Fic: "A Hundred Shades Of Blue" (Firefly)

For inalasahl, who mentioned a bit ago that she wanted more Simon/Inara; and for executrix, because a)it's Firefly fic, which she believes I should write at all times :); b) it's at-least-half-Simon-centered fic, which she generally approves of; and c) Jayne only appears once and has no lines.

Also, a thought that occurred to me while writing it: If anyone can think of a way to make Mal's line to Inara in the "Out of Gas" flashback ("She'll break atmo from a wide orbit") into a sex pun, I would, like, fangirl you forever. Um. That has nothing to do with this fic.

POST-SERENITY THE MOVIE. Consider that your spoiler warning.


Nothing ever truly changes.

Inara thinks that she should have remembered that. It's such a basic fact that she's learned from her life. From her faith, even- true, the journey of a thousand miles might begin with a single step, and every small action might have a meaning, but there were still all of those other steps to take, and an entire universe that stood unmoved. She should have remembered.

One broadcast cannot topple a government. Perhaps it enraged a few, stirred a handful more to protest, but the body politic as a whole only blinked slowly, shook its head, and went back to work the next morning. It shouldn't have surprised anyone, much less broken their faith in something so abstract as the inherent brotherhood of man.

None of them should have had any such faith left, anyway.

Human nature. That was something else Inara should have remembered. Human nature, most of all, would never change.
***
"We can't stay here." Simon's voice is calm and level, as ever, and to the others he must look utterly composed. Inara's eyes by habit filter through the shine of a surface. There are shadows under his eyes, and his shirt, though snowy white, is wrinkled. He was up all night wrestling demons, she would stake her license on it. He simply does not take that as a reason not to comb his hair.

"This again?" Zoe asks. She makes Inara's thoughts jump in strange directions now, makes her think of leather left unoiled and uncared for, once supple and now gone brittle, with cracks beginning to show. "We've sat through this song and dance before."

"It's not working," Simon says. "We should have gone, and now we will."

"Pick a port." Mal stands up and leaves, but no one turns to watch him go. Jayne doesn't even look up from his coffee-- no one bothers to fight around here anymore.

"River," Kaylee says, a faint thread of hope left in her voice, but only that much under all the weary resignation. "Don't you want to stay?"

River shakes her head, and her hair falls like silk; Inara had thought once in her presence how that hair would shine if she gave it a thousand brush strokes a night, as a girl would do in a training-house. And now it does, it gleams, and Simon has to buy her a new brush on every world.

"No," she says, and her voice chases thoughts through Inara's mind, thoughts that tangle up together and blossom. Thoughts like flowers. "There's no heartbeat here anymore. Only crying."

Nothing changes; maybe they'd all thought for a moment that purging Miranda from her memory would fix River, but nothing's ever so simple as that. One video cannot topple a government. One trauma resolved cannot heal a mind.
***
Inara finds him in the infirmary, his face impassive, the lines of his mouth scrupulously neutral. She approves of this, his maintenance of propriety in a maelstrom, though she knows that Kaylee is crying for the both of them and the look in Zoe's eyes hinted at last straws and a need for new scenery. Jayne's things have been packed and ready to go since the day he came aboard.

Simon's hands shake, just a little, and Inara approves of that as well. Propriety doesn't mean that one doesn't feel at all.

"Girls who enter the training-house legally cease to be," she tells him, and his eyebrows dart up behind a fall of hair that's just beginning to go unruly with the length of the day. "They vanish for the course of their training, and when it's done, they take new names. The Alliance has never challenged this custom."

"Why couldn't you have mentioned this a while ago?" he asks through clenched teeth, the surgeon who is ready to perform an appendectomy when the patient casually mentions that he swallowed a tack.

"I was hardly in good standing with my House," she reminds him. "Now I'm a training mistress. Tragically kidnapped, but that makes it easy to return." She pauses, for just a heartbeat, enough to assess his face. "A House will never decline the services of a doctor."

One eyebrow raises even higher. "And there's nothing to keep you from returning? Nothing at all?"

She shakes her head. As Kaylee would say, sometimes a thing's broke, can't be fixed. And Mal Reynolds, who shouldn't have believed anyway anymore, has broken that far now, or at least far enough that he's beyond the help of a Companion's hands.
***
River Tam's name was never entered in a computer. It was written on rice paper, with a hand-carved pen, and then it was burned to ashes as she ceased to be.

