Like Describing The Alphabet
by Mosca

Mal had known that it would happen someday: enough time spent moving cargo through the ass end of nowhere, enough alcohol in his blood, and he'd forget the name of the moon he was on. The old man sitting next to him was droning on, and Mal was trying to think where he was. The brain cells were dead. There was no turning back from here.

Most of his crew was missing. Setting aside the ones he wasn't strictly responsible for, it was a shameful tally. It'd been hours since he'd seen Wash or Zoe or Kaylee. And there was Jayne, last of the breed, making for the door of the tavern.

"Just heading home, captain," Jayne shouted.

Mal beckoned him with a glare. "I've known you long enough to be skeptical of that," he said when Jayne was close enough to hear a whisper.

"Turning in early," Jayne said. "Don't wanna miss the show."

"There's a show?" Mal said. "There's a show on my boat?"

"I take it back. Turning in early. Is all."

"Tell me more about this show," Mal said. He marched Jayne back to Serenity and stopped short in the cargo bay to look around like he was searching for a stage.

Jayne sighed and muttered, "Come to my bunk."

"What was that?"

"My bunk," Jayne said. "Show's in my bunk."

"Now, you know I don't go in for any of that luen stuff."

"Ain't like that," Jayne said, a little too defensively. The first thing he did when they got to his bunk was pull out a jug of homemade hooch from under the bed. Across the widest part, Jayne had written in large block letters, "FOR AMERJENSES ONLY."

"You're gonna need some of this," Jayne said, taking a less-than-reassuring swig for himself. "Don't worry, I'm not the one brewed it."

The stuff tasted like medical-grade gin, but it was warm going down. "Now, listen," Jayne said. "May be a while, but it always happens sooner or later."

So they sat stone quiet, passing the jug back and forth, waiting for a show the nature of which was growing more and more dubious.

When Mal finally heard something, he thought it was the drink playing tricks on him. One set of footsteps down a metal ladder, in heavy shoes, and another, lighter set following behind. Talking, laughing-- two women. One had to be Kaylee, because she lived next door, and who could she be rutting often enough for Jayne to look forward to it? The other voice was low and soft, so much so that he'd have to work by process of elimination.

River would be a shriek and a gale of laughter. Zoe was loyal as anything, and he'd overheard her and Wash more than a few times, through the walls. Besides, she knew that if Wash didn't get around to killing her for cheating, Mal would take care of it himself.

That was four women on his boat, three accounted for. Unless he had himself a stowaway, that left one terribly arrogant whore doing unimaginable things to his sweet little engineer. "This doesn't fly," Mal said, hitting his head on a low swoop of ceiling as he stood up.

Jayne grabbed his arm. "Don't you go interfering with that," he said.

"Don't want me spoiling your fun?"

"Don't want you spoiling any of ours," Jayne said. "We got a pretty good situation on this ship-- awfully few brawls for nine people."

"How long's this been going on?"

"Dunno," Jayne said. "Couple months."

"It stops tonight," Mal said. He made for the door, but Jayne grabbed a fistful of his shirt and stared at him with a feline intensity that Mal had only ever seen before when Jayne was about to get violent.

"You ain't going up there," Jayne said. "It just ain't happening." He leaned back into his bed. "You know how little it would pain me to tie you to that chair to make sure of it."

"You do, and your ass is off this boat so fast--"

"Sit down," Jayne said. "Enjoy the show."

There was a whole lot of silence before the first moan, but they began to rise up like popcorn exploding in the pan, until the air was thick with muffled feminine cries. It was a pretty good show, as these things went-- hard to fire up a man's imagination without any visuals, but those two were doing a fine job. Unhappy with it as Mal was, they were planting some gorram pretty pictures in his mind.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jayne scoot to the far corner of his bed and turn his back. And unzip himself, which was plain inconsiderate. "Gotta take care of something," Jayne said. "Can't let you leave, neither, so I guess you'll just have to look the other way."

"Fine," Mal said, thinking how completely it wasn't, and how completely he lacked power to express that.

"If there's something you need taking care of, now might be a good time," Jayne said, his voice beginning to strain.

Mal couldn't deny that the moans in the next room were putting him in need of relief. He unbuttoned, pulled it out, stroked to the rhythm of those women, closed his eyes to shut everything else out but the way he pictured the two of them naked. But he felt Jayne nearby and couldn't shut him out completely. Mal found himself stuck at half-mast, and all his feverish work couldn't get him any closer.

When he was about to call it quits and skulk to his bunk, he felt a second hand on his ji ba, working around his own hand at first, teasing the tip, squeezing his balls. And finally pushing his own hand aside, harder and faster until he came.

It didn't occur to him until he opened his eyes that it had to have been Jayne's hand. Mal didn't say anything after, either, just wiped himself off with the handkerchief in his pocket and buttoned back up. He stayed to listen until the girls got tired and there was no reason for him to be there anymore. "Thanks for the show," he said. "Was enlightening."

He went back to his bunk half in a daze, more drunk than he'd reckoned. Drunk enough to prove the weakness of one lie: none of that luen stuff anymore.

 

Jayne knew the captain was avoiding him. Mal wouldn't look at him, let alone speak to him, and he always found something more pressing to do the moment Jayne walked into the room. Jayne knew he pretty well deserved it-- emergency gin or no, there wasn't no excuse for touching a man without his permission. He was trying to think of excuses anyway, but he wasn't coming up with much.

Still, when Mal brushed past him wordlessly for the million and third time, in the cargo bay, Jayne couldn't help muttering, "This is the most qing wa cao de thing..."

"What'd you think it was?" Mal said.

"Dunno," Jayne said.

"Let me tell you," Mal said. "It was one very manly hand job on one very strange night, and that's all it will ever be."

"'S all I expected," Jayne said.

"'Sides," Mal said. "It don't count. We were both thinking about women."

"Yeah," Jayne said, "women." He hadn't been thinking about women. Not very much, anyway. He'd known early on-- from when they were on opposite ends of a loaded gun-- that the captain fell in the category of people he'd fuck if he was to get the opportunity. In a way that he let that be and got on with his life. He started towards his bunk, to not think about Mal, and Mal's hard dick in his hand. The skin soft like peaches.

"We could... go back to my bunk," Mal said. "If you ain't doing nothing else."

"Yeah," Jayne said, "yeah." He followed Mal there. The room was more spacious than Jayne's bunk, and the bed was bigger, though not any softer. Mal undid his belt, pushed his pants down to his knees. Jayne had been too drunk the first time to recall much of his original technique now, but it was that same soft skin. Same swell of appreciation when Jayne ran his thumb up the underside or played with his balls. Same way of coming like he was pretending not to come.

Mal turned away like he expected Jayne to get the hell out, but Jayne folded his arms and sat deeper on the bed, resolute as he could muster. He lowered his own trousers and waited to win the battle of wills.

Not more than a minute went by before Mal made a very tentative fist around Jayne's cock and shuddered dryly upward. Jayne began to wonder whether it was worth demanding this. "Hold on," Mal said. Mal opened a drawer in his bedside table and pulled out a jar of what every man in the 'verse had in his bedside drawer. Dr. Foster's Famous Miracle Hand Cream, famous mostly for not being used by anyone as hand cream. It tingled.

What followed was not the most inspired hand job in the 'verse, but it was effective enough. The pride of winning and the fresh memory in his fingertips was plenty to get Jayne there. Not that it hurt to have, for the first time since that brothel on that moon, the rough, practiced grip of someone other than himself.

Afterwards, he wiped off the hand cream and the jing ye and walked off before he'd be forced to find something clever to say.

 

It was three days later when Mal was at the door to Jayne's bunk again, and he didn't have to ask. It was quicker this time, and not so awkward. "Thanks," Mal said, as he left.

Things went on more or less that way, long enough that Jayne began to think it would get to be one of those facts of life on Serenity, like the family suppers with the whole crew. He got an itch he didn't want to scratch himself, he went to Mal and got it taken care of. It was better if it was someone else touching him, even if that person didn't particularly want to look at him. Especially if so.

They were sitting on the edge of Mal's bed one night, both of them tired after a job that would have been uncomplicated if it hadn't been for all the shooting. Usually, one or the other of them would get things started. But that night they'd sat since forever ago, waiting for someone to decide, without taking the trouble of speaking, who was gonna go first. "This is bullshit," Jayne said, getting up.

"I could... suck it if you wanted me to," Mal said.

Jayne sat back down. "You know how?" he said.

Mal shot him a look that either meant, "of course," or meant he didn't realize there was skill involved. It seemed to be the first one, though, because he got to it with a kind of intense concentration, like he was remembering something from a while back. Jayne liked getting his cock sucked, liked it maybe best of anything. He didn't mind it from women, but liked men better for the purpose. Men knew what it felt like from the other end, knew to do that thing with the flat of their tongue on the tip and it was okay to just hold the base, just keep going.

Jayne got off, and Mal got up to spit. He was hard enough that Jayne could see. Good to know it hadn't been a chore.

Mal finished rinsing his mouth out and stretched himself face up on his bed with his legs hanging over the side, feet just touching the floor. Jayne went right away for Mal's fly, but Mal said, "No, give it a minute." Jayne sat, facing the other wall.

"All right," Mal said, sitting up. Which made for an easier angle, anyway. As much as Jayne had been pretending not to pay attention, he knew Mal's dick pretty gorram well: about the usual thickness, maybe a little longer than most, tending to purple at the tip when he was hard. Jayne had it pretty well memorized, at least by sight.

Jayne realized that he'd wanted to know what it tasted like for a while now. He had to always be touching things and putting things in his mouth. His mama had scolded him for that all his life. Mal tasted pretty much like he'd guessed: like male sweat and oatmealy soap, like salt and anxiousness. He groaned when Jayne took him deep in his mouth. (A man spent a few nights in jail and learned that there were more important things than a gag reflex.) Jayne was proud of himself, of what he could do with his tongue and what it did to Mal. He could even be proud of liking it. There was something magic about getting a man hard in his mouth. It tasted good to have Mal grabbing the hair at the back of his head and making noises low in his throat. And he came like he needed it so gorram bad.

Jayne spit in the sink, and he thought about how it was always the same way. Wanting to have something to say and coming up without any words, not wanting to leave but not feeling welcome. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and thought of laying his head on Mal's shoulder, showing some kind of appreciation. But he couldn't bring himself to do it, so he put on his shoes and went back to his bunk.

 

"You're appalling," Inara said as she brushed past Mal in the hallway outside the infirmary.

It had been a fair while since she'd been anything more than civil to him, but this level of hostility was brand new. "What'd I-- Do I smell funny, or something? What'd I do?"

She turned on her heel, folded her arms, and sneered at him. "Let's see, Mal," she said. "What did you do?"

He thought harder on it, but he was still drawing a blank. Unless this had something to do with him and Jayne, in which case now didn't seem like a terrifically sensible time for her to get worked into a lather.

"You really don't know, do you?" she said. "The hypocrisy is just that deeply ingrained."

It seemed that Inara had chosen this afternoon to not be sensible. "It ain't hypocritical just 'cause it doesn't involve you," he said.

"So the childish attempt to make me jealous, or exact revenge, or whatever it is, because it's so inept that I can't even tell what you're trying to make me feel-- that doesn't involve me at all?"

"Strange as it may seem to you," Mal said, "I can have sex without thinking of you."

"Forgive me for assuming that you were thinking at all," she said.

"Oh, don't strain yourself too hard, trying to think well of me." He remembered when this had been a game between them, this bickering that verged on flirtation. It had been comfortable, so long as there hadn't been anything real behind it. He'd done everything he could think of to solve it: offered to give things a chance when he saw how she felt about him, moved on when she'd turned him down. She'd thwarted him every time, and she still blamed him. He was so tired of it that he couldn't even tell her to go fuck herself. All he had left was the knowledge that he was being a man about this.

"I won't anymore," she said. "Believe me."

"Um--" Simon was behind them, trying to get by. Not only were they having a loud argument where anyone could overhear, they were blocking the hallway. Simon cleared his throat as Mal turned to face him. "I'm-- Have either of you seen River? She-- she wandered off, and-- I'm sorry."

Mal forced a smile. "I ain't seen her all morning. You checked down in the cargo bay? She finds her way into the storage lockers sometimes. Pops out, gives everyone a fright."

"I'll-- I'll try that," Simon said. "I'm... I'm sorry, I-- I'm sorry." Mal and Inara cleared a path, and Simon high-tailed it down the hall.

"See what you do?" Mal said.

"What I do?" Inara said. "You're just a bystander in our arguments?"

"I at least make an effort to--"

"Do what?" she said. "Pretend we don't have them?"

"Keep them discreet," Mal said. "Keep them from affecting those as don't need to hear them."

"So if I would just bottle everything up, like you do, life would be fine?" she said. "I don't think even you believe anything that simplistic."

"It's served me well enough so far," he said.

"Is there any sense in my enumerating the evidence that you're wrong about that?" she said.

"Not a whole lot," he said.

She looked like she was about to either break down crying or scratch his eyes out. "Well, then, I--" She sighed like he was placing a heavy burden on her if he agreed to what she was about to say, but she didn't expect any better of him. "I'll keep to my affairs, if you keep to yours."

He didn't understand why that was so difficult for her. He'd tried to make their affairs one and the same, and she'd rejected that. She didn't have the least bit of right to blame him for denying her that access now. "That's all I ask," he said.

"Fine," she said.

"Fine," he said quickly. Once he started moving his feet, it was easy to walk away from her.

 

"Ain't you excited, though?" Kaylee was saying. She was rigging the cargo bay hatch for Jayne, so he could ride just underneath and aim down without being seen. She swore it would make it more comfortable, easier to hold steady. Jayne doubted there would ever be anything comfortable about dangling from the outside of a moving spaceship. There was that adrenaline rush, sure, and he was a better shot under that kind of pressure than anyone else on Serenity. But he wasn't quite looking forward to the experience.

"'Bout what?" he said. He knew he was in her way, but he wanted to see what she was going to subject him to. Maybe get the straps in his hands, get a sense of their weight.

"New Mindanao. You ever been?"

"It's a rock," Jayne said. "Like every other rock."

"Real food, though," Kaylee said. "Beer and women." She nudged him with her elbow like she was trying to make him smile. "Ain't got much need for them, though, from what I'm hearing. You're being well taken care of, ain't you?"

"Not like you are," he said. "You and the whore, that's gotta be... special."

"She's real special," Kaylee said, looking right mirthful. "As you well know, or don't you think we can tell when you got your ear pressed to the wall and your hand down your pants?"

"With you two carrying on, ain't got no way not to," Jayne said. "If you was a man, you'd see."

"Don't gotta be a man to see," Kaylee said. "Not since you and the captain have gotten all smoochy. Or didja forget I gotta live next door to you?"

It made him feel better to know she wasn't sore over that. If he took her meaning right, she was having a pretty good time with herself, them nights when Mal came over. Maybe that was why he felt the need to set her straight on the details. "We ain't all smoochy," he said. "I ain't never kissed him."

"Never?" Kaylee said.

"Reckon he don't want me talking about it so much," Jayne said. "He gets tetchy about that."

"Not even once, you and Mal ain't kissed?" she said. "Now, that's something I'd hafta be a man to understand."

"Wait a minute." It was Simon, who'd heard God knew how much on his way up to six inches behind Jayne's ear. "Why would you have kissed--" He looked to Kaylee, who seemed about to burst with sheepishness, and to Jayne, who rolled his eyes. "Oh," said Simon. "Is there... something I'm not supposed to know about?"

"There sure is," Jayne said.

"Jayne and the captain are-- Well, there ain't no kissing, apparently," Kaylee said. "Don't know quite what there is, but through the wall, it sounds like blow jobs." Jayne knew that she said stuff like that because he wouldn't dare lay a hand on her. Even the thought of hurting her made him sorrowful. 'Sides, if he'd had this kind of secret about Kaylee and the chance to lord it over Simon, he wouldn't have hesitated.

"Jiao ta che qi che fo zu," Simon said. "First you and Inara, then you and Mal. I can't-- What's next?"

"You and the shepherd?" Jayne guffawed, but there wasn't nobody else laughing.

"Now, Simon," Kaylee said, patting Simon's shoulder. "If you're feeling left out, I'm sure someone would--"

"That's your solution?" Simon said. "To compound the screwing around with-- with more screwing around? That's-- I don't even know what that is, but I don't want any part of it."

Kaylee called after Simon a couple of times as he stomped out, but he didn't turn around. "I wish I knew what to say to him," Kaylee said, "would keep him from getting all huffy."

"I ain't seen no pattern to it," Jayne said, though he didn't hardly ever see a pattern to what set anyone off.

Kaylee was busy for a minute, screwing latch clips into the floor. "You ain't never wanted to?" she said.

"Piss Simon off?" Jayne said. "Do that without trying."

"Kiss the captain," she said. "All those times you gone down on him, you ain't never thought about it?"

"Ain't part of the arrangement," he said. But now he was thinking about it, and he couldn't get the thought out of his head. He got to wondering what Mal's tongue would feel like in his mouth. It'd been a while since he'd let anyone do that, kiss him. When he'd kissed people, they'd started to have expectations he hadn't had no ability to live up to. But he could imagine himself peeling Mal naked and touching him all over. He could almost feel Mal under his hands and under his lips.

This had been going on for too long, if he was starting to want that stuff. It was better, not having Mal expect nothing from him. Mal's only other way of being was to expect the 'verse, and Jayne didn't have that to give. Not even close.

 

It wasn't even awkward, not like Mal thought it would be. They had an unspoken agreement not to speak of the fact that they were sucking each other off regularly, and they both kept to it. Sometimes it was difficult, especially now that Inara and Kaylee were so overt with each other. Inara was showing off, like she expected Mal to do the same. Like she expected him to break down and believe she was right.

With the thin walls between bunks, he and Jayne were hardly a secret anymore. But Mal didn't know what he'd do if he had to stop acting like it was, so he kept on pretending. It wasn't easy when Jayne forgot himself and smiled a little sideways as he passed the rolls across the table, and it was less easy when Mal passed by Jayne in the hall, close enough to touch his arm accidentally, and felt himself jerk up hard, like his body hadn't gotten the message that it wasn't supposed to get too excited.

The most difficult of all was when he caught Inara and Kaylee swapping tongues in the engine room and couldn't convince himself not to be sore at them for being happy with each other. He could worship Inara all he was able, but he wasn't never going to make her happy. He'd learned to accept that, more or less, that she was his fantasy. And that the reality was, he'd gotten into the regular habit of sucking the ji ba of a very different person from her, and that person was making him forget her more than he was ready to admit.

After he caught the two girls kissing, he went back to his bunk to take off his britches and assess the situation. This was not a time for Jayne's assistance, which was becoming less and less dispassionate. He closed his eyes and thought of their soft pink lips caressing his and not each other's, but Kaylee's left him uninspired, and Inara's made him seethe like she was doing it out of pity.

He cleared his throat and tried to clear his mind. He gave his ji ba a couple of testing strokes. The picture in his mind shifted from Inara's withering kiss. But it was to Jayne, the way he tilted his head sideways just before he went down, the way his biceps curved at the edge of his sleeve. The way it should have been repulsive when his beard brushed Mal's balls and was absolutely the opposite. Mal jerked effortlessly into his own hand.

He rolled over to punch the mattress. He'd made such a point of avoiding this. He'd thought it would be easy with Jayne, the big stupid wang ba dan, but it looked like it wasn't going to be. Which meant he was going to have to end it today, before he got any more unwelcome visions in his head.

He went to Jayne's bunk and knocked softly. He didn't want to sound angry, didn't want to get Jayne that way. "Funny time of day for it," Jayne said when he opened up.

Mal tried to say something, but it felt like his mouth was broken.

"'Less there's something else you want," Jayne said. "Though I can't think what it would be."

"We, uh, we gotta rethink this," Mal said.

"Shut the hatch when you come down," Jayne said. "'Less you want River busting in."

"You-- you wanna keep on?"

"Not if you've got a problem," Jayne said.

"I got a little one," Mal said.

Jayne searched him with his deadly blue eyes. "Can't say I won't miss it," he said. He reached his hand forward, to touch Mal's shoulder or his face, like he could understand everything by touching him. Mal reacted like he would in a fistfight, like he'd taught himself to do if ever anyone tried to lay a hand on him. He pushed Jayne down. Jayne grabbed him around the waist and pulled him forward, taking him along.

And they were wrassling on the floor and on Jayne's narrow bed, rolling everywhere, banging their heads and their elbows on the furniture and the walls, on the floor and on each other. Once in a while, one or the other would get the upper hand for a moment, hold the other one down, then realize he didn't know what he'd won and give up control. Their bodies pressed tight together, Jayne's breath in Mal's ear, Jayne getting hard into Mal's thigh.

They were both exhausted and turned on-- no use denying anymore that this was sexual-- and Mal discovered he had Jayne pinned to the floor, and that Jayne wasn't fighting back anymore. "What're you gonna do?" Jayne said.

"Dunno yet," Mal said.

"'Cause it looked for all the 'verse like you was about to kiss me," Jayne said.

"That definitely wasn't it."

"Wouldn'ta minded," Jayne said. He bench-pressed Mal up off of himself, threw him over onto his back, held him down with both hands. And shoved his tongue into Mal's mouth in a way that was not so much a kiss as an act of penetration. Mal tangled his tongue in Jayne's, let it be as rough as it was. He took in Jayne's mouth like he was gulping water. He forgot to breathe.

Jayne broke away and looked at Mal seriously, more serious than Mal had ever seen him. "You okay with this?" Jayne said.

Mal surveyed him. The hands, blunt from work, but clean under the nails; the muscles in his arms and chest, carefully cultivated; the strong set of his jaw. Those deadly eyes again. There was prettiness there, when Mal let himself see it. And he knew that if he rejected it in the flesh, he'd still see it when he was alone in his bunk. He would come to despise Jayne the way he'd come to despise Inara, and it would be all his fault for refusing. He could have this, was being offered it, and the part of him that wanted to run away scared needed to bi zui and let him not regret this.

"Yeah," Mal said. "I reckon I am."

"Then would you finish me off?" Jayne said. "'Cause I ain't gonna last much longer."

It was different, sucking Jayne's ji ba now that he admitted to wanting to. To it not being something he only gave so he could get in return, but something he'd worked hard on to make Jayne keep asking for it. He'd figured out how to keep his teeth out of his way and keep from hurting the back of his throat, and he knew just where to put his thumb on Jayne's balls to make him cry out in spite of himself. This time, he barely had a chance to put his mouth on Jayne's ji ba before he came, and it disappointed him.

He would never admit to anyone not currently in this room that he liked getting on his knees for Jayne, but he was about ready to admit it to the two of them. He stood up, fixed his eyes on Jayne's, and got himself to swallow. "You know, I came here to put an end to this," he said.

"Figured as much," Jayne said.

"Looks like it didn't take," Mal said.

"Looks that way," Jayne said. "Want me to do you?"

"Yeah," Mal said.

Jayne knelt in front of Mal like always, but instead of undoing Mal's fly and getting down to it, he untucked Mal's shirt, ran his fingertips down Mal's back. "'S not gonna be the same no more," Jayne said.

Mal shoved his suspenders off his shoulders, unbuttoned his shirt, and let the sleeves slide off his arms. He'd never bothered to before. It had seemed like unnecessary effort. No, keeping his clothes on had been the effort, an effort to not incorporate any body parts that weren't absolutely vital to the task at hand. "It's gonna be pretty much totally different," Mal said.

"I can live with that if you can," Jayne said, finally getting around to letting Mal's ji ba out and putting his mouth on it. It was amazing how he could forget between blow jobs how Jayne could run his tongue up and down like that and make him incapable of speech. He gripped Jayne's shoulders and let Jayne do that other thing with his lips on the tip, and there were other things after that, but he wasn't so much as differentiating anymore. Just biting his lip and being very close to coming, and then getting there.

"Is there supper tonight?" Jayne said. "'Cause if there is, we're late."

"Ai ya huai le," Mal said, looking for his shirt. "There anyone on this boat still in the dark about this?"

