Author’s note: Well, I still haven’t figured out how to download the ep “Heart of Gold” – but that doesn’t matter, ‘cause I have the script. I mention this because I wrote this story right after reading said script. I was left with the impression that Inara was going to leave Serenity after that episode. Apparently, I’m the only one as the subsequent episodes have no mention of her desire to leave. Anyways, this story is about what happened when she left and how she came back.

CHAPTER ONE

"Ya look tired," Kaylee observed. "Maybe ya ought’a go to bed."

"Nah," Simon said. He was slouched on the floor in the engine room near where she was working under Serenity’s huge rotating motor. Every now and then she would emerge to get a tool and smile at him. If he noticed, he didn’t smile back. His eyes, which were barely focused and surrounded by gray bags, were looking through the length of the Engine room and the hallway to River, who was sitting and ‘fixing’ another book at the dining room table. "I can make it to dinner."

"It’s four hours till dinner," Kaylee reminded him. "You could get a nap in there easy. I’d see you got woke up."

"I’m fine," he said, his voice soft and scratchy. "My first year at the hospital I’d work 36 hour shifts. This is nothing."

"Yeah, but did you have gun fights and abductions and funerals during those shifts?"

Simon’s eyes slid from River to Kaylee and a soft smile tempered the edges of his lips. "No."

"There you go," Kaylee said definitively.

Simon closed his eyes and rolled his head back so that it was resting on the hard cold bulkhead. "Yep, there I go."

"Deliverin’ a baby hard work?" Kaylee asked as she dove back under the rotating motor.

"Nerve-wracking, more than anything else," Simon said. "As far as medical procedures go, it’s easy. If there are no complications, as there weren’t in Petaline’s, the process is almost entirely . . ." his voice trailed off.

"Simon?" Kaylee asked from inside the engine. She wondered if he’d fallen asleep as he’d been talking.

"’As