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Title
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing: Kaylee/Simon
Author: Trillium aka![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
redbrunja
Recipient: written for![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
het_challenge.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: “Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick.” Simon isn’t the kind of doctor to stand idylly by when people need help, even if helping may require a little more subterfuge than he’s used to...
On Osiris, the Recreation and Landscape Department took great care to keep the public parks stocked with a handful of idyllic animals. Songbirds trilled in the trees, the ponds were brimming with bright, matching koi, and deer had been trained to nibble bread out of children's’ hands.
Even as an undergrad, back when there had being nothing in his mind beyond being the best trauma surgeon in the Core, he’d found the dull obedience of the deer slightly creepy. He had kept trying to deduce which sedative they were under. That may have been an early hint that his life would not end up as perfectly ordered as Simon Tam had always believed.
Serenity performed some tricky loop-de-loop that caused the psychosomatic sensation that his stomach was crawling up into his throat and wished, fervently, that he was back in Nepthys Park, being disturbed by the placid wildlife.
Kaylee didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary as she connected wires and slid delicate looking filters into hidden panels in the wall.
Simon shifted his attention between her and the fast-cycling engine as he clung to the doorway.
“Kaylee!” cracked out of the speakers, Reynolds’ voice sounding even harsher than normal. “I’d like to leave atmo sometime now!”
Simon saw Kaylee roll her eyes and mutter something uncomplimentary about Mal’s temperament.
He didn’t realize she’d finished until she was striding across the engine room. “We’re shiny, Wash,” she called into the speakers.
“Thanks, Kaylee,” the pilot responded, and did something that flattened Simon into the decking.
“Are you okay?” she asked a few minutes later, giving him a hand and helping him to his feet.
“Yes, of course,” Simon agreed, tugging his cuffs straight.
Kaylee brushed at his shirt, her hands warm and steady as she flicked dust off his clothing.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, giggling a little. “I guess I should have swept more recently.”
“That’s quite all right,” Simon said briskly, trying to keep his voice from wavering. “not everybody is naturally fastidious.” Kaylee stopped brushing him off.
“I-I mean–” Simon stuttered, “it’s fine–”
Mal poked his head into engine room. “So how did reinforcing the oxygen scrubbers go?” he asked and Kaylee gave him an annoyed look.
“You said I’d have the afternoon before we needed to leave,” Kaylee said with a [sad]
look on her face that Simon was grateful he wasn’t responsible for. Mal drummed his fingers on the door frame nervously.
“Well, a few folks got a mite tetchy, so I decided we’d leave a little earlier than scheduled, “Mal said, “Also, it ain’t like you didn’t have most of the afternoon to fiddle about.”
“Actually, it’s just a quarter past noon,” Simon offered.
Mal shoot him a disgruntled look.
“Captain, I’ve been telling you for months that I needed to reinforce the air scrubbers, and that can’t be done in the black,” Kaylee pressed her case. “And having to put them back with out adjustin’ them properly brings the whole system out of true.”
“Oh, Kaylee, it’s Serenity,” Mal said. He walked over to the bulk head and ran his hand possessively across the metal. “She wouldn’t let us down.”
Beneath his fingers, something cracked.
Kaylee flinched like she’d been struck.
“So, maybe we should put down on Io.” Mal said. “Stay for a couple days.”
“Better make it Prometheus,” Kaylee said. “It’s closer.”
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing: Kaylee/Simon
Author: Trillium aka
redbrunjaRecipient: written for
het_challenge.Rating: PG-13
Summary: “Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick.” Simon isn’t the kind of doctor to stand idylly by when people need help, even if helping may require a little more subterfuge than he’s used to...
On Osiris, the Recreation and Landscape Department took great care to keep the public parks stocked with a handful of idyllic animals. Songbirds trilled in the trees, the ponds were brimming with bright, matching koi, and deer had been trained to nibble bread out of children's’ hands.
Even as an undergrad, back when there had being nothing in his mind beyond being the best trauma surgeon in the Core, he’d found the dull obedience of the deer slightly creepy. He had kept trying to deduce which sedative they were under. That may have been an early hint that his life would not end up as perfectly ordered as Simon Tam had always believed.
Serenity performed some tricky loop-de-loop that caused the psychosomatic sensation that his stomach was crawling up into his throat and wished, fervently, that he was back in Nepthys Park, being disturbed by the placid wildlife.
