Inara nodded cordially at Mal as he passed her on the catwalk. "You seem cheerful."

Mal offered a devious grin. "Got a good feeling about today. Think we can hawk the Lassiter finally, without needin' your help."

That brought Inara up short. A year hadn’t even passed since they had stolen it – had six months even gone by? "Mal, it's still too early to try fencing the Lassiter! It’s much too hot!"

Once, she would have couched her words in warm, dulcet tones, choosing each one carefully to avoid his temper. Now she no longer cared. She was too tired to try to keep the peace. She settled for voicing her thoughts in small words she knew he’d understand – not that he would actually listen. Lately, the tides of Mal’s trust were even more fickle toward her than toward River.

"And what exactly would a whore know ‘bout fencing stolen property?" Mal returned fire. "Seein’ as your experience is so vast and all, I'm just burnin' with curiosity." Something was wrong between them – he was aware enough to know that much, but he had no idea what it was or how to deal with it.

"That insult is getting old, Mal," Inara stated, too tired to even talk anymore. She simply turned and walked into her shuttle, firmly shutting and locking the door.

Mal heard the click of the lock engaging and blinked at the door. She’d never done that before. He shook off the unsettling feeling it gave him and let his pride take control. Giving his pride free reign was getting to be a bad habit with him lately, but Mal didn’t seem to care all that much.

"Can't fence the Lassiter," he muttered, turning on his heel and storming towards the bridge. "Can't fence the Lassiter! I'll show her can't fence – wouldn't know her elbow from a teacup. Don't nobody tell me what I can and can't do on my own ship!"

River was sitting quietly on the bridge, watching Wash play with his dinosaurs.
"Serenity shall be mine!" the Tyrannosaurus Rex declared malevolently.

"No! I won’t let you have her!" the Stegosaurus responded in a high-pitched squeak. "She belongs to Wash!"

"Wash is just a pilot. He will do as I say or be eaten!" the Tyrannosaurus Rex growled.

"No! He loves Serenity!" the Stegosaurus insisted, his voice even higher-pitched as he trembled in fear. "He’ll never work for you!"

"Then you and he shall be my dinner!" Wash made the Tyrannosaurus Rex laugh darkly before it brutally lunged for the stegosaurus.

"Your stegosaurus is very brave to bicker with the tyrannosaurus in the face of certain death," River told him. Growing more serious, she added, "I like watching them."

She fell silent again, watching him play. It was daytime; their flying lessons were still hours away, but this was an enjoyable way to pass the time. The playing reminded River of life with Simon before the Academy; it made her feel more like the child she used to be rather than the confused thing she’d been made into.

Wash knew his dinosaur playacting helped settle River's mercurial moods, and was glad to see it make her eyes come alive. It was nice to know he could help the girl out in ways her ridiculously smart brother couldn't. It didn't hurt that she was an appreciative audience, either. He let her watch, even hammed up his play, because he liked seeing that look in her eyes. It was kind of like the look he knew he had when he was flying; really flying, not just coasting through the black. The girl needed her freedom, too.

River watched quietly for a few minutes, laughing appropriately when the stegosaurus was saved from his imminent demise by a kamikaze pterodactyl, until her happy world was interrupted by a psychic influx of sad exhaustion from the direction of the shuttles. It wasn't unexpected; she had grown accustomed to Inara's frustrated sorrows. Today must have been a bad day, though: she could almost taste the salt of the Companion's tears.

"Pride goeth before the fall," she whispered to the dinosaurs and Wash. The pilot broke off his game to give her a curious look, and she gave him a sad smile in return. The spell of happy memories from before the Academy was broken, shattered like Inara’s mask of cool indifference. Standing up, River leaned over to kiss the stegosaurus once on his hard plastic head, and then turned to drift from the bridge.

Wash watched her go, her steps eerily graceful. Her eyes were blank again. There had been a spark of life in them a moment ago, but now they were back to dead. It was a little scary, how quickly she could go from happy to haunted. It was a little scary, and a lot sad.

River passed Mal in the corridor on her way out, her delicate shoulder colliding with his as he marched past her. Oddly enough, he was the one who ended up stumbling, while she stayed solid on her feet. "Wo de ma!" he grunted, straightening up. "You oughta watch where you're goin', Little Witch."

"Pride goeth before the fall," she murmured again, holding his fiery eyes with her placid ones. It was her warning to him, one she knew he wouldn't understand until it was too late. She knew better than most how his trust ebbed and flowed. It was almost impossible to get him to listen with anything other than his ears.

"Uh... sure." Mal decided he really wasn’t ever going to get used to the prickle of unease he felt whenever the girl talked to him, especially not when she was fixing him with those scary, blank eyes of hers. When she didn't make any move to walk away, he cleared his throat and bobbed his head at her. "Gotta go." Turning away, he steamed on toward the bridge. He had contacts to wave and an uppity "Ambassador" to prove wrong.

