This is how life goes for Simon and Kaylee, after Miranda, and River, and death, and danger. This is how life goes for them when they realize time is a finite thing, and missed opportunities are a grievous thing to regret.
- - -
They make love in the deep, secret places on the ship, the homes they have nurtured in the greater nest of metal and circuitry. Whether the whirring womb of the engine room, or in the cool, dark shell of the infirmary, what matters is that they grow and change and become one in the separate, respective corners they had long ago claimed as two. Because there's no room now for that distinction, not with the ship is full of empty spaces and haunted corridors, a bridge with echoing laughter and a passenger dorm with greying pages torn from a Bible. There's the slow, gentle learning of names and faces and pasts. But there's also the driving desire to match heartbeats, to breathe in tandem, to feel skin against skin.
They become a unit amidst a family so fractured by circumstance. With linked fingers and shoulders leaning into shoulders, they break through the phantoms clinging to Serenity's walls, and they bring each other into one another's worlds.
- - -
Kaylee leads Simon into the engine room, touches his hand to the hot, throbbing pulse of fire and steel. She coos to him in the same voice she uses with her girl, syllables laced with yearning and joy and awe. Her eyes almost never close in pleasure anymore, straining open and wider, corners crinkling and creasing and brown eyes burning bittersweet. It seems odd at first, until Simon realizes he can see the working turn of the engine reflected in the glassy sheen of her gaze, and somehow, the flickering movement behind the surface reassures him like little else can.
The world keeps turning, with each creak of that engine, and Kaylee wraps herself around him tighter, falls further into the earthy, organic force that drives her own core.
Her fingers clench around his arm at every surge of Serenity's thrusters, her legs scissoring around his hand at every whisper of Serenity's wings. Her boat is her child, her blood-but-not. It is her River, and Simon can't help but love Kaylee more for the conflicted devotion in her eyes, as she kisses him with one hand buried in his hair and the other braced against Serenity's walls. He can understand her fealty to the boat that has given both of them their roles, after all-- Kaylee, the heart-healer of Serenity, and Simon, the healer-by-hand. She mends the souls of this ship's children while Simon does his best to mend the bodies. He would be adrift without the security of this bird in flight. Without the guiding voice of this beautiful creature, who charges him with her decree: protect my people. Protect my person.
Serenity hums Kaylee's name, and bathed in the oily, orange glow of the engine room's walls, Simon knows a little better exactly why.
She is Venus de Milo, long thighs and flared hips, full breasts and rosed skin. She is the Mona Lisa, enigmatic without meaning to be so, such mysteries lying behind the sparks of her eyes and the sensual curve of her lips. She is a sort of art that can't be deconstructed because she simply is, open for all to see. He wants so desperately to understand her, thinks he already does.
The engine room is a sort of masterpiece as well, cogs and nuts and bolts making a whole picture, a working image. Simon is content to just be there, to retreat from the world while being undeniably a part of it, and this is how Kaylee draws him in, makes him a part of her, a part of Serenity. Sometimes, he wonders where one leaves off, and the other begins.
- - -
The infirmary can be locked down and seal closed, privacy coaxed out by dimmed lights and drawn shades.
It's a fact they both learn when Simon drums up the courage to invite Kaylee into his life, to finally let someone cross the bridge between his past and future. When he lets his present rest on her slim, able shoulders instead of on the whims of an Alliance battle cruiser in hot pursuit of him and his sister.
Kaylee guides him in the dark, her hands just as steady and sure as his, and he feels free to feel safe in her embrace. He doesn't fear that he'll say the wrong thing, because they're long since past words, and she reads his eyes better than his lips anyway. In the infirmary, sweat and skin generating heat enough to keep the cool walls from leeching warmth from their skin, Kaylee presses her mouth to his, and she tastes of tea, of dust and grass and summer sun. Like a home on some praire backworld, and apple pie and everything Simon always secretly wanted as a child.
He wants to give her something like home, because she has given him homes unto homes. So he gives her his workspace, his skills, everything he loves about this tiny, sterile room.
The sanctity of the beds is solidified by Kaylee's absolution over his bent head, the gentle touch of her hand to his hair when he tongues a grateful script across her folds.
The shelves where his tools lie, gripped and shaken and torn asunder by her innocently fierce grip, by the white-knuckled grasp of her hands as she rides him, holding the cabinets for purchase.
The quiet of the room, the peace most patients demand, disturbed by her giggles and gasps and his desperate, long moans. They mutter curses and pleas and the drip-drop of each syllable of one another's names, until the stutter of Si-mon, Ka-kay-lee, is forever etched into Simon's mind.