Kaylee didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary as she connected wires and slid delicate looking filters into hidden panels in the wall.
Simon shifted his attention between her and the fast-cycling engine as he clung to the doorway.
“Kaylee!” cracked out of the speakers, Reynolds’ voice sounding even harsher than normal. “I’d like to leave atmo sometime now!”
Simon saw Kaylee roll her eyes and mutter something uncomplimentary about Mal’s temperament.
He didn’t realize she’d finished until she was striding across the engine room. “We’re shiny, Wash,” she called into the speakers.
“Thanks, Kaylee,” the pilot responded, and did something that flattened Simon into the decking.
“Are you okay?” she asked a few minutes later, giving him a hand and helping him to his feet.
“Yes, of course,” Simon agreed, tugging his cuffs straight.
Kaylee brushed at his shirt, her hands warm and steady as she flicked dust off his clothing.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, giggling a little. “I guess I should have swept more recently.”
“That’s quite all right,” Simon said briskly, trying to keep his voice from wavering. “not everybody is naturally fastidious.” Kaylee stopped brushing him off.
“I-I mean–” Simon stuttered, “it’s fine–”
Mal poked his head into engine room. “So how did reinforcing the oxygen scrubbers go?” he asked and Kaylee gave him an annoyed look.
“You said I’d have the afternoon before we needed to leave,” Kaylee said with a [sad]
look on her face that Simon was grateful he wasn’t responsible for. Mal drummed his fingers on the door frame nervously.
“Well, a few folks got a mite tetchy, so I decided we’d leave a little earlier than scheduled, “Mal said, “Also, it ain’t like you didn’t have most of the afternoon to fiddle about.”
“Actually, it’s just a quarter past noon,” Simon offered.
Mal shoot him a disgruntled look.
“Captain, I’ve been telling you for months that I needed to reinforce the air scrubbers, and that can’t be done in the black,” Kaylee pressed her case. “And having to put them back with out adjustin’ them properly brings the whole system out of true.”
“Oh, Kaylee, it’s Serenity,” Mal said. He walked over to the bulk head and ran his hand possessively across the metal. “She wouldn’t let us down.”
Beneath his fingers, something cracked.
Kaylee flinched like she’d been struck.
“So, maybe we should put down on Io.” Mal said. “Stay for a couple days.”
“Better make it Prometheus,” Kaylee said. “It’s closer.”
~~~
Prometheus was a beautiful planet. Some quirk in the terraforming had caused carbonization in the soil, lending the whole planet a glinty violet shade. Even the clouds were purple. Outside of the cockpit windows they floated in puffy spheres, looking like grape icy-planets.
Simon would have loved to walk about, get a chance to be someplace other then Serenity, but wasn’t foolish enough to even ask the captain. Surprisingly, River didn’t request the same. She spent her time in the engine room with Kaylee. Simon would have appreciated that more, the excuse of keeping River out of Kaylee’s way allowing him to spend more time with the mechanic, except that he was more of an inconvenient lout than his sister was, and occasionally River would make one of her nonsensical comments, they’d both look at him, and then giggle.
The shyness that had plagued Simon all through grade school was starting to reassert itself.
Jayne clomped into the room, returning from one of the errands Kaylee’d been sending him on since Serenity had first touched down on Prometheus.
River broke off of her conversation with Kaylee and swung her arm toward Jayne, finger pointed accusingly at the brown paper bag in his hand.
“Wrong!” she declared.
“I told you to stop jinxing me,” Jayne snarled.
“Jayne,” Simon commented, “how exactly do you propose that my sister caused you to pick up the wrong set of screws?”
“With her–” Jayne made a teeter-totter gesture with his hand, making the bits of metal inside the bag rattle like dried bones, “congressy voodoo genius powers or something.”
Kaylee held out her hand imperiously. “Let me see,” she requested. Jayne tossed it to her, and swore at the face she made. “You’re getting closer,” she said optimistically. “I’m sure next time you’ll get the right ones.”
“The hardware guy said these suckers would do the job just as good, and he was outta the ones you wanted,” Jayne protested. “Can’t you just make ‘em fit?”
“If the port store doesn’t have these,” Kaylee said, scrawling measurements on the bag with a grease pencil, “just go to another store. They should have one in the town proper.”
Jayne grabbed the bag back with ill grace. “Feel like a gorram yo-yo,” he grumbled, “back and forth and back and–”
River followed him out, dancing in his invisible foot prints.
