MAKE ME A STONE: Chapter 2. And who exactly could fix you?

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Not really. Alienation, more like.

Warning: It's slashy. It's gory.

Again many thanks to Wedjateye for beta-ing.

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AND WHO EXACTLY COULD FIX YOU?

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Mal's first thought on waking is of the job on Sulis. How he's gotta deal with that wang ba dan Jonas Marriott again when he'd rather be cutting the hundan's treacherous throat. Mal ain't the forgiving type. Nor the forgetting type neither. What that bastard did – what he stood by and let others do – during the war, well suffice it to say, there'll be a reckoning. One day. When Mal don't need the work he puts Serenity's way.

Yesu tamade, Mal hates compromise. And every gorram day of his life is full of it. Full of doing what he has to do. Some days he'd rather not get up at all.

He turns over, buries his face in his pillow, trying to blot the 'verse out for a few merciful minutes more.

It don't work. Cuz his pillow smells of Simon Tam. How in the good gorram can that be when the boy's always so ruttin' clean? And yet it does. Smells of something dark, hot - sweet with an edge of bitter. Familiar somehow.

Gou shi.

Mal flings the pillow aside and drags himself out of bed.

As he waits for his sink to fill, he glances at his reflection in the mirror above it, then thinks he maybe oughta take a closer look. At his neck, his chest. But there's nothing there that shouldn't be. No bite marks, no scratches. Nope, not marked at all.

He looks up again, catches his own eye and sees something in it he wishes weren't. Cursing himself for being all manner of stupid, he sets about washing, taking extra care over the task. Then he strips the covers from his pillows and the sheets from his bed and bundles them into the old packing case that serves as his laundry basket.

There. Any evidence that there mighta been anything between him and Simon other than what's proper between a captain a