"What the hell am I looking at, Simon?" Mal asked again.
The doctor paused, one hand held up, fingers splayed before his part-open lips. He didn't speak at all for several long seconds, and then he said slowly, "This is an asylum... the cells, this set-up... these people... whatever they're doing to them, they're keeping them here long-term."
"Not 'whatever they're doing'. Mind-reading, doctor. You heard well as I. Alliance been poking into these poor folks brains just like they did your sister's."
"We don't know that. It could be a coincidence. It would be... a remarkable coincidence, for just the place where we decided to come to actually be involved in - "
"No big coincidence. We needed someplace had the facilities... No coincidence. Look at him." Mal pointed to the occupant of the cell, hunching and cowering like a man only had a pile of sandbags between himself and enemy fire. "Look at him. First he picks your sister right out of our heads, now he's having gorram flashbacks to Serenity Valley, and... what the hell?"
Inside the cell, the man had started clawing at his own face like he was fixing to tear it clean off his skull.
"No - " Simon went for the door and, little surprise, found it locked. There was no bolt, no sign of easy-accessible keys. He looked around, growing frantic. "They should be supervised. You can't just lock them away and leave them like this. River would - " He grabbed onto the bars of the cell with both hands and called through, "Stop! You don't need to hurt yourself... you don't want to do that... take deep breaths...count them with me... try to calm down... One..."
"Uh, Simon." Mal reached up to drag on his sleeve.
"What the hell are you people doing down here?" A voice barked out, more strained than angry. A man in a security uniform was marching down the long corridor, another on his heels. "You can't be here."
"I'm sorry," Simon said. "We were lost. But this man seems to be in some distress - "
The security fellow blanched as he came into view of the cell, and dived for a set of keys on his belt and, in the holster next to his gun, a tranq gun. He and his fellow had the door open and the man within doped inside a couple of seconds. "Got to keep strangers away from the inmates. Look at this." He was addressing mostly his companion or himself with that last, looking down at the blood on the crazy man's face and under his nails.
"I'm a doctor," Simon began. "I could - "
"You've done enough," the guard growled. "Get out of here. This corridor's out of bounds, 'less I have word from the board otherwise."
Simon persisted, though. "What's wrong with these people?"
"I don't know and I never want to know. Before I got here... and none of your business, anyhow."
"S-Steven," Mal said warningly, just remembering their need for aliases in time. "Best do as the man suggests. Like he says, ain't any of ours."
The doctor swallowed and nodded, and clear as it was that it pained him to walk away from the unconscious patient, walk he did.
Temporarily forgotten, Mal wheeled cautiously in his wake.
"According to the man I was talking to this morning, that security guard we spoke to last night has been here longer than he has - that makes it over four years," Simon murmured, leaning down close to Mal. The morning had brought with it an influx of life to the facility, and it seemed people were heading back and forth along the corridor outside or wandering in and apologising every other minute. Though all the bustle recalled sharply to him a life in more comfortable times, he was nervous of being surrounded by so much activity. "Those people have been kept here like that for - "
Mal took a hold of his wrist, where he'd gripped the edge of the surgical bed upon which the captain lay, stalling him. "Right pleased as I am to see how you're brushing up on your people skills in all this investigating - we already talked about this last night, Great Detective." The sea of machinery rigged above and around Mal seemed to shrink the captain in his unfamiliar white hospital tunic and pants, but the irascible air of authority wasn't showing any signs of going anywhere. Although his eyes did keep drifting off up and to the side of the rig, betraying nerves. "Even saying these folks are victim of the same experiments the Alliance done to River, you don't know if anything we might learn here's gonna help her and we don't want folks here getting suspicious. We deal with what's in front of us, what we know we can fix. Have to confess I got me a personal bias toward that end, but either way - "
"It's what we came here to do, yes, and I fully intend to do it, captain," Simon said, hearing it come out harder than he'd meant. He took a breath, snapped closed his eyes briefly, and seized back his control; reminded himself that he owed the captain for going back for River - without which action they wouldn't be here, and Mal wouldn't be effectively crippled. And of course Mal wanted this over, he couldn't walk... No, Simon thought, they had come here for the captain, and everything necessary for the operation was good as laid out before him now. But he said cautiously, "I might find something here to help River. If similar work was done here, even if it's not recent... they may have records, especially considering that the subjects are still here. And knowing what they did, what they were trying to do, having access to that specific information - "
Mal dipped his head in a covert but distinct nod. "I know you want to help your sister. Won't help her any though if your digging gets us caught - gets you caught, specifically, who might I point out she's reliant upon more than a little. Ain't none of us would know what to do to help her should her meds take another turn for the wacky, and fancy core doctors not too mindful of the law don't grow on trees."