“And through doors and hatches and–” her voice started to list in a practical tone.
“Oh, remember to get oxy-sensors and extra batteries!” Kaylee called after him, to which he responded with a shout of invective that Kaylee didn’t appear to care about.
WIthout the buffering presence of his sister, Simon felt the way he always did when he was alone with Kaylee: a half-pleasant prickly sensation across his body, like his limbs had restricted circulation, combined with the (justified) fear that he would say or do something moronic that everyone who was not him knew not to do or say. Simon always felt rather strange with Kaylee and had the feeling all the hated poets in his required, undergraduate Literature classes were laughing at him from their graves.
“Hand me the three-eighths heterodyne wrench, would you?” Kaylee asked, her upper body in the wall of Serenity.
“Of course,” Simon said, and had to try five times and have her describe the tool before he managed to get the correct instrument.
After handing it to her, the brush of her fingers against him making Simon feel like he should be wearing a cardiac sensor, he retreated to the opposite side of the engine room, and attempted to lean casually against the wall.
“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have you retrieve the screws?”
“I wish I could,” Kaylee said with a sigh, her voice muffled by the wall plating. “But they don’t really like girls on Prometheus.”
Simon lifted his head. He’d heard about planets like that, where the population had reverted to the misogynist ways all sensible people had rejected since before humanity left Earth-That-Was, but he kept being surprised by how many backward superstitions still flourished. Of course, considering his sister had almost been burned alive, maybe all his professors were wrong about him being gifted and he was actually a very slow learner.
“I can’t imagine it,” Simon said.
Kaylee pulled her head out of the wall, face flushed and smudged with grease, looking perfectly at home in Serenity, the warm walls of the engine room seeming to glow around her.
“What?” she asked.
“People being foolish enough to prefer interacting with Jayne rather than interacting with you.”
Kaylee giggled, eyes sparkling, and Simon felts a thrill of success.
The reading Simon did before the crew converged for the evening meal only strengthened his belief in the foolishness of the people of Prometheus. Apparently women had restricted access to everything; education, money, jobs, rights.... In the presence of any male who was neither a husband nor related by blood in the first degree, they were ordered by law to wear a mask covering half their face.
Simon thought of all the Rivers and Kaylees whose minds were currently rotting under these conditions and felt a wash of distaste.
He went put to the kitchen with a gloomy mood that didn’t last past hearing the first laugh out of Kaylee’s mouth.
Dinner was the usual, stories and jokes tossed around, the kind of loud interaction that was completely antithetical to the way that the Tam family had conducted meals.
Towards the end of supper Simon noticed that Book was being unusually quiet.
Simon leaned towards him. “Is something wrong, Shepherd?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” Book admits, speaking in a low, serious tone, and Simon leaned closer. “Are you aware of the situation on Prometheus? How painfully they constrict their women?”
Simon nodded.
“Well,” Book continued, “because of my station they permitted me to venture into the women’s section, and most of them are in quite a bad way.” Book pursed his lips as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Most of the women in the town must have been crammed in to pray with me, and even I could tell half of them were unwell.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Simon said, “Prometheus is quite well off for the Rim. They should have doctors and ready access to medicine.”
Book nodded, looking at Simon with steady eyes.
“Yes, but they don’t allow men to be in the same room as women they’re not related or married to so–”
“Nominally speaking, Jayne would be a better choice,” River projected, her voice rolling out across the room. The other conversations died, the whole table turning to look at River and then focusing on Simon and Book, leaning together conspiratorially.
River cocked her head consideringly, “but he wouldn’t fit in Inara’s clothes.”
Simon had a bad feeling about this.
“What did I tell you about that girl’s-name thing?” Jayne said, leaning across the table with malice.
“And they don’t allow their women education,” Book continued, as if everyone minus Jayne wasn’t staring at them. “So none of the women know much more then basic first aid and midwifery. Plus, there’s no way for them to access the drugs that are needed.”
“So you want me to....” Simon trailed off.
“When speaking with the town Patron, I may have told him that we had a doctor on board.”
Simon pinched the bridge of his nose. “Will they let an off planet man see to the female patients?”
“No,” Book said apologetically. “However, I managed to convince them that the very pious and very female doctor we had on Serenity would be acceptable.”
Jayne started chuckling then, heavy guffaws that made Simon think of all the unethical uses of various drugs in his infirmary.
“I’m not a women,” Simon stated the obvious.
