Worlds Collide: Not everything that rises will converge

By Marazion

Disclaimed: I wish these characters were mine, but since they’re Joss’… That’s good too!

Requesty: Feedback is soooooperwelcome. Feed me back, please.

Spoilproof: Through the Big Damn Movie, but mainly that and Heart of Gold, Objects in Space

Ship: Mal/Inara

~~~~~~~~~

When Mal comes upon Inara on his way back down from River’s bridge, (and there’s nothing funny about that) he knows immediately that she was coming to speak with him. Knowing what she is planning is terrible, which makes him to remember the savage downturn of her pretty mouth as she said “I’m leaving," and the tears in her eyes when she turned away. Worst of all, though, is the sure and crystalline knowledge that Inara loves him. That was when he finally figured it out.

For these two, though, there will only ever be one kiss, and that is long past. Inara's leaving again.

She ducks her head down, the better to avoid his eyes, asking for the time of the next morning’s landing on Shadow. Do they both know that it is a pretext? He thinks that she must. It’s an old game they played together, back before they had to go and change the world.

The Operative was right about one thing. This is worse, much worse, than he thought it would be.

“Should be on the ground early in the mornin’, my mama’s ranch, muh- my ranch, ain’t too far a flight in the shuttle to Plymouth City. If you’ve got appointments thereabouts, you could be to your hon’rable host just in time for an early lunch. I can have River bring the shuttle back remote.”

He’s sick in his guts, because he is sure now that he is going to let her go.

He will never see that he makes her feel like a wild girl. She believes in her heart that in the court where Mal Reynolds is the judge, Inara Serra wears the red word Whore.

It makes no matter though, because for Inara Serra, all the Companion training that he hates and fears, that work in his heart and make his cruel words come out, it just fails and wanes, diminishes before the sheer liveliness of him. All the Companion training, which she knows even better now after all her long, hiding months of teaching those words and ways and charms, the spells, to her flock of beautiful girls…

She thinks sometimes that if she were to lay her hands on his fine white skin, (and in her mind she sees her hands on his chest) that it would vibrate or thrum with the extra fizz right in the molecules of him.

She can’t focus herself properly when he is looking at her with his very deep blue eyes. It reminds her of something that sweet Kaylee said when they stood in the cargo bay, in a ring around the simpering little snake, Saffron, or more vulgar yet, Yolanda. “He makes everybody cry. He’s like a monster…”

She thinks, viciously, that it is true.

Mal wonders why she studies the floor as he offers her the shuttle to bear her away. After tomorrow, he may never see her again, and all he wants in all the spinnin’ worlds is to look at her, and look at her, until he has enough to hold him forever. If he could wrap his arms around her - they are strong – perhaps he could hold her here forever.

But she is getting ready to run. Not even in his quietest ship-night Hell can Mal bring himself to believe in a probability that might cross their paths any more in his life. After all, the first time she left, she was running away from Nandi’s lifeless face, from the animal she saw in Mal that afternoon, before he turned and loped off to bring back the hundon who killed her teacher, her friend, his lover of one night. But this… this is a decision. He can smell its cold on her.

Inara’s worst memory of the day when Nandi died is the shame that burned through her tears over her friend’s corpse. They couldn't rival those she cried in her room earlier, after meeting Mal outside her that room at the Heart of Gold. She spares a moment to wonder that given some context, Mal’s wit would appreciate an irony in that name, after a spaceship in an ancient novel with an engine powered by improbable events, far from the Earth-that-Was.

Mal sees the secret smile at this, the bitterness and the ashes in her eyes. His heart goes cold and bare as the Black. His rawboned face juts forward, and he barks, too sharply, “So do you want the ride or not? We don’t want you missin’ any more o the fun.”

She has been waiting for the next turn in the dance. Now she raises her head, looks at him, draws back her shoulders and volleys back the hurting words.

“As a matter of fact, I am looking forward to an appointment in Plymouth for the week until my transport is due. It was the nearest vessel in the quadrant that House Madrassa approved to bring me home.”

Her barbs find their mark, as she knew they would, and drag down his smirk into a kind of sneer.

This is not my home. Mal, this could never be my home.

It works too well, always.

She won’t tell him that the assignment she has taken is as the Head Priestess, The Vessel of the Lotus Goddess, at her Companion Training House, Madrassa. Somehow, this strange obsession that has led her on her own walk across the worlds, and the things that have happened this year have convinced the Guild that she is one of the few of each generation to be named a Light of the Guild. What they sense in her that has brought them to this choice, beyond her deceptive simplicity, her elegance, her keen coldness and terrible banked heat, is what she has learned from living a year with this man.

His love is like the gravity that keeps the moons in their orbit of Mankind’s second star.

Such love might have the to power even to unite a tradition as antiquated and ceremonious as the Guild, to propel it into the future and imbue it with, well, Light.

None of this matters to Inara (and that is just as well), because she recognizes the elevation for what it is: her last chance. The call of the Guild is the only thing that could have broken the spell of the last month on silent Serenity as she surfed a plasma wave across the sky far out on the rim. Serenity, mourning Wash, and remembering prayers, ‘Words,’ spoken over the indignity of Book’s corpse.

That, and the word that came in a black wave from an unseen and unsuspected sister of Mal’s. She was calling from the Reynolds ranch, Black Moon, to give the news that Mal’s mother (and there a thought!) has passed. This sister, Starla(such an unlikely name!) wants Mal home to pay his respects, to do for the ranch and the girls, and make the hard, bad decisions that would come with the death of Zadie Reynolds. The arrival of this wave, on cat-feet just behind the wave from the Council of Lights bearing their offer, (How did they know? How did they know to wait until the weakest moment?) has the feel of a lifesaver, and so Inara reaches for it, takes it.

It’s the sign she has been waiting for, and also the only leavening she knows for the density of what Malcolm Reynolds wants from her. Mal's love is like the tide. It tears down the pretty houses, doesn’t understand mercy, sees only the Light and the Black, and nothing in between. His love leaves Inara in the ruins.

She steels herself. Looking up at the tender-and-hard face of the only man she can ever love, she steps outside the moment, and lets the pain wash through her and past her, and where it has passed, she finds her strength again. (The Guild’s bright eyes see well. She has a kind of genius for this.) Her color improves and her eyes dilate, her shoulders roll back. Let him kill her now, with the words he knows she can't stand to hear from his mouth.

To Mal, this flush of self-possession is the axe that cuts off the blood-poisoned limb. She will be saved without him, and safe. And without her, he will finally surrender the Battle of Serenity.

At the end of the catwalk over the cargo bay, River stands with her head cocked. They both know that she is there, and it is part of River’s household magic that they are not thrown by her sudden appearance at this instant so heavy with their eternal love and war.

River sees worlds, sees how they overlap like soap bubbles. Connecting rainbows hint at surface tensions, tensions which are local eddies in the everlasting verses of the Universe.

Her head is cocked because here are two worlds at once, here they are and she is hearing them both again, over the rushing sound of quantum particles meeting themselves in the slip and pop pop popping like bubbles.

It sounds like waves. Like the tide going out, and out and out.

Inara’s hands say “I can take it. I’m a big girl.”

Mal’s eyes say “None of it means a damned thing.”

River wants to tell them that she heard a world here once where they beheld a child of their own, a boy, and lived sweet with their family on Mal’s mama’s land, where his hand cupped her cheek, where she grew familiar with his sleeping shoulders and his waking.

But instead, River listens to the tide.