"I know that." Simon extracted his wrist.
"There's times I don't think you do. Whatever she has of a life right now - and I know it's not nothing; I see her laughing, see her playing with Kaylee, see her saving the whole gorram ship from feng le bounty hunters - it's not so bad in need of fixing that you need to risk her losing you, or landing her back in that place."
"What are you saying, captain?"
"All I'm saying is, Badger aside, girl's doing okay. Maybe she ain't right, but what she is now, it's something she can grow with. No cause dragging her and us down trying to hit a reset button that may not exist and... and may not even be the right thing to do," he finished with a certain awkwardness.
Simon stared at him blankly a moment before responding, crisply, "I think I know what's the right thing for my sister."
"How about I know what's best for my crew?" Mal shot back. "Been doing this a while now, one fashion or another. You get a feeling about people you're responsible for, and lately my feeling is that that sister of yours is fitting in happier and smoother than you are. I mention this, Simon, 'cause I'm full aware my control of this situation ends the moment you put me out on this table. Don't jeopardise my crew unless there's call to do so." The captain held him with a hard gaze, until those eyes slid past him, the flint going out of them. "Inara."
"Hello, Mal." She glided in, wearing green today, bright and blazing as though it were a shield against the backdrop of rock and monochrome. The green set off her velvet dark hair, pressed flat but curling into remnant little ringlets at the end. Simon noticed Mal being rather obvious about not noticing.
Professor Sherwin was a half-step behind, and from Mal's expression he'd have been all too happy not noticing him at all.
"Professor," Simon greeted, straightening formally.
Inara went across to Mal's bedside immediately, and Simon peeled away, trying not to look too intently at the professor, who had after all only been on Riarden three years, theoretically ruling him out of any direct involvement in this at least.
Instead he said, "I looked through the file you gave me last night," neutrally, letting his eyes drift over to Inara.
The professor blanched, and tried to cover it.
"Thank you," Simon said - forced himself to say. "The information was very helpful. I've made all the notes I need. I'm finished with it now." He crossed to the counter where it lay and returned to press it back into the professor's hands.
"Will your captain recover?" Hoyle inquired, and nobody not knowing what to look for would have noted his relief.
"If this treatment is successful, I should be able to combat any more generalised long-term damage. If it isn't..." He faltered, watching Mal argue animatedly with Inara even while flat on his back. "Well, I should still be able to do as much, but - "
Hoyle nodded. "Inara seems unwilling to tell me precisely how it was that your captain managed to put himself in the way of a piece of high-level weapon-tech in the first place. It seems to me an ambitious way for a small-time illegal cargo-runner to get himself incapacitated."
Simon checked a laugh. "It's not terrorism, if that's what you're worrying about. But it's probably best you don't know." And added as he saw the reluctance with which the professor received that evasion, "Just as there are things it's probably best Inara doesn't know."
There was a short silence.
"So... you have everything ready that you need?" the professor asked neutrally.
"Yes. We're all set to go. I was just waiting for Inara." He grimaced, looking across at the two, reminded that if anything went wrong he wouldn't just be failing Mal. "She wanted to see him before he went under."
"I swear, these things are meant as a cruelty," Mal said, when Inara commented upon the pyjamas with a smirk in her eyes and a sideways twisted smile, a catch in her voice as it tried to bubble up into a laugh. "Feel like I should be auditioning for your kind of work."
She rolled her eyes. "You couldn't cut it in my kind of work."
"Too gorram ugly?" he posited.
