I hope the fact that this is a long chapter will help make up for the fact that I have been up to my ears lately, and unable to get this thing posted in a timely way.

17. You'd Be Conferring And Planning And Plotting And Possibly Scheming.

Mal paused outside Inara’s shuttle, and pressed the annunciator.

The hatch slid open, and Inara’s voice said from inside “Since when do you knock?”

“Since I come begging,” Mal said, walking into the shuttle. He was reminded, when he saw the interior, that Inara had left the training house with nothing but the clothes on her back and a trunk of things she’d left behind. He’d need to get her to the training house, and soon, even if she intended to stay with Serenity. She ought to at least have the opportunity to get her things. But taking her to the training house was risky. Not just because of their fugitive status; if he took her there, she might decide to stay.

“Begging for what?” she said. She’d been cleaning, trying even in the absence of her personal effects, to put the shuttle to rights, and she was dressed as he had never seen her – in clothes borrowed from Kaylee, with her hair tied up under a scarf.

“I -- ” he was distracted by her appearance; even in dishabille, she turned him about. He collected himself. “I want a new ship for Christmas, and I can’t afford it.”

“A new ship?” Inara said, amused. “Mal, you’re going to die on Serenity. You’ve already tried it more than once.”

“I know it. I just want this other ship so I can give it to somebody else,” he said.

“We’re talking about the Firefly on Beaumonde, aren’t we?” she said. Inara composed herself on the shuttle’s bare bench. Mal thought he had never seen any human being move with such grace. For her, it ought to be a right downy bench, not what it was.

But the only compliment he offered her was, “Smart woman.”

“You think it’s going to help us out of our current predicament somehow?”

“I do. But not if I can’t get my hands on it