Inara waited on the Med Center’s landing platform with the grace of a rhino. She had alternated between pacing the length of the deck and biting her nails – she never bit her nails. But couple the return of Mal to her life with Kaylee’s illness and patience was something she had in short supply.

She wished the thought of seeing Mal again didn’t have this effect on her, but she had learned long ago that wishes rarely, if ever, came true.

She heard the distant pop and echo of a ship breaking through the upper atmosphere, and she turned toward the noise, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the rising sun. While it took a full five minutes for Serenity to come into view, she tracked it from the moment she looked to the sky. The ship was as familiar to her as any home, any city, any planet she had every visited and she could picture it just as clearly whether it was in or out of sight.

The rusty exterior looked slightly worse for wear as the firefly transport settled to the platform. Over the whine of the ship’s fading engines, she heard the clang of a door behind her and turned to see Doctor Bernard limp onto the platform. The man was older, easily pushing seventy, but his skill and wit didn’t suffer for it. He was a bent man, his spine having long ago lost the battle with gravity, but his features were alive and his eyes held a spark that Inara had always found mischievous and comforting. He came to stand beside her now in silence. She had already briefed him and he knew what to expect. Inara wished she did.

As the ramp lowered to the deck it was Mal, of course, who came striding down first, River following in his shadow as she was prone to do these days. The two of them had formed somewhat of symbiotic relationship, especially since Wash’s death. The added time the young girl spent on the bridge meant prolonged periods of close proximity to the captain, and Inara secretly wondered if anything Mal thought or felt was hidden from the psychic. She guessed it wasn’t something Mal liked