A/N: Set post-Serenity; Written for the annual Porn Battle using the prompt words bonding, trust, understanding, flame. Feedback is appreciated!
Those Lost and Low
Long time past now, he used to wear a cross at his throat. Used to be a good man, and a righteous one, who was sure of things beyond the turning of worlds.
Used to be he wasn't the kind of man who'd take a girl just on the edge of being a woman into his bed, would've been able to ignore the way she looked at him, with her whole heart showing plain and open in her face. Been a long time since anybody thought he was worth looking at that way. Don't seem to matter none to her that he's a thief, that he lies and cheats and lowers himself to doing whatever's necessary to keep flying. Don't seem to matter that he's all broken up inside, that he can't make sense of his own life cause that'd require too much thinking, and he's worried his mind is like his ship – go poking about too much in the workings, and it might just fall apart.
River though – she ain't like to fall apart, no matter what the rest of 'em might think. He knows she's got a part to play, sure as he does, and long as one of them keeps going, he imagines the other will too.
Still, he can't help but wonder sometimes, wish he knew what's in her head easy as she reads him. Wishes he knew what she's playing at when her fingers trace down his throat, and her lips press warm and sweet to the hollow at its base, where that cross used to lie.
"You're still a good man, Mal," she says, and her body's hot around him, and moments like this he can't help sending up prayers to whatever might be listening that she won't stop, that she'll never stop this, cause he ain't sure he could make it through without her anymore.
"What do you believe in?" she'd asked him once, when they were flying bored in the cockpit, with nothing to do but turn each other's minds inside out for a spell. He'd told her he didn't believe in anything he couldn't see, not anymore, and she'd left it at that, didn't push him where he wasn't willing to go just yet.
He's willing now though, when he's hard and aching and on the edge of coming apart inside her, when she's soft and willing and hot enough to burn beneath him, like some kinda cleansing fire. "You," he says, and his face is buried in the curve of her neck so she like enough can't hear a thing, but she loves that, loves to hear his voice saying what she already knows from his head, so he'll say it out loud anyhow, for anything listening to hear. "I believe in you, River."
That's enough to push her over the edge, to make her go rigid and tight, and he'd be marveling at how much power a few words can have if he wasn't falling over the edge himself, losing his mind to her once more.
Later, when he's near enough to sleep he hardly feels it, she presses her lips to that hollow again, mouthing words against his skin, though the only one he hears for certain is emlove/em.