Inara shook her head, smiling for real. "A companion needs to maintain a certain... objectivity. You'd want to be the knight in shining armour to each and every one of... the clients you didn't outright insult or punch out," she finished with irony.
"Objectivity like with you and grandpa over there?"
She followed his gesture automatically, and Simon and Hoyle broke in their discussion, noting the extra attention. When she swung back around, her face was tight with anger. "Mal." She paused and took in an audible breath, and he watched her features calm again. "This isn't the time," she said, pitching her voice very low. "Surely even you can see that this isn't the time?"
"No," he conceded. "No, it's not. I'm a mite jittery right now, I'll hand you."
"Simon's performed surgery on you before and you lived to tell the tale," she pointed out, setting her hands on the edge of the bed and leaning more at ease over him.
"Yes. Getting shot up and knifed is nothing new. This is kinda near the brainpan for comfort... one slip and I guess I'm gonna be talking crazy like River, huh? Though at least that means the girl gets a playmate a mite more savoury than Badger." He might have more confidence if it looked like his surgeon had had a night's sleep sometime in the past week. He scratched his ear reflexively, recalling Simon's dry explanation; "We need to inject a precisely synthesized calcium carbonate solution into the right area of the inner ear. Tricky, but relatively simple with the equipment here. There are a number of ways I can try to stimulate the formation of replacement statoconia from the solution in situ. Don't look so worried. It should work." He brought his hands down to clasp them together over his midriff as he realised what he was doing. The room rotated at the sudden motion, and even though he wasn't like to fall over while laid out flat, it still felt like a definite possibility.
Inara unfolded his hands to take hold of his right hand in hers, letting their fingers interlace. "There's nothing to be jittery about," she said. "I know the kind of medical care you're used to dealing with, but this isn't some frontier world. It's Alliance, it's the best... there's very little that they can't fix."
"Or break, huh?" He scowled pensively. "Guess I must look like a real dumb hick to you at times." He laughed, keen to divert the subject somehow.
"All the time," she said, that mock flat tone to her voice meant he'd said something she considered eminently stupid. "You're a brainless, backwater thug. It's your most charming feature."
"I'm wounded." He held his free hand to his head, wincing, and noticed that, over the other side of the room, Simon and Hoyle were winding down whatever they'd been discussing. Simon looked like he was edging to set to work. "So..." He caught her eye. "...There's not much these fancy Alliance surgeons can't do, huh? Guess that means there's no point making any passionate and tearful goodbyes, just in case."
"No point at all," Inara agreed with a touch of aggravation, her attention straying again over her shoulder to Hoyle. "Although I'm sure I could dig deep into my companion training and muster up some small show of emotion, if you'd really prefer."
"No, no." He flashed his empty palm at her, fingers spread, conceding. "I will forbear."
"Simon," Inara said, raising her voice, exasperation clear. "Put him out?"
From the way Simon seemed to be trying not to look amused as he came across, they'd had a couple of eavesdroppers for a while. "We can start," he allowed, and frowned down at Mal. "I'm going to have to sedate and nerve-block you for the duration, as I explained, captain. This is a precision procedure - we can't afford any possibility of autonomic movement. You'll be out for several hours, and you should be able to move normally by the time you wake up, but I should warn you, there may some traces of the block still in place."
"How many hours is 'several hours'?" Mal asked, and didn't think there was any blaming him for being a mite untrusting. He had only the doctor's word on what measures were required, after all, and the doc was pretty much known for putting people down a few hours if they seemed like to get in the way.
"Six to eight." Simon prepped the dope gun on the small table next to the machine rig, and from the edge in his voice the boy had a good idea of the thoughts behind the question. "Your body will need that time to start it on the road to recovery. After you wake, we'll see how much time it seems wise to give before we move."
Mal followed the movements of the dope gun uneasily, slid his gaze to Inara, at Simon's side, her hand still laced in his. Couldn't say a word to her, obviously. And damn it, it was futile to pretend Simon wasn't going to try help his sister no matter what, or that he could exert any control over that, in current circumstance. Maybe it was only futile to worry about the inevitable on top of all else he had to be worrying about. Speaking of which... "You've done this before, Simon, right? Successfully?"
