(no subject)
Title: Given Time (Chapters 1-2 of 4)
Author: Alexis
Rating: M
Characters: Mal, Zoe, Tracy, Other
Genre: Action
Timeline/Spoilers: Set just before and during the War for Unification.
Summary: The way it used to be. A young Malcom Reynolds leaves his homeworld to become a Big Damn Hero, only some stories don't have happy endings.
Warning: Mild war violence. This is a WIP, and I'll see if there's interest in this sort of story to decide if I should continue to post small sections, or if you'd like the whole shebang all at once (which means I need to get crackin').
Disclaimer: All belongs to Joss, for he is our lord and master. Hallowed be his name.
GIVEN TIME
Chapter One - June 2506
The ocean of ripe green wheat stretched to the horizon, rippling slightly in the wind like waves upon the sea. The breeze carried with it a faint sickly-sweet smell, methane and crushed grass from the thousands of cattle grazing far to the west. Even from his vantage point on the bluff and mounted on his big mustang Saint Clyde, Mal couldn’t see the herd. He could only catch their scent, a smell he’d know anywhere, that pungent cow-smell of a thousand cattle drives and brandings, sharper in fall when the haying started, buried under winter snow but always, always there to be revived in the spring thaw. He’d miss that smell.
Saint Clyde shifted his weight, stamping his foot in impatience. Mal loosened the reins a little, giving the mustang enough slack to nibble at the broken-open wheat grain under his hooves. The dogs, little more than white specks parting the tall grass off in the distance, yipped and barked, letting Mal know where they were. The wind picked up a little, singing through the crops and sending the wheat stalks to rattling. She was late; Mal checked the position of the sun again, smiling ruefully. The woman did know how to make an entrance.
Becky didn’t show until the sun was high in the afternoon sky. He watched her little pony pick its way through the wheatfield at a snail’s pace. Becky was wearing a soft cotton dress, blue to set off her hair. She’d braided it into a thick length that hung between her shoulders, catching like spun gold in the sunlight. She rode sidesaddle, the dress rucking up some to expose white, shapely calves and dainty little feet. He drank in the sight of her, wanting to hold on to the moment of the girl and the sun and the endless green field. Mal knew heaven wasn’t likely to waste such a sight on him again for some time.
She finally reached the bluff and waited for Mal to dismount and help her down, a blush coloring her fresh, pretty face as he allowed his hands to linger on her waist. “You’re late,” Mal chided, eyes smiling at her. Becky tilted her head, allowing him to place a chaste kiss on her forehead in greeting. She pretended to pout as Mal pulled her close, kissing her fully on the lips. Becky’s eyes widened and she pushed against him a little. Mal released her, ignoring a pang of disappointment.
“’S awful rude of you to make a fella cool his heels like this, his last night in the world,” he joked, hoping to make her smile.
“I couldn’t get away,” she explained, brushing at her dress. “Pa was watching. Waiting long?”
She sounded concerned but Mal suspected she wasn’t; Becky did like to know when she was missed. He shrugged off the question, threading his fingers through hers as they left the bluff and began to wade through the wheat.
At his silence she frowned, biting her lip, making a show of being anxious. “You could just come talk to Daddy. Make him understand. Then we wouldn’t have to wait ‘til the war’s over to get married.”
Mal closed his eyes and sighed. They’d been having this conversation for years, it seemed like. Becky just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.
“You know your father’d never let you marry an Independent. Hell, he ain’t said but two words to me since the succession vote, and that was before he knew I’d volunteered for the cause.”
“You don’t have to go,” Becky said, sunlight catching her azure eyes as she squeezed his hand. “Daddy couldn’t object, not if you stayed out of the war.”
Mal met her pleading gaze, those eyes he’d known since childhood anticipating his nod of surrender. He’d never denied her, not since they’d played cowboys and Reavers in the shadow of the old schoolhouse in Analine. And even if her eyes had taken on some of her father’s calculating coolness in recent years, Mal knew he would never be able to deny Becky Kelly anything.
“You know I can’t do that,” he said, giving her some truth. “This war’ll change everything, change the whole gorram ‘verse. A man can’t just walk away from his shot at being a big damn hero.”
“You don’t care about being a hero, Malcolm,” Becky corrected him, her soft little hand warm on his cheek. “You just want to do what’s right. So stay on Shadow. Take care of your Ma and me.”
Mal fought off the smile inspired by the idea of his Ma needing any kind of caretaking. And as for Becky, he knew she wasn’t as fragile as she pretended. Neither of his girls needed him as much as the Independent Army. There was a war to be won, and he sure as hell couldn’t help win it by staying safe on Shadow, working the ranch and setting up housekeeping with the mayor’s daughter.
Under the warm afternoon sun he told her as much, watching her face collapse in the kind of pain she didn’t see fit to hide. It itched at him to be the cause of her unhappiness, but Mal had given his word. No matter how much he loved her or the fields or the cattle or the world, he couldn’t go back on the Cause.
