A/N: Hi. This is the second part of my first fic. Your comments on the first part were appreciated and any feedback on this one will be appreciated as well. Hope you all enjoy it. Also, a big THANKS to Chazzer (I love my beta).

Disclaimer: All things belong to Joss.

Just a Touch

By abbeygirl

Part Two

Just a touch. That’s all it is. A hand on the shoulder when no one else is around. A single touch and it means so much. It helps us to remember what it is to be alive. It grounds a person. Makes things not so lonely. And it doesn’t demand anything in return.

River knows that healing is taking place on Serenity. She feels it from all of them. Book and Wash will always be in their thoughts. The other crewmembers have changed after Miranda too. Jayne is still grumpy, but she thinks that they may be becoming friends. He respects her as a fighter; however, why she can fight like that makes him a mite twitchy. He doesn’t call her moonbrain or crazy quite as often and that’s nice.

River was sad when Inara left. She and the Captain just couldn’t get things to work for them. The love and the passion were there, but the incompatibility between their lines of work was what made it impossible. Inara couldn’t give up being a Companion; it was all she knew. She also couldn’t sit while he was out on a job and wonder if he was going to come back alive. The tension between the two of them was palpable to River. She didn’t even need to be in the same room to feel it.

Zoe had surprised her. In the beginning, Zoe was barely holding on without Wash. He was all that she thought about. She rarely came out of her bunk. As time went by, River could feel Zoe beginning to ease back into life, but still spent a lot of time in her bunk and she could feel that all of that time was still centered on Wash. It took a trip inside to find out that she had been journaling her times with him. It really helped to allay the feelings that she was going t