Thick. Chapter A. Plans. - *The characters and their world belong to Mr. Whedon and company; the mistakes and the follies are solely mine. - - “Simon, you’re back?” Kaylee came into the infirmary. And stopped short. “You’re bleeding? Wode tian...” She was stammering, hands out like they could staunch a wound across the room; Simon’s white shirt was bright red, as he leaned heavily over the sink. He turned, hands red, shirtfront red, a red streak on his forehead. “Kaylee?” He looked alarmed. She could not bring herself to move, and her hands, half-curled into fists, hovered mid-air. All she could do was babble, thinking she could light on a way to fix him by running through all her options. That maybe by naming it, she could move to do it: “Simon? Should I get—shouldn’t you be sitting. Sit, sit, Simon, sit, I’ll go get the Captain. Or Zoe? Or...” “What? No, oh, it’s nothing, Kaylee.” “Nothing? You’re covered in...what happen-ed? Does it hurt? No of course it, does, what—” “No.” Simon’s face relaxed at the sight of her concern. It loosened something tense across his shoulders. “Kaylee, no, it’s not mine. Not my blood. I was just—a little girl came in. Cut her head on something; scalp wounds bleed. A lot. I didn’t have the chance...” “I thought you were just going for supplies...” Kaylee sank onto the infirmary’s chair, flopped back. She breathed out in a rush, looking up at the too white ceiling. Simon turned back to the sink, covering a smile at her theatrical response. As he finished washing off his hands, he looked down. His shirt was a distinctly worrisome red, he noticed. Perhaps Kaylee had not been overly dramatic. He explained to Kaylee, over the sound of running water. Some townsman, his own hands bloody, his face panicked and pale, had pulled Simon from the pharmacy across the street to local clinic, babbling about the doctor being gone to and pointing to his little girl, limp in her mother’s arms, the woman immediately begging for help. Blood on all of them. Simon was examining the little girl and asking for the story before he thought to pull on one of Elias’s scrub aprons. “That all?” Kaylee said, still looking up at the infirmary ceiling, hand to her chest, but breathing better. “Near stopped my heart, the sight of you there.” “Lucky I’m a doctor then.” “‘Cuz you can fix me up every time you scare the life outta me?” “I will, though I hope I won’t be causing significant trauma any time soon.” Kaylee smiled; Simon was smiling at her, drying his now clean hands, his voice free of irony and hesitation. It was nice to hear; Kaylee wished she heard it some place else than this small corner of the ship; the only place he seemed able to find his feet. “All you’ve seen, don’t suppose me getting a heart-attack is like to count as ‘significant trauma’.” “Kaylee...” “Nah,” she was laughing at the thought, “you’d prolly just mix up a shot outta nothing, tell me to drink a glass of water and be on my way.” “That’s not true.” “Sure it is, Simon. You’ve fixed up plenty worse.” “Worse, well, how do you really measure... and, not that I know anything about the ship, of course, but, from where I’m standing,” he paused, looked down at his feet, “I don’t see how Serenity would—fly, without you.” Kaylee dropped her voice to just below a whisper: “But we’re parked here on good green grass. Or close as it comes, in a spaceport.” “I know. I meant...” Simon’s stammering killed her attempt at a flirtation. She fell back in the chair, defeated. “I hear ya, you’re saying you’ll take real good care of me, ‘cuz I’m the only one can keep this bird in the air. It’s a comfort, I guess. Knowing I’m like to be first in line to...” Kaylee’s voice turned to a blended tone Simon was getting to know, and hate, all too well. Resignation wrestling with determined cheer. He walked over to her on the chair, where she had one arm behind her head, the other hanging over the side, dirt or grease from Westfield’s junkyard still on her hands and face and coveralls. It wasn’t exactly fair, the thought flickered through him. Messed up, he inspired horror; she looked endearing. Enticing. Beautiful. “That’s not ... I was trying to say, Kaylee, that... from the moment I walked on board here, my whole world shrunk down to this. Any chance I had to live, locked up in... a place with doors that don’t reach the floor. Where the bars on the ceiling aren’t art, they’re safety measures.” He looked up and around at his infirmary, and Kaylee followed