"Doubt it strongly," Jayne said.

Mal ran through the crew roster mentally, and knew Jayne was right. Inara and Kaylee had heard through the walls, with Kaylee's bunk next to Jayne's. If they had, then so had Zoe and Wash, them being next door to Mal's. Book and River both had their funny ways of knowing, and somebody'd surely gossiped to Simon by now. "If there are, in ten minutes, there won't be," Mal said.

 

There were still rules, and Jayne didn't like rules much. He tolerated them for Mal's sake. Before, it was purely for the sake of continuing to get his dick sucked regular, but he was having trouble convincing himself of that, these days. He was starting to give a hou zi de pi gu about Mal. No matter how natural a consequence that was, it got in the way of things.

For instance, if he didn't care, he wouldn't bother enforcing the rule that nobody on Serenity was permitted to in any way acknowledge that the two of them were more than passing acquaintances. At first, it seemed like a necessary precaution, but after all these months it was stupid he had to pretend he didn't notice Kaylee's knowing grins, or the way Simon rolled his eyes whenever he saw them together. Hell, he'd fallen asleep one night in Mal's bed and passed by half the crew on the way to his own bunk. It wasn't like he wanted to steal kisses over breakfast, like Inara and Kaylee were doing lately, or to have whole flirtation-laden arguments in the middle of the cargo bay, like Wash and Zoe did. He just wanted the freedom to mention, if necessary, that he was going to be in Mal's bunk if anyone needed him.

It wasn't such a terrible price to pay. Mal's speed at getting used to various new ideas took some patience, but the waiting paid off. It made Jayne plan things out, like where to buy a supply of skins and lube on Persephone, and when exactly to tell Mal that he wanted to fuck his smooth white ass. Which was a pretty effective approach, when the time came to put it into action.

Of course, he'd had to give it up on the receiving end the next night. Mal liked equality.

And Jayne liked staying the night. After that first morning, walking the walk of shame back to his bunk, he got in the habit of bringing a few things when he went over there: a toothbrush, his shaving kit, a change of clothes. Mal was a little skittish the first few times Jayne dropped his knapsack in the corner, but he didn't seem to mind it after all.

Jayne got used to waking up in the middle of the night to find Mal's arm draped across him. He'd grown up sharing beds with siblings, and it was easier, not sleeping alone. Only Mal was a hell of a lot better than siblings. Some nights, Mal would feel Jayne stirring and crawl under the covers to blow him.

That was kinda a matter of self-defense. Problem was, Mal's bunk shared a wall with Zoe and Wash's. Jayne would have thought, them being married and all, things would have died down. But more nights than not, he and Mal got rudely interrupted by moans and a creaking mattress. It made Jayne wish there was more room in his own bunk. At least when Kaylee and Inara got down to business, it was hot. Zoe and Wash, he could have lived a long and happy life without thinking about what they sounded like together.

The night of Zoe and Wash's anniversary, there was long and athletic celebration in the next room. They drowned the happy couple out for a while, but eventually, Mal said good night and rolled over. Leaving Jayne to lie wide awake, listening to Zoe say, "Wash, Wash, Wash," over and fucking over.

"You know what the worst thing is?" he said, not expecting Mal to be awake enough to hear him. "I can actually tell the difference between how she screams when he eats her out, and how she screams when he fucks her. I just can't tell which is which."

"Ni ta ma de, Jayne, it took me an age to learn to sleep through them," Mal yawned. "Do me the courtesy of not giving me visuals."

"Sorry," Jayne said. "Wasn't meaning to share."

"But sometimes your mouth just moves."

"It does that."

"Make it stop, please," Mal said.

"So you can lie over there on your side of the bed and wonder which is that high-pitched shriek and which is the one where she moans real low and says his name?"

"No, so I can shut my eyes and--" Mal was interrupted by a wall-rattling groan. "Wo de ma, please tell me you and I are never that loud."

"You hardly make a sound," Jayne said. "'Cept when I fuck you, and still-- not in that category." It was dark, and Mal was turned away from him, but Jayne still knew which face Mal made when he said the part about fucking him. It amazed Jayne, they could be having this much sex and Mal could still be this shy about talking about it. There was something behind that, and Jayne had no interest in prying into it.

"It's real quiet, all of a sudden," Mal said, and not till then did Jayne realize how much it was.

"Think they're done?" Jayne said.

"Think they're listening."

"Starting to hope they are," Jayne said.

"How... loud d'you say I am when you-- when you-- y'know." Mal said.

"They'd hear," Jayne said. "Wouldn't wake 'em out of a sound sleep, but they'd hear." He moved over to Mal's side of the bed, put a hand on his leg, bit his earlobe how he liked. "You could do me."

"You talk louder 'n you come," Mal said. Mal grabbed a skin from the table next to the bed and put it in Jayne's hand. They were using skins partly because it was more sanitary, but mainly because Mal still tensed up like crazy. It was past the point where Jayne had to work his fingers in there for a million years and then push his cock in so gradually he kept losing his hard-on, but it was still slow. Mal liked it, though, Jayne knew that for sure. Jayne had tried to beg off fucking him a couple times, to avoid all that gorram effort, and Mal had gotten more than irritable. He liked that it hurt, maybe. He was the kind to.

Anyhow, Jayne liked the chance to touch him all over, get him ready. Hold him from behind, bite his neck and his shoulders, run hands over his hipbones and his legs till he shifted to get his cock touched but not do that, because then Jayne would wind up jerking him off instead. Keep touching till Mal was lost enough in it that he stopped thinking, and Jayne could put the skin on fast. He would go in gentle, but he didn't have to stay that way.

Mal was being awfully quiet. Jayne thought first of asking him if it was all right, if he was hitting at the right spot. He realized this was all very on purpose, pressed his lips together, went in harder. He hated not to groan at all when he came. Mal patted his leg to let him know he could pull out, and immediately busted up laughing.

And then, silence again, till they heard Wash pounding on the wall, yelling. "You." Wham. "Both." Wham. "Snore."

 

Mal had a cough, and it was starting to get in the way of things. It had started up a week ago, maybe a little longer, and it was getting worse instead of better. Truth be told, it was only getting in the way of the one thing, but Mal was already tired of apologizing and jerking Jayne off.

Mal reckoned he'd better let the good doctor earn his keep. "I'm sick," he took Simon aside in the cargo bay to say. "Fix me." So he sat on the infirmary bed while Simon shined lights in his ears and listened to his chest, more or less waiting for Simon to announce that there wasn't nothing wrong with him that time and a pot of herb tea wouldn't cure.

"Have you had sex with anyone other than Jayne recently?" the doctor said.

"Shen me?" Mal said.

"You heard me the first time. I know it's not an acceptable topic of conversation around here, but as your doctor, I need to cover all the bases."

"You think he gave me something?" Mal said.

"I honestly doubt it," Simon said. "I was thinking more along the lines of, if there had been someone else, they might've."

"No," Mal said. "I have not had sex with anybody but Jayne." It felt funny to say those words, especially realizing he hadn't ever said them before. They hadn't needed saying.

Truth was, he hadn't hardly noticed. He was having, to put it lightly, an awful lot of sex. Jayne pretty much always wanted to, and Mal got off on being wanted. It seemed like he got off on just about everything Jayne did to him: his hands and his mouth.

And by taking him, which Mal hadn't never let nobody do before. Jayne had been so earnest when he'd asked for that, it had been hard to say no anyway, hard for Mal to insist that he'd always topped and wasn't fixing to change. "Or you could have me," Jayne had said, with a funny sort of hopefulness in his voice. Mal had seen that Jayne wouldn't think less of him either way-- that it wasn't about the one on top being more of a man.

So he'd lain down for Jayne, and there had been broken skins and cursing. It'd hurt like ta ma de di yu, but it was the best gorram pain he'd ever had. So much so that nowadays, Jayne had taken to holding him down, licking his ass and playing with his balls and generally not letting him come until he begged to be fucked.

The night after that first night, Jayne had rolled over for Mal. No questions, no resistance. And it had been so easy, made Mal realize that he didn't want to know the reason for that. He didn't want to hear about who had rutted Jayne before him, hard enough and often enough to make Jayne like that. Tian xiao de, there were plenty of things Jayne surely didn't want to know about Mal.

"Good," the doctor said, and Mal wondered what that was supposed to mean. Simon poked and prodded for another minute or two, then announced that Mal had walking pneumonia. "Which means you need to stop walking and go to bed till it clears up," Simon scolded.

"But--"

"People die of pneumonia, you know."

"How long?" Mal said.

"Till I say you're better," said Simon. He gave Mal a dose of antibiotics and the additional indignity of personally escorting him back to his bunk. "Now I've got to test the whole crew and see if you've passed it on to anyone," Simon said.

Mal went into his bunk to find Jayne already there, which had become a more and more common occurrence. He was certainly allowed-- Mal had given him the code to the door once, when he'd left something or other behind, and not bothered to change it after-- but he didn't seem to spend a whole lot of time in his own bunk anymore. He mostly left Mal alone when he was around. He just liked being there, Mal guessed.

"I'm sick," was as far as Mal went towards explaining. He took his shoes off and got into bed.

"Doctor give you any of the good drugs?" Jayne said.

"Just antibiotics," Mal said, "and a stern talking-to."

"Want some... soup or something?"

"Just wanna rest," Mal said, his head getting heavy. He was starting to wonder if Simon really had slipped him some of those good drugs.

Someone was knocking at his door. "Jayne," Kaylee called out. "You in there? Doctor wants to see you." He was pretty sure he saw Jayne leave before he was out cold. Definitely the good, good drugs.

 

Jayne avoided the infirmary when he could, not out of any fear of doctors, but out of the perfectly reasonable fear that Simon would kill him. The rest of the crew could say what they wanted about Simon not being that kind of man, but Simon had a cabinet full of needles and a score to settle. No matter what Simon had said about not hurting people when they were in his infirmary, Jayne wouldn't have blamed Simon for trying something. He kind of wished he would, just to make things even. But it seemed like Simon enjoyed having that advantage over him. It was the only one he really had.

"Jayne," Simon said when Jayne hopped on the exam table. "I didn't think I'd get you here so easily."

"Ain't doing it for you," Jayne said.

"Then for who?" Simon said. "For Mal?" He picked up a medical instrument and flicked on a light inside it. Jayne flinched. "Say 'ah,'" Simon said. Jayne did, and Simon shined the light and wiped Jayne's throat with a swab. And while Jayne couldn't say anything back to him, added, "Because you care about him so very much?"

"I care," Jayne said with a shrug.

"Care about getting laid," Simon said.

"You done yet?" Jayne said. "'Cause I was gonna go make him some soup."

"You really think he gives a gou shi about you? Don't you realize he would leave you for Inara in a second if she said the word?"

Truth was, Jayne had spent the past few months trying not to think about that. Not about Inara-- he didn't think there was much of a chance of that happening-- but about Mal getting sick of him in general. He was happier thinking it was just sex, and as long as they got along okay, it wouldn't go nowhere, wouldn't change none. Would be this easy thing. And then Mal had to go and get himself sick, and Jayne had to find himself deciding whether to make the soup with the noodles or the kind with the little dumplings in it. Tying himself down.

"Not like she'd ever say that word," Jayne said.

"Doesn't matter," Simon said. "He'll always be waiting for her to say it." The machine next to him beeped and flashed a little green light. He said, "All right, you're all set," and shook a few blue pills into a tiny bag. "Your swab came back clean, but since you're spending so much time with the captain--" he stretched that part out with his nose in the air-- "you ought to take one of these a day until they're gone. Or he is."

Jayne snatched the pills away and started to leave. Thought of something, though. "How's Kaylee?"

"Fine," Simon said. "Not sick."

"No," Jayne said. "Good, I mean, but what I meant was, with you knowing all you do about people being other people's second choices, and with her practically opening up her cunt and inviting you in, how's Kaylee?"

"She's with Inara," Simon said. "She's with Inara, and I-- I-- I accept that choice."

"Don't you think she'd leave Inara for you in a second, if you said the word?"

"She-- I-- It's not the same thing," Simon said. "Not even close."

"'S all I had to say," Jayne said. "I'm going to the kitchen. Got soup to make." He'd been put out of the mood for it, but he had it in his head and wouldn't feel right until he did it. So he went to the kitchen. He stood in front of the cubbyholes for a minute, rubbing the back of his neck like it would clear out his head. He opened up the cubbyhole that said "Soup" on it and found a can of peas. He got so busy opening and shutting little doors, he didn't hear Book come in.

"Do you ever stop eating?" Book said behind him, startling him. But Book had a way of saying things that made them not criticism.

"Not for me," Jayne said, slamming a door that said "pickles" (or maybe "peaches": it was Kaylee's handwriting, and that was never for certain) and contained a stack of protein bars.

"For the captain?" Book said. "Yes, I heard he was under the weather. Is he feeling any better?"

"Dunno," Jayne said. "He was sleeping when I left. Think the doctor slipped him something."

"Probably a wise medical decision," Book said.

Jayne folded his arms and stared at the cubbyholes. "Gorram kuang qi de girl."

"River's been rearranging again, I take it?" Book said. "What are you looking for?"

"Soup," Jayne said. "The kind in the packets, with the little dumplings in it."

"I believe she likes to file that under Tomatoes," Book said, and sure enough, it was there. Jayne didn't want to ask where the tomatoes were. He set some water to boil and sat at the table to wait.

"Do you think I disapprove?" Book said.

"Of what?" Jayne said.

"Of what you and Mal do together," Book said

"Didn't think you approved of much I did," Jayne said.

"I approve of this," Book said. "Maybe not of its dubious beginnings, from what I've heard of them, but what appears to be going on now-- that's two people who care very fiercely for each other, and I have no difficulty approving of that."

"I think... he'd be happier if I didn't say nothing about it, either way," Jayne said.

"And that's the curious thing," Book said. "The thing that makes me suspect that, whatever it is the two of you want to call your relationship, it's worthy of approval."

"What's that?" Jayne said.

"If you didn't care for him as fiercely as I'm convinced you do, you'd be bragging about it to anyone who'd listen," Book said.

It was true enough. Jayne stared at the kettle, wishing he could make water boil by thinking real hard at it. "Don't the Bible have some strong words against fornication?" he said.

"And some equally strong ones in favor of commitment," Book said.

"We ain't married," Jayne said.

"Not in your own eyes," Book said.

"Not in no one's." He wanted to tell Book all the things that made them not even sweethearts, beginning with the part about sweet and the part about there being hearts involved. If sucking someone's dick for a certain amount of time made something a relationship, then that was automatically what he and Mal had. Otherwise, it was just fucking and falling asleep. And making soup, which also didn't mean nothing at all except for there was soup and he was making it.

"If I've scared you," Book said, "I apologize."

The kettle whistled, and Jayne mixed the soup. Found a tray, remembered a spoon. "Ain't scared," he said. And admitted, because it was only Book, who wouldn't tell, "Don't know exactly what I am."

But judging from the way he'd had to hold himself back from punching a crooked line into Simon's pretty face-- no, there were ample reasons for that most every day. It wasn't what he'd said to Simon, who was being a hou zi de pi yan for the sake of being one, but what he hadn't been able to bring himself to say to Book. All them things about not caring. Between them who said doom and them who saw some kind of happy fairy story, there was a feeling like someone had ripped the floor out from under him. Like he had no choice but to keep on falling.

He got back to Mal's bunk, punched in the code, kicked the door upward so he could slip in with the tray and climb down one-handed. Mal was half awake, with the faraway contented look of a man fried on wu zhuo ya pian. "Brought you something," Jayne said. He set the tray on the bedside table.

It took Mal a few tries to sit up straight. "Hey," he said, poking his spoon into the soup. "It's the kind with the little dumplings in it."

"Didn't know if you was hungry or not, but I reckoned--"

"Dunno either," Mal said. "I feel all weird. I think the doctor gave me something extra."

"You think?"

"He'd be in considerably more danger if I could move my legs," Mal said.

"You want me to stay?" Jayne said. "Fetch you something?"

"No," Mal said, "just stay."

 

Jayne stayed over every night till Mal was better. He hardly left Mal's bunk, except to do the few chores he had while Serenity was in motion. He didn't do much of anything, though he'd get Mal a cup of water if he asked for it. He just sat on the bed, being near.

At first, Mal thought Simon had put him up to it. But when Simon came in to check up on things, his eyes went sharp to Jayne, and he said, "I thought I told you to leave the captain alone."

"Mal, am I bothering you?" Jayne said.

"No," Mal said.

"Fine," Simon said. "Go over there, then. Get out of my way."

The two of them hadn't exactly been the best of friends before, but there'd been a truce between them. Mal wondered what Jayne had gone and said to ugly things up. Or, considering how sweet Jayne had been lately, whether it had even been his doing. It wasn't Mal's place to ask, either way. As long as it fell short of coming to blows.

When Simon finally lifted Mal's bed-rest sentence, it was a relief, and not just because he was allowed to leave his bunk. Allowed in theory, because the first thing Jayne did when he heard the good news was climb on top of him. But that blow job was the real relief. It made Mal not have to stare at Jayne, not knowing why he was there but not wanting him to leave, neither. Thinking he ought to say something and having nothing to talk about.

Mal made lists in his head of things they could talk about. Guns. Women. Soup with little dumplings in it.

It wasn't like they didn't speak to each other none. Jayne could make him laugh like hell when he had a mind to. But more often than not, talking would have been cramming stuff into a place that was already full. It was the same reason he'd used to sit in the corner of the kitchen, quiet as a churchmouse, while his mama and stepfather and all them ranch hands stomped in and out. Nobody'd held anything in when it could be bellowed loud enough to shake the paint off the walls-- nobody but Mal. "Musta got it from his daddy," his stepfather would say, thumbs in his belt loops as he walked away.

"Whatcha thinking about?" Jayne said.

But this was one of the things they didn't talk about. Mal didn't want to make Jayne listen to these stories. He worried Jayne would walk away, worried Jayne would pity him. Equally, he didn't want to hear about Jayne's placid farm-boy upbringing, the one he'd left because he'd been too bored to survive it. What they'd wind up doing was envying each other.

"Nothing," Mal said.

"Okay," Jayne said. Somewhere along the way, he'd taken off his clothes. Jayne had taken to doing that when Mal wasn't paying attention, because it got Mal to look at him. Mal had almost gotten over the shame of watching Jayne and wanting to wrestle him down, do such things as he didn't have words for. There wasn't no harm in wanting that if the other person wanted the same from him.

With that in mind, Mal smiled to himself-- or to Jayne, and that was a distinction in the habit of blurring more and more-- and took his socks off first. He had Jayne's attention already. He wanted to keep it for as long as possible, like someday it'd make him understand what Jayne saw when he watched like that. What it was about his body that kept Jayne's eyes there.

Mal unbuttoned his shirt real slow but left it hanging open on his shoulders. He thought of shrugging off his suspenders like he usually did, but had the idea of unfastening them from the bottom instead. He fumbled with them on purpose. He took off his britches and shorts without standing up, and that was it for Jayne, who came up behind Mal, hung over him without touching him for a moment, then tugged at his collar.

"Ain't there yet," Mal said.

Jayne put his hand between Mal's legs. "Liar," he said. He bit Mal's earlobe, probably because he knew it worked, threw Mal off balance. So Mal gave Jayne a lapful of shirt and pivoted while Jayne was throwing it across the room. He stuck his tongue in Jayne's mouth and shoved him onto his back. He let his mind run through the long list of things he could do to a naked man he was holding down flat but decided to keep kissing till he narrowed things down.

Or maybe till Jayne grabbed him by the hair and said, "Don't go tiring out that tongue of yours."

"That what you want?" Mal said. He pushed a finger into Jayne's ass because it was what he hadn't asked for. He'd never gotten Jayne to come that way, just from inside, but it got him so close he would beg, and Mal couldn't help but love that.

He found himself faced with an important decision. First option: take the finger out, grab a skin from the bedside table, hope Jayne didn't pounce on him and steal away every bit of control he had over the situation. Second option: keep the finger in until Jayne pleaded to be fucked, blow him instead, and win anyway.

Mal liked the part about winning anyway, so he didn't wait for the part with the pleading. He found an angle, ran his tongue up and down Jayne's ji ba for a slow minute, finally took in as much of him as he could and let him come.

Without a word, Mal went to the sink to wash his hands. He still had soap on them when Jayne tackled him to the floor. He got the soap all over Jayne's back and shoulders and into the rug, trying to hold on to something while Jayne sucked him off.

The knock at the door had the good sense to arrive after Mal came, but before he'd had the chance to peel himself off the floor. Jayne's first thought, and Mal's, was that it was Wash banging on the wall again, but when Jayne pounded back, it got him a "What the tian xiao--" from Wash and a "Hey, the door," from Kaylee, who it seemed was waiting outside.

Mal grabbed a pair of pants and dove for the bed, covered up his bottom half till he could get himself decent. Jayne climbed up to answer the door, no pants involved. "Jayne--" Mal said.

"What?" Jayne said. "It's Kaylee."

"I was up doing my night rounds," Kaylee said. "Got a warning light. Interocitor's on her last legs."

"Mal!" Jayne called over his shoulder. "Spaceship's broke."

"Would you let Kaylee in, then, please?" Mal said. "And also possibly put some clothes on?"

Jayne offered Mal his saddest face, though he must have known it wouldn't do him any good. He picked up the pair of pants still lying on the floor, held them up by one half-connected suspender, and said, "Yours."

Mal was considerate enough to shake Jayne's belt out of the loops before he balled up the rest and hurled it at Jayne's head. Jayne found a pair of shorts, his own, and put them on slowly as he could before presenting Mal with the right trousers.

"I have my answer for Inara, I reckon," she said.

"'Bout what?" Jayne said.

"Whether you two are secretly cute," she said.

"We ain't cute," Mal said. "Fix my spaceship, please."

"She ain't broke," Kaylee said. "Can't, anyway."

"Ai ya huai le," Mal said. "We gonna wind up drifting again?"

"Nah, she can run okay for a couple days," Kaylee said. "And I got the parts to fix it, only-- I gotta turn off the hull stabilizer and the gravity drive, or the whole electrical system'll fry."

Mal breathed a sigh of relief as there surfaced a vague memory of what the interocitor did. "We gotta land her?" he said.

"We gotta land her," Kaylee said.

"Shiny," Mal said. He pounded on the wall. "Zoe. Wash. Meeting."

"Over there?" Wash yelled.

"Yeah," he said. "Spaceship's broke."

"She ain't broke!" said Kaylee.

The neighbors arrived, Zoe in a robe that looked like it had lost a fight with something rabid, Wash in a t-shirt and undershorts, and it was remarkable how Mal's entire crew could be so underdressed and so wide awake.

"We gotta land," Mal said. "What're we near?"

"Less than a day from Ionia," Wash said, "but since the riots it ain't safe there for much of anyone. About five days from Bethany, which would be fine, if we can go that long, or-- you know what we ain't far from, is Gethen."

"Full of Alliance," Mal said. "No go."

"Yeah, but they're all on vacation," Wash said.

"We should be okay, so long as we keep our heads down, and Simon and River stay hid," Zoe said.

"How far away'd you say Bethany was?" Mal said. "Five days' journey?"

"I ain't sure that interocitor has five days left in it," Kaylee said. "Captain--"

"Fine," Mal said. "Gethen it is." He had a bad feeling somewhere deep in his stomach, but he reckoned it couldn't count for much. They'd take precautions, keep safe, get the repairs done and get the hell gone.

Kaylee left to give Inara a head start setting up appointments, Zoe and Wash left to do whatever it was they did in the privacy of their own bunk, and Jayne took his shorts back off and got into bed. "Never been to Gethen," Jayne said. "Hear it's pretty."

"Yeah," Mal said. "Real pretty."

 

Jayne wasn't sure how long he'd been standing out in the rain, and he didn't care. It'd been a while since he'd seen the stuff, and he had to take advantage of it while it was falling. Most people who worked in space missed the sunshine, complained about all the dark, but Jayne missed thunder and lightning, puddles in the road, the perfume that rose from the ground. It mighta been the farm boy in him, still praying for wet winters. Or it mighta just been the way the water felt running down his body, sticking his clothes to him. He was only a couple of meters from Serenity, but he had his eyes closed and his face to the sky, and he couldn't hear anything but the weather.

