Merry Christmas the second
Title: Scenes from a Space Ship
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Castle/Firefly
Pairing: Beckett/Mal
Gift for: rocketgirl2
Beta'd by: raapsteeltje
Happy Belated Christmas, love! <3 You know I had to exercise my decaying fic muscles for this so I apologize. Also, this is kind of a sequel to that fic I wrote Meo once except it doesn't really have to be. P.S. it has no plot it's just random scenes, and there's not really smut to make up for it. But here it is!
I.
“It gets easier.”
Beckett looked up, but Mal wasn’t looking at her. He was focused on stirring his tea-- horrible, cheap stuff with sugar that wasn’t really sugar and milk that wasn’t really milk.
“What does?”
He tapped his spoon lightly against the edge of the coffee cup to shake off the excess liquid. “Being on the run. I know that you ain’t got any of that ‘righteous indignation’ that Zoe and I carry, and you ain’t as morally corrupt as Jayne, and no normal person is half as cheerful as Kaylee but... This being on the run thing? It gets better.”
It took Kate a few seconds to realize that he was trying to comfort her. She had been on Mal’s ship for almost three months, but the man was so difficult to understand. Beckett had always considered herself a smart woman, sharper than most men and able to render the best of them speechless with the right words in the right voice. People, Beckett knew, were not difficult to understand if you examined them long enough. They can do terrible and wonderful things, but in the end they were usually just fundamentally people: selfish, loving, and easy to predict if you knew what they cared about, what they wanted.
Mal, though, Mal was difficult. There wasn’t much of a pattern to follow. What did he care about? His crew. He loved them, and you could be sure that he’d defend them to the death. But at times it wasn’t even clear whether he liked having them around.
What did he want? Beckett was never sure. Freedom, maybe. Safety, not so much. He held life in low regard. And really, what else was there?
“You get used to it, is what I’m saying,” Mal continued. “I know you’re used to being able to tell good from bad, to knowing who to trust. At first this sort of living makes you feel unstable, shaky, but you’ll get used to it.”
Beckett nodded. “Yeah, thanks.”
“You just looked sad, is all,” he said, still refusing to meet her eyes.
Beckett smiled. “You’re right, it may not end up being all that bad.”
Mal laughed. “Who knows? You might even have fun!”
II.
“Does this sort of thing happen a lot?” Beckett yelled over to Zoe, who gave her a tight smile. There was the ping of a bullet against metal, and shots whizzed by as the sound of guns going off bounced throughout the hanger.
“More often than we’d like it to,” Zoe answered, “though sometimes I think the Captain can’t get enough.”
Staying low, Beckett peaked over the crate she was situated behind and shot twice, taking out two men, who vanished out of her line of vision with a startled cry.
“Nice,” Zoe mouthed.
Beckett grinned and scanned their surroundings. There were twelve guards left between them and Serenity. Alone there was no way they’d make it-- Zoe was a good shot but there were simply too many men. The others should be--
“WOOOHOOOOOO!”
“And there’s Mal, right on time,” Zoe said.
The mule burst through the doors, accompanied by a shower of machine gun blast.
Beckett winced as she saw one guard fall. His face twisted as the bullets entered him, his shoulder pushed backwards by the force.
She’s been-- or she had been a detective for years. But dealing with dead bodies was different from watching it happened.
She wondered if it got easier. From the set of Zoe’s lips and the grim look as Mal washed the blood off his hands after every fight she guessed that it never did. That was probably good.
“Gan mang!” Mal shouted, gesturing for them to get on.
Beckett hoisted herself onto the mule, and Jayne pulled Zoe up.
“Have fun?” Mal asked with a smile as they zoomed into Serenity’s opening doors.
“Does a job ever go right?”
“What do you mean? This went right! We got the money, didn’t we?”
“But--”
“Leave it,” Zoe advised. “I think if it went smooth he’d go crazy.”
“Wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” Mal agreed.
“Shen sheng de gao wan, what did I get myself into?” Beckett asked. “I used to be one of the good ones, you know.”