"I've done similar. Yours is not what I would call a common problem. It should be fine. Besides, it won't really be me doing the work."
Mal glanced between he, Hoyle, and Inara, and didn't see any other potential surgeon among them. "Come again?"
Simon swung the main part of the rig of the machine in over Mal's head, intensifying the unpleasant feel of being stuck inside a metal box. He pointed up into it. "In here, there's a very advanced computer. I've input all the data from yesterday to thoroughly map the area we're working with. The computer itself will perform the operation, matching the details of its own less complex but still highly sophisticated sensors to the map. I program in the raw facts of what needs doing, and - "
"It sticks a bunch of needles in my head to do this thing for you," Mal finished up, his voice pitching higher than its norm. He swallowed.
"Essentially, yes," Simon said, perturbed.
"I don't know, doc. I think I'd rather have you picking around in my head than some Alliance machine."
Simon said, with a slow, patronising candour that must have made him just the darling of all his rich patients back on Osiris, "The machine is about a hundred times more accurate than the very best human surgeon, Mal, and I'm not a specialist on the inner ear. Believe me, you want the machine. In any case, I'll be watching it work on the monitor here in case any human corrections are necessary - which they won't be." He tapped the display screen at the side of the rig.
"Okay..." He tried without success to quash his nervous laugh.
Inara squeezed his hand tighter and looked daggers at Simon. "It will be all right," she said, and, "You really have cultivated that bedside manner, Simon."
The doctor held the dope gun ready, switching on the machine so that lights blinked in its overhanging bulk, and started up a dim electronic whir barely on the edge of hearing. He made to start forward, but Inara got in his way, interposing her body to lean closer over Mal.
"I know you're afraid - "
"Hell, yes."
She smiled at his candour, and her hand brushed gently across his forehead. "Don't be." They held that look a long moment.
"Inara," Simon prompted gently, and she let him move her aside, though she retained her grip on Mal's hand even as the doctor set the dope gun to his neck and depressed its trigger.
Mal felt the faint sting, and the spreading numbness. Inara's fingers felt small and delicate in his, but her grip was hella tight. He blinked up, managed to find and focus on Simon's face. Saw enough there to know...
"Be careful," he told the doctor thickly, not talking about surgery. Then his thoughts surrendered to the Black.
Simon was so far away he didn't feel like Simon any more, barely a wisp of him left on the edge of concentration, distances of the Black between. The absence set her off-balance, reeling like the captain, her internal direction all turned amiss. River turned over the thought of Simon as her Pole Star. Thought of finding the real Pole Star, piecing it from old charts out of Earth-That-Was. She might download such charts from the cortex. Maybe it could help them all to find their way...
But unlike the captain, her sense of the floor under her feet behaved, in a non-metaphorical way, so she followed her feet along the corridor, taking advantage of that. She knew he'd be there as she turned in to the engine room, and saw him then with her eyes as well as without. Saw him looking at some pretty, slender, small thing that was her, but wasn't really her.
"Wondered where you were at," Badger said. "Good at hiding out on this boat, ain't you?"
He was sprawled in amongst Kaylee's things, and she paused, looking down at it all. "That's Kaylee's."
"Well, Kaylee ain't here to be missing it. Let her have it back all pristine-like soon as she is. No harm, no foul. See?"
"I see." She could see he was sad again. Missing his kingdom ever more now, with all the ways home blocked. He didn't like being at the mercy of others; had no faith in others' mercy. Missed the people to tell what to do, the people who had to pretend to like and respect him so he could fool himself by pretending it wasn't pretend. He was even beginning to wish the captain was back, a little, because the captain was a part of his world the way Book and Wash (those stubborn and unfriendly peasants) weren't; at least he and the captain moderately understood each other, spoke the language, knew how things should work. "No harm, no foul." She added, with a smirk, "It's pink. And there are flowers." And watched him shift uncomfortably, rocking Kaylee's hammock, reaching up quickly to keep his hat in place.
