Title : These are the Maybes

Disclaimer : Firefly does not belong to me.

Keywords : Inara, Inara/Mal, Inara/Other

Word Count : 735

Rating : PG

Written for ff_friday, Challenge: #130 “Old Age”

I.

Mal ages faster than she does, but it suits him—gives him a refined, respectable look. Wrinkles grow around his mouth and eyes, but it makes him softer, chinking away at the roughened look he wore as the Captain of Serenity. She doesn’t tell him any of those things, of course, because Mal likes to pretend that he’s still the hardened war hero inside and out.

The first time she finds a gray hair, she almost has herself a good cry. Back on Sihnon, there would have been any number of products to return her youth. Here, on the Rim, such things are rare, and nearly impossible to afford.

Mal laughs, but she doesn’t think it’s funny, and she’s all ready to start one of their patented arguments (not the kind that leads to the ripping off of clothes, but the other kind—the slam-the-door-in-your-face kind), but he grabs her from behind, kisses the back of her neck, and swaggers away.

After all, it is why she’s kept him all these years—the first man to love her for going gray. It’s enough to make her smile.

II.

She finally retires as a Companion in her mid-forties. A little soon, maybe, but nothing has been quite right since she left Serenity (that second time, after the Miranda incident). Soon after, she finds she’s the one aching for companionship, and it grows harder and harder to believe that she once had love—and ran from it.

She continues working for the Guild, becoming vital to the administration, and respected as a teacher and mentor. She takes on lovers, sometimes seeing more than one man at a time. They are respected men of society, men with political connections, with status to rival her own. She does not love any of them, but she also knows that love is not necessary to help fill the loneliness.

She is content.

III.

She finds he