Mal laughed. “Those days are long past. You’re wu tou wu nao like the rest of us, detective. Now let’s go and see if Kaylee has supper ready. I hope you’re craving protein!”
III.
“You’re being stupid.”
Beckett had situated herself on the counter of the kitchen, ankles crossed, as she stared down the Captain, who was determinately not looking at his skeptical crewmate, and instead focused his attention on the array of weapons laid out on the table. With great care he wiped down his smallest gun and placed it tenderly next to the rest.
“You’re being really stupid.”
“Yer telling me,” Mal said with a grin that tightened at the edges.
Beckett’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the counter. “Why? You don’t have to go alone. You shouldn’t go alone. You’d have a chance if you brought someone with you.”
“Because if I go he may let the rest of you be,” Mal answered.
Beckett groaned. “Oh, don’t you start with me. I know Niska. I have hunted Niska. His concern is with the entire crew, and he won’t stop until every person on this ship is dead. You know it. They know it. So why you’re acting like a da chong wu dan fool is a mystery to all of us.”
“So you’re speaking on behalf of the crew?”
“I’m speaking on behalf of common sense, Mal,” she answered.
He sighed and turned in his chair to face her. “Listen, if I surrender I might be able to take him out. But it’s dangerous. There’s no sense losing eight if you only have to lose one. It’s basic strategy.”
“But there’s more chance that-”
“I’m responsible for my crew and I’m not bringing them with me.”
Beckett rolled her eyes. “You’re being stupid.” She slid off the counter and stepped towards the table.
“We’ve covered this already.”
“You know I’m coming with you, right?”
Mal opened his mouth to protest, but then met Beckett’s steely eyes and seemed to think better of it.
“After all, I’m still technically a prisoner, not crew. You can afford to lose a prisoner.”
“Why?” Mal asked.
Beckett grabbed a gun, spinning it into the holster at her belt. She shrugged. ”Don’t know. I don’t even like you that much.”
“Ben dan Core folk.”
Hesitantly, Beckett smiled.
IV.
“This is ridiculous. This is reckless. Mal, you’re going to get us all killed!”
Mal turned from the wheel to look at Beckett with a frown. “This is the only way to get paid, ain’t it?”
“So you’re going to bi se yan jing zhuo ma que like a fool in order to avoid an Alliance toll booth? You’re seriously going to take this ship through Reaver territory to avoid paying a slight fee to the Alliance.”
“It’s not the fee to the Alliance I’m worried about. It’s the goods we stole from the Alliance that I see as problematic.”
“Mal-”
He stood up, moving forward so they were almost nose-to-nose. “You don’t tell me how to run my ship.”
“But-”
“You ain’t crew,” He told her, his chest muscles flexing. “You ain’t one of us. Even if you were you couldn’t tell me how to run my ship. You’re just a little lost core-girl who got stuck with us when her little illusions were shattered. So don’t be telling me what I can and can’t do.”
Beckett huffed, turned, and walked swiftly out of the room, almost running into a laughing Zoe.
“What?” Beckett asked.
“Nothing,” Zoe said, “It’s just-- I think he likes you.”
V.
“There’s no way you can make the shot.”
This is how it worked. Beckett was competitive by nature, and Mal could never admit he was scared of some tian di wu yong core-girl (even though he knew that she really wasn’t one, not anymore), and so when a job was done and the whiskey was flowing, they would find something to bicker about.
Mal held the dart with his right hand and and closed one eye.
“Maybe you couldn’t,” he said, ignoring the fact that in the last couple of games she had, “but I am a superior species of dart thrower.”
He had lost the best two out of three, the best three out of five, the best six out of ten, and so on and so on.
Beckett had lost count of both the number of games they had played and the number of drinks she had consumed. Kaylee and Simon had left hours ago, giggling and touching as they went. Zoe had stayed home. Jayne was half passed out on the table, to the clear disappointment of the woman whose drinks he had been buying all night. River was in deep conversation with a man who Beckett was fairly certain was both homeless and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The two seemed to be understanding each other perfectly.