Cast a final quick study around the corner. "All right." Irritation all over him as he swung out of the hammock. "Rutting uncomfortable gorram device anyhow, you ask me."
She laughed at him, and he didn't mind, because he liked to watch her laugh. She lost herself in being the girl he watched, and leaned back against the bulk of the engine, and only returned to herself when he caught her arm and she looked up to realise him close enough to do so, standing so as almost to corner her. She smiled up at him, surrounded by the warm glow of his regard.
"You really set upon that big merc with a knife?" he asked.
"He's got a scar." She ran a finger down the rough edge of Badger's lapel. The fabric was coarse and felt more like a rag for scrubbing than clothes. It - he - smelled fusty. Of smoke and incense, legal and otherwise, of animals and streets and alcohol and the thousand different scents of Persephone's markets. And he wasn't a gentle man, and he wasn't a good man, but she was used to the presence of others who were plenty of neither. "He ruined a T-shirt. I remember cutting it. I don't recall what I was feeling when I did. Simon's changed my medication since then. He knows how to help me better now. I won't cut you."
"Wasn't worrying about it, love." But his nervous laugh on its own would have been enough to whisper her the lie.
He was more familiar now, her mind adjusted to his presence, and she'd found there was room to squeeze in one more, after all, without reducing her further. He set his hand to his breast, trapping her fingers that were already there, flattening her palm to the coarse lapel, and she stared at their hands, one over the other, and remembered other touches, pieces and snapshots of other lives. Wash and Zoe, in their cabin, on the ship. That night in the shiny silver whorehouse. "Well now, sweetheart," he said, gentleness and want.
"Your intentions are dishonourable," she told him, frowning, inclining her head. It was good that they should both understand where they stood.
"They are, at that. Just a little bit, mind."
"Do you want to kiss me?" she asked him. She felt her heart pick up because his did, and felt a thrill and a fear. She'd never done this inside her own skin.
"Happy to oblige." And he was surprised; had expected a struggle, to have to persuade. Silver tongue and all that... that's silver in more ways than one, my love.
River stood on her tip-toes and closed her eyes; parted her lips a fraction to meet his, and bumped her forehead upon his hat. The contact made her retreat in surprise, and he swept it off his head, tossing it aside to land in the pink hammock instead, and bowed a small apology. She grinned and stepped up to try again.
His face was rough (rougher than Wash's, much rougher than Zoe's, or Nandi's, or Inara's lily-livered rich boys, or even the boy at the parts yard on Vandeen that Kaylee never told Simon about) and its roughness abraded her cheek almost pleasantly. Scratch-scratch, and beneath the scratch, a cautious mouth, not hard, not gentle, and on it she tasted all the scents of his jacket. He told her silently that she tasted like antiseptic... neutral, surgical... and that that was all right. His hands didn't stray from their rest on her hand and her arm. When they parted, it was a soft leavetaking, by mutual concession.
River blinked, carried back to herself by the ebb of the tide. She swayed in the reality of the present and its inexorable future. Badger's thoughts scratched at the edge of hers like stubble against her cheek.
He said, "That was - " And she pressed a finger to his mouth, silencing him.
"It can't work," she told him earnestly.
"What?" Disappointment in a faint, not-quite-believing laugh.
She explained patiently, "You have to go back to Persephone, and Persephone isn't safe for me and Simon, even if we could stop running, which we can't - and besides, the captain and Simon would hurt you."
"I'm not one for caring about - " He saw it in her face, changed tack. "Could always not tell them. We'll always have the right now. Seize the moment, so they do say..."
River shook her head. "I couldn't hide it from them." She reached up and held both his lapels, smiling, trying to make him understand. "Sometimes the world crashes in and I can't control what I'm saying, and... it's all very confusing. Besides, Simon's my doctor, silly. You have to tell your doctor."
He backed off, a swift pull of his hands detaching hers from his jacket, not roughly. Just a step back for distance while a maelstrom in his head confused her. His eyes studied her, and she saw herself change, reshape, become some other new reflection. Badger leaned to retrieve his hat.
He self-consciously set it on her head, and tweaked a loose strand of her hair with his fingers. Brushed her shoulders off as if he were ashamed what he might have left of himself there.