And Wash, his running shoes squishing in the wet gravel, saying, "I forgot about you and rainstorms."

"Didn't think you knew in the first place," Jayne said.

"I have superior skills of observation," Wash said.

Better to just not answer back to that. "D'you need something?"

"I wanted to go hear some music tonight," Wash said. "Taiko drums, at this place by the seashore. Inside. And, well, Zoe hates that stuff, so I -- I thought about who might want to see big sweaty muscular men beat things with sticks, and naturally you and Kaylee came to mind."

"Was gonna see what Mal wanted to do," Jayne said.

"The yu ben de gu gao yang de er zi, he didn't tell you first?" Wash said, and took a deep breath. "He went off with Inara about an hour ago. I don't know where."

"With Inara?" Jayne said, trying his damnedest to come up with a reason why that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if Mal had seen fit to go without telling him.

"He should've known better," Wash said. Jayne could see him trying to be comforting without getting too close, and he wanted to be reassured that it wasn't nothing at all, just a typical Mal oversight. He could go to that place by the seashore, hear music. Let Kaylee make him dance with her, take his mind away till he could get back home and hear Mal's side of things.

"I'll go," Jayne said. "The drums. I'll go."

"It starts after sunset," Wash said. "We can meet up on the loading ramp and head down together. In a couple hours, maybe? I hadn't really planned it out much."

"Maybe I'll walk around some," Jayne said. "See you after."

"Well... okay. Then."

Jayne followed Wash back to Serenity, so he could put on some dry clothes. By the time he'd changed, the rain had slowed to a pointless trickle. He walked until it stopped completely, found himself at the edge of town, where the du pin shops and the unlicensed whorehouses were. He fully intended to pass them right by, but there was a girl on the porch of one, and she called out to him.

"Whatcha gonna find that way that you can't find here?" she said. She had wild yellow hair and eyes too smart and wasted for a whore. He went in, and she took him upstairs. He fucked her fast as he could and refused flat out when she offered to blow him, though she said it was included in the price. He laid his money down and got the hell out of there, back to Serenity.

The whole way back, he could feel the whore all over him, like dirt under his fingernails or something in his eye. He told himself what he'd done wasn't worse-- wasn't worse than Inara. It wasn't retribution, though, neither-- it hadn't been any good. It'd only made him more lonesome, made him want to go home to someone who'd hold him for free.

When he got to Serenity, Kaylee was waiting, back against the hull, smiling to herself. "Thought you weren't gonna show," she said.

"Said I was." He wondered if she could see the guilt on him, if everyone could, if they could wring it from his clothes like rainwater.

"Wash said he'll be back in a minute," Kaylee said, and he was. They caught a land shuttle down to the shore, got a little supper before the lights went down and everyone crowded towards the stage. It wasn't dancing music, but he spun Kaylee around anyway. He told himself to dance till the world ended, till Mal came back and everything went right to hell.

 

The tight pants were still tight, too tight for this far a walk. Inara'd had to land her shuttle a ways outside the development where her friend lived, and they'd searched in vain for any kind of vehicle to carry them the rest of the distance. It was too late to bail out now, though. She'd given him the chance when she'd apologized for the third time for asking him at the last minute to escort her. Two well-established companion houses on Gethen meant Inara wasn't going to find any business, especially not on such short notice, but her favorite instructor from the Academy had retired here. Rosamond de Garza was an old-fashioned companion, and she'd be affronted to see Inara show up alone.

So Mal was yanking the tight pants out of his ass and avoiding the mud that the afternoon's flash-flood rainstorm had left on the footpaths. "If you don't stop fussing," Inara said, "I'll be forced to mention my shoes."

Mal looked down. They were red and shiny and pointy, and they had sharp little heels. He changed the subject. "Still think you shoulda brought Kaylee," he said.

"She'd be overwhelmed," Inara said.

"She'd have a ball anyway."

"I was talking about Rosamond," Inara said. "Besides, Kaylee and I-- that's largely over."

It seemed to Mal that he should have known, somehow or other, the way people seemed to know all the other goings-on on Serenity. He couldn't see how they could keep it hid so well. "Sorry," he said.

"It's all right," she said. "What we had was a sexual friendship, and the emphasis moved away from the sex and towards the friendship. Which we still have."

Was that what he and Jayne had? Sexual friendship. It sounded like a whole other language.

"I'm sorry," Inara said. "If that was too much for you to take in."

"No," he said. "Can't say I quite understand, but--"

"Well, that makes two of us," Inara said. "You and Jayne? I have to admit, I never saw that coming."

He wanted to say she never saw him with anyone but herself, but he had no intention of starting that business up again. Things between them were shaky enough without dredging up old arguments. So he said, "Never saw you and Kaylee coming, neither."

"She made me want to stay," Inara said. "You wanted to know why, didn't you? She made me want to stay on Serenity."

"I always wondered why you didn't make good on that threat," he said. He'd meant to ask, to taunt her about when exactly she was going to give back his shuttle and leave him alone. Meant to, and never done. Like everything with her.

"She came to me and told me how lonely she'd be if I left," Inara said, "and I realized that as much as I told myself I was leaving for my own good, that decision was going to affect other people. I told myself I could always give up if it became too much to bear, but so far-- the longer I stay, the easier it gets."

"I-- I woulda been sad to see you go," he said, and he surprised himself, how hollow that sounded.

There was a hardness in her silence. She'd heard that hollowness, too. "So," she said, with a painted-on brightness, "why Jayne?"

For the life of him, he still didn't know. He hadn't never wanted to formulate a reason. "He-- it sorta happened," he said. "And kept on, and got to be what it is."

"That might be the best way," she said. "Is he your first?"

And there were just plain too many possible meanings to that question. She couldn't be sa gua enough to be asking the obvious one-- if nothing else, she'd seen him with Nandi. Most of the others were too serious to think about. So he went for a safe guess. "Man?" he said. "No. My youth was... suitably ill-spent."

She laughed. "Yes, that was what I was asking," she said.

"It'd been a while," he said. "Thought those days were over."

"To be honest," she said, "I was worried. Sometimes, people's expectations-- it does make a difference. But it seems you've got enough of an understanding that he didn't mind your spending the evening with me, so--"

She was still talking, but Mal couldn't hear a word. He was trying to remember if Jayne minded or not. He thought of Jayne standing in the rain, and wanting to wait till he was finished. Inara'd hurried him along, telling him to get dressed already. They'd gotten in the shuttle right after he had his clothes on, and Jayne'd still been outside. He hadn't asked. He didn't know. "Ta ma de," he said.

"Don't tell me--" she said, and she was laughing again.

"I forgot," he said. "Forgot to tell him."

"You're in a lot of trouble," she said.

"That I am," he said.

"It'll be fine," she said. "He'll understand."

Mal wanted to tell her just how much Jayne wouldn't, but they found Rosamond De Garza's house. He was inside and being polite before he could think any more on it. He forced it to the back of his mind, figured he'd work it out when he got back.

 

Jayne didn't want to go back to Mal's bunk at all, but he had to get his stuff. He went in, didn't even say hello. Mal looked to be asleep, anyhow. Jayne cleared his half a shelf above the sink and emptied his drawer. They weren't really his no more, anyway.

Mal stirred. "You're just leaving?" he said.

"You got what you wanted," Jayne said. "Outta me, and outta her."

"Inara?" Mal said. "You thought--"

"I didn't expect you to keep me around this long," Jayne said. "Thanks for that."

Mal got up out of bed, half-dressed. "Who said I wanted you to go now?"

"You didn't have to say nothing," Jayne said. "Never had to say nothing to me."

"Don't," Mal said, but he couldn't have meant it. He wasn't sad, wasn't remorseful, was only saying not to leave. Not to take away the fucking, which was all it had ever meant. All it coulda meant.

Jayne knew he could stay, pretend to forgive him. But it was all broken, and he'd be lying besides. There wasn't no sense in lying now. "You know what I did, when I found out you'd gone off with her?" he said.

"You went to the shore with Kaylee and Wash," Mal said. "Zoe said."

"Nuh-uh. Before that. Went out walking. Came upon a whorehouse, went inside. Fucked what they had." He was watching Mal back away step by step, narrow his eyes and set his jaw. "And you know what the worst part was? The whole time, I thought of you." He slung his knapsack over his shoulder. "Reckon that's all I get to do anymore."

Mal pressed his lips together. "Leave," he said. "If that's the way you want it, you can leave."

Jayne shut the door quietly as he could. He tried to be invisible in the hallway. Then, he shut himself up in his bunk, with no plans to ever leave.

 

Mal did his best to act like nothing was different. In some ways, it wasn't even hard to do. He and Jayne had never shown much affection for each other outside his bunk. That wasn't the way they'd been. And Jayne wasn't around much anymore. He hid in his bunk, mostly. He was probably right to do that.

But when they had to be anywhere near each other, things got complicated. Jayne skipped some suppers, but not all of them, and Mal worked hard not to look him in the eye. They made a few runs, and he had to tell Jayne the plan beforehand. He tried to get Zoe to do that for him, but she refused flat out. The worst thing about those conversations with Jayne wasn't the cold feeling he got, but the fact that he still hardly had to say a thing for them to understand each other.

It wasn't hard to tell they were irritating the gou shi out of the rest of the crew. It seemed like they were all afraid to say anything, but the tension was between more than him and Jayne. Mal had thought people would take sides, but they didn't, at least not the usual way. They all seemed to be on the third side, the one that was utterly exasperated with the both of them.

He wanted to fix it, and he didn't know how. When he tried to get Jayne to listen, Jayne walked away, and forget about getting him to answer his door when he was in his bunk, which was almost all the time. And even if he could get Jayne to hear him out, he didn't know what he'd say. He couldn't think of anything in the 'verse that could put them back together again.

So he lay in his empty bed and didn't sleep, because it was too cold. He didn't jerk off, because he could feel Jayne not being there. He listened to Zoe and Wash next door, trying to be quiet for his sake but not doing a very good job of it. He wanted to just kill every gorram thing in the world, not because it would fix anything, but because that way everything would actually be as bad as it looked to him.

So it was probably for the best when Zoe dragged him bodily to the kitchen and sat him down. "Make this end now," she said. "You and Jayne. This-- fight, or whatever you want to call it. Make it stop, or I swear to God--"

"I can't," he said.

"Did you try?"

"He walked out on me," Mal said, "and now he won't talk to me. As far as I can see, it's already ended."

"Oh, no," Zoe said. "Long as he's on this boat, it ain't the end."

"He can go any time he wants," Mal said.

"And has he gone?" Zoe said.

"Next time we land, I'll send him on his way," Mal said. "Would that make you happy?"

"Not if you'd keep on acting like you've been," she said. He opened his mouth to ask her how he'd been acting, but she talked over him. "If you drop him on the nearest moon, this will never end. Because you know what? Those stories they tell you when you're a child, the ones that end with 'happily ever after'? They stop a long time before the ending. This stuff takes work, Mal, and like most things that take work, it won't go away just because you leave the work undone."

He wanted to say something back to her, but Zoe on a tear was near impossible to go up against. He reckoned he'd let her say her piece, and then he'd say his. If he had one.

"Remember when I told you about me and Wash?" she said. "You laughed at me, Mal."

"I didn't laugh at you," he said. "I never laughed at you." The truth was, he'd forgotten he'd even done that, and it took him a second to remember why again. "I laughed because I was happy for you," he said. "Couldn't say how happy I was."

"You ordered me not to marry him," she said.

"That was me being your captain," he said. "There was a whole other part of me that was glad you were happy, glad it was with someone I didn't have a lick of interest in."

"You always did like your girls to be girls and your boys to be boys," she said.

He'd never noticed. He liked what he'd liked, and left it at that. But Zoe would have paid attention. In a way, he was glad of that. "That so?"

"Every single time," she said.

He thought for a minute. "There's got to be an exception in there somewhere," he said.

She shook her head. "Keeps us safe from each other," she said.

"I reckon it does," he said.

"Who'd've thought?" she said. "We'd both wind up with men. It looked like it was gonna go the other way for a while there."

She had a way of dragging him back to the heart of things that made him want to both sock her in the mouth and hug her, then remember that their friendship lived in the place between the two. "What makes you think I'm gonna wind up with him?" he said.

"I think you love him," Zoe said. "I think you saw something in him the first time you laid eyes on him."

"We were on the wrong end of a gun," he laughed.

"How many times have we been?" she said. "All the other times, you find a way to kill 'em or else scare 'em off, fool 'em till we got away. That time, you found a way to keep him."

"We'd talked about needing the extra crew," he said, but he knew how he sounded. Weak.

"You couldn'ta possibly thought he was trustworthy," Zoe said. "No, you saw something you thought was pretty, found a way to buy it for yourself."

"I did nothing of the sort," he said. He heard himself raising his voice to her, and it was like raising his hand to her.

"Didn't you?" Zoe said. "No, you're better than that. You're always better than that. Poised to condemn. While you bring this man aboard, forgive him for things you would kill other men for, all the while flirting with him like it would break you to stop-- and don't start arguing, there is a way you've always looked at him that you ain't never looked at Wash or Kaylee and never will. You can tell me all you want that you don't know how this happened, but this is the house you built, and tian xiao de, Mal, someday you're going to wake up and realize you've been living in it."

He breathed slow, counted in his head, didn't let himself say nothing to her.

"When I told you about me and Wash, and you laughed, do you remember what I said to you?" Zoe said.

"You said someday I'd feel the exact same thing for someone, and you'd laugh right back," he said. He smiled at the memory. She made that easy.

"I ain't laughing, Mal," she said. "I thought I'd be able to laugh, and I can't."

"I don't know what to say to him," Mal said. "Don't know how to fix it. Don't know if I can."

"Start off telling him you're sorry," she said.

"I didn't do nothing."

"It doesn't matter," she said. "He'll know what you're apologizing for, even if you don't. Especially if you don't."

He put his hands flat on the table, felt his eyes get heavy. He was tired. Just so tired.

"Try," she said.

"Fine," he said, and he turned his back on her. He went back to his bunk. To not sleep, not talk, not do anything but hear that empty room and hate it.

 

Nothing hurt as long as Jayne stayed in his bunk. He couldn't forget nothing, but at least there wasn't nothing new. The farther away he got from walking out on Mal, the more numb he got. But not numb enough to look at him, look at anyone. He couldn't think of nothing but the way Mal's face had set in anger, the way he'd broken. Jayne had been able to do that much injury without touching him. That'd been a power he'd always liked having over people, but now he would have given it up for almost anything.

So he hid himself away. He didn't do much of anything. Slept, mostly. Cleaned his guns, aimed them at the walls and put them away. He heard Kaylee sobbing softly sometimes, at night, and he thought of going in, but he knew he couldn't say nothing that wouldn't make her worse.

He left off working out for a week or two, to keep from having to hear Book lecture at him, but he got restless. Book made a point of not saying a gorram thing to him. It mighta been Book's way of showing disapproval, but it mighta been wisdom, mercy, one of them Biblical things.

After, he'd go back to his bunk, head down. He'd sneak out at night and get food, though he wasn't hardly ever hungry. His clothes were fitting loose. He didn't care, just went to sleep.

Till the one night he woke up again, because that was Kaylee in the next room, crying out. It looked like she and Inara were on again, looked like he wasn't gonna be getting any more sleep. He'd used to have a solution for that. He didn't even have to take down his pants to know that wasn't gonna work no more.

He put on a shirt and went to the kitchen. It was late and would be quiet there. He sat down at the table and rested his head in his hands. He didn't stop himself from dozing off.

He shook off the sleep after he didn't know how long, raised his head and found River staring him in the eyes. "Holy cao ni ma de gui," he said, sitting up so straight, so fast, he could feel it behind his eyes.

"You got all his sleep," she said.

"Shen me?"

"You sleep all the time," River said, "and he doesn't sleep at all. He kept the bed, but you took away all the sleep."

"Oh, hell," Jayne said, getting up, trying to think where else on Serenity he could go.

"I can find somewhere to sit alone, since you were here first," River said. "I don't want to, but I know lots of places."

He sat back down, not trusting her. "Creeps the shit out of me," he muttered.

"I took my medicine," River said. "Simon doesn't want me to, 'cause it hurts my stomach, makes me see colors. But he doesn't have to hear all the noise. So I go when he's asleep. I know what vial it is, how much to take. And he'll never know, unless you tell him."

He could see through what she was doing, putting them both on the same side. But she knew he could see it. At least she could if she was as smart as they all kept saying. "Won't tell no one," he said. "Least of all your brother."

"You hate him more than you hate me," River said.

"Don't hate you," Jayne said. "Reckon the stabbing was nothing personal." That was true. It took a lot of energy to hate a person.

"You make me think of people taking me away," she said. "Steel straps and shots to make me sleepy, so I won't feel it when they take my brain apart."

"Ain't trying that again," Jayne said.

"I know," River said. "That's why I forgave you." She flopped her elbows down on the table, leaned in close to him. "Little girls forgive. It's the little boys who can't forget, and cause all the trouble."

He leaned back in his chair and pretended not to know what she was talking about.

"And now you're a little boy all alone," River said. "Or you think you are, which is the same. Alone, when anyone would take you in, now, that's a shame."

"Not anyone," Jayne said.

"Not the shepherd, not your mei mei, not--" She stopped, looked like she was thinking for a minute. "Oh, not in that way," she said. "But anyone would listen, if you had words to say. Even him." She leaned a little farther across the table, gave him a peck on the lips. "But you never did that."

Jayne slammed his hands on the table. He stood up fast and kicked the chair away. She looked fragile, like something he could unravel or tear the paper off of. "No," he growled.

"He'd like it, if you did," she said. "And you will."

Jayne had backed himself almost to the door. "Why's that?" he said.

"There's a man inside of you," she said. "You dress him up and hide him, but he's there. He doesn't need anyone else to put him back together. When I said I forgave you, that's who I forgive. The other one, the one who hides and sleeps, I don't have to forgive. Because he isn't real."

"It ain't mine to fix," Jayne said.

"Then go back to your bunk, little boy," she said. "Play your games."

He wanted her to be making this all up, working to bait him. But she was the crazy girl, and sometimes that meant she got to say what everyone else thought. What he knew. Which was, he had to forget what time of night it was and go to Mal, and not just because River mighta been fixing to punish him if he didn't, in that funny River way where nobody saw his side of things.

"Ain't doing it for you," he said as he headed back to the bunks.

"I certainly hope not," she said, her voice clean and serious, like she'd had her head together this entire time.

He meandered back to the bunks. He stopped right near Mal's bunk, but couldn't make himself get any closer. Couldn't go home, couldn't go there. He wandered the halls for a few minutes, like a ghost. Like River.

"Jayne," he heard behind him. It was Kaylee, looking little and satisfied in a tiny t-shirt and a skirt he didn't think was hers. "You been walking around like this all night?" she said.

"Went to the kitchen," he said. "Was heading back."

"I was wondering how it was you hadn't died yet," Kaylee said. She studied him. "You look gorram near, though."

"I'm all right," he said.

"You ain't," she said. "You ain't."

"Will be," he said.

"Inara's gone home," she said. "She don't wanna have sex in her shuttle, because then it feels like work, but she don't wanna stay the night. It's kinda lonesome." He was about to tell her about how she had no fucking idea, but she added, "Sorry. That was hurtful. I shouldn'ta mentioned it." She slipped her arm in his. "What I meant to say was, if you wanted to come back with me, sit awhile--"

He shook his head feverishly.

"No, not like--" Kaylee said-- "oh, God, could you imagine? No, just sit. Talk, maybe. Since ain't neither of us sleeping."

He let her lead him. "Can't go back to my bunk, anyhow," he said.

"Prob'ly not the best idea," she said.

"No," he said. "Really can't. River'll kill me."

She didn't ask him to explain, and he was grateful for that. She didn't make him talk, once they were sitting on her bed, but waited for him.

He hadn't never been in her bunk before, and he hadn't thought what would be in it. She had a whole lot of stuff, all over everywhere. Bright-colored cloths and weird little tacky things she musta bought on weird little tacky moons, fans and paper lanterns and lights shaped like flowers, tools and funny gadgety things, makeup and lotion, one very pink dress. Kaylee stuff, all jumbled together and cluttered in. He wanted to pick everything up and hold it, but it woulda been like touching parts of her he didn't have no right to touch. He sat on his hands.

"I miss him," he said. "More 'n I thought I would."

"I know," Kaylee said. "Everyone knows."

He was supposed to say something, keep the conversation moving. It seemed like he never knew the right thing to say, no matter what. Even with Kaylee, who it shoulda been easy with.

"You are so stupid," she said.

"Been told that," he said.

"You got any idea how envious I am of you?" she said. "I throw myself at Simon, get nothing. I let Inara in, think something may come of it, can't seem to get anywhere near her heart. You take the least likely chance in the 'verse, win him over completely, and then you throw it away." She rested her head on his shoulder, sleepy and sisterly, comfortable. "So fucking stupid."

"Didn't mean to," he said.

"Ain't that the beauty part?" she said. "I think-- maybe if I did less meaning to, I'd be better off."

He shook his head, laughed. "You got Inara," he said. "And you're envious?"

"Nah," Kaylee said. "She got me. She was all upset over Mal, kept coming in and talking about everything but. Damn near drove me crazy. But it kinda turned into-- she actually cared what I said about things, and it was real nice, having that. All I woulda wanted, really, but she thought-- I reckon when what you've got is a hammer, everyone looks like a nail."

"Pretty shiny hammer," he said.

"Yeah," she said, all dreamy. "Pretty shiny."

"And she-- she likes you," he said.

"Reckon so," Kaylee said, "but she ain't never gonna love me, I don't think."

"That shit's more trouble than it's worth," he said, getting up. She had a little desk thing in the corner, and he leaned over it, let his weight fall into the heels of his hands.

"Then you do," she said, and he could hear her smiling.

"What?" he said.

"Love him," she said.

"Didn't say that," he said, real fast, not thinking. And then thought about it. He reckoned that mighta been the thing all along. He wished someone woulda told him this was what it felt like.

And he knew what he needed to say. He didn't know if he could say it, but he knew what the words were. "Gotta go," he said. "I gotta go." He turned around, and she was looking up at him, full of expectation. She made him think of what River had said, about people taking him in. The shepherd, his mei mei.

He thought about his four little sisters with eyes full of light, and the way the light died in their eyes till there wasn't nothing left for them to do but marry the useless assholes they'd grown up with, breed more useless assholes. He hadn't stuck around long enough to see the last two lose all that light. He couldn't have stood it.

But here was Kaylee, with the smiles and the knowing stuff, and enough light to break her free. What he'd wanted them girls to be, she was. "Thanks," he said, and he kissed her forehead, real gentle. "Mei mei."

She grabbed his wrist and grinned like she knew what he meant. "Go already," she said. "Get."

He climbed out of her bunk and back into the hallway. But this time around, he had something pushing him in the right direction. "Love him, love him, love him," he kept on saying under his breath. The ambient lights were coming up, making morning out of the big dark.

He got to Mal's door and froze. There weren't no words in his head anymore. "Fuck," he said, but he didn't walk away.

 

Mal knew just what he wanted to say to Jayne. He'd spent hours and hours going over it in his head, changing the words around, making it perfect. He knew how to make Jayne listen and win him back.

He couldn't, for the life of him, get himself out of his bunk to go and do it. And now it was morning. No more excuses. He got up, stretched. He got himself halfway to the ladder and stared very longingly at his empty bed. It was early yet.

He was weeks too late. He took one deep breath and pushed himself forward. He got himself up the ladder and raised the hatch, and there was Jayne on the other side, looking at his feet, petrified.

"Missed you," Jayne said.

