"Simon"
Simon lay awake and thought of River. Kaylee slept like the innocent always seemed to. She sighed against his back and sank deeper into him. It amazed him that she could get any closer. They already lay like one flesh, not just when they were having sex but whenever they were together. Romantic love was a joke. Simon knew it. You couldn't get through college without learning THAT. Everyone had to take at least one literature class, even pre-med students as gifted as Simon Tam. Romance had been created 1300 years ago by French troubadors wandering around and playing on their lutes for bored lords and ladies. He tried to imagine the scene, tried to place himself and Kaylee in it, and could not. She would never fit in at a French court, with banners flying, and he was always nervous, never able to assert himself, unless he was in an operating room with bloodied hands, standing over a gaping wound.
That was how he'd met Kaylee, wasn't it? He'd talked to her, of course, before signing on to this fool's errand, but he'd really met her, known at least the physical inner secrets of her grach in a way that no one else could, after the Alliance agent shot her. Standing over a gaping wound. Simon remembered bargaining with Mal, over whether or not he'd pull the bullet out of her small intestine, and felt ashamed. It was a nasty wound and would have been a slow and painful death, probably even if Zoe had been able to find and remove the slug. He thought of Dr. Lin Xi Han, an old Sihnonese man, the most revered surgical ethicist on Osiris, and a class called "The Healer's Nature." Dr. Xi Han had been a cardiovascular surgeon for thirty-five years. He was thin and bald with wispy white mustaches and a voice like paper sliding across glass. "The Healer's nature is to heal. It is not a choice. You must revere life, children. Every one you operate on is one like you. Their blood moves like yours. You will know this when you cut into them, when it splashes up onto your clothes and runs hot across your hands. You are sons and daughters, wives and husbands, sisters," Simon felt those dark, almond shaped eyes boring into him, across the years, "brothers, lovers... so are they. They are just like you. They are you, for you are made of matter, just as they are, and all matter is the same matter, which is the heart of this matter." He smiled, and grew serious, again, " When you forget this," he said, "you are just a butcher, no better than a man who carves dead flesh."
Would he have refused to operate if Mal hadn't turned the ship around? Would he have let her die? The question disturbed him and, like all those that did, Simon could not push it away. It was dark. He could not see, so instead he enjoyed how her ribcage rose and fell, smelled her hair, and felt her sleeping. Would River's life have been worth it, traded against hers? It was another question that disturbed him, so Simon used her soft smell, flowery soap undercut by engine grease and human skin, to destroy it.
He did know that saving her life had saved his own soul, though. She had made a frightened young man into a healer once again and, through her gentle touches, healed him in return.