Mal missed. In fact, he didn’t even hit the dart board. He tossed the dart and it landed a few feet in front of him. He glared at it, and then tilted slightly to the right, catching himself right before he fell over.
“I win,” he told her.
She giggled. “No you don’t. I always win.”
He blinked as if trying to stabilize the world around him. “Yes, I suppose you do.” He fell backwards into his seat. “Would it kill you to let me win once and a while.”
Beckett nudged his leg with her foot. “Yes,” she said.
“Thanks for staying on my ship,” he slurred.
Kate tilted her head and smiled. “You’re welcome,” she said.
As they sat there, grinning sloppily at each other, Beckett thought that maybe this was what happiness was.
(Though she would retract that in the morning, as her head hammered and she downed cup after cup of coffee that tasted like toilet water and refused to meet the captain’s eyes.)
VI.
“Don’t you have a doctor for this sort of thing?” Kate asked, wincing as Mal finished the final stitch.
“Nah, we don’t wake up the doctor for the little stuff,” he answered, examining his handiwork with a critical eye.
“Where on earth did you learn to put in stitches?”
Mal grimaced. “In the war the infirmary tents weren’t always accessible. We had to learn to do the simple stuff ourselves. Lost a few men to infected wounds, should’ve been able to save them.”
Mal’s fingers brushed against her arm, touching the spot near her shoulder where a flying knife had struck her in the brawl. The skin was tender and bruised, but his callused fingers were gentle as he ensured that the wound would stay bound. His hand trailed down, below the cut, lingering on the inside of her wrist before he dropped it entirely, bringing his arms stiffly to his side.
Beckett wanted to ask him something-- about the war, and why he fought in it. About the people he lost. She didn’t know where to start.
“Zoe and I were the only ones to survive in our battalion,” Mal said, answering the unasked, “It wasn’t so much a war as it was a massacre, though we fought hard.”
Beckett didn’t say, “I’m sorry”, because she knew it wouldn’t help. She just nodded.
“It was better, though. To have fought and died, I think, than to have surrendered.”
“Life under the Alliance is better than no life at all, isn’t it?” Beckett asked, and immediately regretted it.
Mal grimaced. “Maybe.”
Beckett slipped off of the examination table to stand in front of Mal- her back still pressed against the steel edge.
She reached out to put her hand on Mal’s elbow, but he stepped back. Beckett dropped her hand.
They exchanged a glance and Mal smiled apologetically. “Get some sleep,” he said, and turned and walked out the door.
Beckett sighed. She was never going to get the hang of this-- whatever this was.
VII.
It’s amazing where you can find solace.
It was a funny thought to have when Malcolm Reynold’s lips were on your neck, when he was nudging your legs open, when your back was against a wall and he was doing that thing with his tongue where-
“Oh!” Kate said, and was treated to a low chuckle that vibrated across her skin.
She didn’t know when exactly she had surrendered herself to the strong arms, unyielding eyes and deeply confusing puzzle that Mal consisted of. She didn’t know when she stopped trying to figure out the maze of his personality and resigned herself to slowly and carefully exploring it. She could barely remember when their drunken competitions turned to drunken bets.
“I bet you all of my chores for the week that I can beat you at Chinese Checkers.”
“I bet you my favourite books.”
“I bet you a drink.”
“I bet you a kiss.”
Then that became the competition. And there was a lot you could learn from competition.
Beckett was learning a lot these days. She was learning how to steal, how to live on protein mold, how to undo suspenders as quickly as possible, how to slip inconspicuously from one room to another--
Mal sucked gently on her ear, and she gripped his shirt tighter to keep herself upright.
“God, Kate,” he said breathily as she began to clumsily undo the buttons of his shirt.
“It gets easier,” he had told her ages and ages ago. And she wasn’t sure if that was true. This wasn’t any easier, nor was it any less complicated.
Mal pressed into her, making her groan and kiss him, hard and desperate.