And that whole speech that Mal had practiced, the one that was going to win Jayne back, that speech fled his brain so fast, he couldn't think to do nothing but grab Jayne by the shirt and yank him forward. Jayne pressed his weight into the rungs, and the hatch shuddered. Mal kissed Jayne so hard it almost hurt, got tangled up in his arms, in his legs and his mouth. They barely got down the ladder before they tore each other out of their clothes and landed backwards on a bed that wasn't empty anymore.

He lay on his back for a minute, looking up at Jayne. He was waiting for Jayne to do something, but Jayne only looked back down. Mal wished he could look in those eyes until he knew exactly what it was kept him up nights about this big, dumb motherfucker. Not that Mal was one to judge. But if things were going the way they looked to be going, he was gonna have to figure it out sooner or later.

Till then, he mostly wanted to have sex till neither of them could get it up anymore. It was a much more realistic goal.

He crawled out from under Jayne. He had to go all the way to the back of the drawer to find the skins, because he'd put them where he wouldn't have to look at them. He pressed down on Jayne's shoulders and sucked on his neck, the combination of which got Jayne down on his belly. Astounding, how it could make Mal so hard just to get Jayne to yield to him. It was something that had shamed him with women, but he knew Jayne was letting him.

He pressed one hand between Jayne's shoulder blades to hold him there and put the skin on fast. It was so easy to have him like this. Fuck him. Jayne's word for it.

Mal closed his eyes, shook off the last of the doubt that this wouldn't fix anything. He put his hand around Jayne's ji ba, because if he didn't do it before, he'd forget, make Jayne irritable. He went slow, slower than he needed to. It seemed like he could feel every muscle in Jayne's chest tighten under his hand, feel Jayne grunting, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," and then, "Harder, harder." So he did, fucked him harder, hard as he could, forgot about hurting him. He'd already done that. He came with his mouth full of words he couldn't quite say, opened his eyes to Jayne's sweaty back and a handful of limp ji ba. And was possibly ready to say them.

He took off the skin and lay down on his back on the bed. Jayne lay down next to him, draped one thick arm across Mal's chest, rested his head in the crook of Mal's neck. It was affectionate in that ridiculously direct Jayne way that made Mal want to throw him off and hide. "I'd figured out exactly what I was gonna say to you," Mal said. "I was just about ready to say it."

"Me too," Jayne said. "Knew what I was gonna say." He bit Mal's earlobe, gave Mal's body that funny itchy feeling of looking for a way to get hard again so soon. "Prob'ly better we did the fucking first."

"Probably," Mal said.

There was a knock on the wall. "You both in there?" Zoe yelled, like she had to ask.

"Uh-huh," Jayne said.

"Should we do all your chores?" Zoe said.

"Uh-huh," Mal said.

"You're both pulling double tomorrow," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," Jayne said, and it was quiet again. Quiet in the good, peaceful way, but not what it needed to be.

"What were you gonna say?" Mal said. "Before the-- before the sex."

"What were you?" Jayne said.

"I asked you first."

Jayne mumbled something low and fast, like he couldn't quite work out how to get his mouth to make words. He took a breath that Mal could feel in his ear and on his neck. "Kinda--" Mal could feel him shifting, furrowing his brow. "Kinda in-- kinda in love with you."

"Okay," Mal said. "Yours was better."

"Sounds stupid," Jayne said.

"No," Mal said. "I had this whole thing about how sorry I was, how I'd find some way to be better if you'd just fucking look at me again, but that was what I meant. What you said."

"Just-- don't make me say it again," Jayne said.

"I wouldn't," Mal said, and not only because that would mean he would have to. Which, he realized, he should. Just to let it be there. So Jayne would know. So maybe he would know. "But I am."

"You 'am' what?" Jayne was smiling into his neck, teasing him.

"I'm. Um." The words should have come easy. The truth was supposed to come easiest, wasn't it? The things a person already knew. But it was like they were stuck, knotted up in him. "Tian xiao de, don't make me do this."

"Ain't making you," Jayne said.

"I'm in-- I'm-- Fuck." He told himself to say it fast, so he'd be done before he started to hear it. Before he caught himself on his own throat and made it worse than it was. But it sounded surprisingly normal when he actually got it out, like he wasn't afraid of those words at all. "I'm in love with you."

"Yeah," Jayne said. "Figured."

"We don't have to talk about this no more, do we?" Mal said.

"Hell, no," Jayne said, running a hand down Mal's body. "Wanna?"

"Couldn't hurt," Mal said.

"Good," Jayne said, "'Cause I've been thinking about sucking your cock for weeks."

Most serious conversation they'd ever had, and Jayne still wanted to have sex. Or needed to, maybe. He needed to know what it tasted like when he knew the person loved him. It made sense, in a feng le, Jayne sort of way. The most feng le thing about all of this might have been that Jayne was starting to make so much gorram sense.

There was no question that Jayne knew him too well. He was doing that completely unfair thing to Mal's ear, the one that got Mal hard so fast he couldn't say nothing about going slower this time. Mal tried to think if he'd had another lover who'd known about that-- not one who'd hit on it by accident, but who'd remembered it and rutting abused the privilege.

It was hard to accept Jayne as the first one who had. Hard to think he had many firsts left, but Jayne was finding them, squeezing into them, taking up all that space. Mal was going to have to give all that space up.

"I can't," he said. He raised himself up on his elbows, tried to get out from under Jayne's mouth. "Can't, I'm--"

And lay back down, because he'd already said what else he'd said. Already told Zoe to reassign his chores. If he wanted the good parts of this, he was going to have to live with the ones that weren't so easy. He was just going to have to accept not being completely alone in the 'verse, and he couldn't help but think that was the better thing.

"Okay," he said. "I'm about done panicking now."

"You ain't there yet, anyhow," Jayne said.

"I ain't there 'cause I'm--"

"--thinking," Jayne finished. "Yeah."

"You too?"

"A little bit," Jayne said.

"'Bout what?"

"Dunno," Jayne said.

"Now, I got the impression we was supposed to be in here talking, and not--"

"Some kinda gorram conspiracy of women," Jayne said, "I swear."

"You think?"

"You think they didn't?" Jayne said.

"Did Kaylee take you aside or something?" Mal said.

"Yeah," Jayne said. "And River."

"River?"

"No idea what she was saying," Jayne said, "but I reckon it had something to do with you."

Mal shook his head. "Conspiracy of women," he said.

"So you--" Jayne said-- "you talk to Inara?"

"No. Zoe," Mal said. "Inara and I ain't hardly said a word to each other since-- since."

Jayne screwed up his face like he was trying to hold back some off-color comment. Possibly the first time in his life for that, so Mal didn't press him. "So nothing-- nothing happened that night?" Jayne said. "With you and her?"

"We talked a lot," Mal said. "She still ain't-- I don't know what's going on in her head. Never have."

"So you two didn't even --"

"Nothing," Mal said. "I wouldn'ta let it."

"I thought--" Jayne said-- "Dunno what I thought."

"I shouldn'ta let you think it," Mal said.

"Ain't your fault," Jayne said. "It ain't." He creased his brow, like he was working out the words in his head. "What I done to you-- nobody knows, 'cept me and you. I was careful of that."

"It woulda been okay," Mal said. "I didn't expect you to be loyal. Didn't think you could."

"I wanted to be," Jayne said. "Wanted to be worth your time."

"If you weren't," Mal said, "I wouldn'ta given so much of it to you." He sat up, brought his face very close to Jayne's. "Wouldn't be wanting to give you more."

Jayne looked away, smiled. "We fixed yet?" he said.

"Dunno if it works that fast," Mal said.

"Wanna save the rest for later and fuck now?" Jayne said.

"Yes, please," Mal said. Seemed like all those words had fallen out so fast, there was nothing much else to say. The rest would have to heal like bruises. And the rest hurt less, now that he could name the troubles.

He steeled himself for the awkwardness where he figured out what kind of sex they were going to have. But Jayne started biting at his neck, putting his hands all over. It reminded Mal of one of the really nice things about Jayne. Not always having to be in control, sometimes being able to lie back and be touched. Be taken. And then take him back.

Jayne was going slow, touching him everywhere-- the way Jayne had of touching like he was reading Mal's body. In weird places, ones that by themselves only turned Mal on a little: his arms and his belly, his hairline and the crease of his ass. It felt good at first but turned into torture when he was hard enough that he couldn't feel nothing else. And finally, Jayne's tongue on him, and coming in Jayne's mouth like there hadn't been a day since the last time. It was still that easy.

If things had been more certain between them, Mal would have teased Jayne for getting hard just from anticipation, from touching and not being touched. He would have walked away, or rolled over and pretended to sleep. Made him play that game. But easy as it was, it wasn't that easy yet.

So he didn't say nothing, didn't bother with a kiss. He pushed Jayne back and went down. He hadn't forgotten a single thing he'd taught himself about Jayne's-- Jayne's cock. There wasn't none of that nervousness in his throat. He knew what speed to go, knew how close Jayne was. Which was close, and then, with a quick stroke of the tongue, there. Mal swallowed, cleared his throat.

"Best blow jobs in the 'verse," Jayne said. "Still."

"You flattering me 'cause you think I'm still sore at you?"

"No," Jayne said. "It's that whole-- I dunno. Works pretty good, though."

"The thing where we know each other?" Mal said. "Yeah. Works pretty good."

Jayne yawned, took up the whole bed stretching. "Was up all night," he said.

"Heard tell you didn't do nothing down there but sleep," Mal said.

"Inara came by Kaylee's."

"I thought that was over with," Mal said.

"Mighta been," Jayne said. "Ain't over no more."

"I gave up on following that melodrama a while ago," Mal said. "Too complicated."

"Reckon they like it that way," Jayne said.

"Can't say I understand," Mal said.

"Women," Jayne said. He was lying on his back now. His hipbones jutted farther than Mal remembered: he'd lost some weight, pining. All this fei hua they'd brought on themselves.

"It don't gotta be like that," Mal said. "We don't gotta-- You got a problem, you tell me, dong ma? You don't walk out on me, you don't pretend nothing's wrong, hold it against me."

"Okay," Jayne said. "Ain't we gone over this enough?"

It didn't seem right to say nothing else, so Mal lay down next to Jayne, put his head on Jayne's chest. He stayed there with his eyes open for a long time, just breathing him, being near. He felt Jayne start to snore, remembered how the soft rumble of that and the warmth of Jayne's body had put him to sleep so easy. He put out of his mind that it was the middle of the day, shut his eyes and let himself drift off.

He got woken up what mighta been a few hours later. Jayne was trying to get out from under him. Mal pressed a hand into Jayne's chest, pinned him like a bug.

"Gotta go," Jayne said.

"Ain't done with you," Mal said.

"Toilet," Jayne said.

"No," Mal said.

"I could go here," Jayne said, and Mal let him up. He heard some clattering from next door, Zoe and Wash going down the ladder. He decided to set aside his plans for another round of noisy sex for the time being.

"They still in there?" Wash said, loud enough he was probably expecting an answer.

Mal knocked on the wall a couple of times.

"You want us to bring you some food or something?" Zoe said.

"We're all right," Mal yelled. He didn't want to get dressed, mainly. He got out of bed just as Jayne was about to get back in, pushed him up against the wall. Forget Zoe and Wash, he wanted the noisy sex.

"That how it is?" Jayne said. He stared into Mal's eyes like he was about to try something Mal wasn't going to quite approve of. He kissed Mal's lips very softly, that kind of romantical way that women did. "Nah," Jayne said. "Don't feel right." Jayne kissed him in their usual way, those deep, tongue-fucking kisses. Had Jayne thought there was something missing in those? Like there was some way they were supposed to be with each other, and they were refusing to comply?

That was the thing with Jayne, maybe. All the rules that Mal had spent his life following, chivalry and solicitousness, making himself seem better and gentler because no one would ever want him as he was. With Jayne, the rules didn't make no sense. Mal hadn't had to do nothing to win him. Jayne had wanted him, wanted exactly what he saw. And Jayne had taken him anyway. Maybe even because of.

It was hard to fight that. Hard not to be in love with it.

And Mal had been thinking too long and too much, because he wasn't paying enough attention to resist when Jayne got an arm around his waist and turned him to face the wall. Jayne kissed Mal's neck, groped his ass, did the gorram ear thing. Which felt good, when Mal wasn't busy resenting its existence.

Mal was about to beg, but Jayne said, "Oh, fuck, hang on." Mal didn't think of moving. No, he was gonna beg to be fucked in the ass-- and that was another example of those rules not being where they should be. He should at least have been ashamed to ask for it. But he'd come to like it, the slow intensity on the edge of pain, coming and not feeling spent.

The first he felt of Jayne was breath on the back of his neck and fingers full of lubricant in his ass. He squirmed against the cold, but the pressure-- that was the point. Mal braced his hands against the wall and pushed back into Jayne's fingers. He said Jayne's name, real soft, and steeled himself against those first moments when it hurt.

Jayne had one hand on Mal's hip and one against the wall, his teeth leaving a mark in Mal's shoulder. Mal could feel the slow rise, that funny way from inside that still surprised him, and the tear of orgasm that made him cry out. And Jayne still working, not quite there, which meant Mal got a little bit of a second one, like an aftershock.

It took Mal a minute, after, to feel like he could move again. He could feel it in his lower back and in his hands where he'd pushed into the wall. He heard Jayne talk over the noise of running water: "You still hard?"

"You know when we do it like that, I don't actually--"

"Gimme a second," Jayne said.

Mal turned around, leaned his back against the wall, shut his eyes. It felt like forever before the tip of Jayne's tongue under his foreskin, warm clean hands on his balls and that little bit of skin behind. He hardly needed the encouragement of Jayne's mouth to get there, but liked having it. Liked having more than he needed.

Jayne got up off his knees. "You don't need me to lie with you again or nothing, do you?" he said, "Wanted to get washed up a little, maybe get some breakfast, and--"

Mal laughed. "It's past noon," he said, because that wasn't the problem.

"Or lunch," Jayne said. "I'll--" He sniffed at Mal's shoulder. "You smell like fucking. Why don't you take a shower, I'll come back when I'm ready and we'll go up to the kitchen together."

Mal wanted to hold him in there forever, lock him in where he could never get free. It was hard to misunderstand each other when he could see every move Jayne made. He grabbed Jayne's wrist. "I don't want you to," he said. Jayne looked back at him, a little resignation in his eyes. Trying so hard to be good. "Go anyway," Mal said.

"You sure?" Jayne said.

"Yeah," Mal said. "No. Yeah."

"I'm coming back," Jayne said, pulling his pants on.

"You better be," Mal said. "I don't wanna have to go through all this again."

"I'm coming back," Jayne repeated, and he was up the ladder and out the door.

Mal went to the showers, took a longer and hotter one than usual. It all got recycled, anyway-- why did he worry so much about that stuff? He went back to his bunk, shaved, cleaned his teeth, got his hair going mostly in the same direction. He realized that he was smiling back at himself in the mirror. He knew he was going to bottle all this happiness back inside once he left his bunk, but for now, no reason to worry about that none, either.

When Jayne came back, Mal was pulling up his second boot and still grinning like a love-drunk idiot. He was pretty sure he managed to hide that before Jayne saw him. It mighta been okay if he hadn't, though. It might even have been better.

 

Most days, Jayne didn't know what the hell he was still doing there. He spent a lot of time shushing the voice in his head that told him this was serious, told him that meant it was time to run away very fast. He had a list of things to tell himself back when things got confusing: good job on a good boat with a good crew for good pay. Sex and a warm body to sleep next to. Wading through all this emotional crap was a small price to pay for that.

It got easier when Mal was around. Jayne didn't have to think so much, then. He didn't know how to be nobody's qing ren, nobody's sweetheart. But that didn't seem to bother Mal none. It wasn't even hardly what they were to each other. Mal didn't want any of that fake attentiveness, the stupid presents and the compliments that didn't mean nothing. He just wanted Jayne around. That, Jayne could do. It wasn't so different from the first time around, that way. But now, there was a reason for being there, besides just wanting to be. He knew Mal wanted him there.

They talked more, now. For a day or so, it was Mal trying too hard, but as soon as he stopped that, it got easy. Lying around in the late afternoon, when the work was mostly done and it wasn't their turn in the kitchen, or at night after they'd fucked. Not about nothing special, just being able to say stuff and not thinking the other one wouldn't wanna hear it.

Sometimes it made a difference, kinda. Like the night Jayne came back with a head full of steam, having missed supper cleaning out the release locks on the septic because who'dever emptied the system last hadn't sealed them right. He overheard Mal the next day, tearing Simon's head off for acting like he was above the shit work.

There were days when Mal came home and didn't say nothing, though there was something weighing him down. Jayne was trying his damnedest to keep up his part of this honesty thing, and fuck him if it wasn't hard sometimes. The more Mal didn't say, the more it looked like what he wasn't saying had something to do with Jayne, and the more Jayne wanted to know. He decided being honest about being pissed off was part of being honest, so he said something about being pissed off.

He said it loudly, which might not have been the best idea. Mal started shouting back. "Ain't nothing," Mal said. "And if it was, it still wouldn't be none of your rutting business."

"Thought we wasn't keeping secrets from each other no more," Jayne said. "If that ain't so--"

"If there was something to tell, I'd--"

"Oh, there's something to tell," Jayne said. "If there wasn't, you wouldn't be walking around all quiet like that."

"I walk around all quiet like this all the gorram time."

"Is it something I done?" Jayne said, trying to think what it could be. He was being good as he could muster: didn't leave his stuff around Mal's bunk, kept his mouth shut around Simon. He didn't always know what he was doing to people, though.

"I already said it ain't nothing to do with you," Mal said. "Why won't you--"

"'Cause if I'm here, and I see it, it's got something to do with me, whether it did before or not," Jayne said. "Now, if you want me to get out of here, let you be alone with whatever it is you reckon's more important, I can do that." He put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, swung himself up.

"Don't you leave," Mal said. Softer now, like a whisper compared to before. "Don't you fucking leave me again."

"Don't you fucking lie to me," Jayne said.

"I wasn't lying," Mal said. "It really don't have nothing to do with you. 'Cept I thought maybe you could make it better, which it no longer looks like."

"How can I make it better if I don't know what it is in the first place?" Jayne said.

Mal sat down heavy on the bed. "You got a little bit of a point there," he said and gave a weak smile. "Only a little one. But it's there."

"You don't gotta," Jayne said, trying to force himself to quiet down. "You don't gotta tell me if you don't wanna."

"I get bad memories sometimes," Mal said. "Get stuck in my head so I can't see nothing else."

Jayne sat down next to him. He thought about putting an arm around Mal, but reckoned it might be too much. "So it ain't me, then?"

"Ain't you," Mal said.

"You said I could make it better, though," Jayne said.

"You are," Mal said, but he seemed so far away, Jayne couldn't see how to make any kinda difference. He wished he could just go inside Mal's head, fight away whatever was there.

"Lemme do something," Jayne said. "Don't care what."

"Dunno what to tell you to do," Mal said, "other 'n be here."

"Still don't think it's fair," Jayne said.

"It ain't about you," Mal said. "Ain't about what you think."

"So I gotta sit here and watch you be miserable and not do nothing else? Nuh-uh. I thought we was past that."

"It don't just go away like that," Mal said. "I've had this a lot longer than I've had you. It ain't gonna be the kind of thing you can fix just by-- just by being."

"Wish I could see it with you," Jayne said.

"No, you don't," Mal said. "Lao tian ye, don't you ever say you want this."

Times like these, Jayne thought how nice it would be if he had someone to tell him what to do, how to be good. He was trying so gorram hard. He didn't deserve none of this, not really. Not someone who wasn't in it for no other motive than liking him around. Loving him. That was the part Jayne didn't deserve none. He kinda wished Mal hadn't even said so.

"I want you, though," Jayne said.

"C'mere," Mal said, that defeated look in his eyes that meant he thought Jayne was both stupid and right. He rested his head on Jayne's shoulder. But they were too much the same size, and it wasn't real comfortable. Jayne lay back on the bed, taking Mal with him. Mal put his head down on Jayne's chest like he did sometimes when they went to sleep, and Jayne put an arm over him. It felt funny, being that close to someone hurting. But safe, real safe.

 

"Now, when we get in, you're just gonna--" They were plotting. In the middle of the cargo bay, even though it was just him and Jayne. Plotting in the bedroom was generally a suspicious way of conducting things, and besides, the one time they'd tried that, Jayne had ended up blowing him before they'd had anything close to a plan.

"By the door?" Jayne said.

"With the-- yeah," Mal said. "But not that one."

"Too much?"

"You could vaporize a steer with that thing," Mal said.

"Kinda the point," Jayne said.

"Subtlety," Mal said. "Jolene appreciates subtlety."

"So I should carry the one in the--"

"In case," Mal said. "Yeah."

"Zoe?" Jayne said.

"Outside," Mal said. "Jolene don't so much as--"

"That was Zoe with the--"

"Uh-huh," Mal said. "Who'd you think it was?"

Jayne had an awfully sweet smile when Mal caught him off guard.

"You give me too much credit," Mal said.

"I do that," Jayne said. He folded his arms, nodded his head back towards the door Wash had just walked in. "So. We got trouble, I go, what? Right for it, or--"

"Not for Jolene," Mal said.

"Whoever she got in there?" Jayne said.

"It gets real bad, I'll--"

"Yeah," Jayne said. "Got it."

"And... give her a little distraction," Mal said. He fingered Jayne's shirt. "Wear the tight one."

"For her?" Jayne said.

"I'm gonna have my back to you," Mal said.

Jayne put on his thinking face for a moment. "Then how you gonna--"

"You'll see it," Mal said.

"Oh, like--"

"Yeah."

"Nothing else?" Jayne said.

"It oughta be easy from there," Mal said. "Shouldn't even get there."

"'Kay," Jayne said. "'Cause I told Kaylee I'd help her down with the-- dunno what it's called. That thing she can't lift on her own."

"Go," Mal said. "We're done." He smiled, hesitated, patted Jayne's arm. "Come back, though."

"Gonna," Jayne said. He ran for the door like Kaylee was gonna be put out by him being late, almost plowed Wash down on the way.

"You know," Wash said, "there were words in that conversation I understood. Maybe even a sentence or two."

"Working out how to fuck someone over," Mal said.

"With telepathy," Wash said.

"With the what?" Mal said. "No. We ain't got nothing like that."

"You finish each other's sentences," Wash said. He smiled in a way that wanted to be reassuring but ended up mostly just evil.

"Now, just 'cause I don't need so many words with him as with other people, don't mean--"

"It happens," Wash said. "It's not a bad thing. Necessarily."

"It don't happen to us," Mal said. "It ain't like that." He didn't even know why he was fighting it, really. He didn't fight that knowledge in his head, that he and Jayne could sometimes say things to each other without saying nothing at all. He knew things like the difference between Jayne saying "It's fine" because something was fine and Jayne saying "It's fine" because he was ready to get violent about something. And Jayne was the same way with Mal. Even better at it.

Wash was laughing at him. "You're an 'us'," Wash said.

"We are not," Mal said. "I mean-- he and I ain't--"

"You are," Wash said. "You're an 'us,' and a 'we,' and probably an 'our.' Which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing."

"I don't know where you get this stuff," Mal said.

"Okay," Wash said, "when's his birthday?"

"February twenty-seventh," Mal said. Without a moment's hesitation, which meant that whatever Wash was trying to prove, he was well on his way. "But we all knew that, from when--"

"That's less than a month away," Wash said. "What're you getting him?"

Mei ta ma de, he'd planned that out, too. A bottle of decent whiskey, some ammunition, a blow job. Several blow jobs. He smiled to himself.

"Better you didn't answer that out loud," Wash said.

"Much better," Mal said.

"None of these things're bad," Wash said. "Terrifying, sometimes, in that way where you wake up in the middle of the night in a panic wondering if there's some magical portal that'll take you back to being single and carefree. But they ain't bad."

"I just... thought it was gonna be different," Mal said. "Thought there'd be courtship. Flowers. Talking about feelings. All that stuff's supposed to go on."

"There are probably people it goes like that for," Wash said. "No one I'd wanna know, though."

"It doesn't seem to count, though," Mal said, "the way things are. Like I oughta be trying harder."

"Can I ask you another question?" Wash said.

