Disclaimer: Mal & Co. are not mine, just borrowed, all characters not present in Firefly/Serenity were created by me.

Lyrics take from the song Dance With My Father by Luther Vandross.

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His mother had kicked him out of their bunk this morning.

“Go to breakfast, I’ll be right up,” she’d told him, pushing him toward the ladder. But she hadn’t come. After breakfast, he was dragged off to Inara’s shuttle for his lessons before he could go check on her. He fought the lessons until Inara finally gave up and turned him loose, only so he could get kidnapped by Kaylee and forced to help in the engine room. It wasn’t until Simon had come in to talk to Kaylee that he’d been able to escape. He made it to the corridor where the crew bunks were when he ran into Jayne.

“Go on and get!” Jayne had yelled at him, scaring the 8 year-old a bit. He’d taken off only to run into the Captain, who grabbed him by his shirt collar.

“Why aren’t you doin’ your lessons?” the Captain had asked, and took Hoban back to Inara’s shuttle. And so Inara tried again to teach him, even though Hoban pestered her with questions as to why his mother was not teaching him today. When she turned away to answer a wave on the Cortex, Hoban was gone.

He made it to the door of his and his mother’s bunk when River stopped him. She stood in the doorway to the bridge and looked at him calmly.

“She needs you,” River said. “None of them realize it, but she needs you.”

With that, River leaned on the doorway and hummed the song she’d been singing the past week, only when she’d been alone with Hoban. Ignoring her, Hoban kicked the door to the bunk open and froze. The sound of sobbing came from the bunk; primal, gut wrenching sobbing. Hoban had never heard his mother cry, let alone sob so hard. He looked up at River.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, unable to move.

River stopped her humming. “Anniversary,” she said simply, before resuming the song.

Young Hoban realized what day it was. He looked at