his glance, the room seven paces long, seven paces wide. Compared to that hospital they’d robbed, floor after floor of rooms and knowledge. “And it’s only now, somehow, starting to be...I can’t go back to... not ever, and if your heart stopped, I can’t see how—the ship could still be—it wouldn’t work, anymore.” Kaylee lost her breath for a second time, at the earnest if poorly worded compliment. He paused, waited. She blinked a couple of times, unscrambling his phrases, making sure she heard what he said, not just what she hoped. Then she thought to sit up, get closer to him, lean in, but Simon had taken a deep breath, laughed falsely, and stepped back a fraction. He pulled a cord from some machine, clipped it to her finger, and scanned to the monitor behind her. “I don’t think that will be a problem, though. You’ve got a very strong heart.” He spoke with precision, although he gave her a half-smile. He watched the lines behind her head for longer than Kaylee could account for. She wanted to reach over to take his hand, but Simon stepped back again, fiddling with the buttons on his shirt. “I should go change. Try and... I’m running out of things that don’t have blood or holes clear through them.” He backed out of the infirmary and disappeared before Kaylee could say a word. She sat up, kicking her feet over the side of the chain, looking at the screen. “Strong heart. Ku xiao bu de.” - - Simon’s quick step took him up stairs and more stairs. He found Mal in the kitchen, staring into a cup of tea. “Reading your destiny, Captain?” “More your sister’s line of work, ain’t it, Doctor?” Mal’s response was fast enough, but there was a delay between the statement and his glance up at Simon. The delay made Simon hesitate, stand awkwardly before Mal. “Sometimes I think tea leaves would be easier to understand,” he offered. Eyes now firmly on the boy, Mal raised his head, turned it to the side, considering. His expression did not change, but he nodded. Simon pulled out a chair and sat down, struck by the sense of being able to. Being able to take a chair, sit down. Talk to Mal. He looked over at the far hatch, as if checking to see if someone else was present or listening. “The job you settled, I understand it involves returning here, to Westfield, after unloading the cargo on Milagros and Santo. “That’s right. Making a round trip.” Mal was somewhere between sarcasm and curiosity. “You taking a sudden interest in our business for a reason?” Simon’s answering grin was flat out ironic. “Something like.” Boy was in a good mood for someone with a shirt full of bloodstains, Mal thought. He waited for the explanation. “Kaylee’s birthday is coming up.” “This month, as I recall.” “In nine days, actually. I was, thinking, she really deserves something nice to mark the day.” “You were thinking that?” Mal watched Simon now with a disquietingly blank face. Simon plowed on. “She does her best to make other people feel special. At least, she’s always done so for River and I.” “Won’t argue there,” Mal answered to Simon’s assertion. He was amused at Simon’s gravity, at his concern for Kaylee, and his slow and sideways approach, when he was usually pointedly upfront. “Dr. Elias asked for my help. In Westfield. Said my staying, while you and the others did the job, would mean a much-needed vacation. Even a few days rest would do wonders.” “And this has what to do with Kaylee’s party?” “I’d have the chance to get some things together, for her. River could help. Kaylee wouldn’t be around, so there’d be a better chance at a surprise. I’m assuming she’d like a surprise.” Mal spent a moment deciding on whether to torment the boy or let him breathe, but his idea was a good one, and Kaylee did deserve it. “Sounds a fine idea. We don’t need you on this trip, small moons to smaller, and legal cargo all the way. You stay here and gather up party fixings as can be found. I reckon a surprise is just in line with what that girl’s dreaming of.” “Thank you, Captain. We’ll take some things out tomorrow morning before you take off.” “Just don’t go gettin’ into trouble, Doctor.” “Me?” Simon said in wide-armed sarcasm as he left the galley. “What could possibly go wrong?” “Tremble to think,” Mal told the empty room. He turned back to his cup, only the bitter end of his tea left. He swallowed it, anyways. Better suited his mood, than friendly chatter about birthday parties and pleasing Kaylee. - - For a month, Inara did not sleep much. She curled up