His fingers, deft and sure, skate over Kaylee's body in a way that's both similar and separate from his treatment of the crew. He cradles her to him, protects her and treats her like she's precious because she is, and that same refined delicacy is present in every stitch he sews, every bone he sets. But she isn't a raw, gaping wound, she isn't a ticking bomb of mortality. There is no cold pit of fear that this day will see his work rivalled by death, ruined by life's truth. Simon doesn't look at Kaylee with a surgeon's self-preservation, his need to keep his patient at arm's length. He looks at Kaylee and sees a canvas waiting to be painted, strikes a sense of whimsy and sets about learning the curves of her body, the colors of her self.
Simon looks at Kaylee and he sees all the things he could have been, once upon a time, and all the things he already is. All the things he has yet to be, and sometimes he thinks the hope and belief in her eyes is more of a prophecy than River's reading could ever be.
- - -
Simon isn't sure he ever knew who he was before he stepped foot into the cargo-hold, into the great, warm belly of this lovely beast.
There was the plastic, the superficial. The crisp blue uniform, the gold-plated nametag, the files and files worth of schooling and accolades and old-money that was set to propel him farther than he'd ever thought possible. But then there was love, also, so much love he was helpless with it. His sister, his blood. River, her churning waters over immutable stone. To save her, to mold her back into girl-shapes, he took to the sky, pried his feet from the only ground he'd ever known.
And he would do it again, in less than the space of a heartbeat, because what he left behind was paper and ink, parents who wanted a trophy instead of a son, a staff to call him sir. And what he found was endless space that became freedom instead of terror, a home and a family to navigate it with, and someone to call him honey.
Simon loves the way Kaylee says the word. Honey, slow and luxurious as the sweet itself, rolling in golden tones over her tongue. It's a way for Kaylee, so unassuming, so gentle, to lay claim to what's hers. Him, he is hers, and Simon finds he rather likes belonging to someone in some capacity other than doctor, other than brother, other than son. When she calls him honey or sweetie or angel, he ducks close and whispers bao-bei against her throat. He thinks she knows what he means, from the blush in her skin and the surrender in her sigh.
Nowadays, when he stands on Serenity's landing deck, when he wakes up in his bunk, when he beds down for the night, he is tangled up in Kaylee, limbs and heart and all. He doesn't see himself as some sort of Sisyphus, charged with carrying an unrelenting burden up a hill that only mocks him at every turn. If only because River was never a punishment, and besides, she is blooming now, a rose instead of a rock. He has discoveries to make about his own self, and the opportunity to do so, and every day, he looks in the mirror, Kaylee's heart-shaped face and dimpled cheeks pressed against his own, and he sees another line of wisdom, another button undone at his throat.
He is grateful that he was wrong when he feared Serenity would make him lose a piece of himself. He is grateful he was wrong, and grateful he was right, when he took a chance and fell over the edge, into a woman with melting smiles and skillfull hands and hair that smells like flowers and engine grease.
Who he is isn't about who he was--it's about who he's becoming, who Serenity has made him, who Kaylee loves. That he measures his identity by her steadfast care isn't something he is ashamed of, either.
It's a mark of honor, he thinks, and one he will, unlike many other instances in his life, accept with grace.
- - -
Each day is a learning process, and Simon isn't a genius for nothing. He learns what makes Kaylee tick, what makes her look at the world in such wonder, what makes that wonder a genuine joy instead of naivety. She tells him about her childhood and he tells her of his, and there's almost no bitterness left for what he's lost, because right in front of him is what he's gained.
She teaches him how to play Tall Cards the dirty, sneaky, underhanded way, and he teaches her how to illegally download episodes of her favorite soap opera on the Cortex. They share in many things, but not least of all is this newfound penchant to share crime.
It's somehow fitting, and Serenity marks her approval every day, by keeping them in their own world just a little bit longer with each time. Flying faster, harder, farther. Neither of them thinks anymore about what will happen if Serenity stops flying at all.
Family is made by the moments that bond people together, and just because they may one day leave the ship, does not mean the ship will ever leave them. Simon gets that now. Lives it.
- - -
The most important thing he learns is to let go.
He closes his eyes and thinks in smells and textures and tastes, instead of trusting only it what his eyes can see, in only what books tell him to trust. When they kiss, he feels like he's standing in a field awash with sunshine, the heat is so intense. Every moment is breathless as a blink of the eye--simply another moment after the last, a capture in an ever-rolling photodex, resting on any given image by the wind's whim. He lives day to day with her, and doesn't wish for things he can't have. Things like forever, things like continued good health, things like a peaceful existence not being chased by federal agents.
He's just happy with what he has now--the press of her arm against his, the laughter in her eyes, the image of her beautiful curls bent in mischevious solidarity with his sister's own dark locks. It's some sort of future, he figures optimistically, and for once, he doesn't have it within himself to be unsatisfied with his lot in life.
- - -
He doesn't promise forever and she doesn't ask it. But spinning dizzily through the reaches of space, they count the stars one by one, and each one is just another reminder that they're still alive, still together, still flying. And every day, it is more and more than enough.
--finis--