Title: Spill Challenge: 35, secrets Words: 418 Disclaimer: It’s all about Joss Summary: Written for Firefly Friday at livejournal. Mal and Inara play cards. The loser has to share a secret. A good one.

Mal laid down his cards with a triumphant, “ha!” Plum tall. Inara sighed involuntarily. The man hadn’t been bluffing. He smiled, downing a hefty-sized drink from his mug of Kaylee’s engine-wine. When he put it down, it hit the table with a large thump. “Spill,” he demanded.

“All right. Once, about a month after I starting training, I…”

“Uh!”

Inara raised an eyebrow. “Uh?”

“Yes. Uh,” Mal repeated. “Uh, as in, ‘uh, no.’ I will not listen to another story about how you broke some silly rule at the training house. We’re trading secrets here. I wanna hear a real secret, Inara. A juicy one. For when I need to blackmail you.”

She shook her head, smiling despite herself. “Blackmail me?”

“Yes, blackmail.” He was grinning, so proud to have beaten her. “You know, repeatin’ every word I say ain’t gonna make me forget you owe me a story, here. So quit stallin’. Spill.”

Secrets. Inara did have secrets. All kinds of secrets. Some were hers. Others she had inherited from clients. Some were dark secrets, some light. Some were painful, other merely embarrassing. All of them she held close, guarding them with each beat of her heart.

“All right,” Inara said, growing more somber. She looked him square in the eye when she told him. “I want to have children.”

He nearly choked on his drink.

“Relax, Mal. I don’t want to have them with you.” Truth be told, the prospect didn’t bother her, but they could barely manage to spend an afternoon together without bickering.... “There isn’t room in a Companion’s life for children. It’s not strictly prohibited. Some even joke that’s in an occupational hazard. Hundreds of years of medical breakthroughs and it’s still impossible to be one hundred percent sure…”

She looked away. His eyes were too much for her.

“But I… I used to think it would be nice to have a child, to care for it, to kiss it on the forehead and sing it a lullaby before it went to sleep, to tell her I love her, to do all the things that I never…” She shook her head, looking up at him. “Terribly sentimental of me, isn’t it?”

“It ain’t,” he said.

“Oh, yes it is. Terribly sentimental. Fatuous…”

“I’m being serious here, ‘Nara.” His tone was insistent. “There ain’t nothin’ silly about it. It’s…”

But he didn’t say.

“Are you going to deal?” Inara asked, gesturing towards the cards.

“Sure,” he said, picking them up and beginning to shuffle.