Long Division
Firefly. Simon/Kaylee. For the prompt: scars. 542 words.
It’s not that Kaylee’s lost in this part; it’s just that she never gave it a whole lot of thought.
“Okay,” Simon mumbles, and he’s sitting up now, sheets pooled low around his midsection. He’s flushed, sweaty, looks mighty bent out of shape, and it’s enough to make Kaylee grin, to want to see him grimy from oil and mechanics instead of just from sex (or maybe from both). She giggles, and Simon reddens.
“Oh, don’t, Simon,” she says, and she wonders if this should be the other way around, because she’s sprawled naked, whilst Simon tightens his hold on the sheets. Kaylee never was all that self-conscious. “Quit ruinin’ my warm, sex glow.”
Simon bites his lip, looks away, and Kaylee frowns, “On second thought, quit ruinin’ yours.”
He snorts a little at that, but she thinks maybe he resigns himself a little, the knot in between his shoulders loosening, untangling, and she wants to lean over, run her fingers along the skin, just to be sure. So she does.
He’s so warm beneath her, in a different way to when they were fucking, this is, it’s different. Simon’s less wide-eyed, unwound, it’s like he’s managed to get dressed again when she wasn’t looking, even if his clothes are still pooled at the end of her bed. It’s not cotton beneath her thumb though, not silk, just skin, just Simon. She startles when she runs her hand over a bump in the skin, long and slender, something that breaks up the hard muscle, the painfully smooth skin. She blinks, tries to focus her hazy eyes.
“I ain’t heard a lot about this before,” Kaylee hums, her fingers hovering just above the scar. It feels personal, intimate - it really shouldn’t make her as pleased as it does. When he tenses, she purses her lips, pulls her fingers away and it’s almost a relief to see he’s not any less wound up without her touching him. “Seems this whole damn ship thinks all the bumps and bruises need to be tucked away.”
Simon doesn’t say anything at that, his eyes still counting nuts and bolts, screws in the wall of the ship. It makes it almost painfully easy to press her body against his, her bare chest fitting too perfectly against his warm, hard back. She drops a hand down against his chest, her fingers lingering over his heart as she presses cool lips to the space between his jaw line and ear.
“If this ship’s taught me nothin’, Simon, it’s taught me that the scars that show up are the best kind.”
He doesn’t answer, not now, and she thinks about River, about Mal and Inara, and a little about herself. Pushes herself tighter against him, her face in his neck, lets herself touch him as much as she wishes he’d touch her, and when he does, the tips of his fingers reaching up to brush the tips of hers where they lay over his heart, it’s not an exhibition, it’s just him. Gentle, barely there, and she doesn’t lean into it, apart from the fact that she does, and when he sighs, his fingers entangling with hers, she figures maybe she could get used to this.
A Road to Somewhere.
Gossip Girl. Nate/Serena. For the prompt: Pre-series firsts. 352 words.
It’s Blair’s fourteenth birthday when he realises.
It’s one of the worse ones, a birthday that Blair won’t remember affectionately, genuinely; it rains, and her dad works all day, and Dorota picks up the wrong sort of candles at the party store. Blair cries into Serena’s shoulder for half the day, and Serena, wide-eyed and beautiful, even then, will laugh and coo and hold Blair’s fingers over her heart as she tells her that she loves her and she wants her and that they didn’t care about rain or candles when they were little. It only works in halves, and Nate watches Blair wait for his offerings, consolations, but the words stick in his throat as Serena dotes on Blair, as she leans over her, hovers like some heartfelt saint in stain glass windows.
Blair’s dad gets home late, and he looks haggard, pained, but he makes a show of greeting her, hugging her, loving her, and Nate will slip out the back of the house, where the rain is propelling off the slate patio, and sinking into the grass, earth. Into Serena’s shimmering pastel blue dress, that clings to her baby curves, to her slow-swelling breasts and her long, fawn legs. To her hair, where it plasters around her face, neck, back like a second skin. It paints her gold.
She smiles across the garden at him, holds her dress wide and twirls in the rain, lets it catch and tangle between her legs, her toes barely touching the ground as she dances through the grass. She’s laughing as she slips, falls back into the flowerbed, and Nate’s hurrying to help her, to pull her to her feet, even as she slides through his fingers, loose strands of skin and hair and perfume lost between the raindrops.
There won’t be a great reveal, no angels whispering false gospels in his ear, but that night he’ll dream of golden hair and porcelain skin, of her laugh and her heartbeat and her eyes as they watch him kiss Blair, light and loose, when she cuts into her birthday cake.
Why do I always want to write when I actually don't have time to? On my days off, I'm always at a brick wall, but when I work all day and then have assessment, I can't turn myself off.