Written for Tara LJC, because she's the biggest Simon/Kaylee fan I know.

No archiving, please. The usual discliamers apply.

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"Visionary"

(c) HawkMoth, 4/4/03.

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He's dreamed of nights like this.

Well, not exactly like this. Not lying in a narrow bed in a small, spare compartment that has somehow taken on the aura of home. Not forever on the move through the black in a transport ship that's seen better days. Not carrying the total and complete responsibility for the well-being and safety of another person, the one person who always meant everything to him.

Not wondering, not for the first time, if he has love and strength enough in him for his sweet, broken sister, and the sweet, loving girl in his arms.

But there had been dreams--few and far between during the long years of pre-med and Medacad, when he was looking forward to the life mapped out for him. A secure future, a life of possibly even more standing than his parents'. A life he could share with someone he would find along the way. Someone kind and beautiful, clever and generous, who would love him and make him happy. Someone to share delights with in the dark--to touch and cherish and love in return. Infrequent though they were, those dreams had sustained him. That life ahead would one day be his own, to shape and control as he wanted.

It was a life that would never happen now, that would be his only in hopeless dreams.

Reality is this narrow bed in his cabin deep inside Serenity. Reality is Kaylee curled up against him, making little sounds of pleasure as his hands roam over her body. Nothing is more real than her soft pleas to touch her here, or there... nothing matters but the tiny shivers that ran through her as he complies.

Dreams pale in comparison to the way he feels when she touches him in return--the deft fingers of a born engineer as clever as his own, working against his skin, finding sensitive places he'd never been aware of before. In his dreams, he hadn't felt lost and found at the s