Back Stories III, Chapter 12
Saturday, January 9, 2010
In the quiet hours of the ferry ride, River finally gets to spend some time alone with Malcolm.
CATEGORY: FICTION TIMES READ: 3615 RATING: 10.0 (G) SERIES: FIREFLY
Chapter 12.
It belongs to Joss and all those business people. I'm just playing.
Links:
, , , BS Book II, BS Book III, Chapter 1. Timing, pairings, and canon blurbs are in my . Many thanks to desertgirl for the beta read.
Jayne sat up, suddenly awake and unsettled in a way he wasn’t used to. It wasn’t the being in a strange place that got to him—he was an old hand at that type of disorientation. After a moment he realized that it was the view that turned his stomach. He didn’t often have his dreams melt away and leave him in the realm of the Black, a far stranger place than any his sleeping mind brought him to.
“Behind glass,” he told himself in rough whisper as he remembered his lodgings. Actually, the scattering of stars and smeared wisps of dust had to be separated from him by a sheet of something much stronger than glass. It had held the air in and the emptiness out for all the years this ferry had been in service. Surely it could be trusted for a bit longer.
Jayne kicked his legs over the side of the bed—a generous word for the thing he’d been sleeping on, considering it wasn’t anything more than a row of padded seats—and rubbed his face. Then he remembered something more and sat up straight, alarmed. But he needn’t have worried that a
Yes, I'll post the next one soon. Can't leave this one hanging for long!
At least she's on the upstep, because otherwise the startled whoa-what-push would probably end even worse.
Yeah, I think we've all come to that conclusion now and we’re not even mind readers.
And go figure, only you could get me to ship Mal and River because this is very sweet; the way you've written her finally pursuing her crush on Mal. But something tells me it’s not going to be what she is hoping for.
I'm looking forward to his reaction on that end note.
There might be a grain of truth in that assessment, but it is far from the only thing Mal feels. We know he's conflicted, and this is compounded by the fact that he has no idea what is going on. I think River is expanding and embellishing this one tiny grain to make a justification for what she wants and what she does.
I mean, River is trying to tell herself here that after spending a day together and being able to talk and laugh, and that she is "the only person who put him at ease this entire leg of the trip" that this is love. You'll notice that even by her own definition, River makes Mal uncomfortable by pressing him about Inara later.
Remember, this is from the perception of a not quite sane teenage girl who thinks she's in love. She's the very definition of an unreliable narrator.
Though it may still be a PART of the series Inara's secret, because the leaked secret doesn't explain why she's never gone back to Sihnon.
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