Title: All the love in the 'verse (9/)
Series: Creature of Extraordinary Grace
Author: Romanceguru
Disclaimer: Joss is boss, I am but a lowly subservient.
Rating: R, For mention and brief depictions of sex
Summary: River reflects on her relationships with two very different men.
Pairings: Mal/River Jayne/River
Notes: Post BDM 1 yr. + I'm going to stop promising a resolution and just go with it. So when this thing ends, it ends. Thanks crazywriterchic for your helpful insight, you helped clear a path through the madness. Also, special thanks and endless praise to my lovely beta elsibet34.
Rayne shipper/Maliver shipper Warning: This story is equally heavy on Mal and Jayne interaction with River, both intimately and romantically.
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When River next opened her eyes, she was no longer surrounded by the cold, sterile chill of the infirmary but rather encircled by the vaguely familiar comfort of her own room. The truth was that she had not spent a single night in her quarters in the past two months.
The room was oddly silent, desolate and cold. River suddenly felt the utter loneliness of not being wrapped up in Mal, not having the smooth skin of his warm chest rise and fall beneath her cheek with each slumberous breath he procured.
It felt like years since they had last been together, even though in reality it had only been days. There were so many things she already missed. First, the scent of him, pure full-bodied male, brown and green like earth.
When she snuggled her face into the warmth of his neck and breathed especially deep, she picked up the light trace of his cologne interlaced with the metallic tinge of Serenity. In her little world, he emanated the essence of home.
She missed his sleepy morning smile as she peered up at him from the comfortable crook of his arm. How he always stayed in bed just a little longer to cuddle with her before starting the day.
She missed his playful teasing when she had started to slowly move small personal items into his bunk. One day while humming to herself as she meticulously spread a pastel covered comforter across his bed, he told her that as much as she thought she was being all sneaky like, her girly pink candles and fine smelling sundries could not go unnoticed. He claimed that her things were messing with the rugged, manly aura he had worked so hard to preserve.
She remembered standing tall on his bed and responding matter-of-factly that he secretly liked things complicated, as well as the color pink, and that it was wrong to suppress his feminine side. She continued on about how one day he would snap from the unnatural suppression and start adorning woman's clothing.
After that, it was a mess of tickle torture and denial, followed by heavy kissing and an order from him that her girly things need to start paying rent for the space they were taking up. When she silenced his teasing with a long, sensuous kiss and whispered into his ear the many ways in which she would repay him, he shivered at her tempting promises. Grinning widely, he agreed that those things would do just fine, more than fine actually, and granted her things permanent residence.
One afternoon when they were planet side, Mal stole her away from the rest of the crew with the fabrication of work to be done. After about a mile's hike up a hill, through a meadow and past several young tree growths, River spied a blanket laid out by a small lake which was sparkling in the afternoon sun.
River covered her mouth in surprise. The scene before her was so wonderfully picturesque she was almost certain that she was in a dream state. Things like this didn't happen to her, or on her behalf, and for once in her tragic existence, she felt like a normal girl.
After teasing Mal about his girlish romantic nature, River turned on her heels as her captain gave chase, dodging back and forth along the sandy bank to avoid capture. Breathless and tired, she put her hands up in surrender making her expression as sweet as possible to avoid retaliation from the enemy.
Instead, Mal lunged forward and scooped her up, easily flinging her over his shoulder as he headed towards the water with the girl kicking and screaming in protest.
Later, as they lay under the warm sun to dry, he told her about his past, about his life on Shadow before the war. He confided to her his dreams of heroic grandeur and then about his wish to just simply survive. He admitted that he was scared to let anyone in, afraid that if they saw the darkness that haunted him, they too would turn black. She assured him that she only saw colors and that the darkness was fading into a dim memory.
He crawled over her and kissed her face, and told her that she was his light, his guiding star. The setting sun lighted his eyes a brilliant blue as he gazed down adoringly at her and confessed that he had been living dead most days, and couldn't imagine going back to life before her.
River felt swept up in the clouds. She felt as though she was truly flying without the confines of the ship's hull to protect her from the naked air and the possibilities that lay in the vastness of space. She felt everything with no restrictions or forethought and she wondered if Mal knew that he wasn't the only one who had been saved.
Mostly she wondered if she would have even known the captain like this, so beautifully intimate, if his mercenary hadn't broken her heart first.
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Jayne, in all his paradoxical glory, loved her now, as she had always wanted him to, only one heartbeat and moment too late.
She had been drawn to him from the beginning, like a curious moth to a flame, unafraid of the burn. At first, he played indifferent to her persistent, silent company. Whether she was watching him make improvements around Serenity, lifting cargo in the bay or penning a letter home, he barely acknowledged her existence.
When she finally broke the mutual silence with a teasing comment or advice on how to improve his technique, he would just stare at her in annoyance or tell her to scat or gruffly inform her that he liked it better when she was quiet like.
As the months passed by, she would trail him around the ship and ramble on in great detail about things ranging from literature, and astronomy to art and most recently, psychology. She would inform him the reasons of his nature by titling him with some weird sounding complex he couldn't pronounce. Sometimes she would just make some eerie ass prediction about which one of them were going to get shot that week during an upcoming job.
