Disclaimer: characters and 'verse not mine, Joss's

Need

Zoë’d known it was a big mistake, her staying on the boat and Kaylee -- Kaylee, for the love of Buddha-- going instead. The captain’d had all kinds of reasons, like he needed Kaylee to outwit the water bank’s computer systems, and that he already had two guns with him, namely Jayne and River, and that Zoë had been working way too hard and needed to take a break. He’d nailed her on that last one, she admitted only to herself. But this was the first job he’d done in years where she wasn’t his number two.

And she was angry at the forced ‘break’. Didn’t he know she couldn’t take the nothingness? She had to keep moving, or she would notice how much the boat lacked, with her husband gone. She’d nodded in final acquiescence, but fumed as she went into the kitchen to make dinner. He could make her stay on the boat, but he couldn’t make her not work.

She stayed angry through the meal preparation, so when she heard the noise the four of them made coming back, the anger in Mal’s voice and the protestation in Kaylee's, she felt vindicated. She went down to the common room, and they all four eventually tumbled through the door, arguing back and forth. They brought a load of sand with them, shaking it out of their boots and hair and the bandanas they’d worn to protect their lungs.

Mal finally banged his fist against the wall and demanded silence. Inara, who'd poked her head out of her shuttle at their return, slipped into the room as Mal stood before Kaylee, River and Jayne in his most captainy stance. Zoe adopted an at-ease posture just behind him, and Simon, drawn out of the infirmary by their arrival and level of agitation, sat on the arm of Kaylee’s chair and wound his fingers in her hair. Zoë flashed on Wash doing just that when she perched on his lap up on the bridge, and couldn’t breathe for a moment. It took a blink of time, with a grit of her teeth, to bring herself back to focus on Mal’s swelling tirade.

“- an