Once every couple of months, Serenity would run medical supplies in under Alliance radar and deliver them to her one-stop med center on Sweetwater. The crew would stay for a few days, where she got the use of Simon Tam's skills during the day and Mal Reynolds' skills at night.

The arrangement suited both of them well enough.

Nevertheless, she and Mal had an understanding between them. Both were fiercely loyal to their people. Both had lost more than they cared to admit to the Alliance - although he'd been betrayed by his angels and she had made a pact with the devil. And she had about as much desire to get off-world as he had to stay grounded.

Their dance had been a slow and halting one - full of the missteps and trod-upon toes of people who didn't dare care too much for anyone else. She had told him once, before the first time they made hard and fast love to match the pounding rhythm of the ever-present rain outside, that everyone brings a ghost the first time they bed someone new.

He'd laughed at that, trying to disbelieve what she had said.

She knew otherwise. Her ghost had come in the form of a young, eager Core doctor, not terribly unlike she imagined Simon Tam was, once upon a long time ago. He'd arrived with a fancy leather suitcase full of hopes and dreams. Three months later, he'd repacked that case with empty promises and left.

She'd also seen Mal's ghost, in the captures Kaylee showed her. She'd heard Mal's ghost, when he mumbled Inara's name in his sleep. Once, when the crew brought in supplies in what had been Inara's shuttle, she could even smell a faint trace of Mal's ghost - jasmine.

The ghost that got away. Given to her black humour, she sometimes wondered if perhaps her ghost and Mal's were enjoying the finer things that neither of them would ever have.

Sometimes, right at the instant they both climaxed, she and Mal could banish each others ghosts. But just for that instant. And then their spirits would haunt each of them all over again.