Mal shrugged. "Go," he said.

"Do you always sleep on the same side of the bed?" Wash said.

He had to think for a moment about that. "On the left."

"Who decided that?"

"Dunno," Mal said. "Just how it is, him on the right. Is that... not normal?"

"No, that's-- exactly the point I was trying to make, actually," Wash said. "You just knew. That's how it's-- There's some things you have to talk out completely, but a lot of it just makes sense, and fuck the rules if they go against that."

"That how it works for you and Zoe?" Mal said.

"Mostly," Wash said. "We have our troubles, and sometimes there's just a bad month in there, but when it's going well? That's pretty much how it goes."

"So," Mal said, "what side of the bed do you sleep on?"

The intercom squealed. Mal remembered that he needed to ask Kaylee to see to that. "Husband?" Zoe's voice came over. "If you ain't back up here in two minutes, I'm gonna hafta land her myself."

"Can't let that happen," Mal said, with utmost false solemnity.

"By the wall," Wash said as he dashed off. "Zoe likes to be closer to the door."

Mal stood alone in his empty cargo bay, thinking what sound logic that was.

 

Jayne put down the heavy piece of spaceship innards he was holding up for Kaylee, the intercom transmogrifier whatever thing. What was gonna make it not make that funny squealing noise, once she replaced some other thing. She'd just told him for the third time what it was. He was pretty well convinced it wasn't never gonna stick in his mind.

He watched her do something with wires and glue and her teeth and a screwdriver, kick the wall and curse a couple times. She did another thing with the screwdriver, leaned back, looked pleased, asked him to put the big piece back on. When Kaylee was doing her work, it always looked like magic.

"Wanna test it?" she said.

"What'm I s'posed to say?" he said.

"Never mind," she said. "I'll do it." She picked up the intercom box and talked into it. "Bridge, how's it working on your end?"

"No piercing screech," Wash said, tinny on the other end, "and it ain't cutting out anymore."

"How soon we landing?" Kaylee said.

"Got told to put her in an orbit pattern for a spell," Wash said. "Twister warning over Granite City. Shouldn't be more 'n half an hour, but stay where you are-- it may be rough cutting through atmo."

"Lemme know if anything changes," Kaylee said into the intercom, then said to Jayne, "Looks like we're stuck in here till the storm passes."

"Twisters," Jayne said. "Reckoned I got away from those."

"You had 'em on Moriah?" Kaylee said.

"One took out mosta Salt River when I was a kid," Jayne said. "A couple settlements west."

"We didn't get none on Kuanyin," Kaylee said. "Too many hills."

"They turn the sky pretty colors," Jayne said. "Yellow and green."

"Musta been exciting," Kaylee said.

"Nah. We had to go down to the shelters and not do nothing for hours and hours."

"Kinda like everything," Kaylee said. "Kinda like-- how things look like they're gonna be shiny, but then they turn dangerous. Or boring. Or kinda... both."

If she was trying to get at something, Jayne didn't know what. He wasn't that good at figuring out women. He was just barely getting the hang of men, and that was only even one of them. "Huh?" he said.

"Never mind," she said. She sat down with her back against the engine block, pulled her knees to her chest. She looked so little, there, looking up at him. "You ever been back home?" she said. "Since you left."

"Nuh-uh," he said. "Ain't nothing out that way. No reason to go."

"Me neither," Kaylee said.

"We was down on Kuanyin last year, wasn't we?" he said. "That job with the fish."

"I didn't tell no one, though," Kaylee said. "Didn't wanna see 'em. Didn't wanna get dragged back into all that."

"You-- you thought of going back?"

"Been thinking," she said.

"Thought you liked it here," he said.

"I do," Kaylee said. "I love this life more than anything. But nowadays, it seems like everything's gone all hou zi cao de di yu, and I don't know what to do. Don't know how I can stay."

It would be so different without her. He could kinda imagine it, ugly and silent. And stuff would break all the time. He didn't know why she couldn't see that she held Serenity together. It musta been pretty obvious, if he could see it. "You gotta," he said.

"Yeah," she said. "Where else am I gonna go, right?"

"I'd miss you," he said.

"You would?" Her eyes were really wide, but she looked old somehow. Like she didn't think nothing could surprise her anymore.

"Yeah." Incredible, what people didn't know unless he told them.

"That's good," she said, "considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering you're about the only person on this boat I ain't sore at right now," she said.

His first thought was to wonder what Mal had done to make her sore. He thought weird shit like that all the time now.

"You're the only one don't treat me like a little girl," she said. "I'm everybody's fucking mei mei, and I'm sick to fucking death of it."

He thought he should do something, try and fix her. But he remembered about just being near, just listening. How it worked with Mal like it did, and how it might with Kaylee. Except without the sex after. So he didn't say nothing, let her talk.

"She comes in like she's God's gift," Kaylee said. "And who knows? Maybe she is. Best I've ever had, anyhow. But she don't-- I dunno. There's something that ain't there, and I can feel it ain't there, but when I ask, she says everything's already fine. Tells me how sweet I am. Like I'm too gorram sweet to understand." She stopped talking for a minute and looked up at him like he was an engine part that needed adjusting. "Would you stop looming over me like that?"

He sat down on the floor. "Thought she talked your ear off," he said. "Thought that's what you said."

"She don't talk about what's important, though," Kaylee said.

"She'll come around," Jayne said.

"Ain't gonna," Kaylee said. "She made it clear she don't think of me like that. I can keep on eating her out till Doomsday, but she won't never think of me like that. I ain't good enough for her, or something."

"How is it you ain't good enough for a whore?" he said. "Whore with some fancy schooling, but she ain't no more 'n that."

"Funny," Kaylee said. "I can't tell whether you think I oughta toss her out or not."

"Dunno what you oughta do," he said.

She smiled, not at him but to herself. Shut her eyes, stretched out her legs. "You reckon I'm good enough?" she said.

"Better," he said. "Better 'n she'll ever be."

"She's so fucking jealous of you," Kaylee said. "That's one of them things she don't say."

"Ain't nothing I got, she couldn'ta had," Jayne said.

"She can't have him now, though," Kaylee said.

"That ain't my doing," he said. "I gave him his chance. Ain't my fault he didn't take it."

"It's all your fault," she laughed. "Absolutely. All your fault." She planted a kiss on his cheek, out of nowhere. Made him unclench his hands, made him smile. She said, "For having a heart that ain't all froze over."

"Is too froze over," he said. "Froze over good."

"Niu shi," she said.

"So it's all right that I think about killing her sometimes?" he said. "'Cause I think about stabbing her. With knives."

"You would not," Kaylee said.

"Wouldn't do it," he said. "You'd kill me. With tools."

She was giggling when Wash came over the intercom, said they'd been cleared for landing. That meant Jayne had to run back to his bunk, while Serenity bumped her way through rough atmo, to put on the tight shirt and make sure the right guns was loaded. But he hated to leave her. Like he was leaving something behind with her that he'd made between them. He didn't know quite what to call it, but knew there were things she'd said that he'd leave in that room and not tell no one. And come back for.

 

They'd been in this dark little room with the dirty white curtains for gorram near forever: him and Mal, Jolene, and some pretty fella of Jolene's who kept his hand on his gun, but who Jayne coulda taken out in about three seconds. It wasn't such a bad thing, the boredom-- it gave Jayne time to fret over Kaylee and stare at Mal's ass, come up with ways to kill Jolene's fella fast and clean. Especially since that one wasn't doing so well: he went back and forth between fidgeting and falling asleep on his feet. It wasn't an easy thing, keeping one eye open and not going loopy. But Jayne'd always been comfortable in his own head.

It woulda been better if they wasn't delayed over something so suo xi. Jolene was offering a price so low, they shoulda put a gun to her head or walked out by now. But Mal wanted to negotiate. Some kinda pride thing. "Two hundred?" Mal was saying. "That ain't hardly enough to cover the fuel cells to get us there. And I got a crew to feed. Can't take no less than five."

Jolene swished her hips, moved in so close to Mal there wasn't no point in her not touching him. That was the funniest part of it, that she thought the flirting was doing her any good. She was way too old for coquettishness, for one thing. And if she couldn't see Mal going tense and backing away every time she made a move on him, she was blind, too. The act mighta worked on some men, mighta even worked on Jayne. But being petted and winked at didn't flatter Mal or weaken him. It just made him shyer, more resolute.

The closer she got to backing Mal into the corner, the more Jayne itched to pistol-whip her across the face, teach her to mess where she wasn't wanted. But Mal wouldn't want that, wouldn't want to be defended where he thought he could still hold his own. So Jayne stood waiting for some kinda signal.

He got one when she actually put a hand on Mal's chest, purring about how he'd be just fine on two hundred. Not the "kick her ass" look, but something more like Mal was drowning. Hurting her would just screw the deal, and then they'd be stuck on Boros with no work and no money.

Jayne was sure he was gonna fuck this up somehow, but it was all he had. Sweetness and light. He couldn't even threaten her proper. "'Scuse me, ma'am?" he said. "You've got your hand on my qing ren, there."

Mal looked like Jayne had just kicked him in the gut. At first, he reckoned it was calling Mal his qing ren, which came off awful intimate out loud. But there was another thing he realized, which was that he'd sounded like Mal. Like Mal, fucking with someone by being polite.

Jolene faked giving Mal the once-over. "Don't see your name on him," she said.

Jayne went over to Mal, pretended like he was checking for a mark under his collar. "Musta rubbed off," Jayne said. He set about putting a mark where there wasn't none, but Mal grabbed him by the hair and pulled him into a very possessive kiss.

"Well, ain't that a pretty sight," Jolene said.

Mal stopped kissing so he could stare murder at her.

"Do that again," Jolene said, "and it just might be worth that five hundred platinum."

"You serious?" Jayne said. "We kiss, you pay us what we asked?"

"Ain't every day I get to see two such pretty boys put on a show for me," Jolene said.

"Done," Jayne said, before he had time to think whether it actually was.

"Now, wait a minute," Mal said. "Don't you go agreeing to things I ain't--"

"Why don't you boys go over there, work out your terms," Jolene said. "I'll be patient." She beckoned her man, and Jayne pulled Mal to the far corner of the room.

"She's gonna double her offer for hardly nothing," Jayne whispered when they were alone as they were gonna get, "and you're gonna turn her down?"

"More 'n double," Mal said, "and if it means whoring the both of us out for her satisfaction, then yes, I will turn her down."

"How's it whoring?" Jayne said. "We ain't even gotta touch her."

"You know what she wants that show for. You know what she's gonna do after."

"So you can kill a man for money," Jayne said, "but you won't kiss a man for it? That's gou shi, and you know it."

"That's two totally different things," Mal said.

"Yeah," Jayne said. "I was raised to believe that the killing's a little worse." He brushed Mal's face with the back of his hand, could feel Mal gritting his teeth. "Listen," he said. "Now she knows what she wants, ain't no other way we're gonna get the five hundred. Might not even have a shot at the two hundred anymore. I dunno about you, but I ain't gonna go through all this ta ma de fei hua just to walk away empty-handed."

"I would be walking away with my pride," Mal said. "But I get the impression you'd just take it away from me, after."

"It's just kissing," Jayne said. "Just what we do all the time."

"I can't think how to explain to you how it ain't at all the same," Mal said.

"So close your eyes," Jayne said. "Pretend it is."

He watched Mal run the situation through his head. Mal started to raise an objection, but he seemed to think better of it. He wasn't gonna come up with nothing. "No other way out of this," Mal said, finally. "Come on, let's get it over with." Mal had that war hero way of walking when he went up to Jolene, narrowed his eyes at her. "You don't touch us," Mal said to Jolene. "There will be no nakedness, and--" Mal pointed at Jolene's fella-- "he goes out."

"Now, how can I guarantee my own safety if he goes out?" Jolene said, syrup in her voice.

"Ain't his show," Mal said. "He goes."

Jolene pursed her lips, but she turned to her fella and said, "You wait out there, Artie." He didn't seem overly put out to be leaving. She looked Mal back in the eye and said, "Two-fifty now, the other half on delivery. I'll say when you've earned it."

"Wanna shake hands on that?" Mal said. She agreed fast, eager.

Jayne knew Mal wasn't never gonna start it. He was just gonna stand there the rest of his life, looking lost. So Jayne came close as he could, whispered, "You ready?"

"I ain't gonna be," Mal whispered back. "You might as well go ahead."

Jayne shut his eyes, cradled Mal's jaw with his hand. He braced one foot backward to catch Mal's weight, and he opened his mouth to Mal's nervous tongue. Jayne kissed back, let Mal be less nervous. He wished he couldn't feel Jolene's eyes burning into him-- wished he could feel like Mal and him were the only two people in the 'verse. But Jayne had done much worse for much less. This wasn't nothing at all.

Mal was relaxing into him, grabbing his hair with one hand and his shirt with the other, making him grind into Mal's hip without meaning to. Any other time, he woulda been pushing Mal's head down, trying to get blown already. But he heard Mal's voice in his head, from before, saying the thing about no nakedness. He could hear Jolene sigh. He had to put some effort into slowing himself down.

He told himself to think about the kissing, just the kissing. The buzz on his lips and the ache in his tongue. It worked so well, he couldn't feel nothing else till Mal pulled back, saying, "Jayne, Jayne, she said that was plenty."

"Pleasure doing business with you," Jolene said. She was counting some extra platinum into the bag she'd had ready. When she was done, she put the cash in Jayne's hand. She told them she'd have the cargo to Serenity by sundown, told them they'd always have work on Boros. But Jayne didn't look at her none. He watched Mal instead-- Mal was holding back a grin.

When they came out, Zoe gave Mal an impatient stare, waiting for the whole long story she wasn't gonna hear.

"Two-fifty now, two-fifty when we get there," Mal said. "No middlemen, no strings, no way I'm telling you how we got it. And now we're gonna go celebrate." He grabbed the money out of Jayne's hand and gave it to Zoe before she had time to talk.

"Where we going?" Jayne said when they were just out of her earshot.

"Dunno," Mal said. "Somewhere quiet, I can get my revenge on you."

"There's alleys," Jayne said.

"Yeah, and there's the Granite City sheriff, sucking up to the Feds so they stay away from his settlement," Mal said. "You wanna spend the night in jail?"

"Could be fun," Jayne said.

"Please be joking," Mal said. And they were racing through the back streets of Granite City, dodging people, looking for somewhere as quiet as the black. The city gave way suddenly to a block of rich old houses. If there was anyone in them, they were bunked away.

Some of the houses had outbuildings behind them. Storage sheds, garages, stuff like that. Thinking there might be something worth taking, Jayne went up to the door of one of the bigger ones-- padlocked, but nothing else securing it. He coulda shot the lock off, but that woulda drawn attention. He stared at it for a minute, trying to come up with another way, before Mal gave the lock a sharp yank. The lock had turned mostly to rust, and it fell into the dirt without hardly a complaint. The door creaked loose and pushed up easy, like it was happy to be free.

It was a small space, mostly empty. There wasn't no power, but the door and some high windows sent in dusty sunbeams. The only thing in there was hidden under a tarp, which Jayne immediately dragged off. The thing was a hovercraft-- the big, flashy kind that rich folk bought when their hairlines started to move backward and their wives stopped paying attention. Nothing new, but shined up nice. It meant something to somebody.

"Don't even think it," Mal said.

"Why not?" Jayne said. "You are."

The craft was locked and alarmed. It had its dome up, but no extra security. Wash or Kaylee coulda had it broke into and hot-wired in ten seconds. Jayne didn't have that kinda talent, but he'd stolen a few of these in his time. He yanked the cover off the maintenance panel in the dashboard, took his knife out of his belt. Kaylee'd once told him, never cut nothing red or yellow. He sliced the other three wires and punched in the Alliance security hack he'd picked up in prison. He took a breath and watched the inside of the car light up and the dome roll back. "Niao shi de hun dan, that actually worked," he said.

Jayne didn't have time to see the look on Mal's face, because Mal was on him like a fly on honey, pushing him up against the car, sinking his teeth into Jayne's neck. Jayne vaulted himself backwards into the car to keep from falling in. Mal climbed in after him, wedged him in so he had one leg under the dash and one foot propped on the passenger seat. He unbuckled Jayne's belt one-handed.

Jayne leaned back against the frame, sucked on his lip, growled low when Mal ran his tongue slow up the underside of his cock. Mal teased the tip of Jayne's cock with his lips for a long time, did something real good with his rough fingers on the base, everything right but not quite hard enough to let Jayne come. Anyone else, Jayne would have said something. But Mal knew what he was doing. That thing he'd said about revenge. Jayne was pretty sure he deserved it.

So he squeezed his eyes shut and curled his toes inside his boots, weathered the torture. It felt kinda great, being on the edge of coming, so long he could notice it, knowing how it felt in his spine and his knuckles, everywhere he was thinking about so he would think less about his cock. And then Mal put his lips around Jayne's cock, stroked with the flat part of his tongue, gave Jayne something to jerk up into. Jayne groaned and let go.

He'd come so hard that he couldn't work out how to move, and he was in such a funny position, it didn't make matters no easier. He couldn't even get his eyes open, didn't have a single defense against Mal fucking him. Which excited him.

But Mal was not fucking him. Not making any move to, neither. Mal was kneeling between Jayne's legs and cursing a long string of not helpful at all. "What?" Jayne said.

"And now I remember why we only do this at home," Mal said.

"'Cause you're afraid someone's gonna come by and shoot us for being luen in public?"

Mal gave him a silencing look, turned serious. "You don't got any skins on you, do you?"

"Why would I?" Jayne said. "We don't never have sex anywhere but at home."

"Of course we--" Mal looked around himself. "We ain't never done this before, have we?"

"Didn't wanna force you into nothing."

"I wouldn't be here if you didn't force me into things," Mal said. "Make me like 'em." Mal pulled himself up and forward, leaned his arms onto Jayne's shoulders and around his neck. Like he could kiss but wasn't gonna. "Why, when I say stuff like that, you gotta look at me like I'm joking?"

"I keep on thinking, someday you're gonna take it all back," Jayne said.

"What would I do that for?"

"There's people would have you," Jayne said. "Some of 'em better 'n I'll ever be for you."

"You still hung up on that?" Mal said. "Still hung up on her?"

"Ain't my fault, you ain't given me no reason not to be," Jayne said. He did the best he could, with his pants halfway down and a man in his lap, to sit himself up. "You even talked to her?"

"I've gathered that her way of dealing with me and you is not to say nothing at all," Mal said.

"Don't gotta," Jayne said. "Says it all by looking."

"She ain't never had me," Mal said. "Ain't never had me like you have me."

"Well, she sure as hell ain't got that message," Jayne said. He thought of Kaylee, all those signals she'd been throwing that Inara just ignored. She had to have noticed, but didn't seem to care.

"I can't have it, though," Mal said. "Can't have it going on. I'll handle it."

Jayne was all set to tell him he didn't gotta do that. But Kaylee wasn't never gonna speak her mind, and Inara didn't take Jayne serious at all. Threatening her would only make her look down on him further. There wasn't no harm in letting Mal do this, do what he could. This one thing.

"You ain't gonna argue with me?" Mal said.

"Woulda already started, if I was."

"This some kinda plot to be extra agreeable, so I'll fuck you sooner?" Mal said.

"Only a little."

"Still don't got no skins," Mal said.

"Ain't gonna hurt me or nothing," Jayne said. "You ain't quite my first."

Mal took Jayne's boots off and threw them in the back of the hovercraft. He wasn't quite angry. Determined, more like. Focused. He yanked Jayne out of his socks, too, then his pants and his shorts, threw everything in the back. Then he undressed himself, real slow, standing up on the seat so Jayne couldn't reach nothing worth touching. So he just had to watch.

Mal wasn't nearly hard enough. He'd probably lost it when they was talking. For a minute, Jayne thought he wasn't gonna admit he wasn't there yet, but Mal wasn't proud that way. He liked being worked on, anyhow: liked Jayne's mouth on his neck and his ear, Jayne's hand on his cock. He saw what felt good about being about to fuck.

Jayne spit into his own hand a couple times, rubbed Mal's cock with it. He grabbed Mal's wrist, took two of Mal's fingers into his mouth and sucked them wet. "Should be enough," Jayne said. Actually, it was a little short of that-- it'd be a little dry, not quite comfortable-- but as close as they was gonna get.

Sometimes, it was better not to be too comfortable. Better being too many legs in too small of a space, shifting his hips and arching his back to get lined up. Mal's fingers were warmer than he thought, and made him shudder. And they were both too used to skins and to lube that came in a bottle, because Mal went in way too fast, too hard, made Jayne wince. But just for a moment, till they had it right. And a little pain was good, once in a while. It made Jayne feel like there was blood in his veins.

It felt different, with nothing between them: close, and safer even though it was supposed to be less safe without a skin on. Sharper bursts when Mal hit him right, felt almost like they was behind his eyes. He knew Mal's hand was on his cock, but couldn't hardly feel it through everything else. It was all kinda running together, struggling some. It froze him for a second. Mal coming inside him was hot and sticky but didn't sting, and jerking into Mal's hand was an afterthought.

Mal pulled out, started digging around in his inside-out pants with the hand that wasn't full of jing ye. He looked over his shoulder and cursed.

"Someone out there?" Jayne said.

"Sun's going down," Mal said.

Jayne was about to ask what that mattered, but he remembered what. Rendezvous with Jolene's people at sundown. "Zoe's gonna have kittens, ain't she?" he said. He leaned over the seats to find his clothes, started putting them on in a hurry.

"Many pretty little ones," Mal said.

They finished getting dressed. They left the hovercraft unlocked but threw the tarp over it-- Jayne knew how to steal a car, but he didn't know how to un-steal one. Mal smiled at him, hooked two fingers under the neckline of his shirt. "Well," he said.

"What?"

"We made out for money, did a little breaking and entering, and stole a hovercraft for the sole purpose of having sex in it," Mal said. "Let it not be said that you don't know how to show a man a good time."

It took Jayne a moment to think his way through that sentence, work out that it'd been a compliment. "Was this our first date?" he said.

Mal's smile widened. "I reckon it was," he said.

They broke into a run, didn't slow down till they got back to Serenity. Where Zoe was waiting, hands on her hips, looking like she wasn't sure whether to laugh or kill the both of them. "Finished loading an hour ago," she said.

"You owe me one," Mal said. "That time on Persephone, you and Wash left me and Kaylee to load up?"

"You see me smiling?" Zoe said. "I'll only be sore if it happens again."

"Everything get on okay?" Mal said.

"It was an easy one," Zoe said. "They had antigrav units and stuff. Simon's in his bunk, icing his back, but I think he's mostly playing for sympathy."

"Didn't give you no trouble, then?" Mal said.

"They acted like they were under orders not to," she said. She raised an eyebrow right at Jayne, like she knew every single thing that had happened. "I wonder why."

Mal cleared his throat, shifted his weight. "Then we're free till tomorrow," he said. "Inara's got an overnight client-- she'll radio in when she's done. Anybody staying on Serenity, other than the doctor and his sister?"

"I think Kaylee's staying in," Zoe said. Jayne felt a pang of worry. He reckoned he oughta go check on her. But he didn't have the patience for that now, and it'd just be the same thing all over again. He promised himself he'd go by there later, though.

"Then you go out, have fun," Mal said. "Take Wash somewhere nice."

"We're on Boros," Zoe said.

"Well, then, take him somewhere grimy and disreputable," Mal said.

"That, I can arrange," Zoe said.

Mal turned to Jayne, ran a hand over his hair. "Now, you," he said. "Wanna go somewhere, get drunk?"

"Start a fight?" Jayne said.

"Not if we can get someone else to throw the first punch."

"But--" Jayne started, then changed his mind. "Fine." Mal laughed at that. He put his hand on the back of Jayne's neck and kissed him. Just a little, but right there, in front of Zoe. Like there was some wall in him that had come down, and now he couldn't remember where it'd stood in the first place.

Jayne had sensed the wall, the one that kept him apart from Zoe and Mal, since long before he and Mal had been anything to each other. When he'd just been a hired man with an eye out for a better job, feeling shut out had made things more comfortable. But lately, the separation had made him lonesome. And now he felt like he'd been let back in.