"I’ll show her. Can’t fence the Lassiter. Will too!" he muttered again, furious beyond reason as he stormed into the cockpit.

"Am I interrupting?" Wash asked, looking up from his dinosaurs.

"Get out," Mal snapped, slinging himself down in the co-pilot's seat.

"And go…?"

"Somewhere that ain't here," Mal snapped, furiously punching at buttons.

"Right." Wash knew what was good for him. He gathered up the dinosaurs and left without another word. It was easier to liken the Captain’s state to that of a spoiled child, Wash figured, rather than a hard-edged captain. His ranting was sounding more like River than River was.

A few hours and a dozen waves later, Mal had found himself a buyer on Muir. He'd had to go through the contact of the contacts of a contact, but he'd done it. Never mind that it had been like pulling teeth to find someone who was willing to handle something as hot as the Lassiter; that didn't mean Inara was right. Just meant buyers were stupid, which was a fact he'd accepted years ago.

The buyer – buyers – were a fine, classy bunch of rubens: straight-laced schoolboy types. Admittedly, he didn't tend to do much business with schoolboy types, but a dynamic man of action such as himself had to be willing to go where ever the job took him, and right now the job was taking him straight to a whopping purse of hard currency. Hell, if these folks were really as green as they seemed over the Cortex, maybe he'd be able to wring a bit of extra coinage out of them; wouldn't that be a nice how-d'y’-do to Inara's unfounded concerns. There was no denying it'd be nice to be rid of the thing; it was burning a hole in his cargo hold.

"First thing I'm gonna do is buy a new Mule," he said with a grin to himself, sitting back in the pilot’s chair, lacing his hands behind his head. "A nice, shiny new Mule, with all the bells and whistles. Heck, I ain't even gonna call it the Mule. Gonna call it the Thoroughbred." He rolled the word around in his mouth.
"Yeah, Thoroughbred. Perfect." The warning bells he was ignoring about Inara were drowning out his warning bells about the buyers, and all in all, looked like he had a sweet deal lined up.

"Tonight’s lesson, my dear Fledgling, is vitally important to the survival of any good, hard-working pilot. Do you think you’re ready?"

River glanced around the empty galley. "Yes," she affirmed with a sharp nod. "Here?" she added.

"Yes, here." Wash held his arms open wide to encompass the entirety of the room. "This, sweet River, is one of the pilot’s most important skills. Can you guess what it is?"

She could, just by reading his mind, but she wanted to hear him say it out loud. "Hiding?" she guessed.

"Precisely," Wash enthused. "One of the duties most vital to a pilot’s survival is knowing when to get out of the way so the Captain can rampage in peace. Understood?"

River nodded eagerly. "Yes." She loved these stolen hours with Wash. He treated her like a real girl, not like the broken thing she’d been programmed into, or the fragile porcelain doll Simon saw when he looked at her. Wash treated her like a friend; to the best of her knowledge, outside of Kaylee, she’d never had any friends. It was worth risking Mal’s wrath and Simon’s worry to have this opportunity to feel like a human being for a few precious hours every night. It was nice, trusting Book and Wash not to expose her, knowing they trusted her enough to let her have this time. She hadn’t had anyone she could trust in years before waking on Serenity; at least, no one who wasn’t named Simon.

She gestured to the plastic dinosaurs he had lined up at attention on the coffee table. "May we recreate the transition of the Triassic to the Jurassic period again?"

Wash beamed at her. "You bet."

Before they had a chance to match up dinosaurs of competing periods against each other, with Cretaceous dinosaurs acting as referee, Mal came stomping into the common room. He looked like he'd just won the lottery, discovered Atlantis, and been knighted, all at the same time. "Wash, don't I pay you to fly my boat?" the captain asked, slapping the pilot amiably on the back.

Wash shared a curious look with River. "Why, yes, Mal, you do," he said. "When we have money, that is. Nice of you to notice."

"Then what're you doing hiding down here, huh?"

"Your words, and I quote: ‘Get out.’ I said, ‘And go?’ And you said, ‘Somewhere that ain’t here.’"

"Ah, Wash," Mal chuckled, chuffing the man on the shoulder. "Laugh riot, that's what you are. Now get on up to the bridge and keep my boat flying. Got us some buyers for that Lassiter! Program a course for Muir over in the Georgia System." He looked extremely proud of himself, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Just make sure we get there in one piece, yeah?" He turned his beaming grin in River's direction. "Well hello, Little Witch. You playin' dinos with Wash again?"
"Proved wrong, but wrong self. Nothing good comes from wrong," River stated, eyes blank, voice sharp. She could see the happy cartwheels he was turning in his head, pinioning on axes of pride.

"Sure, little River." Mal spoke slowly, as if afraid she was going to launch off into a fresh episode if he talked in sentences of more than three words. "I know nothing good comes from being wrong. Learned it at my mama's knee." He offered her a placating smile that was so ridiculously saccharine she wanted to scream. He was deliberately ignoring the meaning of her words, and she hadn't even garbled them like usual.

