AN: Sorry for making y'all wait! I've been busy busy busy with school. (Medical Assisting, here I come!... I already know how to draw blood. It's super fun! :D)
Also: If any of you have Twitter and would like to follow me, I've been told I'm a hoot'n'a'half! Message me and I'll tell ya what to hunt for!
Disclaimer: Joss reigns supreme in awesomeness. I could never hope to come up with characters as awesome as his! (feel free to disagree, though)
Jayne rushed to Mal's side and started to clean his captain up.
"Not me…. She needs it more," Mal protested.
Jayne grunted. "You both ruttin' need it." He pushed Mal's hands out of the way and bandaged the wound as quickly as he could.
There was something to be said about being a mercenary. Jayne knew not only how to create wounds, but also how to temporarily decrease their severity. In less than a minute, he had fixed Mal up as best he could and moved onto Karáh.
"Captain, we're docking. Best get ready. The doc is waiting for the two of you," Zoe called from the front.
"Got it. Jayne, get her. I don't think I can carry her right now," Mal instructed as he painfully lifted himself from the floor next to Karáh.
The shuttle doors opened to reveal Simon and River waiting.
"God, she's going into shock. We need to get her to the infirmary now,"Simon said immediately as he rushed in. "Jayne, help me carry her. Mal, can you walk?" he asked, noticing the ever growing red spot on Mal's shirt.
Together, Simon and Jayne carefully lifted the unconscious girl
"Yeah… Don't worry about me. Just focus on her. I'll patch myself up or something," Mal answered.
"No. You won't. I gotcha, Captain," Zoe told him as she came up behind him.
As Simon worked on the unconscious Karáh on the main table, Zoe cleaned and sutured Mal's wound.
"Kaylee, go tell Wash that we'll need to be stationary for me to do any sort of patching up," Simon asked.
"Get us to the other side of this rock. We gotta get away from this place specifically," Mal instructed.
"Mal-" Simon started.
"It'll take 5 minutes, that's less time than it'll take you to even think about doing anything surgical," Mal explained. "Tell him to do it NOW," he emphasized.
Kaylee ran off to tell the pilot of the change of plans leaving everyone else in the cramped infirmary.
"Mal?" Simon called from his exam table where he was running scans on Karáh.
"What?" Mal grunted.
"She's…"
"Bun meets oven," River interrupted.
"She's pregnant?" Mal exclaimed.
"I was going to say she cracked a few ribs and is going to be sore for a few days. River?" he asked turning to look at his sister.
"Baby on board," she replied with more than an air of certainty.
"I-it's not showing up on the scans. Must be new… Captain?"
Mal was staring at Karáh's unconscious form, shock clearly registering on his face. "W-what? Me? You think – no. Not me. We never…"
"C'mon Cap'n, we all know'd you was together," Jayne remarked.
"No, not like that… not when she was … we never…"
"536th time is the charm!" River called as she skipped away, excited at the prospect of not being the youngest anymore.
They all looked at each other as though wondering what that could have meant, but secretly understanding River's usually cryptic messages.
The Havers bloodline would live on.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Karáh was slowly coming to, the fluids Simon had given her beginning to kick in.
"What's going on?"
Mal sighed. "I should tell her," he said softly.
Everyone besides Mal and Simon cleared out of the infirmary.
"Karáh, sweetie…" Mal paused not knowing how to break the news to her.
"What?" she asked, worry written all over her face. "What's wrong with me? A-am I going to die?" she asked, misreading the distress on Mal's face.
"Oh God! Nothing like that!... it's… you're… pregnant…" he told her barely whispering the last word.
Her eyes grew wide, tears welling up and bursting over the ridge of her lower lid. "He did it. That wángbādàn finally did it."
Mal had never heard h Karáh use words like that. He had seen her upset, but she had always been reserved in her insults.
"It's going to be ok, darlin'. I'm here for you. Anything you want, we'll do it," Mal tried to assure her as he gingerly gathered her in his arms.
"I want it gone," she moaned into his sleeve. "I don't want to remember that man at all! I don't want a constant reminder of what he did to me!"
Simon nodded. "I'll take care of it in the morning."
She cried for hours until she fell asleep.
A few hours later Mal was suddenly awoken to the sound of bare feet pounding down the metallic hallways of Serenity.
He rolled over thinking River was running rampant as usual, but as he turned, he realized that Karáh was not on the exam table a few feet away.
The warning horn and tell-tale hiss of Serenity's cargo bay being opened.
She was running. Mal shot up off of his makeshift bed in the infirmary and began chasing after her.
Her feet were pounding beneath her; driving into the pavement as though she was trying to break through to the other side of this world. Her ribs burned with each movement and her lungs felt as though they were going to burst.
Twigs and branches tore at her skin and clothes.
Tears obscured her vision. Her bare foot caught on an exposed root, causing her to faceplant.
Her world was in shambles and she had to get away from it. Running was the only thing that made any sort of sense at the moment.
She ran and ran until she broke through the woods into a clearing surrounding a manmade lake.
She fell to her knees and relieved what little contents she had in her stomach.
Somewhere behind her a twig snapped. She didn't even bother to look up. Whatever or whoever it was, if they were here for her, they could have her. She had given up.
Wordlessly, Mal knelt down beside her in the soft grass and held her.
She had never felt such pure and unsullied love as this. For a man to selflessly hold her without asking questions, without wanting it to go further… She let herself fall into it.
AN: SOOOO SORRY FOR THE LONG WAIT! I've been oober busy with class and flirting with hot army boy to write! (Flimsy excuse, I know) I really hope to finish this soon, so I can fully devote time to my studies and not feel like I'm totally letting you lovelies down!
Here's your Chinese lesson for the night:
Wángbādàn: Bastard (Turtle egg/ turtle child) Yeah, I'm not sure why that means bastard either.