Jayne wasn't sure that he wanted to be there. There wasn't nothing in the 'verse that Mal'd had longer than Zoe. It felt funny, like he'd walked into her bunk by accident, even when he wasn't doing nothing more than listening to them talk about things he didn't have no part in. It was the same kind of funny, he realized, that he would have felt if Mal had been listening down in the engine room when he was talking with Kaylee.

But that kiss had made him Mal's again, made this time theirs. And now they were gonna go back to the center of town, find themselves a bar to get fucked up in. Him and his qing ren. His.

 

When Mal had bought Serenity, he'd been under the impression that being a captain involved owning the spaceship and telling everyone else on it what to do. He was waiting for the day when his job got that easy. He spent more of his time doing the chores nobody else wanted to do, and listening to everyone else's complaints, and keeping them all from killing each other. He'd chosen this life to get away from the world, to get away from people. But he needed a pilot and a mechanic in order to fly this spaceship he'd bought, and some crew in order to get jobs enough to keep her moving. That left him with eight people he had to know better than himself, had to be responsible for. It was sorta like being a sergeant all over again, only without the certainty of purpose.

In some ways, it helped to think of the Inara problem as a personnel issue. That made it about crew relations, about her not souring Jayne or Kaylee, keeping everyone happy enough not to run things to a halt. Mal could pretend it wasn't hardly about himself at all, no matter how much he knew it had everything to do with him. Kaylee and Jayne were only collateral damage.

If it was just Jayne having problems, Mal wouldn't have done nothing. He knew that wasn't no way to take care of a lover, but this was Jayne, who could withstand a few dirty looks. Jayne took pride in knowing that someone was jealous of him, so long as he knew Mal was his. It wasn't no trouble, making sure Jayne knew that. It was the best part of Mal's day, most times.

Kaylee was the greater concern. She always had been. It pained Mal to admit that he wouldn't have seen there was something amiss with her, if not for Jayne. Jayne couldn't say no more than she wasn't quite right. "Off her Kaylee," he said, like he knew more than he had permission to tell. Mal didn't know what made him angrier: that there was discontent among his crew that he was blind to, or that Inara was the cause.

He'd had enough, and still, he put off confronting her. He knew it was his responsibility: even if there was somebody else on Serenity who could make any kind of difference, he'd given his word to Jayne. He had no plans to lose that man twice, especially not twice over the same woman.

He told himself he was waiting for a good opportunity to talk some sense into Inara, and he let the unrest hang in the air, wishing it would have the good sense to go away on its own. Now that he knew things were wrong and knew where to look for them, he couldn't escape them. The way Inara lowered her eyelids and stared down at Jayne from across the table, so he'd feel her eyes on him and hunch over his food. The way Kaylee excused herself early and skulked off to be with her engine.

Procrastination was awfully effective, till they were halfway to Beau Monde, and he had to tell Inara she might want to start making appointments. He stood at the door to her shuttle for a few minutes, rehearsing what he was going to say, reminding himself why he had to say it now or give up on a lot of the good things he thought of himself. In the end, he wasn't so much ready, as worried she'd notice him when he was off his guard. "Should I ask you to invite me in," he said, "or just barge in like usual?"

"Mal," she said. "I thought you'd forgotten where my shuttle was."

"Just wanted to let you know we're three days from Beau Monde," he said. "So if you want work there, you oughta-- you oughta." It didn't matter how tall he loomed, how he spanned the doorframe with his arms. He still felt like the smallest man in the 'verse.

"Thanks for the reminder," she said. She did him the belated courtesy of looking up at him.

"Welcome," he said, fighting to keep himself from turning tail and leaving her alone with her superiority.

She let him have his uncomfortable silence for a terribly long time before she asked, "Was there... something else?"

"No," he said. "Yeah. You... you have a problem with me, you don't take it out on Jayne. Do you hear me? You don't take it out on Jayne, and you sure as hell don't take it out on Kaylee."

"So you're coming to Jayne's rescue now?" she said. "I'm sure he appreciates that."

"You know if he came to you, you'd laugh him away," he said. "Even if this was about him, which I know it ain't."

She sighed overdramatically. "I wish I knew what this was about," she said, "so I could mount a proper defense."

"So do I. I wish I knew what it was with the dirty looks and the not talking to me and the mechanic crying in my engine room, but I don't know a thing beyond you're driving everyone to distraction, and I can't let that go on. I let it go on long enough." He wasn't sure about the crying in the engine room, but he reckoned it was a safe guess.

"I didn't realize I was taking things out on Kaylee," Inara said. "Although I can see how, unconsciously-- if that's your concern, Mal, I'm genuinely sorry, to her and to you. I will see to it that it gets resolved."

"Is that supposed to make it all better?" Mal said.

"It's all I have," she said.

"Oh, come on."

"What do you want me to do?" she said. "Do you want me to tell you that I'm thrilled with your choice of lovers? You know I'd be lying."

"I don't need you to lie," he said. "I just need you to treat him with a little human decency."

"I've treated him with a little," she said.

"Very little," he said.

"And that little has been a struggle, believe me," she said.

"Maybe if you tried to see him for what he is," Mal said, "you wouldn't think so low of him."

"Because under that gruff exterior," she said, "there's a heart of gold?"

"Please," he said.

"Honestly," she said, "I don't see how he's even enough for you."

It didn't take much for him to conjure up the smile he got when Jayne went down on him, and he couldn't have said it wasn't fun to use it for purposes of torture. "I can hardly keep up with him," he said.

"I have no doubt about the quantity," she said, "or even the quality. It's just... unusual for a man who's used to relationships with women to be as content as you are in a... passive role."

That self-satisfied smile flew off his face. "What, just 'cause he's got a few centimeters on me, you think I don't do nothing but roll over for him?"

"I can't exactly imagine him on the bottom," she said.

"Well, that's a fault of your imagination," he said, "not of ours."

"Right," she said. "Because my very favorite thing to do in my spare time is imagine the two of you making love."

He couldn't help but bust up laughing. "Making love?"

"Don't you go splitting semantic hairs on me, Mal," she said.

"And don't you go using them big words you know I don't know what they mean, just so you can make me feel small."

"All right," she said. "If you don't make love, what is it that you do?"

He knew she was backing him into a corner, and he didn't care. "We have sex," he said. "We fuck. We rut. We-- It sure as hell ain't some kinda sacred commingling of souls, like you'd have it."

"Funny," she said. "I can't think of two souls more joined by physical union than the two of yours."

"It ain't about that," he said. "It ain't never been. All right, it was for a while there, but not to the extent where you're justified in that speech you're about to give me, about how I'm mistaking sex for love."

"That's not the speech I was about to give you," she said.

"So which one was you about to give me?"

"I don't know," she said. "Part of the problem has been that I can't think of a convincing argument. I'd love to accuse you of thinking with the wrong head, or of feigning an attachment to justify a sexual relationship, but you're not that kind. I think you've wrestled with this, and I think your feelings, however misplaced they may be, are genuine."

"But you think they're misplaced," he said.

"I think you could do better," she said.

"And just who, in your lofty estimation, would be good enough for the likes of me?" he said.

Inara looked at him, stern and impatient, and tossed her hair a little. She came as close, he realized, as she was ever going to come to admitting she felt something for him. "Anybody," she said, "but that vulgar, boorish, violent, zang huo--"

"Ain't zang huo," Mal said.

"There you go again, taking out one word--"

"He ain't," Mal said. "Man spends more time on his beard alone than--" He thought of Jayne in the morning, spending near half an hour in front of a mirror with a straight razor and that trimming thing, getting every hair in the right place. Usually not wearing no more than his undershorts, so Mal didn't have no complaint about sitting and watching. And then, when he was finally done and if they weren't running late as it was, touching the smooth skin on his cheek, kissing the difference between that and the roughness around his mouth. Mal couldn't think how different it would be to kiss someone clean-shaven. A woman. Anyone.

He sighed, made himself not get distracted. "Go ahead and accuse him of whatever you're gonna accuse him of, but at least be right about it."

She smiled broadly. "Then you've got no quarrel with vulgar, boorish, and violent?"

"None at all," he said, "seeing as you could use them just as well to describe me."

He watched the smile drain out of her: out of her face, then out of the rest of her body. "I just can't understand," she said, "why you would choose to be with someone who brings out all of your least attractive qualities."

"Least attractive to you," he said.

"Least attractive to anyone with the least bit of--"

"Whatever you was gonna put on the end of that sentence," Mal said, "I'm glad Jayne ain't got a lick of it."

She stood up, arms loose at her sides, and walked towards him like she was measuring her steps, making herself not lunge at him. She was barefoot, and it startled him, how much smaller than him she was. He'd forgotten how many people were smaller than him, that much smaller. He stepped down into the shuttle, maybe to be more on her level. She stopped as close to him as she could without touching him. "You sound like him," she said. "Lao tian ye, do you sound like him."

"Well, I been spending a little bit of time with him, ain't I?" he roared.

She stumbled backwards, like he'd slapped her. "Yes, you have," she said softly, so soft it was crueler than shouting.

"It ain't no secret, you think I oughta be spending less," he said, fighting to keep his voice down. He didn't wanna give her any more reason than she already had to think she was better than him.

"I think you would be wise to consider your options before you settle for him," she said.

"You think I'm settling?" he said. "You think I'm-- you think I ain't thought about this? You think I ain't tried to break it off before things got serious? Ni ta ma de shi, the only reason I started up with him was because I thought there wasn't a chance in the 'verse things would turn out like this. But now they have, I gotta-- I reckon I owe it to the both of us to see this through."

"So it's your noble duty to have sex with him?" she said. "How romantic."

"I tried breaking up with him," Mal said, "and you saw how well that worked out. Yeah, I'd say I've got a duty to keep that niu shi from happening again."

"Because schoolboy heartache is a terminal illness now?"

"Gorram near killed us," he said.

"Don't be dramatic," she said. "You can rationalize all you want, but you're still taking the easy way out."

"Yeah, 'cause getting involved with a member of my crew is liable to make my life so much easier," he said, his voice rising again, the muscles in his arms and his jaw clenching with the urge to destroy something, make something bleed. "'Specially the member of my crew who does the most dangerous work. I reckoned it would be that much easier to hang him out the hatch, or to put him in the line of fire."

"If it's that upsetting," she said, "you could always--"

"What?" he said. "Not have him do what it is I hired him for? Just pay him for services rendered? I bet you'd like that. It'd put you and him on the same level."

"And two whores on one spaceship is more than you can handle?" she said, finally losing her temper.

"You said it," he said. "I didn't."

"You backed me into a corner, Mal," she said.

"Only way I could get you to admit what you really thought," he said. "Of him or of me."

"You don't have any idea," she said, "how highly I think of you."

"I got some," he said. "I got some idea what you think of me, and it's so high up you don't have the least idea what I'm like. You believe all these things about me, and they ain't even-- You don't hardly know me at all. You didn't know I was luen, didn't--"

"How was I supposed to know?" she said. "It's not exactly something you advertise, Mal."

"Zoe knew," he said. "Didn't know me a week before she knew. And Jayne did an all right job, figuring it out."

"Fine," she said. "I don't know you at all. You're a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and I will never have access to the many layers of your soul."

He threw his arms open wide. "Here," he said. "Have 'em. All my dark secrets. They ain't half as interesting as you think they are, but you can have 'em." He started unbuttoning his shirt. "Take me now, and get it the hell over with."

"Mal," she said. "Don't." He couldn't tell whether that was real fear making her voice tremble.

He buttoned back up, straightened his collar, and backed off from her.

"We'd just keep hurting each other," she said. "I think we both know that."

"Then why do we keep on?" he said.

"Maybe... we can't not." She righted her shawl and marched up to him, stood up on tiptoes like she was going to kiss him or something. But she didn't dare. "So you should go back to your yu ben de wang ba dan, who I'm never going to approve of, but who I might learn to accept, and I'll go back to--"

"Your sweet little mechanic who's way too good for you, and might give up altogether and leave you for the medic if you don't watch your step?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "That one."

"Then we're in agreement?" he said.

"I think I can live with it," she said.

"You go line up some clients, then," he said. "Tell me how long you're gonna wanna stay, and I'll do my best to work around that."

Her clothes rustled and shimmered as she turned around, sat down in front of her shuttle controls and started setting things up. Mal knew where he wasn't needed, so he went back to his boat, to his bunk, to things that were only just as complicated as they had to be. Jayne wasn't back from his chores yet-- Serenity had been due for a deck-swabbing, and he'd put Zoe in charge of rounding everyone up to mop floors and scrub railings-- so Mal took off his boots and lay down on the bed.

He kept going back to how Inara had accused him of letting things be easy. Taking the easy way out. Like in order for what he felt to be real and serious, there had to be anguish and longing and all that gou shi. The only time they'd had that was when they'd broke up, and he hoped to never revisit that state ever again.

All along, he'd reckoned that this was right because it was so easy to be with Jayne. Easy to say things to him. To fit into each other and know each other's bodies, and to say yes to doing things that would have given Mal pause with anyone else. Even the arguing seemed to go right, most of the time: they fought it out and found themselves both happy when the dust settled. If this was the easy way out, he could live and die just fine without knowing what the other way was like.

What it came down to was, she thought he was having it easy because he wasn't changing like she wanted him to change. He wasn't turning into the person she thought he should be. Maybe she even thought he hadn't changed at all, 'cause all them things she didn't like about him, they hadn't gone away. But Jayne liked that he was mean and quiet and enjoyed shooting things. Jayne understood why it was fun to come home with a bloody nose and a torn shirt.

And then going back to his bunk and having sex until they started to feel hung over, and not feeling bad about any of it. Not like he was supposed to grow out of what he was, turn into something mature and pinched enough to be worthy of someone's love. Anybody he'd have to change that much for, shed that much of himself, he didn't want no part of.

Mal heard Jayne before he saw him, banging down the ladder like he assumed Mal wouldn't be back yet. Jayne had the remnants of that lemony-bleach smell from the cleaning products, but his hair was wet and he looked to have put on fresh clothes, so he'd at least tried to shower it off. Zang luo? Not in the least.

Jayne leaned over Mal, frowned, and touched Mal's neck. "Wo de ma, what'd that woman say to you?" Jayne said.

"Nothing," Mal said. He sat up. "So you all-- you all heard?"

"Simon was down there, said he heard shouting," Jayne said. "We all reckoned we'd best stay out of it." He sat down next to Mal and put a hand on his back. "Didja win?" he said.

"What?"

"The fight," Jayne said. "Did you win?"

"It ain't that kinda-- I dunno. She said some things, made me think maybe this time-- but that's every time."

"Yeah, well, she's gonna," Jayne said. "Don't know why you gotta take it so personal."

"'Cause she looks me in the eye and says things about me," Mal said. "Says things about you."

"They true?" Jayne said. "Them things she says?"

Mal went through them in his head. Especially the part where Jayne wasn't good enough, where he brought out the worst in Mal. Mal could feel the rage begin to drain out of him now, and Jayne hadn't hardly done a thing. "The woman is more full of gou shi than anyone else I ever met," Mal said.

"Well, then, you tell yourself that the next time she starts up with you," Jayne said.

"Yeah," Mal said, because he was tired of talking, tired enough he couldn't even talk to Jayne no more. He sat there quiet, felt Jayne's steady hand on his back.

"You need some time to yourself?" Jayne said. He was good about that, giving Mal space. He went back to his own bunk, or wherever. Mal didn't wanna know. He reckoned it was Jayne's own time.

"I could use it, yeah," Mal said.

"I'll be back before dinnertime," Jayne said.

"I'll be here," Mal said. "Don't you try nothing stupid."

"Ain't gonna," Jayne said, though he didn't even need to.

Mal watched Jayne go back up the ladder. He lay down on the bed again. He wished he could convince himself that what he saw was really there, that she was wrong and he was right.

 

Jayne thought everyone knew to stay clear of the cargo bay when he was throwing knives. It was something he did when he was angry and didn't have nothing else to take it out on. When it came down to ripping Inara's throat out or playing with his weapons, he knew he had to pick the one that didn't involve intentional murder. He hadn't had a whole lot of jobs where that was true, and when his head was clear, it made him glad to have this one.

A while back, Kaylee'd set him up something sturdy with a couple old crates and a board, made him a target. He'd spend some time up in the catwalk getting everything honed as good as possible, then pull out the target and make that first measured throw. There was something about that sharp and shiny, the blade free in the air, and him focusing to keep it moving where it had to. It fixed him right up every time.

Until Simon had to come in and break all his concentration. "The shepherd said you'd be in here," Simon said. "I-- I thought we could talk."

"Now?" Jayne said, aiming. Not that he could clear his head proper with someone so nearby, but he hoped he could frighten Simon off.

"River insisted," Simon said. "When she heard about the incident between Mal and Inara, she-- that was how she reacted. She said something about you proving yourself to her, and I thought I would humor her. She can be-- I don't even know why I listen to her, but-- Forget about it. I should just go."

"She's your sister," Jayne said.

"Yes, she is," Simon said, in that slow schoolteacher way where Jayne knew he was making fun whether he meant to be or not.

"'S why you listen," Jayne said. "'Cause she's your sister, and you can't not."

"I can't see how you would know anything about that," Simon said.

"Oughta," Jayne said. "Got four of 'em back home."

"I... didn't know that," Simon said.

"Lotta things you don't know," Jayne said.

"Would you look at me, please?" Simon said. "You're making me nervous with that. Which is... probably the point."

Jayne walked over, stuck the knife he was holding into the target board. He wheeled around, walked up a pace or two too close to Simon, folded his arms. "Whaddaya need?"

"I really-- I really don't even know," Simon said.

"Then go, and come back when you done figured it out," Jayne said. "I ain't got time for this."

"But you have time to throw knives at plywood?"

"That's what I wanna be doing."

"Can't see why," Simon said. "It seems almost purposefully--"

"Keeps me from doing stuff I don't mean to do," Jayne said. "Reckon you don't got that problem. Every urge you got is buried so deep, you don't even feel it no more."

"I have-- I mean, there are things I feel, but--"

"Then why you ain't acted on 'em?" Jayne said.

"It's too dangerous, most of the places we go, to try to meet anyone," Simon said. "And here-- there isn't anyone left."

"There's them as would make room for you," Jayne said.

Simon gave a piteous look of naked heartbreak that made Jayne want to smack him across the face. "Kaylee," Simon said.

"Reckon she'd still have you," Jayne said, "if you asked nice enough."

"I... thought she and Inara got back together," Simon said.

"That ain't serious," Jayne said. "Won't never be."

"How would you know?" Simon snapped.

"Kaylee told me," Jayne said. It dawned on him that that mighta been in confidence, but it was too late now.

"She told you she'd-- she'd leave Inara for me?" Simon said.

"Didn't say that," Jayne said. "Reckon she'd make room for you, is all I said."

"How can you-- you people just-- This thing where you can say to each other, 'Hey, let's have some sex, and if it works out, maybe we can date for a while'?" Simon stormed around himself for a minute, then plopped himself down on one of the cargo crates. "Forgive me for not being able to get my head around that."

"Whaddaya want her to do, love you and marry you and have lots of your pretty babies?" Jayne said. "She ain't even that kind." He sat down on the crate next to Simon, too close on purpose. "That kind don't leave home. Marry the first fella who smiles at 'em, have lots of his babies."

Simon sat for awhile with his chin in his hands. Jayne didn't have the rage up in him to say nothing wounding, couldn't think of nothing clever enough to open his mouth for. Simon had a way of making him feel so stupid he didn't hardly deserve life, even when he was saying stuff Simon didn't already know.

"You think well of Kaylee, though," Simon said, after about a million years. "That's funny."

"Ain't so much," Jayne said.

"No, it is," Simon said. "You think well of her because she... puts out."

"Them girls who don't? Who pretend to be all virtuous? They ain't got nothing. Just the one thing."

"So it's not that you really respect her, it's that you have some vague and perverse hope of someday--"

"You think I got some kinda designs on Kaylee?" Jayne snorted. "Nuh-uh. It'd be like fucking my sister."

"It's good to know that's off-limits for you, at least," Simon said.

"There's lots of things that's off-limits for me," Jayne said. "Hell, I ain't been with but one person in--" He tried to add up all the months and days since his one mistake, but he didn't know how long it had been. He'd put as much of that day out of his mind as possible. "Dunno," he said. "Been a good long while."

"You're actually faithful to him?" Simon said.

"What, you didn't think I could be?" Jayne said. "You think he woulda kept me around this long if I wasn't?"

Simon sized him up. "I... guess not," he said.

"He said to me once, if I ever had a problem being faithful, I should tell him," Jayne said, "but I ain't had a problem." Mal had been pretty gorram drunk when he'd said that, but sometimes putting a few beers in that man was the only way to get him to say what he meant.

Simon shook his head, chuckled. "You just... have these conversations," Simon said. "You just have them."

"We don't just-- Most of the time it's a fucking-- But you gotta," Jayne said. "Otherwise, you end up mad at each other all the time."

Simon shifted, like he was trying to put his thoughts into words small enough for Jayne to understand. It must have been a terrible burden for him. "You don't have any roles," Simon said.

It looked like the words weren't quite small enough. Or too small, maybe. "Any what?"

"You've got to understand," Simon said. "You've got to understand the way I grew up, the way I was raised. >From when I was young, I knew who I'd marry-- not the exact person, but... I knew the pool she'd be drawn from. And I knew-- I knew I probably wouldn't love her, at least not at first, but I knew what my role would be. In the marriage."

"Wasn't so different where I'm from," Jayne said.

Simon gave him a kinda fish-mouthed look.

"Hell," Jayne said, "I even knew which girl. Wasn't that big a settlement, on that rock."

"Is that... why you left home?" Simon said. With something like genuine interest, which was new enough.

"Was part of it," Jayne said.

"So you... knew even then?" Simon said. "That you were--" He trailed off. Jayne wondered if they'd even had words for things like luen on Osiris, or if they just pretended that stuff couldn't happen to the likes of them.

They hadn't had words for it on Moriah, either. There'd been them big churchy words meant to scare the congregation-- sodomy, fornication, homosexuality-- but those were things a person did, not things he was. Not things that he couldn't stop being, no matter how many women he fucked. "Knew I was something," Jayne said. "Knew I didn't wanna spend the rest of my life on that xi niu wei xiao moon, never figure nothing out."

"How old were you?" Simon said.

"When I left home?" Jayne said. "Sixteen."

"River's age," Simon said. "And you knew. You just... knew you were... sly."

"Ain't sly," Jayne said fast.

"But you're-- As much as it's easier on my brain to think you and Mal sit in his bunk and discuss fine art, I don't actually believe that."

"Sly means you don't like women," Jayne said. "I like women. Mal, too." He thought on it for a second. "Reckon there ain't nobody sly on this boat. 'Cept maybe the shepherd, and I ain't asking."

"Then what are you?" Simon said.

"Luen," Jayne said. "Flexible. You can say I switch, or take both. Womenfolk are ling huo, sometimes."

Simon rubbed at the bridge of his nose, laughed like he was uncomfortable. "Ambi," he said, a sorta nostalgia in his voice. "Liang bian zhi. It's the same concept, just-- different words for it, in the Core. There was one woman I went to university with, this-- she was-- to this day, I couldn't tell you how she got away with being the way she was." He chuckled like he was far away. "It seemed like every time she invited me for a night out, we ended up drunk and drenched in some restricted area, but-- but the point is, she'd get all worked up when someone called her guai."

"Just about anyone'd get worked up if they got called that," Jayne said. "Out here, at least."

"I didn't even know," Simon said.

"You'll pick it up," Jayne said. "You'll pick it all up, sooner or later."

"I already am," Simon said. "I said 'ain't' last week, and Wash hasn't stopped making fun of me for it. But somehow-- the language is easier than the-- How did you just know? That you were... luen."

"How do you know you ain't?" Jayne said.