Though, was most definitely a lot more fun.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Castle/Firefly
Pairing: Beckett/Mal
Gift for: rocketgirl2
Beta'd by: raapsteeltje
Happy Belated Christmas, love! <3 You know I had to exercise my decaying fic muscles for this so I apologize. Also, this is kind of a sequel to that fic I wrote Meo once except it doesn't really have to be. P.S. it has no plot it's just random scenes, and there's not really smut to make up for it. But here it is!
I.
“It gets easier.”
Beckett looked up, but Mal wasn’t looking at her. He was focused on stirring his tea-- horrible, cheap stuff with sugar that wasn’t really sugar and milk that wasn’t really milk.
“What does?”
He tapped his spoon lightly against the edge of the coffee cup to shake off the excess liquid. “Being on the run. I know that you ain’t got any of that ‘righteous indignation’ that Zoe and I carry, and you ain’t as morally corrupt as Jayne, and no normal person is half as cheerful as Kaylee but... This being on the run thing? It gets better.”
It took Kate a few seconds to realize that he was trying to comfort her. She had been on Mal’s ship for almost three months, but the man was so difficult to understand. Beckett had always considered herself a smart woman, sharper than most men and able to render the best of them speechless with the right words in the right voice. People, Beckett knew, were not difficult to understand if you examined them long enough. They can do terrible and wonderful things, but in the end they were usually just fundamentally people: selfish, loving, and easy to predict if you knew what they cared about, what they wanted.
Mal, though, Mal was difficult. There wasn’t much of a pattern to follow. What did he care about? His crew. He loved them, and you could be sure that he’d defend them to the death. But at times it wasn’t even clear whether he liked having them around.
What did he want? Beckett was never sure. Freedom, maybe. Safety, not so much. He held life in low regard. And really, what else was there?
“You get used to it, is what I’m saying,” Mal continued. “I know you’re used to being able to tell good from bad, to knowing who to trust. At first this sort of living makes you feel unstable, shaky, but you’ll get used to it.”
Beckett nodded. “Yeah, thanks.”
“You just looked sad, is all,” he said, still refusing to meet her eyes.
Beckett smiled. “You’re right, it may not end up being all that bad.”
Mal laughed. “Who knows? You might even have fun!”
II.
“Does this sort of thing happen a lot?” Beckett yelled over to Zoe, who gave her a tight smile. There was the ping of a bullet against metal, and shots whizzed by as the sound of guns going off bounced throughout the hanger.
“More often than we’d like it to,” Zoe answered, “though sometimes I think the Captain can’t get enough.”
Staying low, Beckett peaked over the crate she was situated behind and shot twice, taking out two men, who vanished out of her line of vision with a startled cry.
“Nice,” Zoe mouthed.
Beckett grinned and scanned their surroundings. There were twelve guards left between them and Serenity. Alone there was no way they’d make it-- Zoe was a good shot but there were simply too many men. The others should be--
“WOOOHOOOOOO!”
“And there’s Mal, right on time,” Zoe said.
The mule burst through the doors, accompanied by a shower of machine gun blast.
Beckett winced as she saw one guard fall. His face twisted as the bullets entered him, his shoulder pushed backwards by the force.
She’s been-- or she had been a detective for years. But dealing with dead bodies was different from watching it happened.
She wondered if it got easier. From the set of Zoe’s lips and the grim look as Mal washed the blood off his hands after every fight she guessed that it never did. That was probably good.
“Gan mang!” Mal shouted, gesturing for them to get on.
Beckett hoisted herself onto the mule, and Jayne pulled Zoe up.
“Have fun?” Mal asked with a smile as they zoomed into Serenity’s opening doors.
“Does a job ever go right?”
“What do you mean? This went right! We got the money, didn’t we?”
“But--”
“Leave it,” Zoe advised. “I think if it went smooth he’d go crazy.”
“Wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” Mal agreed.
“Shen sheng de gao wan, what did I get myself into?” Beckett asked. “I used to be one of the good ones, you know.”
