taxonomites | 008: [location: serenity] & [accidental visual]

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008: [location: serenity] & [accidental visual]

Here is Mal, thankfully not smashing things in a rage this time around, but instead absorbed in a much more sedate activity. Said activity involves the kitchen table on board Serenity, and a frankly bizarre array of ingredients spread out across it, with a mixing jug in the middle. He appears to be doing something ungodly involving high protein milk bars, oatmeal, sarsparilla, root beer, chocolate milk and... bourbon. An educated viewer might recognize some of these as the formula for making Mudder's Milk, the local drink of Canton. An uneducated viewer might just think he has malfunctioning taste buds.

In any case, once he's done mixing the suspect concoction, he raises the jug to his mouth and takes a deep glug, before promptly spitting a large quantity of it back out again, and wiping his lips with quite evident revulsion.

"Well, if that ain't just the most disgustin' thing I ever had in my mouth."

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"Poor Mal," she laughs, sinking gracefully into one of the seats. She pulls the one next to her out, in case he had some silly idea about sitting across the table or something.

"Bourbon was, believe it or not, my drink of choice throughout the latter years of my companion training," Inara tells him, resting her elbow on the table and leaning her chin in her hand. "There's a delicious cocktail, extremely old fashioned, called a Manhattan. Bourbon, red vermouth, a dash of bitters and a little cocktail cherry."

A gentleman at one of her pre-debut parties had introduced Inara to them and she'd rather fallen in love with the beverage, especially upon being assured that it wasn't a silly, girly sort of a cocktail. Inara had had aspirations of being something of a broad as a young woman. She laughs ruefully at the memory. "I drank a fair number of those."

The chair pulling out was probably a good move, considering he's just stupid enough to consider doing something like that. In any case, he takes a seat next to her in the proffered chair (less gracefully, it should be noted), and sets the glasses down on the table.

"Is that so?" He asks, with an intrigued raised eyebrow, after listening to her anecdote. He sets about pouring the bourbon as he continues. "I wouldn'tve conjured that the training houses would allow much in the way of drinking-- alcohol not bein' too conducive to poise and decorum and such."

"There are a certain number of sanctioned parties that all young would-be companions attend before we're fully trained," she tells him. "Sort of like a meet-and-greet, getting to know the local elites, that sort of thing." Inara watches him pour the liquor with a thoughtful expression -- he's got a generous hand, she notes. Not that that's a bad thing.

"And then there were a certain number of... non-sanctioned parties." Her lips curved impishly at the admission, and she took one of the glasses. "Ganbei," she toasted him, taking a sip.

"Ganbei." He returned, taking a sip of his own. Now that Inara had explained, it didn't much surprise him that part of the Companion training involved parties, given the amount of socializing she was required to do, attending high-class balls and the like. The youthful rebellion, however, well. He gave her something of an amused look.

"Inara, do you mean to say you weren't always the very model of respectability?"

Inara laughs again, this time a full-throated sound the likes of which he's likely never heard from her. Part of Companion training was learning to put others at ease so that they might offer up their secrets and stories. Confession, she'd always been taught, was good for the soul. And so it seemed.

"If I were ever truly and thoroughly respectable, would I have found my way onto a pirate ship?" She cocks an eyebrow teasingly at him. "Let alone feel at home here? ... You'd despise some of the girls I grew up with. All the Companion training onto a blank slate. Nothing beneath the layers of frou-frou."

Mal has heard Inara laugh genuinely before, generally when Shepherd Book would tell his unfailingly hilarious monastic tales-- but the sound is so rare that it's all the more pleasing to hear, especially when he's the cause of it.

"While I object strongly to the term 'pirate', I take your point." He chuckles, privately delighted to hear her say she feels at home on his ship, though he won't acknowledge it out loud.

"...and I don't doubt it. Though presumably there was something beneath the layers. Ridiculously complicated undergarments, for example."

Well they are discussing Companions, after all. It wouldn't be right if he didn't make some kind of risqué comment.

"That depends on the Companion," Inara quips.

It's rare for her to let her guard down quite like this and she knows it, but something in her has relaxed a little in this strange place. There's no one to police her behavior, no one to ensure she's appropriate -- it's very, very odd.

But it's pleasant.

"Or, really, I suppose, the client. It varies a lot according to whatever is desired of us."

He would agree on the pleasantness, certainly. Perhaps the odd, too, because he's grown accustomed to her censuring glares and the boundaries of 'no-go' subjects-- ones he'd (mostly) learnt to respect. Except for when she called him 'petty', in any case.

"...and I assume some clients are more 'unconventional' than others." He observes wryly, taking another sip of his drink.