on a divan in the corner of her room during the darkest part of the night. Pulled against the large window, she could smell the well-tended flowers that framed the training house. The inevitable mountain wind cut moonlight into milky patterns as clouds moved over and past it. Inara did not want to miss the gentle ground mist, before dawn, or the streaking colors of sunrise, different each day. She kept a record, careful calligraphy noting the shades and shapes of the morning, another column detailing the day’s weather. To miss the restless, changing beauty of a world was foolish. She considered it ungrateful. She did not consider how much easier it was to float through the days in a haze of persistent fatigue. Or her back-of-the-mind fear that if she climbed into bed, she would never get out it. Better to stay awake, and watch her world. Beauty, order, place. These virtues had been her first lessons. They were her teachers, now. But when she overhead three girls discussing her, the constructed peace she had so carefully draped about herself fell quietly and irrevocably apart. “Did you see Mistress Serra, pacing about the gardens last night? Well after midnight.” “She likes the little temple back there.” “So much she has to pray in the middle of the night?” “I know what she was doing.” “Jien tah-duh guay, Sandrine.” “You’re so coarse, Reni. A companion speaks with precision, at all times.” “All times,” Reni dragged out. “Even when in bed.” Inara rolled her eyes and almost left the window she had been leaning against, only one storey above the girls. Only Jiliam’s quick reply kept her in place: “Bed, as in where we should be, girls, if you hearken to the hour, and where we will be, girls, when they check and banish us to chambers, and then, where we will be without Sandrine’s theory on Mistress Serra’s nighttime walks to think about, if you—aren’t—quiet.” Reni giggled, mimicking Jiliam’s singsong with the rhyme, “will he, won’t she, did he, don’t she” to Sandrine, but the words caught up with her, and she stopped chattering. Inara remained above them, content to listen. These ones would not think to look up, but she stayed out of their sight, anyways. She could imagine Sandrine’s hands, though, following her words with apt grace. While not a promising student in many ways, the girl was a storyteller. “She walks beneath the stars, dreaming of the black.” “The black?” “Space, Jiliam, dong ma?” “Dui bu qi, Reni, if I don’t know every bit of spaceport li yu.” “She walks below the stars, dreaming of the time she spent among them, and the captain that still holds her heart...” “That’s bu jing zhi tan, Sandrine. I’m surprised at you.” “Oh? and what’s your explanation, Jiliam?” “Not something so childish as to think Mistress Serra’s pining for some zui fan space pirate. She’s a companion, first rank. Not some heroine out of a backworld tinsel vid.” “But companions don’t wander about gardens in the middle of the night.” “But they do walk the halls after curfew. I’ve no desire to write hallway rules in calligraphy.” “Or translate them into the Latin.” Inara watched them hurry away to their rooms. She remembered stretching curfew limits herself, as a student, but never with such ease or for such speculation. Of course, she had sat there listening, rather than rebuking the girls... Instead of continuing out to the garden, as she had planned, she went back to her classroom. If these flighty, chattering things, who were hardly quiet enough to hear what a friend would say, let alone read another’s thoughts, had still picked up on her distraction, she needed to rearrange this fei qin wang shi that she had fallen into. “Not that I’m spending my nights thinking about... the ship,” she told herself. “Of course not. Even Jiliam saw how ridiculous that idea is.” Still. She looked around her classroom. She would fail her students, if she could not show them how completely a companion takes to her training. Not as a thing one wears, to slip on and off at will. Some decent sleep would give her the clarity she needed, and perhaps the patience to bear seeing these girls in detail. - - (Future Chinese) Translations - Wode tian: oh my God (oh heavens.) Ku xiao bu de: (idiom) find something both annoying and funny, not know whether to laugh or cry Jien tah-duh guay: Like hell. dong ma: understand? li yu: slang Dui bu qi: Pardon me zui fan: criminal bu jing zhi tan: an absurd story fei qin wang shi: forget about sleeping and eating