He no longer told her to leave him alone but rather actually listened to the things she had to say as he worked industriously. He figured she was more entertaining than not, a quick way to pass the time. If the genius were lucky, she would receive a grunt of decipherment from him or a slight smirk at one of her ridiculous observations.
River understood Jayne had loathed her before he could understand the truth of things. The events surrounding Miranda had instilled a new perception of her. River was no longer weak and cracked in his eyes but the result of something greater than all of them. Once he understood her beginnings and saw with his own eyes her worth, he easily began to accept her as crew.
She was used to his callousness and his indifference to her and she could tolerate it if it meant she could be near him. In all his simplicity, things were clearer when she stood next to his towering mass.
Slowly, she felt her sanity strengthen, the start of normalcy, and she couldn't want for more. That was until the day he finally began to converse back with her. She experienced a newfound excitement as she began to connect for the first time with her polar opposite. Every time he told her some dirty joke that Simon would have certainly been appalled by or when he asked her the meaning of something he didn't understand in an instruction manual, she felt as if the whole 'verse was spinning at her feet.
One late night while the two played a game of cards after few shots of whiskey, Jayne swayed a bit as he made a flirtatious comment about the way her clothes were fitting better now. River just smiled as she continued to beat him at his favorite game, only he didn't seem to mind.
After a few more shots and through slurred speech, he confessed to her that she drove him crazy with want, especially the days when she wore those tight little black shorts.
The thing was she had always worn those shorts. It was only now when he was able to see her as a viable woman that they were starting to have their affect. She knew that even though he was inebriated, he spoke the truth. The only divergence was, he would have just kept it to himself had he been sober.
Some days she would brush against him as she walked past, smiling mischievously as he leered after her. It soon became a game of cat and mouse, the hunter and hunted continuously alternating. The flirting and groping turned into necking and roaming hands, clothed bodies grinding together urgently in little dark hideaways around the ship.
Their first night together was rushed, awkward and uncomfortably painful. In a flash of eagerness and lust, they peeled off one another's clothes before slamming together in the heat of passion. River knew nothing of how to proceed with her first sexual experience and Jayne was too blinded by the simple want of her to progress with ease.
About halfway through the act, he felt the hot sting of her tears against his naked chest and realized she was whimpering. He stopped abruptly as it finally dawned on him that she had been a virgin.
The fear and guilt of hurting her turned quickly to anger about being in the situation in the first place. He told her straight out that they had made a mistake, and that she needed to get dressed right quick and get out. That was the first night Jayne Cobb made her cry.
The next morning Jayne found her snuggled tight and secure in a blanketed cocoon upon her bed. Inconspicuously, he had slipped in her room past the unknowing crew and attempted to apologize to the unresponsive bundle sniffling under the covers. He told her that he weren't used to being with girls that had no experience. Also with ones that talked as much as she did and that she'd just have to be patient with him until he got used to it all.
It was quiet for a long while before River flipped the covers off her head and peered at him through a tangle of dark hair and red-rimmed eyes. She smiled her forgiveness and for a singular moment he allowed it to affect him before he quickly made some excuse to leave.
About a week later, River followed Jayne once again into his bunk and this time he was slow and gentle, taking extra care to make sure she was enjoying every slight slip of the tongue, every explorative caress to her smooth white skin. When his tedious efforts and restraint were rewarded with moans of pleasure, he smiled against her body and for the first time in his life took pleasure from gratifying someone other then himself.
Their relationship progressed primarily in the confines of Jayne's bunk. Each night was beyond gratifying, but as she grew more attached, she began to dread their time together.
After waiting all day just to touch him, they would make love in a torrent and he would hold her only briefly before insisting she leave. She had never anticipated that being with somebody could feel so lonely.
The night it had ended between them was the night she told him how she really felt. Through tears, she demanded why he never kissed her, why he never wanted her stay and sleep the morning through. She confessed that she loved him and was tired of the restrictions and boundaries placed on what should be such a freeing emotion. He immediately turned cold as ice and whatever small door he had opened to her had slammed shut at her avowal.
A lot of things were said that night, a barrage of hurtful words weakening her heart with their cruel truths, but it was when he lied and declared that he never cared for her, that he could never love a crazed little girl, that her heart truly did shatter. Her despaired form crumpled to the floor in a heart-wrenching sob at the loss of everything she never had.
It took all of her strength to climb up that ladder and out of his bunk. Once she picked herself off the floor she refused to look back, even though she could feel the heat of his gaze follow her out.
In the dim corridor, she felt tragically empty; her body felt strangely buoyant and fear gripped her as she thought she might float away into nothing. Before she knew what she was doing, she was climbing down into the captain's bunk, looking desperately for an anchor to ground her, to save her as he had before.
Things had spiraled so out of control over the past few weeks that she doubted things would ever be the same again for any of them. She had broken the very men she loved by simply loving them wholly and completely. They had unintentionally wounded her in their attempt to assume dominance as they struggled in confusion for the fading illusion of what was no longer.
Guilt gripped every sore muscle in her body and overwhelmed her tired soul. She was aware of her failure to absolve things before culmination, and it tore at her conscience.
River sighed as she mentally tried to put everything into place, to find room for both chaos and love. Since the beginning of both relationships, she hadn't been able to control a single outcome. For all her abilities to precisely calculate and solve problems before they arose, even she could admit when it came to the matters of the heart, there would always and tragically be substantial room for error.
TBC…