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He never really felt a need for a word until Inara left. He just was, maybe a little different from everyone else, but wasn’t everyone on the Serenity?
But then she left, because of this one specific difference. He lost a friend, a crewmember, someone he trusted explicitly. He needed and explanation, a justification, because the one he was getting from others wasn’t right.
There was no “unresolved sexual tension”, that was reserved for Kaylee and Simon.
And so he started looking for words, something to explain why he had let things go so terribly wrong.
The first word he found was “wrong”, then “sick”, then “broken”. He felt ugly.
Kaylee had yelled at him, told him it was all his fault that Inara was gone, that if he had just taken a minute to think about someone other than himself and let himself be “an actual person”, she would still be here.
He believed her. He was different, he was wrong, he was broken, and he lost his right to be a person a long time ago.
And then there had been River with her book learning and fancy vocabulary and she had given him new words. “Asexual”, “Aromantic”, “Sex-indifferent”.
She had shown him the black ring she had always worn on her middle finger (Mal remembered asking Simon about it once, the doctor had just shrugged and said he figured it was something from her time at the school that she actually wanted to remember).
She had shown him that there were people like him, people who didn’t feel a need to have sex with a person, people who actually resisted romantic gestures, but still people who loved, just as fiercely as anyone else.
And he had begun to discover the many layers of River. From the torture survivor, to the genius, to the little girl, to the military weapon, underneath all of that, he found a person.
The broken people fixed each other.
And, of course, he eventually noticed Wash’s ring too. And he learned more new words (“Demisexual”, “Grey-asexual”, “Sensual attraction”), and he found that this was something beyond just him and River and a book. That he was welcomed in a community that was just as diverse as the rest of the verse, even though the alliance tried to silence them.
And Wash brought him and River to meets-ups. They would meet so many different people that all shared the same base experience that his head would begin to spin.
And he learned about trust. That there were experiences that Wash would never share with Zoë but would share with Mal, because there were some understandings they simply shared. Wash didn’t keep secrets, but some things were easier said in front of someone who already knew.
They had both felt broken, they had both struggled to explain their existence, they had both found people that saw them as people, instead of some sick, crazy person.
He tried to tell Inara, ask her to come back. He had found the words to explain himself, and he wanted her to know exactly how much he loved her, exactly how much he missed her, even if it was different from what she expected.
She had thrown it all back in his face.
“Stop making excuses, you can just say you don’t love me”
“There’s medication for that, Mal, maybe you should talk to Simon”.
“Were you abused in your childhood? Companions can help with that”.
He didn’t try again.
He never really looked at a calendar when they were in the black, so he was surprise when River and Wash got him a birthday present. The tiny gift box from Persephone held a simple black ring.
He hadn’t been able to speak at the gesture. They had spoken for them.
“Just because Inara hasn’t come back doesn’t mean you’re wrong, it’s her loss”
“You see and you listen, no power in the verse can stop you. The people who can’t see that are the ones that are broken”.
He wasn’t much for jewelry and the like, so he mostly just left it in his room, or let it jangle around in one of his pockets. But it was there – the reminder that he was a whole person, a member of a community, that he didn’t need any kind of fixing.
When Wash died, he started wearing the ring permanently.
Zoë came to his cabin one day in tears, mourning. He hadn’t seen her lost like this since the war, and, even then, she had maintained calm.
All he could do was talk. He told her how Wash went to flight school to escape an arranged marriage. He told her how Wash had assumed he was doomed for a life of loneliness until he met Zoë.
He told her that he knew these things because of that day when he had trashed the bridge in frustration and self-hatred, and how Wash had calmly continued flying Serenity and just told story after story until he was able to see how not alone he truly was.
He told Zoë that it had been Wash who had given him his ring, and how that one simple gesture had killed so many of the demons that he had been fighting for years.
He would never be able to bring her husband back, or find her a clear path through the woods, but he could give her stories. Stories of exactly how much Wash had meant to them.
It had to be enough.
Inara didn’t leave after Miranda. She started renting the shuttle again, redecorated the whole thing, stayed on as a companion, their mark of respectability.
They kept their conversations to business only, avoided each other neatly. He never went to the shuttle, would just send Kaylee to pass along a message if it was needed.
Sometimes she would already be with Kaylee when he went looking for his engineer, and he’d just quietly back away from their intimacy and do something else until conversing with one or the other of them became a necessity.
Maybe he had been wrong about the sexual tension between her and Simon.
She found him in the kitchen one day, looking after his guns, a reminder of a conversation long past.
“I miss you, Mal”
He just grunted and continued cleaning his pistol, he had finished this conversation for himself a long time ago.
“I know things just went wrong for us, but I want you to know I still care”
“If caring’s shoving a bunch of medication down my throat, I’m not interested”
He tried not to notice her look of hurt. He was done caring about her feelings. The last time had cause him to hate himself.
“Its up to you, Mal,” she spoke quietly, “but I want you to know that I’m still here, and I’m still a person and I’m going to try my best”.
He didn’t trust himself to speak. He tried to think of what River would say, but she was off on the bridge flying their boat, and he had to grow up, he didn’t need his albatross to solve every problem for him.
Inara solved the problem for him by speaking first.
“I’ve never seen you wear a ring before”.
“Got it from Wash and River a while back,” he smiled, “It’s a reminder that I’m not broken”.
“No one ever said you were”
“I did, once, but that’s over,” he picked up one of his guns and aimed dramatically at a wall, “I’m a person now”.