InsaneJournal

Who: Jess M. and Simon
What: Simon is neurotically testing Kyle’s gift, and will now have to explain to Jess why he is fiddling with her stalker-jewelry
When: Tonight, late-ish
Where: Med lab
Warnings: Should be pretty tame

There was a crease between Simon’s eyes, a little dimpling and puckering of the skin, just starting to become ingrained enough that it was obviously going to become a wrinkle someday. That first night aboard Serenity, when he’d settled River into her room and she’d run her hands over his face like a blind person would, her fingers had paused there for just a moment and he’d thought, I didn’t have that line the last time I saw her, by which he’d meant before she went to the Academy. He remembered he hadn’t gone with their parents to drop her off, she hadn’t wanted him to, she was perfectly old enough to go without her gege hovering around in addition to her parents, making her look like a freak. He hadn’t resisted the idea of staying behind, he’d had an exam and he’d expected to be up to visit soon enough. That visit had never materialized, and years later there he had found himself, a wanted man on the outer rim, his sister tracing his face like a blind stranger and stopping her finger on that line. That always would have happened, he’d wanted to say, wanted to explain that worry over her hadn’t traced that wrinkle down his face. It had been the microscopes he’d stared into, the fine text on screens spelling out symptoms, the little details he couldn’t miss.

The line was pronounced now, a furrow, as he stared into the microscope and tilted the slide a little and adjusted the settings on the microscope itself. None of the telltale signs had materialized, none of the color changes of a chemical tell, but he’d been staring at the swab he’d run along the grooves of Jessica’s new necklace for the past fifteen minutes anyway. Every one of his tests had come up clean, as had all of Ruby’s according to Sam. He was beginning to think he’d have to admit that the thing was genuinely a gift and give it back to Sam so that the other man could give it back to Jess. He sighed and touched his index finger to his temple, warding off a building headache. There has to be something I’ve missed. No one just leaves something this expensive on someone’s doormat. No one just leaves something this expensive for someone they aren’t even seeing, it would be too forward. He reached over to the table and picked up the necklace itself, holding it up to see it better under the light set into the ceiling. It stood to reason that this gift wasn’t harmless. Even if it wasn’t cursed or poisoned it would be from someone who preferred to skulk around and worry Jess and her friends rather than simply ask her out for coffee, someone who didn’t care about disrupting other people’s lives and worrying them, and Jess was the kind of person who would just let it go on indefinitely. Better then, in some ways, that he did find a poison now. It would be more straight-forward than trying to convince her that whoever this was shouldn’t be humored. Yes, it would be safer that way he told himself. Completely rational.

He lowered the necklace out of the light and picked up another swab, working it over the clasp, a section he hadn’t tested yet. He was so absorbed in the task that he almost didn’t notice the sound of the door to the med-bay opening, and by the time he did it was too late to hide what he was doing. If he hadn’t, of necessity, had steady hands he would have startled visibly. As it was he merely froze, almost guiltily, necklace and swab still in his hands.