Disclaimer: Joss created Firefly and Fox killed it in its cradle. It doesn't belong to me. I'd have treated it better. The lyrics are Matthew Ryan's. Slowly walking down the streets Where the homeless and the lovers meet The bars glow blue Your skin does too It's important that this blue-eyed black-haired boy, with a girl's name inked inside of his right arm and a ring through the top of his left ear, leave before sunrise. Mal can see the sky growing lighter, but the blue-eyed boy isn't going anywhere. He's snoring. For the third time this week, Mal gets up first, runs the water in the shower cold. When he steps out of the stall, still rubbing his hair dry, the boy still isn't awake. Mal leans over to shake him roughly, but finds himself stroking the smooth white skin on the boy's shoulder instead. Almost no muscle tone, bones outlined in blue beneath, but his skin was some kind of perfect thing, warm even in the early morning cold. Inside three years, Mal knows from the others, he'll be scaly and worn. A life spent breathing meth and pleasuring mudders in the clubs will do that to you. Mal goes to the cupboard, gets down bowls and a canister of oatmeal. He lets the dishes clatter against the tin tabletop, and the boy stirs. "What are you doing?" If his skinny face hadn't marked him as a victim the first time Mal saw him, his high and kind of whiny voice certainly would have. "Makin' you breakfast," Mal answers mildly. "It's almost time to get movin'." The boy turns on his stomach and stretches his thin arms above his head, gripping the headboard. Mal curses the heat he feels in his face. He'd gripped the headboard just so himself, last night, and the boy beneath him had moaned so loudly Mal clapped a hand over his mouth. The boy bit his fingers, hard, and smiled at the taste of blood. "Did you sleep well?" "Like a rock," the boy answers, then cocks his head. "Why do we say that? It's a stupid expression. Rocks don't sleep, much less sleep deeply. I slept like ... something that sleeps deeply." "Good," Mal says, stirring the oatmeal, gray in its pan. "You need sleep. Need food, too." He can see the boy watching him, his expression equal parts hungry and sated, as if they're in love. "And you need to find a job," Mal continues. "Need to stay away from those meth clubs. Foul air in there. Find you some other way to make yourself useful." The boy considers him carefully, then says, "I could be useful to you." Mal spoons the oatmeal into bowls, sighs. "Trust me when I say that as sure as I pay you for what you did last night, I'm not taking you in. I don't keep people." "My name's Simon," the boy says. Mal has picked him up three nights in the same club this week, high as kites fucked him on every flat surface in this shack. And he does not give a damn what his name is. He doesn't care if they ever seen one another again. "You've picked me up three times in the same week, at the same club," Simon protests. "You aren't curious?" "What in God's verse would I be curious about?" "Where I come from, what I'm doing in there, since you can tell from the way I speak that I don't belong." "You ain't," Mal says, answering the question the boy hadn't asked. "I'm not what?" "You ain't better than them. You have a fancy speakin' voice and you dress better than you should, but there's still a name carved in your arm and you're high on the meth right now, so don't come to me like I need to love you or save you or something because you're an innocent lamb lost in the woods." The boy's wide awake now. "I grew up on Osiris," he says. "Eat your gorram oatmeal." "I was a doctor." "I don't give a damn." "My parents were wealthy and my suits were handmade and my little sister had a hundred dresses, one for each ball she attended." "And now you're here," Mal replies, gentling the harsh words with a smile, remembering the hungry way the boy kissed him last night, remembering that he'd thought he was special once, too. "We're all here 'cause we had a run of harsh luck, boy. Ain't nobody on this rock 'cause they want to be here. Not me, not the mudders I work for, and not you sucking drugs out of the air every night and lookin' for soft-touch ex-soldiers to sleep with for money." The boy closes his eyes again. "Will I see you tonight?" Mal thinks of the club, glowing turquoise in the low light, bodies moving up and down through the smoke. The way the meth clears his mind, the way it makes the whiskey go down easier, makes him forget the ship he lost and the friends he got killed. Mal thinks of seeing this boy again, his thin face and fixed gaze from across the room, the way he draws Mal into his warm embrace, so intent on answering questions that he never thinks to ask any. He has to be out on the mud flats in an hour or the foreman will have his ass in a sling. The others will be waking in a few minutes. Don't want them seein' him sneak some club kid outta his shack, not that they should judge, from the sounds of things goin' on in their bunks these last few nights. He stares at the watch face pointedly. The blue-eyed boy looks up at him from the rumpled bed and says, "I never see you in the daylight."