Never home
Inara’s body doesn’t have a single scar. Inara’s body has been looked over by the finest doctors in the Core once a year since she left the Academy, and a hell of a lot more often before that, when they made her skin flawless and her body perfect. When they made sure she felt safe, made sure she felt comfortable, made sure she felt at home.

When they made her baby and took it in a heartbeat, before it was 10 days in the womb.

When it’s 12 years old and if it’s beautiful, it will be invited to the Guild, but it will never know its mother. And no one would ever know she’s a mother to know because Inara’s doctors didn’t leave a single mark that anyone can see. She doesn’t know how that’s possible. It doesn’t seem like it should be.

Simon would know how it was done, she’s sure. Simon could tell her what would have happened next, after the hospital visit she barely remembers. Simon would probably tell her that it’s a safer procedure than a real-life birth, probably tell her that he was born that way himself. She isn’t sure she wants to know that about him if it’s true, isn’t sure she wants the science to be that real.

In her head she anticipates how the conversation might go, how she would handle herself, what she would say. She rehearses carefully as she walks through the ship. In her heart she knows she could discuss it with nothing but perfect poise and confidence. She could leave the room as in control of her situation as when she entered it, regally, gracefully.

She can’t bring herself to ask Simon. She never will.

Mal jokes about ‘a passel of brats’ under his feet with maddening diffidence. Mal can. Mal would fight like an animal if anyone tried to take his child, she’s sure. Of course, Mal would fight to his last breath for Serenity or anyone on it. Mal would fight to his last breath for a perfect stranger if the mood was right, though he denies it. Mal wouldn’t let anyone take his baby away. Wouldn’t have let.

Dangerous thoughts.

In the cargo bay below, Kaylee and River are shrieking, and the sound is familiar. She walks across to the common room but pauses a moment to watch them play--their ridiculous, rule-less ball game again, now two-against-one. Jayne seems to be the only one of the three taking the game seriously, and it’s making him angry and confused. They’re behaving exactly as she expects them to behave, with a predictability she tells herself is comforting. She moves on.

She can hear the Preacher, Zoe and Wash in the common room. Preacher’s low voice sounds amused by something. Zoe is laughing and Wash is recounting some episode that’s sure to be outrageous and at least half made up of a storyteller’s natural lies. Zoe and Wash are trying to have a baby.

Not that anyone has told her anything. Zoe is always polite but Inara knows already that Zoe may never tell her anything personal about herself. Wash is being uncharacteristically... laconic on the whole subject. But it’s in his face. Sometime at dinner tonight he’s sure to look up at Zoe and freeze. Then his expression will turn giddy and ecstatic. Then it will turn horrified and panicked. Then it will briefly turn guilty, then wide-eyed, and then Wash will turn to Mal and follow his lead on how to react to whatever is going on at the table. Wash always turns to Mal in these moments. They’re the one moment when he can’t turn to Zoe.

It’s none of her business, really.

Zoe herself looks damnably serene.

Mal doesn’t notice these moments often, but Inara finds it satisfying when he does. He always looks so taken aback. And she thinks he really is, every time. Taken aback by the fact that he’s commonly held to have no stake in the matter by the principals involved, taken aback that in this Zoe doesn’t give a damn what he thinks. Inara admires Zoe for her independence but she feels a twinge of... something for Mal. Mal. The minute the first person on this ship becomes a parent (that Mal knows about) Mal’s going to have an obsession like he’s never had before. Boy or girl, it’s going to have Mal wrapped around its little fingers before Mal has a chance to even try to go down kicking and fighting. She hopes they have more than one for the child’s sake. Mal would be the same with two or twenty, but with only one she pictures him being stern and serious.

She tries not to think about Mal surrounded by twenty kids, Wash and Zoe’s and maybe Simon and Kaylee’s and maybe River’s and even Jayne’s, running around happily in a permanent state of two-jobs-from-poverty. She reminds herself that Mal would do horrible, violent things to anyone who called them ‘a passel of brats’, still take too many risks and that he’d set a terrible example in a hundred different ways.

But Zoe and Wash’s baby is going to have a family, of a sort, and a home, of a sort, and Mal, whether it likes it or not. Always, inappropriately, Mal. If life comes around and destroys Serenity, destroys half the people on it, Mal will pick the survivors up out of the ashes and make them a home somewhere else. Mal will make a home for them where ever he goes.

It’s what he does. It’s what she’s come to expect. It’s all what she’s come to expect. It’s what she’s grown used to--the people she’s let herself get close to, if she tells herself the truth. Mal, these people, and this place have started to feel a lot like, maybe, some kind of home. But it’s not her home.

Home is where ever her baby is. She’ll never find her home.