Mal laughed. “Those days are long past. You’re wu tou wu nao like the rest of us, detective. Now let’s go and see if Kaylee has supper ready. I hope you’re craving protein!”
III.
“You’re being stupid.”
Beckett had situated herself on the counter of the kitchen, ankles crossed, as she stared down the Captain, who was determinately not looking at his skeptical crewmate, and instead focused his attention on the array of weapons laid out on the table. With great care he wiped down his smallest gun and placed it tenderly next to the rest.
“You’re being really stupid.”
“Yer telling me,” Mal said with a grin that tightened at the edges.
Beckett’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the counter. “Why? You don’t have to go alone. You shouldn’t go alone. You’d have a chance if you brought someone with you.”
“Because if I go he may let the rest of you be,” Mal answered.
Beckett groaned. “Oh, don’t you start with me. I know Niska. I have hunted Niska. His concern is with the entire crew, and he won’t stop until every person on this ship is dead. You know it. They know it. So why you’re acting like a da chong wu dan fool is a mystery to all of us.”
“So you’re speaking on behalf of the crew?”
“I’m speaking on behalf of common sense, Mal,” she answered.
He sighed and turned in his chair to face her. “Listen, if I surrender I might be able to take him out. But it’s dangerous. There’s no sense losing eight if you only have to lose one. It’s basic strategy.”
“But there’s more chance that-”
“I’m responsible for my crew and I’m not bringing them with me.”
Beckett rolled her eyes. “You’re being stupid.” She slid off the counter and stepped towards the table.
“We’ve covered this already.”
“You know I’m coming with you, right?”
Mal opened his mouth to protest, but then met Beckett’s steely eyes and seemed to think better of it.
“After all, I’m still technically a prisoner, not crew. You can afford to lose a prisoner.”
“Why?” Mal asked.
Beckett grabbed a gun, spinning it into the holster at her belt. She shrugged. ”Don’t know. I don’t even like you that much.”
“Ben dan Core folk.”
Hesitantly, Beckett smiled.
IV.
“This is ridiculous. This is reckless. Mal, you’re going to get us all killed!”
Mal turned from the wheel to look at Beckett with a frown. “This is the only way to get paid, ain’t it?”
“So you’re going to bi se yan jing zhuo ma que like a fool in order to avoid an Alliance toll booth? You’re seriously going to take this ship through Reaver territory to avoid paying a slight fee to the Alliance.”
“It’s not the fee to the Alliance I’m worried about. It’s the goods we stole from the Alliance that I see as problematic.”
“Mal-”
He stood up, moving forward so they were almost nose-to-nose. “You don’t tell me how to run my ship.”
“But-”
“You ain’t crew,” He told her, his chest muscles flexing. “You ain’t one of us. Even if you were you couldn’t tell me how to run my ship. You’re just a little lost core-girl who got stuck with us when her little illusions were shattered. So don’t be telling me what I can and can’t do.”
Beckett huffed, turned, and walked swiftly out of the room, almost running into a laughing Zoe.
“What?” Beckett asked.
“Nothing,” Zoe said, “It’s just-- I think he likes you.”
V.
“There’s no way you can make the shot.”
This is how it worked. Beckett was competitive by nature, and Mal could never admit he was scared of some tian di wu yong core-girl (even though he knew that she really wasn’t one, not anymore), and so when a job was done and the whiskey was flowing, they would find something to bicker about.
Mal held the dart with his right hand and and closed one eye.
“Maybe you couldn’t,” he said, ignoring the fact that in the last couple of games she had, “but I am a superior species of dart thrower.”
He had lost the best two out of three, the best three out of five, the best six out of ten, and so on and so on.
Beckett had lost count of both the number of games they had played and the number of drinks she had consumed. Kaylee and Simon had left hours ago, giggling and touching as they went. Zoe had stayed home. Jayne was half passed out on the table, to the clear disappointment of the woman whose drinks he had been buying all night. River was in deep conversation with a man who Beckett was fairly certain was both homeless and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The two seemed to be understanding each other perfectly.
