionate relationship,' someone agreed.

Inara passed a desperate hand over her brow. Dear lord, did everyone in the Training House know about Mal?

Apparently not.

'Her…pirate?' a new voice said inquiringly.

'Oh, I forgot,' came the answer. 'You've only just transferred here. Our instructor, Inara Serra…' there came a significant pause, and the voice went on, 'took a pirate for a lover.'

'A pirate?'

'His name is Malcolm Reynolds, and he's a smuggler. Inara spent nearly two years on his ship.'

'And how do you know all this?' the new comer said sceptically.

'I heard Sheydra and Mohana talking about him,' came the smug reply. 'And then I just did a search for the name "Malcolm Reynolds" on the Cortex.'

Inara gritted her teeth. Sheydra! She always had had a loose tongue, even back in the training house.

'That's not all I found out,' the first voice went on slyly, and Inara pricked up her ears. Something told her things were about to get much worse.

'He's been arrested many times, and one of the charges on his warrant was that of desecrating a place of worship.'

She frowned. She couldn't recall any such incident in Mal's checkered record, but then, she had been away from the ship for some time…

'And he was with a nameless registered Companion,' the girl went on, almost crowing in her delight.

'What?!'

'It's true,' the other girls said, backing up the storyteller. 'We've all seen the arrest warrant on the Cortex.'

'So what were they doing there?'

'They were escaping some people who were trying to kill them,' the story teller went on, as Inara's eyebrows rose higher and higher, 'and they ran to the nearest sanctuary, which was only a few yards away. Malcolm and Inara barricaded themselves inside, so that their enemies couldn't get in. So the men did the only thing they could think of--they set fire to the temple.'

A breathless hush fell on the company.

'And then what happened?'

'They were trapped in the fire—the mercenaries had blocked the gates from the outside--and in their desperation, knowing that they would rather die in each others' arms, they gave in to the passion between them, and made love in the burning temple, their bodies going up in flame along with their surroundings.'

'But how did they escape?'

'Malcolm's ship came and rescued them, blasting down all the mercenaries, and extinguishing the fire with its engines.'

'Wow.'

Inara clenched her fists. If these girls only knew…

The 'hiding in a temple' part was right, but she had flown to Mal's rescue, in her tiny little shuttle, when he'd split up from Zoe and gotten pinned down during a job a few months ago. True, he'd locked himself in the temple, and spent his time taking shots at Badger's mercenaries, but when they'd set fire to the place, she'd made a very difficult landing and rescued him.

She'd risked her career, her shuttle, her very life to rescue him, and what had happened?

Burning temples and pirate lovers, and 'giving in to passion'!

Somewhere, she knew, Malcolm Reynolds must be laughing.

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End

A/N: This was meant to be amusing, so if it wasn't, apologies.

--Feedback is always welcomed very warmly.