“Well, with Inara’s help, I don’t think that will be a problem,” Book replied.
Simon looked pleadingly at the Companion. Inara was looking unruffled and serene, and he wasn’t sure whether she had been in on this fait acompli or if it was just her natural unassailable composure.
“I’d be glad to help,” she said, lips curling in a gracefully smile.
Mal found the entire crew clustered around Inara’s shuttle.
“I wonder what’s going on in there,” Kaylee was saying, trying to peer through the fabric Inara had draped over the hatch's porthole.
“Inara’s making your boyfriend even more sly than he is now,” Jayne said. “By the time she’s through with him, he’ll probably like boys.” He hooked his fingers in his belt. “You should’ve gone with me, Kaylee. You’ll never have to worry about me switching teams.”
“And on that horrifying mental image,” Mal interrupted, “would you all take yourselves elsewhere? I’ve got a boat to run.”
“But I wanna see Simon all dressed girl-like,” Jayne said, looking like the captain had declared Christmas canceled.
“You know, comments like that wouldn’t help your not-sly protests,” Wash said, “because I had a friend in flight school who wanted to see me in a dress and now I think he’s living on Hera with his chiropractor's brother.”
Jayne started toward the pilot with blood in his eyes.
Wash looked at his wife. “Will you protect me from the big, bad mercenary, honey-lamb?” he asked and Zoe chuckled, which caused Jayne to look even more like an enraged bull.
“Jayne,” Mal snapped out, before his crew turned into a pack of comedians and jackals and he never got any smuggling done ever again. “I don’t pay you to loiter around doorways. Go do something I pay you for.”
“You mean I get to shoot the doc now?” Jayne asked with a hopeful look.
Mal jerked his thumb behind him, and the merc stomped off.
“Kaylee,” he continued and then, “Kaylee!” when she just kept peering through the opaque window like she could gain x-ray vision by will alone.
“Huh, captain?” she asked, twisted her head around.
“Are we ready to leave?”
“Ah...”
“Kaylee, run-tse duh fwotzoo, please get Serenity back in ship-shape,” Mal begged. “I’m getting all twitchy and uncomfortable.”
Kaylee sighed, and with lingering looks behind her, walked off.
Mal turned to Wash and Zoe.
Wash looked at his wife. “What do ya’ say we go be in love elsewhere?”
Zoe looked at Mal and her lips curved upward slightly.
“I’d say that’s a good idea,” Zoe answered, and Mal ignored the way her hand slipped down to pat Wash’s rear as they left.
Which just left him with Book and River.
River glanced toward the shuttle.
“Snakes are dancing,” she whispered conspiratorially.
“You two,” Mal waved at them like he was herding geese. “Try not to do anything that I’m going to have to fix later.”
If Simon had been the kind of doctor who would ever treat a patient while under the influence, he would have been plastered when he left Serenity.
Inara had worked magic. He had been there, and he still wasn’t sure what she’d done to add blush and length to his face, to soften his lips, to make him have (dear god) breasts.
They looked real enough that if Simon hadn’t remembered every excruciating second of last night (“sway your hips more, drop your shoulders, arch your back, drape your arms against your side, try to walk like you don’t have a penis,”) Simon would have expected that he’d been put under and undergone elective surgery.
Luckily, the gauntlet of people he faced exiting the ship was lost in a blur of humiliation.
The only thing he could really remember was Kaylee’s laugh following him down the ramp like church bells, the only laughter that didn’t have the expected edge of schadenfreude.
Then Simon was in a crowded room, with women in various states of illness surrounding him, and it didn’t matter that he had a mask covering half his face, or that his back and chest were feeling the strain of unusual appendages.
He moved from one to another, feeling graceful in a way he only did with instruments in his hand, and never on a dance floor.
Simon’s mind was a pleasant cacophony filled with possible causes, medication, and the importance of flushing your daughter’s eyes out with this twice a day, at least eight hours apart, when there was a disturbance behind him.
He didn’t bother looking up until he heard Book’s protesting voice, and then the women around him where making startled horrified sounds and rushing to pick up their masks.
Simon looked at the scrum of men at the door, Book was standing in their way, and Simon went back to the ten year old in front of him.
He handed her mother the eye drops. She quickly plucked them out of his fingers, folding them into some invisible pocket in her gown and then snatched up her daughter and hurried off, the skirt of her gown sliding over the floor in a hiss of silk.
