Inara walked into the kitchen with a mission. She was going to find Mal, and she was going to get him to accept her help in finding Dillon Saunders. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t come to her already. All right, so it took lying awake all night to think of it, but Mal was supposed to think of things like this immediately! Her license may have been suspended, but she still had access to her Cortex files, and her passcodes should still work on the net. So she would help find Saunders, and thereby find River, and she would get to spend some time with the Captain and figure out how to deal with whatever had changed between them. Inara was surprised to find Mal sitting with Jayne, silent and contemplative. Both men were frowning slightly, staring off into the distance. The Companion (they could take away her license, but they couldn’t take away who she was) sat down smoothly. She waited for Mal to look up, and lifted her chin. “I can help you,” she said softly. “How, ‘Nara,” he said tiredly. “Your license… you won’t get us what you did.” She winced inside. She knew he wasn’t trying to be cruel. He almost never did. It just happened. “Maybe not physically. But I have access to all my files, and I have passcodes that won’t have been changed. I can find out things that you wouldn’t be able to without bullets and threats.” Memory clanged: she’d said something like that when she’d first rented the shuttle. He closed his eyes, squinting them hard. She wondered if he’d slept that night. “Not dragging you into this. I ain’t gonna give them cause to lay some more charges on you, get your license permanently revoked. Point of fact, maybe it’d be best for you to get off before we go chasin’ Saunders. You’n Kaylee, and the Doc if he wants.” Inara did not falter. “I am not leaving the ship, Mal. I can’t speak for Kaylee or for Simon, but I will not leave Serenity. And if you refuse to give me leave to help find River, I will do it without your permission. I may not be a soldier, but I am not weaponless.” He sighed. “I know that. I know that better’n most. But ‘Nara, you can’t do this. You’ve gotten into enough trouble because of our ragtag little family, and I’m not looking to get you in more.” Inara sucked in a breath through her nostrils, noticing how Jayne was listening closely but saying nothing. “Exactly, Mal! Family! Are you so blinded that you don’t realize- you don’t see-” She broke off, started again. “This is my family, too, Mal.” He opened his mouth, but she raised a hand to cut him off. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn’t risk everything for them. For us.” Silence. “I’m willing to give it all up, Mal,” Inara stated simply. She didn’t know if those words would come back to haunt her, but she knew they were true. She had passed the point of no return, and she wasn’t sure when it had happened. Things had a habit of sneaking up on you in the Black. “I have no right to ask you to give it all up,” Mal said quietly. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Inara wanted to scream at him to stop, stop playing games, stop masking emotion and dancing around truth. She was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the mind games she had played her entire life. She wished she could see relationships with the simplistic eye of Kaylee, who saw what she wanted and flirted blatantly until she got it. Instead, Inara had to be trained by professionals to lie about her feelings and was in love with a man who had been trained by life to do the same. “You’re not,” Inara told him. “I’m telling you. Come to my shuttle in half an hour and we’ll start looking.” With that, she rose gracefully, nodded to Jayne, and glided out. There was a brief silence, and then Jayne looked over at his captain. “Whipped,” he said bluntly, but there was no mockery in his tone. Mal merely sighed. Whipped, indeed.