"I-- I guess I--" Simon looked at his hands, then looked over at Jayne. He looked like he was fixing to do something bold, something possibly very stupid. Which he then did. He put his hand on the back of Jayne's neck so they were facing each other, and he leaned in to kiss Jayne hard. He kept his mouth closed at first, then gave Jayne a little tongue, sloppy and unfocused. Jayne couldn't tell whether it was a bad kiss, or whether he was just that used to Mal. He reckoned he shouldn't be kissing someone who wasn't Mal. But Simon had started it, and besides, there wasn't nothing to it.

Jayne jerked his head back, pushed Simon away from him. "Ain't nothing there," he said.

Simon laughed. "Not a thing," he said. "Which is... good to know."

"You really never thought about it before now?" Jayne said.

"Not until you and Mal," Simon said.

"That's kinda..." Jayne said, trying to think what it kinda was. "You... oughta have a talk with Kaylee."

"I don't think I can," Simon said. "I-- I mean, I could talk to her, but I don't think I could-- I don't think I'm there yet. I think I could be, someday, but for now-- You're all just so sure. Of what you want, and of what you are. And I've never-- I've never had to be."

"Gets easier," Jayne said.

"Strangely enough," Simon said, "it helps me to hear you say that." He wiped his mouth with his hand, like it'd just occurred to him that his lips were wet. "I... still think you're a crude, ignorant sa gua, though."

"Well, I still think you're a pompous motherfucker, so--"

"So," Simon said. "Does that mean we're friends?"

Funny, how that made an awful lot of sense. "Yeah," Jayne said. "Maybe."

"Then I think I'll leave you to your dangerous and unsettling forms of entertainment," Simon said.

Jayne looked at the target, didn't see much appeal in it. "Nah," he said. "Don't need it no more. For now." He gathered up his knives and sheathed them, put the target in the storage locker where it belonged. He didn't watch Simon leave, but when he looked up, he was alone. He went back to his bunk to put the knives away. He didn't know whether he oughta stay there a while. If he'd given Mal enough time or not. He had his own bunk to run away to, when he needed to be by himself, but Mal didn't have nowhere else to go.

But he'd been in the cargo bay for a good while, throwing, and that had been a long talk he'd had with Simon. It wasn't that he was lonesome, exactly, but he'd get in these moods where he missed Mal, just wanted to be around him. So he put the knives back carefully, in the box under the bed where he still kept them, and went over to Mal's.

He unlocked the door without knocking but stopped before he went down the ladder. "You all right yet?" he called down.

"Qi guai le," Mal said. Out of nowhere, made Jayne wonder what was so strange.

"Did I do something?"

"No," Mal said. "No, I was just getting to thinking-- It would be nice if you came back already."

Jayne climbed down the ladder, turned to face Mal. He needed to clean the taste of Simon out of his mouth. And needed to tell Mal now, before he heard secondhand. In his mind, he went back and forth for a minute. But he decided he needed to suck Mal's face off before he delivered the bad news. So he took hold of Mal's collar and pulled him to his feet. He dug his tongue into Mal's mouth and his fingers into Mal's hair, yanked his shirttails out.

He shoulda known better than to let Mal catch a breath, 'cause when he did, Mal said, "All right. What'd you do?"

"Nothing," Jayne said, but thought how irritating it was when Mal gave him that answer. "I didn't do nothing," he said. "Simon kissed me."

"Simon did what?"

"Reckon it was mostly out of curiosity," Jayne said. "He was asking all these questions, and-- Don't neither of us want to repeat it, anyhow." He backed away, threw up his hands. "So, all right. Toss me out."

"I can't do that," Mal said.

"You can't?"

"There are very few things you could do, would make me so angry I'd be willing to toss you out," Mal said, "and making amends with Simon is not one of those things."

"You ain't sore at me," Jayne said. "Why ain't you--"

"The day I've had? Knowing that somebody on this boat managed to make a little peace-- it makes things easier."

"I-- It's just that-- I was all set to beg you, and--"

"I ain't got that much fight left in me," Mal said.

"So what did you wanna-- Did you wanna lie down for a little, or--"

"I don't know," Mal said. "There's a lot of times I know you want me to tell you what I want, and I just don't know." He looked Jayne right in the eyes, smiled a little. "Honestly, anything you did now would probably be right, so long as you didn't leave this room."

"Anything?"

"Well, juggling geese or shooting me might be a little bit out of the range," Mal said.

Jayne reckoned he'd test that by pushing Mal's braces off his shoulders, then dropping to his knees and undoing Mal's fly.

"I was kinda hoping for something like that," Mal said. But before Jayne could get Mal's cock out, Mal threw his weight forward and shoved Jayne sideways to the floor. Mal let the momentum keep carrying him, though, so he could land on top of Jayne. That was a kinda signal between them, that this wasn't a regular fistfight. They hadn't never had one of those, and Jayne was glad of that.

He got hold of Mal's shoulders and turned him over, pinned him onto his back. He leaned down like he was gonna kiss Mal, but then rocked back on his knees and made like he was gonna go for Mal's cock again. Which left Mal wide open. That was kind of the point, though: Jayne coulda taken Mal in a real fight, no problem. He coulda taken just about anybody. But this was the opposite of a real fight.

Mal sat up quick and pushed his open hand into Jayne's chest. Jayne let himself spill backwards and sideways. He let Mal get a knee between his legs and a fistful of shirt in his hand. Mal got his head down just close enough to Jayne's nipple that Jayne could push his face aside, then his shoulder, and pin him down again. He caught Mal's wrists together when Mal reached up, but it was hard to hold Mal like that with one hand and fumble Mal's pants down with the other, especially with Mal's thigh rubbing against his cock like that.

While Jayne was busy, Mal was inching out from underneath. He got Jayne by the hair and pushed him backwards, straddled him. Jayne gave a little struggle, but not much. This was how it was the opposite of a real fight: he won when he had no choice but to let Mal blow him.

So Jayne closed his eyes and surrendered to Mal's mouth.

 

Sometimes, Mal would just watch Jayne sleep. Sometimes? Often, more like. When he was awake first in the morning, or got up in the middle of the night. Or, like today, when they came back from a long day of noble thieving and looting, and Jayne took off his boots and shirt and announced he was gonna lie down for a spell. As usual, that meant Jayne was still snoring when Mal got back from explaining to Wash, in a loud and undiplomatic manner, just how fast they needed to get far away from that abandoned fuel station.

Even when Mal wasn't there, Jayne had taken to sticking to his side of the bed. He'd wrap the blankets around himself and roll himself into the wall. He'd huddle there like he needed to protect his body. That was something that was hard to unlearn.

They were both pretty well damaged, pretty well broken. Big pieces taken out of them, couldn't be put back. Mal thought of all them stories where love made people whole. How long he'd let himself believe that-- that there was someone in the 'verse could fill in what he'd lost of himself. Left in the trenches and the bombed-out settlements, bled out of bullet holes.

But there wasn't nobody like that. If there had been, she'd died when the Alliance rained fire down on Shadow, burned the town to ash and the ranchland back to desert. He reckoned someday he'd tell Jayne about Kit. He didn't really need to, though. Jayne didn't know the particulars, but he knew where Mal was frayed and patched over.

Everything about Jayne seemed like a second chance, like something Mal didn't quite deserve to keep. He knew he wouldn't, not for too terribly long: men like them didn't die old and in their sleep. If they were lucky, they'd have a few years before one of them went. But it was morbid and defeatist to mourn that already. By staying this long, he'd agreed to see this through the rest of the way, however long that might be.

Mal sat down on the bed, stretched his arms out. He felt Jayne stir and yawn behind him. "Aw, fuck," Jayne said. "How long I been out?"

"Dunno," Mal said. "I was off doing captain stuff."

"You shoulda woke me," Jayne said.

"I didn't need you for nothing," Mal said. "We was just opening up them crates we picked up, and--"

"You let me miss Christmas morning?" Jayne fake-pouted.

"Nah," Mal said. "You know we wouldn't do that without you. I was gonna have everyone go down there after supper and take stock."

"Reckon it'll just be mostly fuel cells, anyhow," Jayne said.

"Yeah, the biggest decision's gonna be whether to fence 'em, or to keep 'em for ourselves and save on expenses."

"Fence 'em," Jayne said. "Get the cash."

"You always want the money," Mal said. "Waste it on mei yong le se."

"Was thinking of saving it up," Jayne said. "Getting us a bigger bed."

Mal looked around his cramped little bunk. It hadn't seemed half so small when there had been only one of him. It wasn't like they could go buy themselves a little homestead together or nothing, though. It would have taken a lot more than romance to get him to give up this life. If Jayne's bunk had been next door, they could have done a little remodeling-- Kaylee was handy with a blowtorch, and Book with a hammer-- but to do that, he'd have to evict everyone else. And Zoe and Wash had done all right with just the one bunk, anyhow. "What're we gonna do with a bigger bed?" he said.

"Forget I said nothing," Jayne said.

"I keep waking up with this pain in my shoulder," Mal said, touching the spot. "From sleeping on my arm. I reckon it would be nice to get rid of that."

Jayne knelt close behind him, circled his fingers into the sore place on Mal's shoulder. "There?" he said, actually pressing hard enough to make a difference.

Mal rocked his head to the side. "Yeah," he said. And then, "We could put a little money aside."

Jayne put his other arm around Mal's waist, rested his head on Mal's shoulder. It looked like they both knew they'd just committed themselves to something. Mal reckoned it would be a while before they had enough for a bed, but planning on buying one was maybe the bigger thing.

"How much time we got before dinner?" Jayne said.

"A little," Mal said. "Unless you're cooking."

"Oh, shit, I--" Jayne said, then got quiet, half-muttered a few things. "No, I'm all right. Me and the shepherd are up tomorrow."

"Then we got time," Mal said.

"Wanna fuck?" Jayne said.

"We could," Mal said. "Or we could... sit here and talk about our feelings."

Jayne snorted and bit into Mal's shoulder, where the pain had been. Mal reached forward for a skin. He barely got his hand on one before Jayne yanked him back and put a hand down his britches. Mal leaned back into Jayne and dropped the skin on the bed. Jayne gave Mal's ji ba a few hard strokes, got him uncomfortable, then unbuttoned Mal and kept on with what he was doing. "You ain't just gonna jerk me off," Mal said. Jayne sucked on Mal's earlobe, probably to keep him from talking, and stroked faster. They didn't do this so much no more. It wasn't something neither of them was likely to ask for. But Jayne's hands were still rough as they'd ever been, his grip still firm, and he made Mal come into his hand as sure as he ever had.

Mal tried to turn around, give Jayne a piece of his mind and a lot of his tongue, but Jayne locked an arm around his waist. "Ain't just gonna jerk you off," Jayne said. When he sunk his teeth into Mal's neck and pushed down a suspender, Mal struggled against him, not because it would do any good but because it was more fun than admitting defeat. Jayne didn't normally use enough strength on Mal to keep him really pinned, but sometimes, Jayne wanted something bad. Mal coulda said something to make him stop: he knew he had that power. When the time came, though, he never much wanted to use it.

Mal let Jayne play the game of sucking on his neck and rolling down the other suspender, then shoving his pants down to his knees. That kept Mal from doing a whole hell of a lot, other than waiting while Jayne got the skin and the lube together. Mal felt Jayne shift heavily behind him, but he didn't feel nothing else till Jayne pulled him back, into his lap and onto his cock. It was kinda new, not having to mess around with fingers first, but Mal wasn't embarrassed about that feeling good.

Jayne took him slow, easy, held them both off coming for a while. Jayne had that sense of his body, made him good like that-- the same thing that made him strong in a fight. Mal arched his back, dug his fingers into Jayne's thigh, got him to go in harder. He hadn't realized he was close at all. Coming hit him in the belly and made him cry out. He didn't know he'd finished Jayne off until Jayne was out of him, lying on his back on the bed they were gonna replace.

Mal got up, righted his britches and put his suspenders back up. He walked over to the other side of the room, quiet. Sometimes things that felt good to him at the moment, they got to him after.

"You come back over here," Jayne said.

"I'm all right," Mal said.

"I know you're all right," Jayne said. "Come here."

Mal took off his boots and went back to the bed, lay down on his belly and put an arm across Jayne. Jayne rolled onto his side and pulled Mal nearer. Their faces were real close, almost kissing. Jayne's eyes crinkled in a half-smile, and Mal let himself smile back. "We got time," Mal said. "We got so much gorram time."

Jayne looked for a second like he was gonna ask what Mal meant, but he relaxed his brow and seemed to get it. He got what he wanted to get from it, at least. They lay there like that for a while, until the ambient lights started to dim into sunset and they were gonna be late for another supper.

Mal caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink as Jayne looked for his shirt. There was a love bite on his neck that he didn't have no way of covering up. It seemed right to have it there, though: to be marked. To be somebody's, and to have somebody belong to him. He'd fought that, like it was nobler to die lonesome. But now it seemed righter not to be lonesome at all. It was the way to show he wasn't so broken. The way to show himself.

 

It was a good plan. But it was Zoe's, so it was gonna be good, anyhow. Jayne wouldn'ta never told her so, but when Zoe made the plans, they usually worked out right. Or at least, when they went wrong, they still didn't end with nobody getting shot. Not that often.

The good plan looked kinda stupid from this angle, though. Mal and Simon were the public face this time, since Simon looked respectable. When they were trying to unload stolen cargo, it worked better to look like they'd come by it honest. Even if the fella they were trying to sell it to was some cousin of Patience's who was missing more teeth than he still had.

So Jayne and Zoe were back in the brush, doing a two-point watch. They were pretty much waiting to ambush if things got out of hand. It was getting a little tense out there, kind of a standoff, but nothing Mal couldn't handle on his own. No sense in firing the first shot. Especially when Jayne couldn't hear most of what was going on, could only see.

Patience's cousin held out a bag of platinum, grinned gruesome and toothless, then pitched the bag into the sand. "Hey, that's my bed money," Jayne said under his breath.

"Quit leaning on your radio," Zoe's voice crackled back at him. He pulled the radio out of his belt loop and got the button unstuck, but he had it too close to his face when Zoe added, "Get over here, anyway. Change of plans."

He ran over to where she was posted. "What're the plans?" he said.

"No change," she said. "They're almost done. It's going fine."

He furrowed his brow. "Then why'd you call me over here?"

"Bed money?" she said. "Just when I was starting to think better of you."

"What the--" he said, figuring it out. "No. Money. For a bed. We're saving some."

"Okay," Zoe said. "That's what I... had hoped you meant by that."

"What did you-- you thought I was fucking around on him, or something?" Jayne said.

"I didn't want you to be," she said. "I want you to be everything he sees in you. I do. It's just, I've seen him through a few bad situations, and I couldn't help expecting you to fuck him over just as thoroughly as every other girl he's been with."

Jayne snickered. Zoe looked at him funny for a minute, then got a look of realization on her face and busted up laughing.

"Not that I think-- it's-- all the other ones before you have been--"

"Not all of 'em," Jayne said. "I ain't the first."

"The first since I've known him," Zoe said. "There was one sort of desperate one-night stand, right after the war, I think might have happened, but other than that-- He'd sworn off boys by the time I met him. Which, if he'd asked my opinion, I woulda told him to keep his options open, but he didn't ask."

"I thought you knew about him, though," Jayne said. "Before me."

"Oh, I knew," Zoe said. "He would... there were certain men in the company he would treat a little different, that kinda thing. Next time we had a night off, I took him out and got him drunk enough to admit it."

"Only way to get anything out of him," Jayne said. "That, or pinning him down so he can't fight." He smiled, thinking of nights he'd spent holding Mal down on the bed, refusing to let him come until he said "cock."

"Depriving him of sleep works sometimes," Zoe said, "or making like you're gonna draw a gun on him."

"Or fucking him," Jayne said.

"Well, you would know that," Zoe said. "I wouldn't."

"Really? You ain't never--"

Zoe shrugged. "Some people you feel it with," she said. "Some people you just don't."

Jayne thought of Kaylee's sweet little smile, turned Inara and Simon to liquid, but didn't make him want to do nothing but hug her. And Wash, who musta had fine qualities, for Zoe to see so much in him. He tried to think how someone could look at Mal and not feel nothing stir in them, but he reckoned there was all kinds of people in the 'verse, all kinds of tastes. Better that his wasn't everybody's, or Zoe woulda had Mal long ago.

No, she wouldn't have. Jayne'd always had a little bit of a thing for Zoe, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he and Mal didn't have that in common.

She took a deep breath, like she was about to say something important. Something she'd been practicing. It seemed strange, Zoe having to think about the right thing to say. "I wanted you to know-- I know you probably don't give a good gorram what I think, but I think you're good for him. I think you make a better man of him."

Jayne looked away from her, out towards Mal, who had the money in his hand now. "Of course I care what you think," he said. "Can't have his best friend hating me. Tends to end with shooting."

"Don't go giving me ideas for what to do if you ever break his heart again," Zoe said.

"Won't do that," Jayne said.

"I know," Zoe said. She came over next to Jayne, looked out at the action. "What the hell are they still doing out there?" she said. "Take the money and get out already."

Like they'd heard her, Mal and Simon came sauntering back. "Remind me to never again casually mention I'm a doctor," Simon said. "We really didn't... need to hear how he lost every single one of those teeth."

"Don't forget the wooden leg," Mal said.

"How'd you get rid of him?" Zoe said.

"I... told him how much it would cost him for a full physical examination," Simon said.

"For a minute there, I thought he was gonna pay it," Mal said.

They went back to Serenity in a loose cluster, Simon looking pleased with himself, Zoe keeping her eyes away from Jayne like she hadn't said nothing to him. When they got close to the boat, Mal put his arm around Jayne's waist and patted the pocket of his coat. "Bed money," he whispered in Jayne's ear.

Wash was waiting in the cargo bay when they got back, ready with the kiss he always gave Zoe when she came back in one piece. Zoe caught Jayne's eye as he and Mal walked past. She gave Jayne a little smile and patted the gun on her hip. It was more of a blessing than a threat.

 

One mention of Reavers, and Jayne shut the hell down. He wouldn't admit he was afraid, exactly, but they put him on edge. He'd get a funny restlessness to him, not be able to concentrate on nothing for more than a few minutes. He'd go from lifting weights to cleaning guns to leaning over the cargo bay railing with a look of indelible consternation on his face. He'd cling to Mal, then not want to be touched. Mal reckoned it was something deep in him. Jayne had an awfully strong sense of himself, of what he was. The threat of losing that mighta terrified him more than dying.

Mal understood it. He did. As far as he was gonna, at least. But these things just slipped out sometimes. One crack about Jayne being on his period, and Mal found himself kicked out of his own bunk.

Wash had picked up a tip from a passing carrier a few days earlier. They'd spotted Reavers out this way and barely escaped with their hides. So Mal was running Serenity quiet and fast, invisible as he could till they were closer to civilization. The danger was probably gone already, but he wasn't eager to take the chance.

The boat was dark, and most everybody was sticking to their bunks as well as they could. Zoe and Wash were holed up on the bridge with a sock hung on the door, making forced jokes and rutting desperately in the middle of the day. River was unsettled, and couldn't be kept from walking up and down the halls, talking in math. Some of these cautious times, the tension brought the crew closer together: they'd while away the danger playing basketball and Chinese checkers, making the best of it. But other times, with no way to predict it, they'd all be like this.

With his bunk out of the question until Jayne simmered down enough to accept an apology, Mal wandered the empty cargo bay, the empty kitchen, the empty infirmary. He'd reckoned the engine room would be equally empty, but there was Kaylee, tinkering. "I wanted to see if I could get her to turn out a touch less exhaust," she said. "Keep 'em from reading our trails." She squinted at a piece of machinery that, to Mal, was indistinguishable from any other. "And if I can't, at least I got my mind off-- Well, you know." She put down her wrench like she'd forgotten she was supposed to show hospitality. "What're you doing down here, anyhow?"

"Taking stock of Serenity," Mal said. "Listening to her rhythms. Making sure everything's all right with her."

"That's awful poetical," Kaylee said. She surveyed him with great skepticism. "So, what'd you say?"

"What'd I say to who?"

"To Jayne, made him throw you out?" Kaylee said.

"Nothing that bears repeating," Mal said. She looked worried, so he added, "It ain't but a little falling out. He'll cool down, I'll go say I'm sorry, we'll-- we'll--"

"Have a whole bunch of making-up sex?" she said, saving him the trouble of saying it himself.

"Well-- we-- yeah, probably."

"I been having a little of that, myself," Kaylee said.

He couldn't quite work out what was the right way to congratulate her for that. Sometimes, he had to remind himself just how innocent Kaylee wasn't.

"Inara's been doing real good by me," Kaylee said.

He knew, sort of. It wasn't something that'd escaped his notice, at least. They were back to showing off being affectionate, and Kaylee was back to smiling for no reason. And Inara had been downright personable, the past few weeks. "Yeah," he said. "That's... good."

"Thought you was gonna throw her off Serenity for a while, there," Kaylee said.

"That wouldn't solve nothing," he said.

"Well, I'm glad you didn't, anyhow," she said. "Even sorta glad you-- Whatever you said to her, she took to heart. It mighta been what she needed to hear, this time."

"I'm-- what do you mean, 'this time'?"

"I can fight my own battles, captain," she said. "I know I ain't much in a gunfight, but the rest? I can take care of my own self. I don't need you rescuing me all the time."

"Didn't hardly say nothing about you to her," Mal said.

She stood up. She had that disbelieving look on her face. "There you go again," she said.

"I didn't," he said. "We talked about me and her, and about Jayne. Only about him because she sees fit to meddle in my affairs in exactly the way I know I ain't got no right to meddle in hers. I ain't never had any problem with you and her being together, as long as wasn't nobody getting hurt over it. When I went to her, it wasn't about you. It was about things Inara and I shoulda worked out long ago. We woulda had that fight sooner or later, no matter who she was with, no matter who I was. Dong ma?"

"Yeah," she said. "Except-- except so far as anything we say to each other is really about everyone. So far as you can't leave nobody out."

"Don't nobody wanna get involved in that ta ma de can zhuang."

"But we are," Kaylee said. "You don't see it, but we are. Inara didn't come to my bunk that night, but the night after, we talked almost till the lights came up. Jayne, he picks up on whatever you're carrying around with you, whether you mean him to or not. And Simon-- I dunno how much he heard, but I reckon he heard a fair amount, because he was running all over Serenity. Patching things up with me, patching things up with Jayne. Like he could see himself having that very same fight someday, and it scared the la shi out of him. It's everyone, captain. It's always everyone, and that's-- Tell me honestly that you'd rather it was every man for himself. Tell me it ain't better that every little thing runs through all of us like a current. Tell me that don't make us all stronger."

He hadn't seen half of what she'd said. It was his responsibility to see all this, and he hadn't seen it. But he wondered if that wasn't just what Kaylee was telling him: he didn't have to see everything for himself. Right now, she was doing her job, just as much as when she was keeping the engine turning. "Can't say it don't," he said.

"It keeps us alive," Kaylee said.

He was standing on the same patch of floor where he'd fallen down, bleeding to death, the last time he'd sent everyone away. And they'd come back. They'd always done. "Don't you let her leave us," he said. "Inara. I know that's-- I'm sorry it falls on you. But don't you let her leave."

"She ain't gonna," Kaylee said. "I don't reckon she can, even. Like the rest of us."

"Now, you know I ain't ever made it like that," Mal said.

"No," she said. "You made it so don't nobody want to. We touch down on them moons, and we know where home is. You know what? I sit in bars sometimes, I get to talking. I tell people how long I been on Serenity, they nearly fall out of their chairs. Don't nobody keep a mechanic more than a year, or a pilot, let alone someone like Jayne. What you put together-- Inara knows she's better off waiting it out till she gets over you than looking for the same somewhere else."

"She ain't done that already?" he said. "Gotten over me?"

Kaylee shook her head. "She wants to. But it's not always... something you can do just by wanting."

"Noticed that," he said.

"She's trying real hard, though," Kaylee said. "And not only to... She wants to make herself worthy, I reckon. Worthy of being kept around."

