Disclaimer: I wrote this as a way to amuse myself, and because the plot bunny was beginning to look like a horny Shih Tzu, and my leg a good place to hump. So…I don't own Firefly.
"I knew him." Inara stated, sitting across the dinner table from Mal. "He was seventeen, first year as a resident at one of th Osiris hospitals. His father contracted me on his son's behalf, to have me 'make a man out of him.'"
"I thought you didn't tell stories about Companion'n." Mal said, his voice low.
"The vow is to not say anything unless not saying it would hurt the client." Inara clarified. "I met him at a little café near the University on Capital City, Osiris, and he was this pale thing in a vest and slacks. I tried for awhile to get him into bed, and I'd thought he was going to, when Simon started crying." Mal went quiet, setting down his cup of coffee. "He'd come from the hospital, having worked three and a half shifts straight. He could barely see, let alone do anything else. The last person he'd operated on had a metal plate shoved thrugh their lower abdomen. He'd reconstructed everything, from her skin to her spine, through the various organs, veins, nerves, even her intestines. She lived for a few hours, died of shock. There were others, some sort of industrial accident. He was seventeen, a year younger than the youngest of the workers, and he saved all of them except the one."
"There's a but, in there, isn't there?" Mal asked.
"Yeah. I've never had sex with Simon Tam. Some things he gave up to be a doctor, and one of them was his innocence. He told me he was bent." Inara recalled. "Our third meeting. By that time, I'd read up on psychology, and had talked with some of the other Companions. "He said, also, that he was sterile. He did it to himself, the right drug combination. He wasn't going to become a father, he swore that."
"What happened?" Mal asked.
"Too many expectations on him, too many deadlines, too many dead bodies, live bodies. I met a Companion who'd met Simon as a kid, when he was real little, met him at a social function, and she told me that Simon Tam used to know how to laugh." Inara sighed. "I never saw him laugh again until I saw him on Serenity."