(Untitled)
It is Friday afternoon. I have a huge stack of essays to mark over the weekend. I cannot leave until about 4 pm, because I have student taking an exam. And yet I cannot bring myself to mark, either.
So. Distract me. Prompt me, even.
So. Distract me. Prompt me, even.
Dean's sulking, and he knows he's sulking, and he just wants to be left alone to sulk, damn it. That's what he's down here in the second hold to do: well, that and check their holy water supplies and how many bags of salt they have left. The answer turns out to be fewer than he'd like: no time to resupply between the last mission and Whitefall, and it don't look like they'll be time to stock up on the way to Corinium, neither.
What he don't want is for that damn girl to turn up, sneaking in while his back is turned so that he turns around and there she is, squatting perched on one of the weapons lockers like some kind of crazy bird. "Get down off that," he tells her. "Ain't you made enough trouble?"
She jumps down so lightly that she don't even make a noise. "Not a bird," she says. "Not little magpie, taking what's shiny, not a crow bringing bad news."
The second hold isn't very big, more like a closet, and she's standing right up in front of him: the hair is standing up at the back of his neck and he'd really likethere to be room enough to take a step back. "Fine. You're not a bird." Birdlike, though, with those long thin legs and her way of looking up at him. "Just don't expect me to be happy about what you are."
"You wanted me to steal," she says, and he really don't like the way she knows exactly what he means. Sam always does, sure, but that's Sammy. That's different. "Cheating is the same as stealing, and you wanted me to cheat."
"I didn't mean for you to steal my own ship out from under me."
"Winchester ship," she says. "All of you here, all your fire. She keeps you safe." Dean folds his arms and waits for the rest. River reaches one hand out and rests it against the hull wall. "She knows me, knows what I do." She can see him getting even tenser, he reckons, even if she couldn't read his mind to see how that rankled, that someone might know the ship better than him. "Not like that," she says. "We're the same. Going fast, fast enough to keep you safe."
"I hope to hell you ain't as crazy as you sound," Dean says. Keep you safe vibrates through him like Impala's engines through her metal walls: gorram girl knows exactly what to use here. Keep you safe.
She's taken her hand from the hull and placed both on his folded arms. "I need to be crazy," she says, and lifts up on her toes to kiss his cheek. "I need to be crazy to do what I need to do." The next kiss is a brief, dry brush on his lips: he bends his head down to her and reaches out his arms to hold hers, but she ateps to the side, into the doorway. "Don't tell Jayne," and then she's gone.
end
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