Note: This is really a continuation of "In the Dirt of the Day" more than a sequel. Thanks so much for all the comments!

-1-

The first time she came into his house it smelled of roasting vegetables and herbs. “You cook,” she said, hanging her coat by the door. His was there, patched brown leather. Her fingers caught a fold.

“Gotta eat,” Mal said. One of his hands crept around her waist, his mouth in her hair. Inara smiled. “Guess you got someone to do that for you though.”

“Well I can hardly cook for thirty people,” Inara said, turning in the circumference of his arm. Their breaths mingled. He tasted of earth now, of things deeply planted.

“Can I have a tour?” she asked. He broke away, shrugging.

“Not much to see.”

The big house next door he and Zoe had built a few years ago to accommodate a growing boy, a couple farm hands. Room enough for him, Zoe had said, but he liked to stay apart, liked his solitude. Privacy, he called it. Inara looked around at the dusty corners of the room. When they first settled, they’d lived in two rooms, he and Zoe and little Wash. Jayne, luckily for all of them given the space, had just been called away to his sick mother. All the money, what little they had, had gone into the farm. On warm nights, Mal used to sleep on Serenity just to get out of the cramped space. Now it was only him though, the front room for cooking and eating and living, and a side room for sleeping. Inara wandered through without asking, peeking into his bedroom. Strange to recognize things: a chair, his worn bedspread.

“Tain’t much,” Mal said stiffly, eyes on her.

“But it’s yours,” Inara replied softly, turning back to him. One of her hands rested on the frame of the door, the wood he had harvested and cut and planed, its grain rough and real.

“Suppose so.” He gave nothing away, she thought, even now. In her bed he had smiled like a younger man, time erased from their skin by the sun through the window. He stepped toward her, said, “We better eat ‘fore it gets cold.”

After dinner he would not let her help with the dishes. He kissed her palm. “Wouldn’t want your students to think calluses were acceptable,” he teased.

“Mal, I’m not a doll,” she laughed, trying to insinuate herself between him and the sink. His raised hands covered with soap suds, threatening her hair. She shrieked, pulled back and he returned to his task. She leaned on the kitchen counter and mocked his domesticization, since he would not let her share it.

In his narrow bed he said, “You’re a lady,” as if it meant something different from a doll. He winced when the bed frame creaked. She savored the sound.

-2-

In the great hall, Inara taught them to dance. In bare feet, in the beginning, to break them out of their self-imposed dignity. That was to be learned later. First came grace. Girls from thirty different worlds, their feet pattering over her lacquered floor. Their backs arching, their chins up. A tumble, a laugh. Another try. She stepped carefully between them, her face a calm mask. She encouraged their play, to a point, and asked for them to listen after, their sweet faces lifted to her words, their slender bodies quiet enough to learn control.

One day she asked Mal to come, to demonstrate a complex series of steps that could only be danced by two, together. The girls sat cross-legged on the floor all around. A few whispered and giggled down the line. Others, the most promising, watched with wide and curious eyes.

“I can’t believe you want me to do this,” Mal muttered as they stood in the center of the room. His coat was off, her shoes were on. She was trying not to laugh.

“I thought you would like the attention of all these beautiful young women,” Inara teased, placing her palms against his. He gave her a horrified look, and leaned closer.

“I like the attention of one particular beautiful—“

“Don’t you dare say ‘old’ Mal.”

“Old? I was speaking of that one right over there.” He gestured at Marrol, who was napping in the corner. “Just about the right age I think.”

Inara rolled her eyes. “Marrol, please do pay attention,” she called. The girl sat up, sudden, blinking, not a day older than thirteen.

“I’m here!”

“I know you’re here dear. But your eyes have to be open to properly note the steps,” Inara reminded her. Back to position, their hands between them. “Not funny,” she whispered to him.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered back. Her brows contracted slightly. He could still surprise her. Their eyes questioning one another, intent, forgetting the room full of girls. “You owe me,” he added in his usual tone.

She laughed. “Just dance,” she sighed, and they did. Grace, and something more.

-3-

They took a lantern onto Serenity, oil-burning and ancient. She stepped carefully over the rusted frame, trying not to weep. Mal’s face was closed and cold.

“One day she just wouldn’t fly no more,” he said. “Not a thing to be done.”

She didn’t try to touch him. She wrapped herself up and followed him through their memories, their ghosts. His more than hers.

In her shuttle they sat side-by-side on the broken frame of a bed. “I was happy here,” she said, “but over the years what I thought of, what I held onto, were the times when I was not happy. When I was hurt, or frightened, or unsure. Those were emotions that were mine. I have been happy in many places, for many people. But here I was real.”

“When’d we get old enough to talk like this?” Mal asked. His arms on his knees, his body bent and dark in the lantern light.

“We could try to fight instead. For old time’s sake,” Inara suggested. She reached over and claimed one of his hands.

“You know what I remember?” Mal asked, looking up. Light filled the crags of his face.

