Porcelain- fragile, delicate, lovely, breakable… that was what the others thought of her. They treated her the same way they would treat a porcelain doll- they petted her, stroked her, but held back for fear of breaking her. But she was not made of porcelain; she was not as liable to break as her mother's china tea set. Only Jayne understood that.

He thought of her as iron, and this made River smile. She was indeed like iron- soft when formed in the womb of her mother, made strong and hard by the smelting of the hands of blue. Jayne of course did not know the chemistry behind it all: that the element, the pure metal, was softer than aluminum. He did not realize that it was the addition of Carbon that made Iron strong. His parents hadn't possessed enough money to educate him, and so he did not realize just how accurate his assessment was. But he saw her as a capable, independent woman who would not break, and for that she was thankful.

He was misunderstood as well. The others thought of him as a boulder- hard, unyielding, and thoughtless. But River knew better. Jayne was not a boulder, he was a diamond. He was hard, so hard that he was brittle, vulnerable. On the rare occasion that he allowed himself to get close to someone, to love them, a betrayal could shatter him with a single blow. And there was a depth to him, a beauty that was impossible to observe unless the time was taken to patiently polish the edges, to look beyond the hunk of rock to see the gem within. River was one of the few who had.

The first time he'd kissed her, he had crushed her close to his body, hadn't worried about breaking her. The first time they'd made love, she'd seen a side of him that the women he paid didn't care to take the time to see: the tender, passionate man who took care to ensure she was as fulfilled as he was. He never said the words, "I love you." He was too gruff, too guarded, too careful for a thing like that. But he didn't have to say them; he demonstrated how he felt with every caress, ever lingering stare.

The others couldn't understand how they fit together. They were worried that Jayne would not be careful enough with her, that he would shatter her. Throw a rock at porcelain and it will break; a teacup cannot move a boulder. They were fearful; River had just pieced herself back together, and they did not want her broken again.

River was heedless of their concerns. She knew Jayne, knew that a diamond could scratch Iron but not shatter it, knew that with a well placed blow, it would be him that would split into a thousand fragments. She understood what they did not; she understood just how well they fit together: the mercenary and the living weapon. He was not a reader but he could read her, and she had glimpsed a part of his soul that others hadn't cared to notice.

What the others thought did not matter. What mattered was what they knew, how they felt, who they were. River and Jayne: misunderstood, dangerous, misfits; diamond and iron…

And they fit.