A/N: So, a drabble about Simon. I needed a change of character studies and whatknot.
Disclaiming time: Not mine. Joss has full ownership of the characters. Damn
He's different.
He knows that.
He doesn't quite fit in.
Another problem.
Everyday he faces a barrier into the life of those aboard Serenity. He can't compute or sympathise what kind of lives they've had. He's always had everything handed to him; money done, job done, a loving family done, a sister to care for, friends done.
What more was there for him to ask for?
That's not the question he asks himself. What did I need it for? The question rolls around in his mind, runs to the front and hides at the back of his brain. Sometimes it'll annoy him all day; a hammer inside the skull. Other days it's just sleeping, occasionally making a snort.
But the question is always there, begging for an answer.
He sits at the table, wearing clothes of fine fabric and once worn to such regal events. It's as he surveys the people around him that he sees how different he is and how far apart he and the crew of Serenity really stand.
He's had a more luxurious lifestyle then any one of them; save for Inara possibly; and has had all that a normal human being would require to live in sanity.
He didn't even know that a part of him was missing until he sat down at the table in the galley for the second time, when Dobson was dead and the Sheppard conflicted. When everyone knew about his sister and when everyone knew he gave up just about everything for her.
The part of him that was missing, was himself.
The crew was made up of misshapen people, he knew that. Some of them quirky and strange, a rag tag bunch of people that didn't quite seem to fit together. But they did at the same time. One of them compensates for what the others lack and it's this that brings them together to hold them into such a strong friendship. A makeshift family.
He sees the invisible thread that binds them to each other, and if any one of those threads is cut the whole crew becomes unbalanced.
It's when he compares this makeshift family to the real family he had back home that he realises this; he'd only been living in a make belief world.
Sure, his parents tried to give him everything that he could possibly want and that his every need was catered for. But out in the black he feels a sense of pride every time he comes to sit at the table.
A sense of need and fitting. Not just for the fact that the crew needed a medic, but that he could offer his own stories of enjoyment and conjure his own well paying schemes.
Slowly, day by day, he was learning what it really was like to live out in the black, on the rim and avoiding any and all Alliance cruiser ships if possible. And not just because of his fugitive status. But because the Alliance had become his enemy, a horrid band of people who still seek to have everyone bowing down to every command. A fire burns in the pit of his stomach for the Feds just as it does in everyone's bellies that lives in the outer rim.
He's not just a doctor and he's not just an extra mouth to feed. He's a friend, a confidante, someone to bounce ideas, to keep the crew realistic, to argue with when its needed. Someone who would be useful in more ways then one.
He's different to them.
He knows that.
He doesn't quite fit in.
He knows that too.
But neither does anyone else and yet, it seems to keep them going.
It keeps them flying.