Title: Don’t Leave Me

Challenge: 133, a wish

Words: 989

Disclaimer: It’s all about Joss

Summary: Written for FireflyFriday. Inara makes a wish, and Mal has a not especially good dream about it. Kinda corny in the “It’s a Wonderful Life” way.

Don’t Leave Me

“Well, maybe you shoulda never come here at all, then!” Mal shouted.

“I wish I hadn’t,” Inara said back, voice raised but still poised. Sharp. Mal blinked, feeling almost nauseated immediately. He waited for Inara to flinch and take it back and tell him she didn’t mean it. Instead, she turned around and walked into her shuttle, closing the door sharply behind her. For several seconds, all Mal could do was stare at it. Then he, too, turned around, and headed for his bunk, not bothering to return Kaylee’s cheery hello as he went.

~*~

Mal knew that he wasn’t innocent in all this. He knew that he, too, had wished, several times and out loud, that Inara had never set foot aboard Serenity. While her status as a registered companion did come in handy now and again when he needed docking permits and the like, more often then not in was a complication. Inara, demanding he didn’t take one job offer or another because it interfered with her schedule. Inara, telling him to land on so-called “respectable” worlds he had no mind to land on, so that she could do her job.

So of course sometimes he wished she were gone, that they’d never met. He wished she would leave. Pack her bags and get off his boat, never to return.

But he never imagined that she felt the same way. Never.

Unable to think on it any long, Mal sprawled himself across his bed and fell into a fitful sleep.

~*~

He dreamed of the wish, dreamt that he had never known her.

He dreamed that they landed on Harvest, just as they had that morning, to negotiate the transport of some livestock, pigs, with a fellow named Lenny Harlan. The ship landed. Mal stepped out, Zoe by his side, stretching her stiff wrist. She’s injured it when they were breaking out of a prison in Paridiso some