She didn’t cry as he’d feared she would. Just reached up on her tippy-toes to brush her lips against his, her blonde hair a halo around her face. His angel. He’d called her that so many times, whispering it to her when they’d stayed out in the fields all night or gone skinny-dipping in old man Fueng’s pond. All those times, and his Angel had never given him what he’d wanted so much. He’d never asked for more than what she was willing to give and had lived for the day the waiting came to an end. Even now, with war on the horizon and their world coming to an end, Mal knew what she’d say. No, because she was an angel and it would hurt her too much when he didn’t come back.
“And if you never come back?” she asked, echoing his thoughts.
“Then you find yourself the biggest, meanest, fattest piece of go se in the ‘verse, preferably someone with a fierce affection for wood alcohol, and you spend the rest of your life pining after me.”
“Mal!” she huffed, slapping his arm. “You low-down, dirty hundan!”
He caught her wrists, laughing a little. “I’ll WAV you every day,” he promised, hoping she would believe he meant it. She nodded, then looked to the sky and the fast-disappearing sun.
“It’s getting late. Daddy’ll notice I’m gone.”
He nodded, wanting her to say something more, something he could look to in the bad times ahead and carry with him across the wide ‘verse. But she only said, “I’ll miss you” and kissed him again, shyly. He cupped her hips and pulled her up against him, his mouth coming down on hers in a breathless kiss. Becky’s mouth remained slack, unresponsive, and he finally set her back on her feet.
“Goodbye, Becky Kelly. I love you.”
She didn’t reply, silent as he helped her back up on her little paint. He watched for a long time as her pony worked its way back across the field, dropping out of sight beyond the horizon.
“Gorram goodbyes,” he muttered under his breath.
************
The sun was just setting as he cleared the northern fence and found himself in sight of the big ranch house. Saint Clyde broke into a canter, eager to be back in the stable with a nice bushel of oats and the mares for company. Mal gave the mustang his head, keeping his eyes on the house. The place was lit up like Christmas, a lantern burning in every room. He could see shadows moving across the windows down in the kitchen. It looked like all the hands had gathered to give him a big send-off. He could almost smell Ma’s chili on the wind, and the scent of fresh-baked biscuits with gravy. Woman knew how to feed a man before he packed off to war, that was a certainty.
After he’d settled Saint Clyde, Mal ran a few pumps of water over his head from the well around back and came in through the kitchen entrance, water dripping off the ends of his hair to speckle the shoulders of his worn red shirt. A voice from the shadows on the back porch made Mal pause.
“Yer ma’s been looking for you.”
Mal grinned, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against one of the porch’s wooden supports. “She’s determined to make my leavin’ into a big to-do, huh?”
“Seems that way,” Clell replied, puffing on his long-handled pipe. He smiled at Mal, the creases in his weatherbeaten face making him appear older than his forty-odd years. Clell had been his mother’s right-hand man for as long as Mal could remember. He’d learn to ride and ranch at the man’s feet; they’d gone hunting together and Clell had been the one to teach Mal to shoot. Mal had noted that Clell had gotten a little slower of late, spending more time smoking out on the porch than he did riding the fences, but Clell still seemed damned near immortal to Mal.
“How old are you, son?” Clell asked, blowing a thin ribbon of smoke out into the night air.
Mal shook his head, smiling. “Twenty, as if it weren’t a fact you’re familiar with.” Clell didn’t smile in return, just puffed on his pipe until Mal grew serious. “I’m twenty, sir,” he said again.
Clell nodded. “I was a bit younger than you, went off to the boarder worlds to fight an uprisin’ there.”
Mal waited for the older man to continue. He’d known Clell had been a soldier, once, long before he’d come to Shadow and the Reynolds ranch. It was a part of his life that Clell didn’t talk much about. Clell had always said that a man’s past was his own, his to hold and his to tell. Hadn’t stopped Mal as a young boy from begging for details about violence and slaughter on the frontier, but Clell had always refused his childish requests.
“I know you never killed no one, Malcolm,” Clell sighed, trying to relight his pipe. “You’ve always been a good, decent sort of man. You grew up right, no denying that. But war has a way of making a man familar his own darkness.” Clell paused, and Mal wondered what he was reliving. “I’ve done some things in my life I ain’t proud of. I found a way to live with them. I just worry...I just worry you ain’t gonna be able to do the same.”
Mal swallowed hard. He’d never heard Clell talk like this, not in the twenty years he’d known him. “What do you mean?”
Clell pushed with a booted foot against the porch railing, setting his seat to swinging. Mal had put in the swing-bench the summer before, a surprise for his ma’s birthday, but the way the chains creaked against the wood was grating on his nerves. The wind was chill and he was hungry; Clell wasn’t making any sense. “You saying I’m gonna turn coward? Or worse?”
Another puff, and Clell shook his head. “You ain’t never gonna be a coward, boy. But you set an awful lot of store in doing the right thing. War makes those distinctions a tad difficult.”
“And you know this for a fact?”
“Bitter experience. The only kind worth a damn, ‘cause it hurts so much you don’t ever forget it.”
