A/N: I know, I know, it's really long and it's mostly dialogue. But it's Christmas so you'll forgive me, right? Holidays Happy!

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Book One – Chapter Two

What are you doing right now? Oh, yeah. You’re sleeping. Keep doin’ that.

Malcolm Reynolds stopped straining his neck and let his face drop back down on the dining room table and heard his bowl of half-eaten noodles clatter a bit. No, the table wasn’t the most comfortable piece of wood to lay his head on, and he couldn’t imagine his posture being approved by any kind of chiropractor, but nowadays when sleep came to him, he’d take it, even if it was disintegrating his lower back.

Mal could feel the saliva dripping across his cheek, and he knew that it was probably ruining the ink on his maps. It was his fault for falling asleep when he should have been plotting yet another impossibly clever route through the increasingly narrow safe space, but it was all just so boring. The more he looked at the faded, somewhat outdated star charts taped clumsily to one another, the less they seemed to hold any actual meaning. Besides, those clever kinds of routes were getting hard to come by. Truthfully, Mal didn’t have as great a grasp on navigating as he would have his crew believe. Wash always was the one to plot courses. But now he really couldn’t be doing that, the condition he was in.

It was thoughts like that that kept Mal from sleeping. So he tried to push it behind him to continue enjoying his uncomfortable slumber.

He could notice that he wasn’t as cold as he expected; the ship’s engine was running at half speed to conserve its energy before its forthcoming refueling so everyone had to live a little chillier than usual. He moved slightly, and he could feel the blanket draped around his shoulders and neck. It wasn’t his scratchy military-grade blanket, though. No, this one smelled good. A lot gooder than his stuff. Smelled like Inara.

Whenever he started thinking