Please note usual disclaimers and acknowledgments apply, including one for the title. Thanks to all those who gave me encouragement and ideas, and my apologies if my Chinese is not up to scratch.

This is set approximately 4 months after Heart of Gold, which was the last episode aired in the series on my side of the planet. Spoiler alert for anyone who doesn't know the ending.

For those who may not know the inspiration....

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(excerpt from The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats)

Things Fall Apart - Chapter 1

The banquet hall is ablaze with light, ceiling and walls hung with banners and the tables covered in flowers. Groups of people in formal attire mingle, a good number of the men in dress military uniform. A band is playing traditional music, and is barely audible over the hum of conversation. At one end of the room the ceiling disappears and a wide vista of stars is visible, partly eclipsed by the curved hull of a space station. A ship moves gracefully across the field of view, lights glimmering over its surface. The station is Nexus 7, a hub of trade and transport between the Alliance worlds and the Rim, considered by many to be the last bastion of civilization in a galaxy that becomes progressively more lawless the further from the Core worlds you go.

Inara Serra stands at the top of a wide flight of stairs at the entrance to the banquet hall, staring up at the view port, entranced. The handsome young Chinese man in uniform who’s arm she holds stares at her with almost the same expression.

“It’s quite breathtaking, isn’t it?” he says.

Without taking her eyes off the view, Inara replies, “That it is.”

The young man follows her gaze. “I see it from the deck of