"You know nothing. Words you hear, feelings you ignore. Knowledge you forget. Pride kills all." River warned, but she knew she was gone and they’d not hear nor heed. Words were useless now. The tide was out and the ears were shut off.

"Hey, River, you want to help me carry the minions back up to the bridge?" Wash asked, gathering up some of his dinosaurs.

"Now you know to be careful and not let her touch anything while you're up there, right?" Mal warned.

"Yes, because I have an attention span greater than that of a two-year-old," Wash assured him. "Besides, she's just helping me carry. Remember when you taught me how? I’m quite good at it now. Anyway, you interrupted a very tense recreation of the final moments of the Triassic Era as the encroaching forces of the Jurassic Era decimated it. High drama, very powerful stuff. Should be made into a shadow puppet play."

Mal spared a glance in River’s direction, which she didn't return. She was too angry with him for ignoring her words. "Well, all right," he begrudgingly agreed. "Just make sure she don't touch anything, dong ma?"

"Why not touch?" River snapped, glaring at him. "It'll all end in tears!"

Mal looked about ready to put his foot down and change his mind about allowing her in the cockpit, but Wash intervened. "Isn't that precious?" he said, rubbing her back and giving her a quick hug, like an uncle showing off his favorite niece. "They're so cute at this age, aren't they? Come on, River, let's leave Captain Mal alone for a bit. He's an important guy, lots of important captainy things to do, mustn't waste his time. You take the Triassic, I'll take the Jurassic, we'll split the Cretaceous." Before she could protest, he'd dumped his dinosaurs into her arms and was steering her bodily up the stairs in the direction of the bridge.

"You did not carry any yourself," she observed with a frown, once they arrived on the bridge together.

"I'll make it up to you," he promised. "But if I didn't get you out of there quickly, he was going to ban you from the bridge for mouthing off to him, and then there'd be no more lessons. Right?"

She grunted in annoyed agreement.

"Right. Yeah, the whole thing I told you about hiding being an important part of a pilot's job?" He made a convoluted gesture back over his shoulder in the direction of the common room. "That’s what I mean."

"Hide, hide, he hides from himself," she muttered as they stepped onto the bridge. Without waiting for Wash to help, she started setting up the dinosaurs in precisely the same formation as they'd been on the coffee table. "Hides behind a big wall of righteous self worth. Can't see the forest for the gorram trees."

"You've been hanging around Jayne too much," Wash chuckled. "Don't let Simon hear you swear, okay? Well, no: don't let Simon hear you swear unless I'm in the room, too. Wouldn’t miss the expression on his face from that for the world."

Wash hated seeing her change so fast. One minute she was a laughing girl flying a ship in secret, the next she was a little crazy science experiment. He hated how Mal worked her, changing her back from the girl, to the crazy, and back again without ever seeing his affect on her. That was the problem with Mal, as Wash saw it: he too often did what he wanted, not noticing the consequences on the crew. He was more unpredictable than River these days.

"No worries, Wash. The girl is here. Soon she will control more. Growing control, less crazy. Mal means well. His ghosts haunt more, too close, to see clear now. He’ll learn again. Just like the girl." River tried to soothe.

Wash smiled, knowing she’d be all right. If she was trying to soothe his nerves, then the sweet girl he knew was on her way back to the surface.

River felt her sour mood melt away as she settled down in the co-pilot's chair. "You’ll teach me how to maintain a course?" she asked, tucking her knees up under her chin and curling her tiny feet over the edge of the seat. River loved the peace – the serenity – she found in the stars on this bridge with Wash.
"Huh?" Wash glanced up from where he was toggling switches. "Oh, that. Sure. See this squiggly line here?" He pointed to a display screen. "That's our course, and that big shiny blob? That's Muir. Just make sure the squiggly line keeps heading toward the shiny blob. Easy peasy."

With a grin, he reached out, tapping a few more switches. "What you really need to learn," he said, as if sharing a secret, "is this."

River glanced up as the Cortex screen flickered to life. She furrowed her brow. "Dynamation. Movie style from Earth-That-Was." She identified the process she saw on the screen. Cocking her head to the side, she asked, "How does The Valley of Gwangi relate to flying Serenity? There are no space ships, only dinosaurs."

"River!" Wash cried, scandalized. "All this time with me and you haven’t learned what is and isn't important yet? You wound me."

River giggled as she held the stick and flew Serenity. "They would shoot the scene twice. There is glass painted black to create the-"

"Shhhh! I’m watching!" Wash shushed her. "I don't care how they did it. I mean, knowing how they did it? That's like knowing how Santa delivers presents to families with no chimney."

"Santa is an irrational personification of a charitable concept based in theology."

"Just fly the ship."

"Yes, Wash." River nodded solemnly, smiling.

Continue to part two