author’s note: this is a rewrite of something that I wrote about 5 years ago (also called September, amazingly enough!). Every single time I hear this song, I think about how I always wanted to rewrite this story, and I finally did it. Gentle concrit is always appreciated, please bear in mind that I have been out of fandom since about the time I wrote the first September, so I may be a little bit rusty. ~3500 words, angsty as hell, obvious Simon/Kaylee with a tiny bit of implied Inara/Simon comforty type stuff. anyway, onward.

Laura lays on the foot of the bed

Mimics a noose with the telephone cord

Doctor’s on the phone and she hangs up and says “I ain’t ever gonna see the winter again”

And I don’t know how, but she smiles

~Ryan Adams, September

There hadn’t been any cases like this in a long, long time. The core planets had long ago developed a vaccine, and many of the outer planets had managed to get their hands on it in some form, and as far as Simon was concerned, cancer was something that was reserved for history lessons and for backwater rebels who refused to submit to the Alliance’s promises of a better world. And then Kaylee got sick.

He suspected the worst almost automatically. By the time they landed on Ariel, about a week after she first started complaining, she was tired and pale, sleeping often and barely eating. The little bruises that usually peppered her arms and legs--the reminders that in some ways, she was still a little girl who loved to run around and play a little bit rough--had grown and spread and seemed to come out of nowhere, purple and angry, staring Simon in the face every time he looked at her, little flags of warning on her beautiful, smooth skin.

He didn’t do anything at first. There wasn’t much he could do, out there in the black, but treat the symptoms. He gave her an antipyretic and cool baths when her fever spiked and an appetite stimulant so she would eat, and waved the hospital (a risk, after the last time they were on Ariel, but a risk he was willing to take