"You know what?" Inara decides, "let's talk about something else. If we keep on discussing the Guild, this is going to go downhill. You'll call me a whore or I'll clam up and we'll end up glaring and stalking off in opposite directions, and that--"

Cutting herself off abruptly, she looks away from him, taking in the pale yellow kitchen, the flowers Kaylee painted on the wall. Her voice is softer when she finds it again. "Everything is so different here. The borderlines are wavering and I don't even know how everything works yet. I--"

I need one steady thing here and right now that's you. I'm scared and confused and frightened and elated and I've never lived without the Guild constantly being a factor, she thinks, but finding the words is so very difficult. Inara drains her glass and pours herself another.

"I had no intentions of callin' you a whore." Mal states, firmly-- though in all honesty, he doesn't object to the change of subject. No matter how mature he tried to be about Inara's profession, he could never really divorce himself from his feelings, could never really stop himself from being jealous of every single one of the rich bastards who didn't think of her as anything other than a service or a pretty bauble to wear on their arm-- who weren't fit to talk to her, let alone touch her. He doesn't want to be thinking those bitter thoughts right now. "And I don't 'stalk'." He adds, a little less firmly, in an effort to take the edge off.

He watches her make short work of the bourbon, silent for a moment as he wrestles internally over whether he should just do what he'd like to, which is hug her. Eventually he settles for resting his hand gently on her arm.

"I know. 'Nara, I've been here for months and I still got no gorram clue what I'm doing. No Alliance, no work, no flyin' wherever the winds blow... I'm just as lost as you are."

He hasn't admitted that to anyone. It's almost a relief to say it out loud.

Inara twists her arm just so, sliding his hand until it clasps her own. His hands are completely unlike any other man she's ever touched -- he has gun callouses and rough patches and dirt under his fingernails. They're, well, his description would be 'honest' hands. They're not pampered, smooth and white, capped off with manicured nails. For a moment, she stares, and wonders what those rough hands would feel like on her skin...

And then she looks up to acknowledge his confession.

"We'll have to figure it out among ourselves." She leans in a little closer, affectionate, unconscious of the fact she's doing it -- that, in and of itself is rare. "I don't imagine anyone else knows any better, either, and -- and all the rules are different, aren't they?"

That's the second time in not very many days that they've held hands-- if she isn't careful, he might just get used to it. Though, no, he wouldn't-- he probably wouldn't ever get used to Inara's uncanny ability to fog up his usually so pragmatic mind.

He leans in closer too, a sort of unconscious reciprication, and replies, with a little bit of a smile. "Seems to me that there aren't any."

"What does that even mean for people like us, Mal?" she asks, her eyes searching his for answers that aren't there. "We've lived our lives defined and confined by forces so much bigger than we are. Shaped and moulded by what we obey and what we defy."

Inara's thinking out loud -- she's not done that in as long as she can remember -- and she doesn't expect him to have answers for her any more than she has answers for him. As she leans closer, she releases his hand, the fingertips of both hands tracing the lines of his suspenders, not looking away from his gaze.

"Who are we when we don't have that? Who are we when we're alone and there's no one to see, to judge, to disapprove?"

Inara's thinking out loud makes a great deal of sense-- even if that sense happens to be questions that simply don't have an answer. His eyes don't leave hers as he listens, and he lifts his now-free hand to gently brush a lock of her hair with his fingers.

"Well, I ain't rightly sure, but... I'd venture that we're just ourselves." He answers, quietly. They're so close together at this point that greater volume really isn't necessary-- so close that he'd be nervous if he could think at all. He's full of doubt and confusion about how Inara feels about him, but he's also tired of wasting chances and running away, of regrets. Maybe it's time to take a risk-- and in the spirit of that resolution, he leans in that tiny bit more to close the distance between them, and kisses her softly.

"But who are we without--" Her further questions are silenced by the press of his mouth to her own.

Really, she should have seen that coming. On some level, she did see that coming, but chose to not consciously pay attention to it so to avoid feeling like she ought to get to her feet and put some distance between them.

He scares her sometimes.

He's not interested in the layers, in the masks, the glamor, the pretense. He doesn't look at her and see a lovely way to spend a few hours. Mal's not the sort of man who thinks of her the way he's supposed to, the way her training should urge him to. When he looks at her, Inara thinks that sometimes, he sees into the very core of who she is. That he sees things she's not even sure how to see in herself anymore.

He scares her deeply.

She doesn't pull away. Her hands slide up his chest to cup the back of his neck tenderly and she returns his kiss warmly. This shouldn't be happening, but it is. She's scaring herself by how much she wants it.

Mal isn't even sure it is happening at all. He's had enough dreams that went more or less exactly this way to believe it perfectly feasible that this is just another one. Maybe the mudder's milk knocked him out, and this is all some kind of hallucination? There doesn't seem to be any other logical explanation for why Inara wouldn't have pushed him away by now, or hell-- even slapped him, as opposed to kissing him back, like she wants this just as much as he does.