Simon turned around to face the cadre of angry men looming behind him.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” he asked, forgetting to lighten his voice.
One of them turned to the leader. Simon could tell because the man was bigger width and height wise then everybody else, and also dressed in a lacy sash that seemed like the kind of affair that denoted rank of some sort.
“I still think it looks kinda femme,” said one of Lacy Sash’s lackeys.
Lacy Sash snorted, gripped Simon by the shoulder, fingers digging painfully into his flesh, and kneed him in the balls.
Through the white-hot agony, as he curled around himself on the floor, Simon heard the man say, “Still think he’s a girl now, Henrick?”
Simon barely noticed when they ripped off the prosthetic breasts, synthetic flesh pulling away from real with an ugly ripping sound, as if they needed further proof that he wasn’t female.
It was much, much latter when Simon had managed to uncurl himself from a fetal position.
He pushed himself up and looked around the cell they’d been throw into.
“Feeling better?” Book asked.
Simon raised his hand, thumb and pointer finger barely apart. “Little bit,” he managed, in the correct range that Inara had tried to get him to speak in.
Book patted him consolingly on the shoulder.
Simon looked around their cell, which was essentially a big metal box with a sturdy gray metal door.
“Any chance of....” Simon trailed off, looking around the fixtureless walls, ”...escaping through the air vents or something?”
Books shook his head. “They have a pretty nice prison for a Rim world,” he commented.
“Oh, good,” Simon said, and went back to focusing on getting his breathing even.
“How long have we been here?” he asked, some time later.
“About five hours,” Book said without stopping to think.
“Do you think–” Simon started, when he heard someone tapping at the door. He and Book froze. The tapping continued. Then the edges of the door sparked wildly, and it feel inward, slamming into the floor with a monolithic smack.
Simon looked up to see Kaylee standing there, hair pulled back, grease smudged across her nose, and tinted goggles obscuring her eyes.
Behind her, Zoe was holding a rifle on someone Simon couldn’t see, and now that the door was down, Simon could hear the captain’s voice. He couldn’t distinguish the words, but the tone implied that what ever the plan was, if was (momentarily) on track.
“Simon!” Kaylee said, rushing forward. “Oh ouch,” she winced in sympathy at the red friction burns on his chest, “does that hurt?” Her hands brushed lightly across his chest, her calloused finger sliding across his nipples, and Simon sucked in a breath.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Ready to go home?” Kaylee asked, one hand resting on his shoulder.
“Yes,” Simon said with feeling, standing up. It was the first time he’d referred to Serenity as his home, not just River’s, not just the Tam sibling’s sanctuary. He meant it.
Kaylee smiled, sliding her arm through his.
“Despite the way this ended,” Book commented, shoes thumping softly over the metal door, “I do believe most of the folk you treated are grateful.”
“Well, even if they’re not, at least they’ll be alive and unblinded in their ingratitude,” Simon said simply, experience coloring his voice.
“That’s so sweet,” Kaylee said, looking up at him.
Simon smiled at her.
He’d never felt quite as much like a storybook hero as he did at that moment, walking out of Prometheus jail wearing the remains of a midnight blue dress with Kaylee wrapped around him.
Author’s Note: "Run-tse duh fwotzoo" means "Merciful Buddha."
Prometheus was a beautiful planet. Some quirk in the terraforming had caused carbonization in the soil, lending the whole planet a glinty violet shade. Even the clouds were purple. Outside of the cockpit windows they floated in puffy spheres, looking like grape icy-planets.
Simon would have loved to walk about, get a chance to be someplace other then Serenity, but wasn’t foolish enough to even ask the captain. Surprisingly, River didn’t request the same. She spent her time in the engine room with Kaylee. Simon would have appreciated that more, the excuse of keeping River out of Kaylee’s way allowing him to spend more time with the mechanic, except that he was more of an inconvenient lout than his sister was, and occasionally River would make one of her nonsensical comments, they’d both look at him, and then giggle.
The shyness that had plagued Simon all through grade school was starting to reassert itself.
Jayne clomped into the room, returning from one of the errands Kaylee’d been sending him on since Serenity had first touched down on Prometheus.
River broke off of her conversation with Kaylee and swung her arm toward Jayne, finger pointed accusingly at the brown paper bag in his hand.
“Wrong!” she declared.
“I told you to stop jinxing me,” Jayne snarled.
