Mal was acting odd.

River had noticed it but when she’d asked the others they hadn’t seen anything differently and told her she was just being over-protective. They’d just lived through Miranda and were all a little jumpy.

Well, most of them had lived through Miranda. They were still mourning the loss of Sheppard Book and their friends in Haven and Mr. Universe. And Wash would have died from a Reaver Harpoon if River hadn’t seen it happening in a vision and hadn’t pulled him out of the pilot’s seat seconds before the harpoon went flying through the visor.

But River knew that she wasn’t just being over-protective. Ever since Miranda she’d been fine…well…not fine, but better, she was more lucid, the truth that’d fried her brain wasn’t her truth anymore, she shared the burden with her family on Serenity, and while the effects of what had been done to her would always keep her from being ‘normal’ she’d stopped letting that bother her—as has the rest of the crew.

Bending over the oven, looking deep within at the cake she’d been baking, it happened to her once again. Heat so strong it left the psychic’s skin pink trailed up her legs to her inner thigh and brushed past her most secret of places, eliciting a soft moan from her which she tried to stifle by biting her bottom lip.

The invisible heat trailed up the back of River’s thighs, lingering on her bottom like a starved caress. She could feel invisible fingers digging into her flesh, kneading her softly yet urgently with a desire so strong it left her breathless.

And she couldn’t silence the moan of pleasure that escaped her parted lips at the feeling it provoked and at the heat pooling at the junction of her thighs.

“You ‘kay, lil’ Albatross?”

River jolted and looked around, face red when she noticed the captain leaning in the doorway, apparently watching her indifferently.

She didn’t understand it. He’d learnt to block his mind to her reading abilities----of which she was glad because one less person’s thoughts would keep her calmer----but