The Alliance has never demanded information from a training-house, and should they do so now, all records are dust on the wind. But it would be uncivilized of them to ask, and so they would not. The importance of civility could never be questioned, not here in the heart of the most exquisitely refined tradition to bloom off Earth-that-was.

One pale, dark-haired novice is much like another, even if she is plagued with strange dreams.

"She'll take orders as a priestess," Inara tells Simon over tea. They both wear House crimson, she with golden ribbons darting through her hair, he with a gold cravat. Gold for money, red for flesh; the truth of both their lives, displayed for all to see. "She'll never pass the psychological exam for licensing. But she seems to like it here. She says the Temple sings her lullabies."

He smiles, even white teeth against the edges of his cup and he takes another sip. "When can I see her?"

"She'll pass the First Orders next week, and then can have visitors." And she will pass, there's no doubt of it; she learns everything as quickly and easily as Simon claimed when he first came aboard Serenity, and Inara has tutored her personally.

Her hands know the dance of the tea ceremony too well to falter, but he does not admire her grace. It is precisely as expected.

"Don't you think it's strange," he begins, watching sugar dissolve beneath his spoon, "that you and I were able to walk away, and they couldn't seem to manage it?"

"Why would that be strange?" She remembers Zoe standing on Serenity's bridge like a sentry, the crack of Mal's glass meeting the wall, Kaylee's boots on the catwalk in the dead of ship's night.

"Well," and his smile is a bitter twist; here is a man who will not misuse the word irony, "I thought the idle rich were supposed to be the idealists, while the humble poor embrace practicality and soldier on unfazed."

"We're cultured, Dr. Tam, not rich," she reminds him, and he almost laughs. "Therein lies all the difference."
***
His mouth tastes bitterly of tea and sweetly of sugar. His hands are soft, but not weak as that might imply; they're capable as a surgeon's ought to be, and kept soft because in the day to day they're protected by the sterile blue gloves of his profession. They slide easily down her back now, gliding over her spine, and in the soft huff of his breath against her throat she imagines he is reciting the names of the vertebrae.

It's sensible-- logical-- right that here in the most civilized of sanctuaries, they should each turn by choice to the one other who had lived the other life, the vivid sharp swirls of color and laughter and pain that was life on the Rim, on the run, on Serenity.

She knows every motion of this dance, flesh to flesh, has choreographed it a thousand times, and he's gentleman enough to defer to her, to let her lead the way. He's not inexperienced for all his boyishness and naivete, and these are pleasant hours after they finish their tea in the afternoons. A simple exchange of gifts, pleasure for pleasure, contact for contact, and no expectation of anything higher or purer or more abstract. She doesn't expect deathless passion or the earth to move; he doesn't for a moment think she'll change her life for him. That essential difference between what they might have hoped to find on Serenity is enough, with the rushing of blood and pounding of heart and surge of chemical ecstasy that he could break down in a test tube if she asked, to make these afternoons good enough indeed, and perhaps more than either of them believes they have any right to expect, anymore.
***
River has learned to move with grace and sit with stillness, and if Inara had not given her high marks on her examination for the First Order already, she would do so now. Simon asks his sister about her lessons, and she speaks with charmingly controlled passion; that skill is not taught until Third Order, but perhaps she learned it from the air.

"...and we have dancing lessons every afternoon." Her smile is perfect, wide but balanced, and she tips her chin so her hair can fall over one eye just so. "For homework tonight I have to learn a hundred shades of blue."

"There are a hundred shades of blue?" he asks, his eyes soft and bright with amusement.

"Oh yes," River says, turning her smile to Inara. "And I'll know them all by name."

"I can only think of a few." Simon's tone is playful, warm with love, and entirely free of fear; there is nothing to fear here, wrapped in the layers of safety and civility that define the Core. Those gently confining shells feel like home around them all. "Light blue, dark blue, sky blue...why do you need more? Are some of them better than the others?"

"No." River laughs and rolls her eyes at Inara, delighted by his foolishness. "They're all just as beautiful. And if you only see one, you'll never be able to paint the world."

"Is that what we want?" Simon asks, glancing from River to Inara and back. "To paint the world?"

"Paint what you see," River corrects him, stretching her arms up over her head. It's a graceless gesture, but Inara doesn't reprimand her for it. Now is not the moment. "The real thing doesn't change for us, but you can learn to see things differently."

"So life is what you make of it?" He laughs and shakes his head. "That seems entirely too simple, River."

"You'd be amazed," Inara says softly, tilting her head back to consider the sky. From here in the gardens, it's almost close enough to touch.