“Jayne,” Simon commented, “how exactly do you propose that my sister caused you to pick up the wrong set of screws?”
“With her–” Jayne made a teeter-totter gesture with his hand, making the bits of metal inside the bag rattle like dried bones, “congressy voodoo genius powers or something.”
Kaylee held out her hand imperiously. “Let me see,” she requested. Jayne tossed it to her, and swore at the face she made. “You’re getting closer,” she said optimistically. “I’m sure next time you’ll get the right ones.”
“The hardware guy said these suckers would do the job just as good, and he was outta the ones you wanted,” Jayne protested. “Can’t you just make ‘em fit?”
“If the port store doesn’t have these,” Kaylee said, scrawling measurements on the bag with a grease pencil, “just go to another store. They should have one in the town proper.”
Jayne grabbed the bag back with ill grace. “Feel like a gorram yo-yo,” he grumbled, “back and forth and back and–”
River followed him out, dancing in his invisible foot prints.
“And through doors and hatches and–” her voice started to list in a practical tone.
“Oh, remember to get oxy-sensors and extra batteries!” Kaylee called after him, to which he responded with a shout of invective that Kaylee didn’t appear to care about.
WIthout the buffering presence of his sister, Simon felt the way he always did when he was alone with Kaylee: a half-pleasant prickly sensation across his body, like his limbs had restricted circulation, combined with the (justified) fear that he would say or do something moronic that everyone who was not him knew not to do or say. Simon always felt rather strange with Kaylee and had the feeling all the hated poets in his required, undergraduate Literature classes were laughing at him from their graves.
“Hand me the three-eighths heterodyne wrench, would you?” Kaylee asked, her upper body in the wall of Serenity.
“Of course,” Simon said, and had to try five times and have her describe the tool before he managed to get the correct instrument.
After handing it to her, the brush of her fingers against him making Simon feel like he should be wearing a cardiac sensor, he retreated to the opposite side of the engine room, and attempted to lean casually against the wall.
“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have you retrieve the screws?”
“I wish I could,” Kaylee said with a sigh, her voice muffled by the wall plating. “But they don’t really like girls on Prometheus.”
Simon lifted his head. He’d heard about planets like that, where the population had reverted to the misogynist ways all sensible people had rejected since before humanity left Earth-That-Was, but he kept being surprised by how many backward superstitions still flourished. Of course, considering his sister had almost been burned alive, maybe all his professors were wrong about him being gifted and he was actually a very slow learner.
“I can’t imagine it,” Simon said.
Kaylee pulled her head out of the wall, face flushed and smudged with grease, looking perfectly at home in Serenity, the warm walls of the engine room seeming to glow around her.
“What?” she asked.
“People being foolish enough to prefer interacting with Jayne rather than interacting with you.”
Kaylee giggled, eyes sparkling, and Simon felts a thrill of success.
~~~
The reading Simon did before the crew converged for the evening meal only strengthened his belief in the foolishness of the people of Prometheus. Apparently women had restricted access to everything; education, money, jobs, rights.... In the presence of any male who was neither a husband nor related by blood in the first degree, they were ordered by law to wear a mask covering half their face.
Simon thought of all the Rivers and Kaylees whose minds were currently rotting under these conditions and felt a wash of distaste.
He went put to the kitchen with a gloomy mood that didn’t last past hearing the first laugh out of Kaylee’s mouth.
Dinner was the usual, stories and jokes tossed around, the kind of loud interaction that was completely antithetical to the way that the Tam family had conducted meals.
Towards the end of supper Simon noticed that Book was being unusually quiet.
Simon leaned towards him. “Is something wrong, Shepherd?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” Book admits, speaking in a low, serious tone, and Simon leaned closer. “Are you aware of the situation on Prometheus? How painfully they constrict their women?”
Simon nodded.
“Well,” Book continued, “because of my station they permitted me to venture into the women’s section, and most of them are in quite a bad way.” Book pursed his lips as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Most of the women in the town must have been crammed in to pray with me, and even I could tell half of them were unwell.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Simon said, “Prometheus is quite well off for the Rim. They should have doctors and ready access to medicine.”
Book nodded, looking at Simon with steady eyes.
“Yes, but they don’t allow men to be in the same room as women they’re not related or married to so–”
“Nominally speaking, Jayne would be a better choice,” River projected, her voice rolling out across the room. The other conversations died, the whole table turning to look at River and then focusing on Simon and Book, leaning together conspiratorially.