Mal missed. In fact, he didn’t even hit the dart board. He tossed the dart and it landed a few feet in front of him. He glared at it, and then tilted slightly to the right, catching himself right before he fell over.
“I win,” he told her.
She giggled. “No you don’t. I always win.”
He blinked as if trying to stabilize the world around him. “Yes, I suppose you do.” He fell backwards into his seat. “Would it kill you to let me win once and a while.”
Beckett nudged his leg with her foot. “Yes,” she said.
“Thanks for staying on my ship,” he slurred.
Kate tilted her head and smiled. “You’re welcome,” she said.
As they sat there, grinning sloppily at each other, Beckett thought that maybe this was what happiness was.
(Though she would retract that in the morning, as her head hammered and she downed cup after cup of coffee that tasted like toilet water and refused to meet the captain’s eyes.)
VI.
“Don’t you have a doctor for this sort of thing?” Kate asked, wincing as Mal finished the final stitch.
“Nah, we don’t wake up the doctor for the little stuff,” he answered, examining his handiwork with a critical eye.
“Where on earth did you learn to put in stitches?”
Mal grimaced. “In the war the infirmary tents weren’t always accessible. We had to learn to do the simple stuff ourselves. Lost a few men to infected wounds, should’ve been able to save them.”
Mal’s fingers brushed against her arm, touching the spot near her shoulder where a flying knife had struck her in the brawl. The skin was tender and bruised, but his callused fingers were gentle as he ensured that the wound would stay bound. His hand trailed down, below the cut, lingering on the inside of her wrist before he dropped it entirely, bringing his arms stiffly to his side.
Beckett wanted to ask him something-- about the war, and why he fought in it. About the people he lost. She didn’t know where to start.
“Zoe and I were the only ones to survive in our battalion,” Mal said, answering the unasked, “It wasn’t so much a war as it was a massacre, though we fought hard.”
Beckett didn’t say, “I’m sorry”, because she knew it wouldn’t help. She just nodded.
“It was better, though. To have fought and died, I think, than to have surrendered.”
“Life under the Alliance is better than no life at all, isn’t it?” Beckett asked, and immediately regretted it.
Mal grimaced. “Maybe.”
Beckett slipped off of the examination table to stand in front of Mal- her back still pressed against the steel edge.
She reached out to put her hand on Mal’s elbow, but he stepped back. Beckett dropped her hand.
They exchanged a glance and Mal smiled apologetically. “Get some sleep,” he said, and turned and walked out the door.
Beckett sighed. She was never going to get the hang of this-- whatever this was.
VII.
It’s amazing where you can find solace.
It was a funny thought to have when Malcolm Reynold’s lips were on your neck, when he was nudging your legs open, when your back was against a wall and he was doing that thing with his tongue where-
“Oh!” Kate said, and was treated to a low chuckle that vibrated across her skin.
She didn’t know when exactly she had surrendered herself to the strong arms, unyielding eyes and deeply confusing puzzle that Mal consisted of. She didn’t know when she stopped trying to figure out the maze of his personality and resigned herself to slowly and carefully exploring it. She could barely remember when their drunken competitions turned to drunken bets.
“I bet you all of my chores for the week that I can beat you at Chinese Checkers.”
“I bet you my favourite books.”
“I bet you a drink.”
“I bet you a kiss.”
Then that became the competition. And there was a lot you could learn from competition.
Beckett was learning a lot these days. She was learning how to steal, how to live on protein mold, how to undo suspenders as quickly as possible, how to slip inconspicuously from one room to another--
Mal sucked gently on her ear, and she gripped his shirt tighter to keep herself upright.
“God, Kate,” he said breathily as she began to clumsily undo the buttons of his shirt.
“It gets easier,” he had told her ages and ages ago. And she wasn’t sure if that was true. This wasn’t any easier, nor was it any less complicated.
Mal pressed into her, making her groan and kiss him, hard and desperate.
Though, was most definitely a lot more fun.