ALIVE

Her perfect breasts were a bare five inches from his face, moving with the undulations of her torso. He couldn’t remember the number of times he had wondered what they would feel like, taste like, and now he knew the answer to both. Her thighs clamped his sides in a vice-like grip and the heat of her near to sent him into delirium.

The only thing that held him back was the sound of her weeping.

But then, he was weeping too, so it hardly made a difference.

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He was drunk when she found him, as he had been for months, crouched over a bottle of cloudy rotgut in a dive on Persephone. Inara was like some sort of exotic flower on a shit heap when she walked in. He swore at her and tried to hit her when she tapped his shoulder and spoke his name. Her face, even through his fog, stopped him from trying again. To his shame, he took another swig from his bottle, then threw his arms around her and began to cry, noisily and drunkenly, on her slim shoulder.

She pushed him back into his seat and glanced around.

“Jayne! Hush! Sssh, now, come on. Quietly!”

Eventually she had shushed him enough that he stopped crying and snorted. She wrinkled her nose and her brow creased when she looked at him again.

“I heard you tried to contact me yesterday,” she whispered. “I knew I’d find you here.” He could barely hear her. “What happened? Where’s Mal? Is Serenity docked here?”

“Serenity’s dead,” he slurred, not looking at her. “Serenity’s dead. I killed her, ‘Nara. She… Serenity’s dead.”

He repeated it a few more times under his breath while he waited for the room to start spinning again. He felt like he wanted to throw up and pass out again, but he couldn’t tell whether it was because of the alcohol or because of her presence and the aching despair in his gut that it caused.

“What happened?” She shook him, her voice becoming shrill. ”Jayne! Tell me what you are talking about!”

She looked around the room at the sudden drop in ambient noise. The bartender was ex