River cocked her head consideringly, “but he wouldn’t fit in Inara’s clothes.”
Simon had a bad feeling about this.
“What did I tell you about that girl’s-name thing?” Jayne said, leaning across the table with malice.
“And they don’t allow their women education,” Book continued, as if everyone minus Jayne wasn’t staring at them. “So none of the women know much more then basic first aid and midwifery. Plus, there’s no way for them to access the drugs that are needed.”
“So you want me to....” Simon trailed off.
“When speaking with the town Patron, I may have told him that we had a doctor on board.”
Simon pinched the bridge of his nose. “Will they let an off planet man see to the female patients?”
“No,” Book said apologetically. “However, I managed to convince them that the very pious and very female doctor we had on Serenity would be acceptable.”
Jayne started chuckling then, heavy guffaws that made Simon think of all the unethical uses of various drugs in his infirmary.
“I’m not a women,” Simon stated the obvious.
“Well, with Inara’s help, I don’t think that will be a problem,” Book replied.
Simon looked pleadingly at the Companion. Inara was looking unruffled and serene, and he wasn’t sure whether she had been in on this fait acompli or if it was just her natural unassailable composure.
“I’d be glad to help,” she said, lips curling in a gracefully smile.
~~~
Mal found the entire crew clustered around Inara’s shuttle.
“I wonder what’s going on in there,” Kaylee was saying, trying to peer through the fabric Inara had draped over the hatch's porthole.
“Inara’s making your boyfriend even more sly than he is now,” Jayne said. “By the time she’s through with him, he’ll probably like boys.” He hooked his fingers in his belt. “You should’ve gone with me, Kaylee. You’ll never have to worry about me switching teams.”
“And on that horrifying mental image,” Mal interrupted, “would you all take yourselves elsewhere? I’ve got a boat to run.”
“But I wanna see Simon all dressed girl-like,” Jayne said, looking like the captain had declared Christmas canceled.
“You know, comments like that wouldn’t help your not-sly protests,” Wash said, “because I had a friend in flight school who wanted to see me in a dress and now I think he’s living on Hera with his chiropractor's brother.”
Jayne started toward the pilot with blood in his eyes.
Wash looked at his wife. “Will you protect me from the big, bad mercenary, honey-lamb?” he asked and Zoe chuckled, which caused Jayne to look even more like an enraged bull.
“Jayne,” Mal snapped out, before his crew turned into a pack of comedians and jackals and he never got any smuggling done ever again. “I don’t pay you to loiter around doorways. Go do something I pay you for.”
“You mean I get to shoot the doc now?” Jayne asked with a hopeful look.
Mal jerked his thumb behind him, and the merc stomped off.
“Kaylee,” he continued and then, “Kaylee!” when she just kept peering through the opaque window like she could gain x-ray vision by will alone.
“Huh, captain?” she asked, twisted her head around.
“Are we ready to leave?”
“Ah...”
“Kaylee, run-tse duh fwotzoo, please get Serenity back in ship-shape,” Mal begged. “I’m getting all twitchy and uncomfortable.”
Kaylee sighed, and with lingering looks behind her, walked off.
Mal turned to Wash and Zoe.
Wash looked at his wife. “What do ya’ say we go be in love elsewhere?”
Zoe looked at Mal and her lips curved upward slightly.
“I’d say that’s a good idea,” Zoe answered, and Mal ignored the way her hand slipped down to pat Wash’s rear as they left.
Which just left him with Book and River.
River glanced toward the shuttle.
“Snakes are dancing,” she whispered conspiratorially.
“You two,” Mal waved at them like he was herding geese. “Try not to do anything that I’m going to have to fix later.”
~~~
If Simon had been the kind of doctor who would ever treat a patient while under the influence, he would have been plastered when he left Serenity.
Inara had worked magic. He had been there, and he still wasn’t sure what she’d done to add blush and length to his face, to soften his lips, to make him have (dear god) breasts.
They looked real enough that if Simon hadn’t remembered every excruciating second of last night (“sway your hips more, drop your shoulders, arch your back, drape your arms against your side, try to walk like you don’t have a penis,”) Simon would have expected that he’d been put under and undergone elective surgery.
Luckily, the gauntlet of people he faced exiting the ship was lost in a blur of humiliation.
The only thing he could really remember was Kaylee’s laugh following him down the ramp like church bells, the only laughter that didn’t have the expected edge of schadenfreude.