Mal said, "It ain't gone unnoticed." Inara'd been almost too helpful lately. She had a way of offering up her time and her business connections, so that even when she only meant to be doing what she could to keep them flying, she patronized a little. But she'd played a good distraction to the sheriff of Bright Canyon a few weeks back, and even with the quotas they hadn't had no trouble landing on Shiawase when she'd flashed her ident card at the dour man in the docking office.

"She wouldn't do a thing in the 'verse for you, if she thought it might go unnoticed," Kaylee said. A trace of tense giggle played in her voice, like even she wasn't certain it was the right time for laughter.

"She doing okay? Inara? Running dark like this?"

"Better 'n any of us," Kaylee said. "She burns all her candles, and that whole shuttle just shines. She told me they used to black out the cities on Zenon when the power shortages got bad, so when the lights go down, she's like a little girl, safe in bed."

"Well, that makes for one of my crew not falling to pieces," Mal said.

"Jayne ain't doing so well?" Kaylee said.

"He never does," Mal said. "Not with Reavers. He don't admit nothing, but--"

"He don't admit it to you," Kaylee said.

"He said something?" Mal said. "What'd he tell you?"

"That ain't yours to hear, I don't think," she said.

He was glad that everything in the engine room was too precious to be punched or hurled, because it gave him time to stop blaming Jayne for telling Kaylee things that he didn't get to know. He couldn't be everything to Jayne. Mostly, he didn't want to be, not everything, but it was a sharp blow, sometimes, seeing just where the borders were.

"You know, anyhow," Kaylee said. "And you ain't never gonna have cause to worry."

He watched Serenity's engine turn. Kaylee had her running so smooth now, those rotating parts actually looked serene. And this wasn't the only engine that Kaylee kept in repair, fixed up before Mal even knew it was broken.

"Reckon he's calmed down enough for me to go back?" Mal said.

"I doubt he wanted you gone in the first place," she said.

"Oh, he did," Mal said. "Sometimes we just-- There's days when everything's right, and there's days when it's all we can do not to kill each other. But I reckon he'll take an apology now."

"Don't go taking your life into your hands," Kaylee said.

"Already doing that," he said. "Every day of my life." He kissed her cheek and told her to get some rest.

When he got back to his bunk, the door was open. There was a bright battery-powered lantern on the bedside table and disassembled parts of Vera on the bed. "Can't kill 'em if my best gun's jammed," Jayne said, not looking up from the pressure release he was cleaning.

"There ain't nothing gonna come close enough that it needs to be killed," Mal said.

"Ain't never gonna believe that," Jayne said.

"What I said before--"

"Don't gotta say you're sorry," Jayne said.

"Yeah, actually, I do."

"Nah," Jayne said. "Don't gotta go saying things. I already know you mean 'em. Soon as you come back, I know."

"That why you left the door open?" Mal said.

"Yeah," Jayne said.

"I'll always come back for you," Mal said. "I will always come back."

Jayne put his gun back together, clicked on the safeties. He aimed her at the door for a minute before he hung her in the place of honor Mal had let him choose, on the wall where he could reach from the foot of the bed. They left the door open and the lantern blazing, lay on the bed talking about nothing in particular. They made out a little, but didn't get real far with it, so they went back to talking. It didn't seem safe enough to be having sex. Sometimes, the best they could do was make sure they weren't alone.

 

Jayne was giving an awful boring blow job.

It happened once in a while, and there wasn't nothing either of them could do about it. Most of the time, them knowing each other's bodies was a good thing. But sometimes Jayne's mind was elsewhere, or he wasn't quite awake, and he went through the motions of everything he knew Mal liked. Mal did it, too, and Jayne could tell the difference. It wasn't so terrible-- boring sex with Mal was better than most of the sex he'd had with anyone else-- but it made him wistful for the days when everything was new.

He bit the inside of Mal's thigh, which woke Mal right the hell up. He teased Mal's balls until Mal was pulling his hair so hard in protest, he had to find something else to do. So he played with the tip of Mal's cock for a while, like he wasn't in any kinda hurry. And when Mal was, took Mal's cock deep in his mouth and got him off.

While Mal was still sitting on the bed with his mouth open, Jayne got up and put his boots on. "Gotta go make dinner," he said.

He didn't have one foot on the ladder before Mal pushed him up against it. "You gonna show that hard-on to the shepherd?" Mal said.

"It'll go away," Jayne said.

"Yeah, it'll go away," Mal said, unbuckling Jayne's belt and getting down on one knee. Jayne wouldn'ta played coy, but Mal liked it that way. He liked being flirted with, liked feeling like he'd conquered something. So Jayne pretended he could live without whatever Mal was offering. He didn't pretend real hard, but it worked okay.

The ladder was a good place to get blown. There was lots to hold on to. Mal was working him fast, making him jerk forward into Mal's mouth and arch his head back into the cool metal. Mal wasn't trying nothing creative, just doing the usual. But the usual worked the best anyway. It made Jayne grit his teeth and come before he was quite ready to. He didn't never want it to be over when it was.

Soon as Mal came up for air, Jayne tucked himself in and turned to go. "Shepherd's gonna come looking in a minute," Jayne said. "Tell me I got the whole rest of the night to sin."

"Then by all means, go forth and cook with righteous humility," Mal said. Jayne didn't like it so much when Mal made jokes like that, the ones that made Jayne feel small for believing in something. But Mal wasn't gonna change that way. And as long as Mal didn't try to change him, which Mal hadn't never, that difference between them didn't bother Jayne none.

"I'll be up there if you need me," Jayne said.

When Jayne got to the kitchen, Book right away gave him that raised-eyebrow look that meant he knew that Jayne had gotten blown not five minutes earlier, and that all the sermonizing in the world would not make Jayne regret that. Then, Book put him to work chopping up onions. It might have been a little bit punishment, but mostly it was something that needed to be done. Jayne was good at cutting things up into pieces, and it would have been his job no matter what he did in his spare time.

Before Book and Simon and River had come aboard, cooking dinner had been kinda casual. Whoever hadn't been busy with something else would all crowd in and help throw together a meal from whatever they'd had. But with more people, there'd gotten to be some not doing their share and some doing too much. Now, there was a rotation, and everyone had to remember when their day was. It was a pain in the ass, but Jayne had to do less work this way than before.

And he'd ended up working with Book, which meant he got to make food that would actually taste good in the end. Kaylee could usually whip up something pretty good and keep Wash from destroying it. Zoe and Mal could only do one thing each, but they did it okay. Even Simon, Inara, and River were getting better. But people looked forward to the shepherd's cooking. Didn't nobody believe that Jayne did more than do what he was told and keep his fingers out of the rest, but Jayne liked being around the good smells. Feeling the food in his hands, watching how it all mixed together and changed.

He brought the cut-up onions over to Book, who scraped them into a pan. "Can opener's gone missing again," Book said, without looking up from the protein he was slicing.

Jayne knew that the can opener wasn't missing at all. There was a persnickety bolt on the fuel feed of the engine that Kaylee used it to tighten. Jayne fished his utility knife out of his pocket. "You want them tomatoes open?" he said.

"Not with that dirty thing," Book said.

"Clean it every day," Jayne said. "Disinfectant and rustproofer. Simon could do surgery with this motherf-- with this thing."

"Get the spinach, too, then," Book said. While Jayne got the cans opened, Book added, "You know, the offer still stands."

"What offer?"

"The ceremony," Book said. "Have you asked him?" A little while ago, Book had talked about marrying him and Mal. It woulda made Book feel better about them, or something. Jayne had blown him off and thought that would be the last of that idea.

"Ain't asked," Jayne said. "Ain't gonna. Already know what the answer is."

"He has no right to insist that his discomfort with religion make your beliefs irrelevant," Book said. "If it's something you want, you ought to--"

"Who said it was something I wanted?" Jayne said.

"You plan on staying with him, don't you?" Book said. "In the long term?"

"I dunno," Jayne said. "Yeah. Guess so." It wasn't a plan, exactly. He liked the way things were, wanted to keep them that way. He hadn't thought of how long it would last, though, just that he wasn't ready for it to change yet.

"Then why not formalize that?" Book said.

"Don't wanna get married," Jayne said. "You get married, you're stuck there. Can't leave if you wanna."

"But you don't want to leave him," Book said. "You've made that quite clear."

"But I could," Jayne said. He didn't know why Book couldn't see the difference. He wasn't so good at being told what he could and couldn't do. It made him want to try whatever wasn't allowed. He reckoned getting married was good for some people. It made things more real. Like the way Zoe and Wash were so proud of being husband and wife. But for him and Mal, it would have just been putting words on them that didn't fit. How Simon had said they didn't have no roles. They mighta had some, but they were different from how married people were.

"Well," Book said, "let me know if you change your mind."

Jayne stood with his back against the wall. The shepherd didn't need him for nothing at the moment. Jayne pretended not to watch the cooking as closely as he was. It was easier to learn things if he acted like he wasn't paying attention, because then nobody fucked it up by showing him and getting him confused. He'd picked up a lot by watching: what the different spices tasted like and how to put a few meals together. It stayed in his head pretty good, because he could touch it, put it in his mouth. He liked knowing stuff and not having people realize he knew it. It was better to have people underestimate him, than the other way around.

"The other part of my advice," Book said. "Did you take it?"

"Tell him I love him?" Jayne rolled his eyes and folded his arms. "I told him. He knows."

"You told him?" Book said. "He knows?"

"Said it to him once," Jayne said. "Wouldn't mean so much if I said it again."

"They're words that need to be repeated," Book said. "Refreshed. A person needs to know that he's still--"

"We got other ways of saying the same thing, though," Jayne said. "Saying it more exactly than-- I dunno. It's a stupid word. Means too many different things."

"Love?"

"Yeah."

Book stirred the tomato sauce like he could see the face of the Lord in it. "Like describing the alphabet," he said.

"The what?" Jayne said.

"One of the founders of my order wrote that using words to describe love was like trying to describe the alphabet," Book said. "It's a pointless exercise, so we use platitudes-- words that sound good together but don't mean anything. He was talking about God's love, of course, but that's what I think you were saying-- the word 'love' means too many things, and all of them equally."

Jayne didn't quite understand the comparison, though he liked the sound of it. He thought maybe the shepherd was finally starting to get it. All these months of explaining what Mal and him had, and Book wanting it to be some other thing. And here Book was, saying he didn't never have to. Saying that them knowing it was enough. That made Jayne willing to think it might be-- what he had was enough.

 

Jayne called them family nights, when everyone hung around the kitchen after dinner. Mal hadn't had a name for them before, but he liked that Jayne had come up with one. Before that, it had just been nine people in a room. Now, there was stuff behind it: they were there because they didn't want to leave, because they liked being around each other. Nobody planned on a family night, or insisted that anyone stay. They just came together, like everyone knew.

Tonight, Mal'd had to go up to the bridge with Wash after they helped clean up the food-- Peregrine Station was giving them shit about docking times-- but they'd hardly had to ask each other if they were gonna go back to the kitchen after. Wash and Simon had some kind of card-playing grudge to settle: they'd been joking about it all the way through the meal, getting everyone to take sides and place bets. It was funny how those friendships cropped up. One day, it looked like Wash and Simon couldn't have less in common, and the next they'd invented some combination of tallcard, poker, and completely made-up rules that didn't nobody understand but the two of them.

When Mal and Wash got back, Simon and Zoe were playing warm-up rounds. Book was at the corner of the table, reading. The girls were all in a line: Inara combing River's hair while Kaylee straddled a backwards chair, her arms around Inara's waist. And Jayne must have begged paper and a pen off somebody, because he was working hard, writing something. There was mail on Peregrine Station-- it would be a letter home.

Simon dealt Wash into the game, and everyone was so well occupied that Mal felt moved to isolate himself from the commotion. He stood in the doorway, making himself stay. It was allowed, sneaking away from a family night, but it wasn't the same with one of them gone. Weaker, and less real.

He knew he could have joined in anywhere, but he almost always wound up near Jayne. That was one of the secret benefits of being someone's: having a person to cling to. Mal put one hand on Jayne's shoulder and the other on the table, leaning over him, sharing his space. Probably bugging the la shi out of him.

Mal kept his eyes off Jayne's letter as long as he could. It wasn't really his business, and Jayne was less than proud of his poor schooling. It was more fun to watch cards and insults fly back and forth, to listen to Kaylee and Inara interrupt each other telling River about the Mardi Gras parades on Shiawase.

Jayne raised his head, almost clipped Mal in the chin. "Shepherd, how d'you spell 'sumptuous'?"

"J-A-C-K-A-" Simon started.

"Fuck off, zhi dai dai," Jayne said, but Mal could feel him smiling, not taking it personal. So long as Jayne was calling Simon brother, they were only teasing each other. It was their way of getting along.

"Jayne, have you considered investing in a dictionary?" the shepherd said, lifting his eyes from his book.

"Them things is only useful if you can already spell," Jayne said. "Mal--"

"Don't look at me," Mal said. "If I was you, I'd just say it was pretty and be done with it."

"S-U-M-P-T-U-O-U-S," Inara said, not looking up from the ribbon she was plaiting into River's hair. She might even have meant it as a kindness to Jayne, and not as a chance to show Mal up. It was hard to tell with her. But Mal wanted to believe that they were past that pettiness.

"You writing about Shiawase?" Mal said.

"Beau Monde," Jayne said. "The township fair. With all them lights strung up, and the free pie." That drew a few skeptical stares. "It's to my mama. Ta ma de gai si."

"Can I see?" Mal said softly.

Jayne covered the paper with his arm. "It's private."

"Ain't no privacy on this boat," Mal said. "You know that." He slipped his hand under Jayne's and pried up Jayne's wrist just enough to steal the letter out from underneath.

It was mostly descriptions of places they'd been over the past few months: Beau Monde and Shiawase, Gethen and Bright Canyon. It made their lives sound awful exotic, with only the pretty scenery left in, no mention of the long stretches spent in transit from one dusty rock to the next.

But for one mention, and that was unquestionably the thing that Jayne had wanted privacy for. "I've been seeing someone on the crew," the letter said. "You'd like her. She treats me real good."

Mal was on the verge of reading that part out loud, but Jayne was getting that slump in his shoulders from being picked on a little too much. So Mal whispered in his ear, "'You'd like her'?"

"Hell," Jayne said, loud enough to be for everyone's benefit, "all them other ones I wrote home about, I completely made up."

"I woulda done the same thing in your place," Mal said. "It's too much to explain." He put the letter back down in front of Jayne and said, "You reckon she'd like me, though?"

"Yeah," Jayne said. "That part's all true."

Mal realized that he wouldn't be opposed to meeting her someday. There wasn't much likelihood of that happening-- Jayne hadn't been back to Moriah since he'd left, and he'd built up a fine collection of reassuring lies that it wasn't worth the pain of going home and dispelling. It was the only way to keep living the way Jayne did, and not lose his family. Of Mal's crew, Jayne was the only one who had managed it: even Kaylee had given up writing letters to her parents after her first year away.

Mal wished he could take Jayne back in time, to when there'd been a back home to take him to. Mal's mother would have disapproved terribly, would have seen in Jayne everything she'd warned Mal about. But she would have known he was settled down, and that would have pleased her.

Mal leaned closer over Jayne, let their cheeks brush. "Quit it, asshole," Jayne said. "I'm almost done."

Mal pulled away fast. "I'll be over here," he said, "helping Zoe win."

Zoe had a fine stack of pennies in front of her, despite not actually knowing how to play. "Don't think you're getting a share, captain," she said.

"I'll settle for some reflected glory," Mal said.

Mal watched them play a few incomprehensible hands before Jayne set his pen down on the table, grabbed Mal by the sleeve, and kissed him, closed-mouthed but forceful. "Done," Jayne said.

"You know, you've got a bunk for all that," Wash said. "Two bunks."

"Oh, let 'em be," Kaylee said.

"So much in there, some of it's bound to overflow," River said, turning her head and making Inara scowl. "You can compress it, but then it overheats."

River had a way of making a room very silent.

Mal was still up against Jayne, that kiss hanging on his lips. It might have done some good to go down to their bunk and overheat. Disrespectful, though: Mal didn't like it when Zoe and Wash ran off like that. A lot of how he conducted himself with Jayne was based on not doing things that irritated him when other people did them. Jayne had no problem with letting his body's needs take precedence over everything else, which made it all the better that Mal sometimes did have a problem.

It helped to know that either way, he was going to get laid. Tonight, and tomorrow. And he had to pretend that those tomorrows piled up into forever, because the thing he was figuring out about happiness was that he had to live in it. Protect it fiercely, and hold it in his eyes so that he could see it when it was a memory. It would be: he would lose some of these people eventually, lose the tranquility they had in each other. Or they'd lose him.

Jayne made him feel like he could go forever. He'd thought the war had killed that sense of invincibility in him. He hadn't really wanted it anymore, anyway. He'd thought it was one of them youthful things. Those were the things that Jayne brought out in him. The parts of himself he hadn't known he'd missed. And yet they seemed to sleep better and keep more in their pockets, now that he allowed himself the occasional bout of playful, reckless stupidity.

It was reckless stupidity that had gotten him into this business with Jayne, and that was another reason not to make so much of reasoned responsibility. Jayne, whose idea of chivalry was letting Mal throw the first punch, and whose idea of romance involved property crime and large amounts of alcohol. Who had drawn all the resistance out of his body and made him warier of sleeping alone than of sharing his space.

On the table by the bed, there was a whiskey bottle half-full of money. Enough to buy wood for a bedframe, and when it was full, there'd be plenty for the rest. It wasn't the usual way of planning a future. But every night, Mal held it in his line of sight as he settled his body against Jayne's and closed his eyes. He knew what it stood for.

 

Jayne unwound the gauze from around his shin, squinted and prodded at the wound underneath, and re-wrapped it. He'd taken two bullets today, from a band of idiots who'd tried to steal the cargo they'd brought over from Peregrine Station. They weren't serious wounds-- a graze along his side that hadn't even stopped him moving, and a clean shot to the leg that had knocked him down but not kept him from aiming up and taking two of the thieves off their horses-- and Simon had fixed him up pretty well. But the leg shot had shattered some bone and done something to the nerves that Simon had given up trying to explain, so Jayne had a regrowing thing in his leg, shiny enough that he felt like he was missing out if he didn't sneak a look at it every few minutes.

"Would you stop messing with that?" Mal said. "You're gonna keep it from healing up."

"It looks funny," Jayne said.

"So don't look at it," Mal said, "and you won't know the difference."

Jayne lay back and tried to find a position that would make his leg feel less funny. Mal was sitting at his desk, looking over the gun he'd taken off one of the guys Jayne had killed. It wasn't much for beauty-- nothing more than a hunting rifle retrofitted semi-auto with a compressor clip-- but it'd put holes in people all right. Mal had offered it back to Jayne in the infirmary, but Jayne had told him to keep it. Mal'd had that look on his face where he was pretending he didn't want something he coveted fiercely. It made Jayne want to give Mal anything he might desire. 'Sides, it wasn't like Mal wouldn't let him use it if he asked.

"You did good today," Mal said.

"I got myself shot," Jayne said.

"Happens to the best of us," Mal said. "You took two men down, kept that cargo safe. That's what I pay you for."

"Did the rest of the job go down okay?" Jayne said.

"Yeah," Mal said. "It was one of them friends of Jolene's. Honest businesswoman, didn't want no trouble." Jolene had been spreading the word around to her far-flung associates, getting Serenity work where they hadn't realized there was any. Jayne was proud of himself, having had something to do with that. But Mal already knew and nobody else would have believed it, so there was no sense crowing about it. He was just glad to be eating better, to have picked up a couple new shirts on Beau Monde. And then there was the sweet plunking sound of platinum dropping into the whiskey bottle by the bed.

"She asked after you," Mal said. "Was disappointed she didn't get to meet you. I reckon more's been getting around about us than we move stuff fast and don't ask no questions."

"That all right?" Jayne said.

"Yeah," Mal said. "Yeah." He was taking off his shirt like it was time for bed. It mighta been-- Simon had given Jayne some medicine for the pain, had put him to sleep. Jayne got himself naked and lay back to watch Mal. He still liked doing that. Kinda more, even, now that he knew what was under there. He hadn't realized there was so much to notice about a person's body until he'd spent some afternoons going slow over Mal's. Licking the cloud of freckles on his shoulders and the faint knife scar near his elbow, tracing the soldier's tattoo on his hip.

Mal spooned behind him and turned out the light. "You tired?" Jayne said.

"Thought you'd wanna sleep," Mal said, "what with the gunshot wounds and all."

"Slept all afternoon," Jayne said.

"So you wanna--"

Jayne wondered how long he and Mal were gonna have to be together before Mal realized he pretty much always wanted to. "Wouldn't wanna fuck standing up or nothing, but-- yeah, if you ain't too tired."

Mal was going real gentle, kissing the back of Jayne's neck instead of biting like he usually did. His fingers tangled in the hair on Jayne's chest, light so it should have tickled. Jayne found he didn't mind it, though. Maybe it was the painkillers that made him more sensitive, or being injured had all his nerves on edge. Or nothing had changed, but he liked that Mal was being so careful with him. He couldn't bring himself to discourage that.

Mal was getting hard against him, grinding against his ass. If Mal'd asked before, Jayne woulda shied away from being fucked. But he'd spent a chunk of time finding a position to lie in that didn't make his leg throb, or fill up with pins and needles, and there wasn't nothing else he could do without moving around some.

It would feel good, anyway, and he knew Mal would get off just from being in control, which saved him the trouble of doing much more than lying there. It was hard to turn down coming without working for it. Truth was, it was hard to think of anything Mal could ask him to do that he would refuse, short of leaving and never coming back.

Mal had fingers in Jayne's ass, to get the lube in, but it was also part of Mal's crusade to get Jayne to come like that. With the fingers, Jayne could get real close, so he was pushing back against Mal's hand. Jayne reckoned he just wasn't put together that way. Mal had to have his pointless missions, though.

Jayne was ready for Mal's hand around his cock, but he didn't get that, only Mal fucking him. Getting him so hard he couldn't feel nothing but that. He reached down to give himself some relief, but Mal grabbed his wrist and held it against his side so he couldn't do nothing but ache till Mal had come in him.

Mal pulled back from him, paused to take the skin off but still held Jayne's hand down. When Jayne was starting to think Mal was gonna make him suffer forever, Mal put more lube on his hand and jerked Jayne off.

Mal nipped Jayne's neck, but with affection, one of those things he did when kissing didn't feel right. He climbed over Jayne to get to the sink, brushed his whole body against Jayne's. All that was so natural now. Being around Mal felt more like being alone than like being with other people. And both of them had liked being alone.

Before Mal, Jayne hadn't seen why anybody would want to stay with anybody else, be faithful. Now, he could even see why someone would fight for it. Getting sexed every day of his life was the one thing-- sometimes, entire weeks went by when he didn't have to jerk off once. He reckoned that was one of the things about being two men together though, so not everybody got that.

The sex wasn't even what kept him there. If it was sex and nothing else, he woulda gone home after, like he'd done at the beginning. He stayed more for Mal kissing him hard before climbing back into bed. And especially for Mal holding him, his hands still damp. Mal's arms and the warmth of his body didn't make Jayne leg prickle and itch any less, but they kept him from thinking about it.

What put him to sleep-- what made him sleep so well most nights-- was knowing for certain that Mal would be there when he woke up. That's what a person got from staying. It didn't seem like much most of the time, but when Jayne had been bleeding into the dirt that morning, it was what he'd been thinking of. Keeping himself alive wasn't purely a selfish matter no more. He was the person that Mal looked forward to.

Jayne had been raised to believe that men like them didn't deserve none of this. But he reckoned the choice to hold on to it was what made them deserving. Or maybe they were good enough after all, and it wasn't what they were taught but what they could touch that was real. That was what Jayne had always relied on, anyhow. He could feel Mal's breath in his ear, the rise of Mal's chest against his back, and he knew he hadn't gotten nothing unfairly. He got to keep this. And that was the safest thing in the 'verse to know. A thing to quiet everything around him, to weight his eyes and keep him warm.

 

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