“What?”

He blinked, shadows moving, and then shook his head. “No, nothing.” He didn’t take his hand away. A step, Inara thought.

-4-

At the market Inara lingered over fresh fruit, bought handfuls of fresh green lettuce and a new comb, polished wood. The trader with the corner stall opened his treasure box and presented her with a book, its cover faded and thin. Imported specially for her. She paid him handsomely for the favor and held the book open for the children who crowded around. Mothers shook their heads and smiled. Once it became clear that the House on the hill was not there to steal men, local attitudes had softened considerably. Now the women came on pilgrimages, offering local goods for a chance to touch real silk, asking questions about men, about health, as if she were a wise woman. Her novices stayed in the Training House, but there were children enough at the market eager to ask questions of the lady.

Wash appeared at her elbow, his old shyness lost. “We have the best apples on the whole moon,” he boasted.

“I know,” Inara said and gave him her hand to lead her. Mal was sitting at their stall with his feet up, slowly cutting an apple into sections.

“You grow them yourself,” Inara said, startled at the reminder of old wounds in this place of light and abundance. He looked down at his hands, as if he hadn’t even noticed what they were about.

-5-

Mal had trouble sleeping on Inara’s silk sheets. The softness kissed him awake in the middle of the night. His breath caught, his eyes opened, and he stared at the high ceiling, the hint of starlight from the window. Inara woke too. Her body, trained and practiced to perfection, could not rest while someone lay awake beside her.

He used to get up when sleep deserted him, and she would rise also; they had spoken in hushed tones or played card games at an antique wooden table, or made love again, in the dark. But eventually he must have realized that his movement opened her eyes, that when he sat up she would too, no matter how long her day, how hard the shadows under her eyes. He began to lie still; he kept his eyes closed and his breath steady, a slow rhythm to fool her.

The deception did not work. An imperceptible shift stirred her and she listened to his even breathing and knew it to be a lie, and a gift. She could not change what she had been — what she was, still, in her lungs and aching muscle tissues — but she could pretend, as he did.

They lay still in her wide bed, counting each other’s breaths.

-6-

She knocked on his door in the hour before dawn. His house familiar to her now, she could walk in without a light but for this she needed his permission to enter. He opened the door, blinking sleep from his eyes. He was dressed, already awake for the day, but he had clearly not been expecting visitors.

“’Nara. What’s wrong?”

She held her arms out with their small, sleeping bundle. The baby was wrapped tightly against the cold, small squinted face peeking out. “Her mother died,” she explained, “She had no one.” Following questions, the local women had taken to asking for her at births. This one had not asked, had simply limped up the hill her hands bracing her lower back, a bare slip of a thing. Please, she had said.

Mal was awake now, sifting implications. Inara’s eyes and throat and arms seemed to have escaped her control. They longed without her consent. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I don’t want her to be a ward of the house,” Inara admitted. “I want her to be ours.” Mine was a word she still had trouble forcing out. But ours, that was something she could hold on her tongue. Something she could long for, and keep close.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, into his sleep-filled silver hair. “Aren’t we a mite old for this kind of thing?” he asked, half a smile on his face. She drew the baby back to herself, her arms aching with the weight. But she would grow used to that. She would grow.

“Don’t you dare say ‘old’ Mal,” she whispered, even though she was, but she felt newborn now, open and ready. “Say ‘scarred.’ Say ‘broken’ and ‘stubborn’ and ‘stupid.’ Don’t say old. We’re not old. At least, I’m not.”

His eyes aching on her face, and a rueful smile beneath. “What’re we gonna call her?” he asked, and Inara smiled back, stepped inside.

-7-

The garden was her favorite hiding spot. In games of hide and seek, or when she was angry or sad, or when she slipped away from the preoccupied gaze of the novice set to mind her, she could always be found in the garden. The flowers Inara planted had long since bloomed and died and bloomed again. Safa could spend hours tending them: watering, tearing up and planting again with little thought for the consequences, the delicate systems of roots.

After the work in the fields was done Mal came walking up the hill to sit in the garden and watch her play. “Daddy,” she said, “Mother Tree is lonely.” Mother Tree was the one in the corner, leafy arms providing shade in the heat of midday. “Daddy,” she asked, “why can’t there be flowers all the time?” Her blue-green eyes were not mirrors of his, her gold hair slender and straight; she was entirely new. “Ask your mother,” he said, “This ain’t my area of expertise.”

“Daddy,” she asked, “when can we go in a space ship?” He smiled, and promised, “Soon, darling.” Inara watched, but he did not flinch; he pointed at the sky and told Safa how the constellations came to life when you got close enough. He teased her small, honest face and made her laugh.

Later, Inara knelt on the stones and showed her daughter how to work gently, how to protect the plants. They danced barefoot on the terrace before bed and all three kissed each other goodnight. Cheeks and eyes and noses and lips.

******

Note: "Safa" means "calm, serenity" in Arabic.