Then Simon was in a crowded room, with women in various states of illness surrounding him, and it didn’t matter that he had a mask covering half his face, or that his back and chest were feeling the strain of unusual appendages.
He moved from one to another, feeling graceful in a way he only did with instruments in his hand, and never on a dance floor.
Simon’s mind was a pleasant cacophony filled with possible causes, medication, and the importance of flushing your daughter’s eyes out with this twice a day, at least eight hours apart, when there was a disturbance behind him.
He didn’t bother looking up until he heard Book’s protesting voice, and then the women around him where making startled horrified sounds and rushing to pick up their masks.
Simon looked at the scrum of men at the door, Book was standing in their way, and Simon went back to the ten year old in front of him.
He handed her mother the eye drops. She quickly plucked them out of his fingers, folding them into some invisible pocket in her gown and then snatched up her daughter and hurried off, the skirt of her gown sliding over the floor in a hiss of silk.
Simon turned around to face the cadre of angry men looming behind him.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” he asked, forgetting to lighten his voice.
One of them turned to the leader. Simon could tell because the man was bigger width and height wise then everybody else, and also dressed in a lacy sash that seemed like the kind of affair that denoted rank of some sort.
“I still think it looks kinda femme,” said one of Lacy Sash’s lackeys.
Lacy Sash snorted, gripped Simon by the shoulder, fingers digging painfully into his flesh, and kneed him in the balls.
Through the white-hot agony, as he curled around himself on the floor, Simon heard the man say, “Still think he’s a girl now, Henrick?”
Simon barely noticed when they ripped off the prosthetic breasts, synthetic flesh pulling away from real with an ugly ripping sound, as if they needed further proof that he wasn’t female.
~~~
It was much, much latter when Simon had managed to uncurl himself from a fetal position.
He pushed himself up and looked around the cell they’d been throw into.
“Feeling better?” Book asked.
Simon raised his hand, thumb and pointer finger barely apart. “Little bit,” he managed, in the correct range that Inara had tried to get him to speak in.
Book patted him consolingly on the shoulder.
Simon looked around their cell, which was essentially a big metal box with a sturdy gray metal door.
“Any chance of....” Simon trailed off, looking around the fixtureless walls, ”...escaping through the air vents or something?”
Books shook his head. “They have a pretty nice prison for a Rim world,” he commented.
“Oh, good,” Simon said, and went back to focusing on getting his breathing even.
“How long have we been here?” he asked, some time later.
“About five hours,” Book said without stopping to think.
“Do you think–” Simon started, when he heard someone tapping at the door. He and Book froze. The tapping continued. Then the edges of the door sparked wildly, and it feel inward, slamming into the floor with a monolithic smack.
Simon looked up to see Kaylee standing there, hair pulled back, grease smudged across her nose, and tinted goggles obscuring her eyes.
Behind her, Zoe was holding a rifle on someone Simon couldn’t see, and now that the door was down, Simon could hear the captain’s voice. He couldn’t distinguish the words, but the tone implied that what ever the plan was, if was (momentarily) on track.
“Simon!” Kaylee said, rushing forward. “Oh ouch,” she winced in sympathy at the red friction burns on his chest, “does that hurt?” Her hands brushed lightly across his chest, her calloused finger sliding across his nipples, and Simon sucked in a breath.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Ready to go home?” Kaylee asked, one hand resting on his shoulder.
“Yes,” Simon said with feeling, standing up. It was the first time he’d referred to Serenity as his home, not just River’s, not just the Tam sibling’s sanctuary. He meant it.
Kaylee smiled, sliding her arm through his.
“Despite the way this ended,” Book commented, shoes thumping softly over the metal door, “I do believe most of the folk you treated are grateful.”
“Well, even if they’re not, at least they’ll be alive and unblinded in their ingratitude,” Simon said simply, experience coloring his voice.
“That’s so sweet,” Kaylee said, looking up at him.
Simon smiled at her.
He’d never felt quite as much like a storybook hero as he did at that moment, walking out of Prometheus jail wearing the remains of a midnight blue dress with Kaylee wrapped around him.
~~~
Author’s Note: "Run-tse duh fwotzoo" means "Merciful Buddha."
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Yeah, those two images where some of the first things to actually come together with this fic. Thanks for the comment!
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As I was writing, I went - should I google real wrenches - screw it, I'm just doing a girl genius shout out.
Thanks for commenting!
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Love is always good.