When the knock sounded at the front door Simon’s first impulse was irritation. He’d spent the day elbow deep in a car crash victim trying to repair a ruptured spleen, successfully as it had turned out, and then had been shuttled back to the clinic for his office hours where he’d endured a sweaty succession of twenty-somethings trying to crank out their last free health care before their parents’ insurance stopped covering them. After that it had been back to the complex infirmary where he’d made some notes about an HIV trial he wanted to try to get Roger into. Medicine had advanced since his fellow refugee’s day to the point where the disease was no longer anything like an immediate death sentence. In Simon’s time, however, it would have been no more than an annoyance—take these pills, be more careful, off you go now. That Roger would, eventually, die of what should have been a non-issue purely because Simon happened to be a surgeon instead of a pharmacist was maddening. That he had gone through that entire day before he could look at River’s file again, much less actually spend any time with his sister, was infuriating, but he supposed he hadn’t become a doctor thinking he was going to get a lot of free time.
It was in that frame of mind that he heard the knock on the door and sighed, put down the pot he’d pulled out as a beginning to his rather unenthused plan to cook instead of ordering takeout (it would be horribly ironic if River was able to begin recovering from The Academy and then promptly died of malnutrition), and headed off towards the noise. He pulled open the door, prepared to apologize to whoever was on the other side (Mal probably, or with his luck Jacen come about that cousin or nephew or whatever he was again, though that one had already tried drugs, massacres, and suicide so he really didn’t know what would be left) and send them on their way, but the impulse choked and died in his throat when he saw Kaylee beaming at him. Since she’d arrived for the second time the mechanic had been giving him strange looks, seemed to expect something of him that he wasn’t delivering, and it made him even more awkward and wrong-footed around her than usual, afraid to offend her further than he’d already seemed to.
He brushed his hands off nervously on his pants, though they weren’t at all messy since he hadn’t started cooking yet, and raised his eyebrows slightly. “Kaylee, ah, hello. Did you…did you need anything?” he asked, not wanting to assume she’d simply wanted to see him, to be forward.