"Ah, well," he said, matter-of-fact. "Like they say: best to throw the little ones back. Can always catch 'em again, later."
He left the engine room without looking back, and turned down into the cargo bay, disappearing away from her.
Frowning, River adjusted the hat on her head. Then she took it off, and watched it turn slowly in her hands.
"And it went well? So... he'll be all right, won't he?" Inara persisted, following Simon as he cleaned up, washing and wiping his hands.
"There were no complications. Everything went as well as it could, and he should be fine. He'll stay out for another four hours, perhaps - "
"Yes." She looked back at Mal on the table - which, with the machine body cranked up and to the side again out of the way and the platform lowered, looked almost like an ordinary bed. "He looks... so quiet and still."
"Well... in a short while, he'll be awake, insulting you and yelling at me again, and very likely complaining loudly to be fed and watered," Simon told her.
"And he'll be able to walk?"
"I've seen no reason why the treatment shouldn't take. All indications are that the crystallisation of the calcium carbonate solution is progressing well; the new statoconia should be fully solid well before the sedative wears off. But for the final proof we can only wait and see. If it takes, he should feel the effects as soon as he wakes up. We could be away from here very quickly." He didn't sound, Inara noted, entirely enamoured with that latter thought. Odd. Her own feelings, courtesy of Hoyle, were more complicated, but Simon... Simon should be impatient to get out of there, to get back to his sister.
"Inara, I have an alarm hooked up to the machines that are monitoring his stats," Simon said, "But it would probably help to have someone here sitting by, especially when he wakes up... to keep him still if he wakes early, if nothing else... and there are some things that I should do while I'm here. Would you stay?"
"Yes," she breathed, and saw it immediately reflected in his face that she had revealed too much. But he said nothing, merely gave a professional nod. A moment after, it occurred to her to question what he'd said. "What other things should you be doing? Surely you ought to be the one to stay here, in case anything happens. What if he needs help quickly?"
"It's a minimal risk. And... there are some things I can look up while we're here." His voice had lowered considerably. "They might help River... The captain knows."
Inara nodded. "Of course. And yes, I'll stay. I was... considering it anyway."
Simon hurried along the corridor, trying to look busy and not out of place. He was self-conscious with the fear of discovery, and all too aware he had not been around the research facility long enough to have absorbed its moods and rhythms, or have a sense of how its staff acted normally. Somewhere like this, he would normally expect to be able to fade into the background, but they did not get many strangers or visitors out on Riarden, and he was a novelty. Should there be trouble, they would remember they had seen him, and where.
"Excuse me." He snagged a focused-looking intern. "Have you seen Professor Sherwin?"
"Not since this morning. He was working in lab 4." The intern shrugged an apology and hurried on.
It hadn't been that long since the professor had left their company, near the end of the treatment, the incriminating file under his arm. There must be somewhere in the research centre where all of the files were kept, and while Simon might not be able to ask where that was without drawing suspicion upon himself, there was every chance he would happen upon someone whose last sight of the professor had been as he headed there.
A tall woman he recognised as one of the senior researchers introduced to him in the canteen that morning was just turning out of a room a little way ahead. He sped his own steps to catch up to her.
"Excuse me! I'm looking for Professor Sherwin. Could you tell me where I might find him?"
"Oh." The woman looked surprised, and a vague sort of puzzlement crossed her face as she thought it over. "Oh, yes. He said he was going down to Files and Records. It's at the end of corridor 6A. Just past the synthetic tissue labs."
Inara looked sharply toward the bed as she heard Mal stir; heard a soft sound almost a groan. She saw his eyelashes flutter, moved closer to watch him while he tried to climb out of the anaesthetic, not quite able.
"Mal," she said, and touched his arm, giving him something to focus on. And again, as his head moved slightly, eyelids stirring over eyes still not yet open, "Mal."
"You been... here all this time?" he murmured sluggishly, so quiet she had to pick the most of it up from the movements of his lips. "How's your professor feel about that one?"
"He's working," Inara said, finding herself unable to muster too much irritation when he was barely even coherent yet. His eyes finally opened a crack and his head turned fractionally her way. "How do you feel?"