He can't remember exactly when he fell in love with her, but it was a very long time ago. He's scared too, though not for the same reasons. What scares him is the thought that any second he'll wake up and she-- this amazing woman-- will realize she's kissing Malcolm Reynolds and pull away, that she'll regret it, and reject him. He puts his arms around her and draws her closer as if to combat this fear, his heart pumping, it seemed, almost audibly.

She moves closer, perching on the edge of her seat, all but in his lap, and lets the kiss continue far, far beyond the point at which she should have stopped it. Because truly, she's been in love with him, too, for far longer than she has consciously allowed herself to think about it.

Inara moves a little closer yet, cups his face in her hands and deepens the kiss, because, really, she doesn't know if she's brave enough to ever let this happen again and, in case she isn't, she wants to know what he tastes like.

When Inara's lips part to let him in, he kisses her heatedly- passionately, like a lover, where before he'd been soft, careful. In truth, he probably tastes a little bit like the bourbon that was so recently on his tongue, though he's not even remotely close to inebriated- there's no haze of alcohol to dull the experience.

After a long moment he pulls away just a fraction, feeling like he needs to say something, to express somehow his feelings. "Inara--" He begins, breathlessly, though as it turns out he's at a loss for words- or rather he has too many words, and no idea what order to put them in.

"Shhh," Inara urges softly, pressing her fingers to his lips to silence those words, regardless of the order he may or may not ultimately decide to put them in. The look in his eyes, so tender and ardent, makes her panic. He shouldn't --

That is, they -- she -- should have known better than to --

She doesn't have the excuse of the alcohol going to her head. If anything, it's the fact she's missed him and Serenity terribly. Or the confusion and fear she feels in this strange new place. Or--

Or the simple, dangerous fact of her feelings for him.

"Shhh," she urges, pressing another sweet, brief kiss to his lips. (He has a beautiful mouth.) "You don't need to say a word."

Mal has never been one for complications. He'd told Wash as much-- on-ship relationships cause complications, and those can never lead to any good. What just happened with Inara definitely counts as a complication... there are so many questions to be asked; difficult questions like 'what does this mean?' and 'what do we do now?', amongst infinite others.

In spite of all of this, he can't feel anything other than glad. To know that, in some measure, she feels for him- and to have her here with him after losing her twice, after so much longing... well, there's no regret to be found in that at all, complications or no.

"Well, that's a kindness." He says, the hint of a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes as he looks at her (she has a beautiful everything), and lifts a hand to gently brush his thumb along the soft line of her jaw. "Because I'm fairly certain anythin' I say right now would be fèihuà*, anyhow."

*[nonsense]

Inara has the urge, cruel though it might be, to simply rise from her seat, thank him for the drink and slink off back to her shuttle to figure out what in the seven hells possessed her to kiss him back.

But then he smiles, and touches her, and she's lost again.

"I don't know what either of us could say that wouldn't be." She lets her eyes fall shut again at his touch. Her heart is just pounding -- she feels deeply ambivalent, torn between gladness and fear.

When Inara closes her eyes, he hesitates just a moment, then presses another brief, soft kiss to her lips. He knows her well enough to know that this must be scary for her-- after all, the last time they got anywhere near this close, she told him she was leaving Serenity. Fleeing isn't an option here in Taxon of course, but he knows that the urge to run away from... what, he's not exactly sure, maybe from somehow compromising herself? From being vulnerable? Allowing her feelings to pierce through the code she's lived by for so long, the rules, the restraint? He knows that urge must be there, and doesn't want to pressure her, so he draws back a little, reluctantly.

"Seein' as how we're not real conversational at the minute, maybe you'd like me to... leave you some time alone?"

"Have I frightened you?" Inara asks, opening her eyes slowly to look at him. She tilts her head a little to the side, considering this option... and realises that he's being kind. And that -- that is quite a relief. To not have to pretend, to run.

"Who are you and what have you done with Malcolm Reynolds?" she whispers, huffing the softest not-quite laugh.

"You're many things, Inara-- scary happens to not be one of 'em," he smiles at her fondly, then lets out a tension-relieving sigh. Her question provokes some amused head-shaking, as he pinches the bridge of his nose. He'd have to make more of an effort to hide his 'actually quite a decent man' interior behind more layers of gruff and dour in future.

"I honestly don't know, but if you see him, could you point him in my direction?"

He'd better not make more of an effort to hide his 'actually quite a decent man' interior behind more layers of gruff and dour. Those are his least appealing traits.

Inara offers him her hand, reaching for his own, palm-down. "I will surely do that," she promises.

008: [location: serenity] & [accidental visual]

Re: [location: Serenity]

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