InsaneJournal

Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	! 2008 twelve characters challenge, author: slowmercury, crossover: firefly/good omens, pairing: adam/mal

"Back to Serenity" Firefly/Good Omens
Title: Back to Serenity
Author: SlowMercury
Fandom: Firefly and Good Omens
Pairing/characters: Malcom Reynolds/Adam Young
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Prompt/Challenge: Malcom Reynolds and Adam Young: "Go on, make yourself comfortable."
Author's Notes: This was the first story I started and the last one I finished. It's been great participating in this challenge, and I'm proud to say I used every character off my list at least once except Tohru. :) I may or may not manage a drabble featuring her too before The End.


Obviously, Mal should have stopped four shots ago. There was no other explanation for his current predicament.

He was on the bridge of Serenity.

Or maybe he'd drunk exactly enough. It was good to see her again, even if it couldn't possibly be real. He almost expected one of his crew, Zoe maybe, to duck through the hatch and ask what the hell was taking him so long.

Instead, a young boy's golden haired head poked onto the bridge and smiled mischievously. Mal found himself smiling back, instinctively liking this boy. Which meant there really was something wrong, because Mal couldn't stand kids.

"I would say something like, 'Go on, make yourself comfortable,'" the boy said, "but it seems you already did." He grinned again, then added, "I'm Adam."

Mal followed the boy's eyes around the familiar bridge, glancing over the worn flight yoke, the patchwork panels and the window out into the black with all the excitement of, well, a kid in a candy shop. Mal approved; a lot of people who looked Serenity saw only the rusty bolts and jury-rigged equipment. Adam, though, had seen that she was also beautiful.

"What's going on here?" Mal demanded. He left the gorammit off, partly out of respect for the kid's age and partly because he didn't want to bark too hard at another of Serenity's admirers, but mostly because he was so glad to be back where he was supposed to be, however it had happened.

"We're sort of in my head and sort of in yours and sort of not anywhere," Adam said, not smiling anymore. "You're very lonely. No one should be that alone." Mal nearly growled at the kid, but something in the boy's expression stopped him—a look of terrible understanding. "It isn't right," Adam continued. "I mean, I'm the only one of my kind and my friends are all dead of old age, but at least I have Dog." Mal noticed for the first time (giving further weight to the idea that he'd had way too much to drink) a small dog with a turned out ear sniffing enthusiastically at a crack in the wall.

Mal took a breath to regroup, then said, "So what if I'm 'lonely'?" He parodied the kid's fancy accent with ruthless precision on the last word.

"So, I really can't interfere directly," Adam told him. "If I do something like that, well, it's all downhill from there. It isn't right to meddle in people's lives—the only people who should try to fix people's lives are other people. But I can cheat a bit. Because, you know, it really wasn’t your fault. So go home, Malcolm Reynolds."

The force of it made Mal blink. When he opened his eyes again, he glanced around Serenity's empty bridge. For a moment he thought he'd seen movement by a crack in the wall, but there was nothing there.

"What the hell is taking so long?" Zoe demanded as she stuck her head through the hatch.

"Did you see something in here?" Mal asked her.

"Like what, sir?"

"I don't know," Mal said. "Never mind."

"Sir?" Zoe said in her you're-an-idiot voice. "Sir, if we don't get moving, Badger's going to give the job to Smithy's Luck."

“I think,” Mal said slowly, “that we need to get the Skilanni connector cables refitted before we go see Badger.”

“Sir, the Skilanni connector cables are fine, we had them replaced last year, remember?”

But Mal insisted, so instead of getting the job they got the cables. It turned out there had been a freak accident, one-in-a-million odds, that damaged the cables so badly that they wouldn’t have lasted more than another week before catastrophic failure. Kaylee was amazed at Mal’s perception, Zoe was apologetic and Mal was insufferably smug for days.

In a different time and place, Adam smiled.