"At the moment, don't feel much of anything," he slurred, and halted, premature, as though he'd have said more. His head turned experimentally, one side to another. "Huh. How about that? Gorram room's staying put." He turned back to her, blinking several times quickly. "Guess that means it worked."
"I guess it does." Her skin felt too tight for her face, and her smile threatened to split it, as she blinked moisture from her own eyes.
His next question surprised her, or at least the concern in it did. "Where's Simon?"
"He's around... He said he had to look up something that might help River, while we were here... Mal, wait!" She pressed him back down into the bed as he tried to swing up only to end up lurching, almost falling. "The sedative will take time to fully wear off. You can't just start dashing about. Is something wrong? Do you need Simon?" She heard the concern ring through in her own voice.
"No," he said, and shook his head minutely, maybe distracted by nausea or the residual weakness from the drugs. He sank back into the bed, and she noted how his limbs flopped boneless in relaxation. "No call for that. I'm good, Inara. One thing you can say about Simon, he knows his doctoring." He grimaced, frowned around the room, and slowly eased himself into more comfortable a position. "Doesn't look like I'll be going anywhere a while... how long was I out, anyway?"
"It's been a little over seven hours. I have to confess, I don't think I've ever seen you stay still for quite so long." She took her hands from him, seeing him settled back, and perched on the edge of the wheelchair still at the side of the bed. "I'm sure Simon will be back soon, and then we can start talking about returning to Serenity."
"Your professor so keen to see you go?" he prodded.
Of course, Mal being Mal, he wouldn't be able to resist making some comment. "He knows we can't risk lingering," she said. "Hoyle and I, Mal... it's - "
"What? Complicated? Old news? Speaking of old news... I'll say. Must be a tough job not to get him so wound up he don't drop dead on the spot, so to speak. Can't say it ain't a hell of a way to go, but... that guy? Seriously, Inara, you must've been practically a kid when you and he were... Right?"
She folded her arms, annoyed. "Not that it's any of your business, but I'll service clients of any legal age. That's been true since I left the academy. I don't see what it has to do with anything, but why don't you go ahead and say whatever it is you're going to say, Mal? I can tell you've been itching to since we arrived here."
He laughed that higher-pitched, off-balance laugh that was usually a sign to tread softly. Inara had been trained well in the art of setting men off-balance, but Mal in those circumstances tended to act more unpredictably than most. "So, you and grandpa..." She sighed inwardly. "You're telling me this was a normal companion-client relationship?"
"He asked me to stay with him once, it's true."
"Inara - half your gorram client base asks you to stay with them. Some more than the once. I never saw any of them short of Atherton you were fixing to accept."
"Luckily there are men in the 'verse with more charm and personal integrity than Atherton Wing," Inara told him fiercely. "I could have accepted. He had the money, back then. And even if he hadn't..." She all but choked on the words, and glared at Mal to pass the time until her voice came back. "No, it wasn't a normal companion-client relationship. We were friends. We've always... seemed to fit together."
"So you were... close." He put an uncommon amount of emphasis on that last word. "And this guy asks you to stay - for as short a time as that would be. I mean, come on, Inara, by the time you were forty, he'd be dead - "
She fixed him with a cold look. "Even if that's the truth, anyone with a heart would have refrained from speaking it."
"Ain't got no heart, is the general consensus. Got an itty bitty chip of hard, cold rock. You know that," he chided mockingly. "Anyway, this guy asks you to stay... and you don't. So why didn't you? Stay?"
Inara looked down at her hands; realised she'd curled them up together, white knuckles betraying emotion, and loosed them and spread them on her knees. "Bad timing," she merely said. His eye-roll forced her to elaboration. "His offer to settle down came at the time I was looking to start moving. Which isn't to say I haven't ever regretted not taking it, especially in those early days. It took me a long while to find a ship I felt safe on." She frowned at him meaningfully.
"Serenity. You know, I've always wondered what in the hell made you pick my boat."
"You didn't feel like a bunch of brainless brigands," she told him sourly. "Of course, first impressions can be so wrong."
