FIC: Aphrodite (Buffy/Inara, PG-13) for brutti_ma_buoni
TITLE: Aphrodite
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly
PAIRING: Buffy Summers/Inara Serra
SUMMARY: She comes to her in dreams.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Set in BtVS S6. Written for femslash_minis Round 96 for brutti_ma_buoni, who wanted a crystal ball, “warriors come in many guises,” and “wine dark” without Angel or a lot of scientific explanations for how the girls meet.
She comes to her in dreams. The images foggy at first, and then sharpening, like those of a crystal ball on TV. The beautiful woman, with the beautiful name: Inara.
Buffy isn’t certain they aren’t Slayer dreams; they don’t feel the same, and there’s certainly less bloodshed, but there is something solid about them, something that makes them seem real.
Tonight. Tonight, they walk through the tall, marble halls of the academy, Inara’s footsteps near silent.
“You know, originally the companions were to comfort warriors.”
Buffy blushes. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, her voice smooth as silk and guileless, not asking anything but promising the world.
Buffy tucks a stray strand of golden hair behind her ear. It isn’t often that she feels unpretty, but beside Inara, she feels positively hideous.
Girls, beautiful girls in beautiful dresses, scramble through the hall, darting in and out of classrooms. Inara tuts at them, her wine-dark lips pinching for a moment. Annoyance makes her no less beautiful.
***
The dreams aren’t always like this. Sometimes, they go to exotic worlds, and they walk together through lush jungles or barren wastelands, and Inara tells her stories of the Earth that was, tells her fairytales. Sometimes, they pause in the vacuum of space, the infinite dark spreading out on all sides of them, and they sit in quietude, Buffy trying to get her breathing to be as silent as Inara’s-it feels somehow blasphemous, in this place, to damage the silence.
Sometimes, they are in the silk sheets of Inara’s bed, the two of them entwined. In these dreams, Buffy cannot manage to stay silent. Inara plays her body in a way Buffy has never experienced; like she is blossoming, something deep within her opening up and unfurling. And in this place, she sees that their bodies are alike, and it is good. Buffy knows what to do, not in some dream-muscle memory, but because Inara’s body is like her own body. And she gives as well as she receives, the two of them ending up beached in the tidal swell of twisted silk sheets, slick with sea foam perspiration, and Buffy feels reborn. Every time, after, she moves her limbs for the first time, feels Inara’s body moving with breath against her own, and it is with the myopia of a child wandering into the world for the first time that she experiences these things.
She doesn’t remember heaven being like this, but then, there’s a lot she’s forgotten.
***
Buffy follows Inara’s silent footsteps, the rustle of her silk skirts, through the tall, marble halls of the academy, until they reach a balcony. They step outside, the air cool, the sun setting at twilight, the indigo of the fresh night and the orange of the bloody sun coming together to form a color Buffy doesn’t have a name for. The stars are out. The stars are bright.
A glen rolls out, far beneath them. Buffy wonders briefly how high up they are; she feels closer to the stars than to the ground below.
“You could stay,” Inara says.
“No, I can’t,” Buffy says.
“No, you can’t.”
Inara’s hands rest on Buffy’s shoulders, and Inara steps forward so that her front is flush against Buffy’s back. Buffy feels Inara’s heartbeat in her own flesh, more fervently than she can feel her own. Her skin prickles.
Buffy knows that there’s more than one kind of warrior. Her mother was one-to the end. And Inara, she knows, is fighting for her, even if these are just dreams.
“I should go,” Buffy says. “They need me.”
Inara folds her arms around Buffy, holds her tight. “It will wait ’til morning.”
Buffy leans back into the soft, delicate strength of Inara, the smell of her perfumes and silks and her hair and her skin, and she closes her eyes.