The moment Serenity closed up completely Mal passed Kaylee off to a startled Jayne and collapsed on the stairs.

“Whadaaya want me to do with her?” he demanded, shifting her a bit in his arms.

“Just gimme a second, will you Jayne? I’m a bit busy learnin’ to breathe properly again.” Mal wheezed.

“No need to get tetchy. Just don’t know if something’s wrong with her is all. We need the Doc?” Jayne pressed.

Mal shook his head and began to stand as Zoe came down the stairs from the bridge. “I’ve been scanning the area and nothing’s showing up on radar. Hasn’t been anything since before we took off from Paquin. Probably a false alarm, sir. And River agrees with me. I think.”

Mal pressed his lips together a moment before speaking. “Well, let’s not breathe a sigh of relief just yet. We’ll keep movin’ fast as we can for awhile and if nothing shows up we’ll rein her back in. I’ll leave it to you to handle.” Before Zoe could ask why, he took a still-unconscious Kaylee from Jayne and walked off toward the sleeping quarters.

Getting an incapacitated person down the ladder and into their sleeping quarters proved to be more difficult than Mal imagined. More than once he nearly lost his grip on the ladder or on Kaylee. As it was, she took quite a bit of jostling before he finally managed to deposit her in bed.

Mal stopped a moment to watch her sleeping it off and couldn’t keep the look of concern for his mechanic from chasing the annoyance from his features. When she woke up the next morning he was likely to give her a piece of his mind for wandering off and scaring him like that. If those Reavers had been real there’s no telling if things would have turned out the way they did.

He understood why she’d turned to a bottle instead of to the list of supplies he’d provided her. Little Kaylee felt things more deeply than anyone he’d ever met. When she was happy, that happiness touched every bit of her body inside and out and couldn’t help infecting anyone who came near. But the same thing happened when she