Snippet from… ‘A Bridge Over Dead Water’

“You never take off your charm necklace!” Inara scolds.  “Ever.”

“She couldn’t have the metal in the MRI,” Grace says, faintly.

“Why didn’t you put it back on when she got out?”

“There was - ”  But Grace’s faint tone is starting to gain strength. She’s not the sort of woman to be cowed for long. Even exhausted and terrified and a thousand other more important things on her mind right now.  “There was an incident,” she summarizes. “And we’ve had other things on our minds.”

Inara turns her back on Grace completely.

“You could have died,” she hisses at Moore.

Because she wasn’t wearing her charm necklace?  Moore knows how strongly superstitious Inara is, and how important the charms always were, and that’s precisely why she’d continued to add charms to her necklace whenever they came in the mail. Even when she was furious with Inara, even when she was heartbroken, she’d always added every last charm because she’d known how important it always seemed to the other woman for Moore to wear the charms, to be protected, from whatever. Always. But dying? Because she wasn’t wearing her charms?

Inara has always been a confusing mix of practicality and skepticism and superstition, but this is next level weird.

“Do you understand you could have died?” Inara demands. She shakes Moore this time. Moore finally realizes the wild look in her eyes when she came through the door, and when she stalked across the room, and when she demanded Grace give her the necklace… It was panic.

Which is vaguely complimentary, she supposes.