"No, really - " He reached over and touched the arm of the wheelchair. "What was it made you pick my boat? Even saying you wanted to travel on a small ship, and the why and how of that is something I've long given up asking... plenty more of those around."
She sighed and stood, pacing away from the chair. By the time she turned back, his hands had retreated to his sides. "It felt like a home - I mean, look at your crew, Mal. Even back then, you had a slip of a girl and a married couple, before picking up the rest of your strays. And you do have a habit of... collecting people."
He clicked his fingers and held one up, stalling her. "If this is about to get onto how it was my innate charm... why, I might just cry." And the bitterness that came through in that unbalanced her. "So that's why you joined. Why'd you come back?"
"I told you why." She turned her back on him again, unwilling to watch his face. "Serenity feels like home to me, now more than ever. I missed her. I missed Kaylee, and Zoe, and Book... maybe I even missed you, a little." She cast a glare over her shoulder, making doubly sure he could not miss the sarcasm.
"I didn't expect you to." His helpless reply was softer, more awkward than anticipated, and drew her to turn around fully. "I mean, when you said you were leaving, I really thought you meant it."
Inara tried to hold his gaze unflinching. "So did I. When I said it, I did mean it. "
There was a long pause, where he looked as at sea in the conversation as she felt herself, and they searched each others faces more in hopes of finding an absence than the confirmation that, as always, they did find.
"So why did you really - "
"Because I was weak," she snapped, despite the feeling he was only trying to break the mood by annoying her.
"Well." He swallowed and flashed a forced smile and looked decidedly ticked. "That's real nice. And it's glad I am you came back... not only for the bribing-mine-officials thing neither, mind, 'cause, well... not to say it ain't like there was no-one to argue with, lacking you aboard - hell, we both know that's one thing can always be found on my boat - but it just weren't..." He pulled a face and shook his head, making a frustrated sound. "I guess there's just something you might call real special about these arguments 'tween you and me just can't take no substitute."
"Like their frequency, for one," Inara said.
Mal nodded; a curt jerk of his head. "Fact almost every discussion we have turns into one."
"Yes. Certainly. And they're... very punctual, too. I've often considered setting my hourglass by the five o' clock shouting match." She'd started to raise her voice, but was increasingly aware of the smirk trying to break through his very deliberately black frown, and the fact she was herself growing nearer to laughter than shouting.
They both broke at the same time and he reached out to her, laughing, and she batted his hand away.
"Inara - " he began, as they both quieted.
She swallowed and shook her head, and what came out was far too choked and hushed to be her own voice. "Even if everything else... were right, Mal - and it isn't, and it can't be - you would demand of me that I give up a part of who I am, and I don't know if I could do that. I don't even know if I should do that... if it would be... fair."
"Fair?" he repeated, almost as quiet. "We're talking about 'fair' now?"
She looked down at her hands, then back to him. "You have no idea."
"Guess I never do give you enough credit for that ability to say 'no', after all," Mal said, as she turned her head. "Inara."
She didn't look his way.
"Inara." There was something harder in his voice this time that cut through her resolve. Different. Not right. His eyes drifted to the door and he'd pulled himself up to sitting. "Want you to go take a look around, see if you can't find Simon."
It took her a moment to recover speech, to wonder how much she'd said that hadn't been necessary at all. "You think something's wrong?"
"I think he's been a long while. Could be there's a reason for that. You know how the doctor is for finding trouble."
She nodded, half relieved for the excuse to leave him, but at the same time... disappointed, despite herself. "I'll find him, yes. We can always argue later. We really should leave here as soon as we can."
"Good girl." He nodded back, and since she was already all but out of the door, she didn't waste too much time in feeling patronised by that comment.
She was several corridors away when Hoyle, turning a corner, practically ran into her, his breathing so laboured she could actively worry about Mal's uncharitable quip.
"What's the matter?" It was all too obvious that something was.
"Your doctor friend - he's set off any number of system alerts picking through our data files," Hoyle said, anger as well as urgency underlying. "Security picked him up. You have to take your captain and get out of here, Inara. You have to go now."