Mal nodded, turning to face the wide prairie. His hair had dried in the cool wind and the sound of music and conversation carried from the kitchen to the little porch. Whatever darkness had been in Clell’s voice, it had passed. “I appreciate the warning,” Mal told the other man. “Ain’t much I can do about experience, I suppose.”
“Just don’t let it tear you up too bad. Yer ma’d never forgive you.”
Mal smiled a little ruefully. “Thanks, Clell.”
He turned and headed towards the kitchen.
The loud chatter of the hands paused for an instant as he entered the room, a few cheers of greeting swallowed up as the conversations resumed. Forty hands worked the Reynolds ranch, more in the summer and fall when haying and branding brought people from Alaline and Maidenhead and Xuia. Work was plentiful, the pay was good and Ma provided the best food in four sectors; they’d never had any trouble finding capable, hard-working men and women to work their ranch.
Right now, most of the faces filling the kitchen were the familiar ones Mal had known since early childhood. Tuffy and Bishop, still stuffing biscuits into their mouths, rose to clap him on the back. Lilly handed him a laden plate, a smile on her soft, sun-worn face. The other hands were arranged along the scarred surface of the old oak table, which was big enough to seat twenty and often served the needs of more. People were always dropping into the Reynolds kitchen, sharing stories, seeking advice on the running of a herd, trading friendly insults with Mal. For six generations, since the terraforming of Shadow finally took and turned a rocky, sulfur-and-iron-dense little planet into the fertile green fields of a ranching world, the Reynolds homestead had been famous for good food, good company and good beef.
“You thinkin’ on how you’re gonna miss it?”
His mother’s flat, matter-of-fact tones made Mal shake his head. He turned to her, the tall, lean, statuesque woman who had raised him, and met her warm gray eyes as she set a bowl of her cooking down before him.
“I don’t need to think on a thing to know the truth of it.”
She nodded, pleased with the only answer he could give. Clairice sat down next to him, spooning an extra portion of chili onto his plate. She watched Mal as he ate, joking and laughing with the hands, well-aware that this might be the last time she would ever have a meal with her boy. Her son was a fine young man, cursed with her stubbornness, spared any of his father’s failings. At nineteen, he was the light of her life, tall, strong, upstanding and brave as they came. He was a hard worker and, like her, lived through the land. She wasn’t sure how well he’d do on a ship up there among the stars, or on a planet that didn’t give him space to breath. She worried for her son, the first time she’d had cause to do so.
“Ma?” Mal asked softly, his hand on hers. Clarice smiled at him, not wanting Mal to remember his mother as a worry-wart who couldn’t speak for the lump in her throat.
“Dusty in here, ain’t it?” she tried, wiping at her eye. “I done told Bartel to make sure and keep this kitchen swept clean.”
Mal smiled a little, seeing through her ruse but not letting his mother know it. She and Clell were more emotional tonight than he’d ever seen them, even more than that time he’d been trampled by a wild horse and spent three months laid up in the guest room at the foot of the stairs, not knowing if he’d ever walk again. Most his mother and Clell had done was shake their heads and lecture him about breaking horses too soon. Neither one had spared a worry for him or his future, at least not to his knowledge. It seemed that war did funny things to people, even before the first bullet was fired.
Mal traced the long, curving scar on his mother’s cheek with his eyes, its contour extending from her sharp cheekbone to beneath her jaw. His father had given her that, the most visible of all the scars his mother carried from that ill-fated marriage. It was part of the reason his Ma was so set against his romance with Becky Kelly; she’d told him to get out, see the ‘verse, meet a girl who wanted more from life than to marry a wealthy rancher’s son.
“Unions made because there’s no better options don’t make for any kind of a marriage,” she’d told him the morning she’d caught him sneaking back into the ranchhouse after a night out in the fields with Becky. And Mal didn’t disagree on that point, deferring to his mother’s bitter experience with the close-knit society of Shadow and the limited options it offered. But he’d loved Becky since they were nine years old and if not for the war, he’d already have married the girl and started up a family. Life was too short to go on denying your heart, he figured.
“I talked things over with Becky,” he told his Ma, hating to see her expression close up and her hand withdraw from his. She looked like she was preparing herself for some luh-suh news. “She’s content to wait until after the war is over to get hitched.”
Clarice let out a sigh of relief; when Mal had left early in the morning to meet the Kelly girl, she was sure she’d find herself with a new daughter-in-law that evening. “You came to the right decision, Malcolm.”
He nodded, unhappy at his mother’s obvious relief. “I’m just tryin’ to be fair to everybody. Ain’t no favor to Becky, me marrying her and then dying in some far-flung corner of the ‘verse.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Clarice said, shaking her head. “You’re coming back from this. Who you think’s gonna take over the ranch? Bartel?”
As if on cue, their clumsy, well-meaning kitchen hand Bartel McDonald dropped his dinner plate on the floor. The dogs set on it at once, much to Bartel’s despair.
“It’ll be a lot different, the Alliance gone from Shadow and all the trade routes,” Mal mused, settling back in his chair. “Be a lot easier to make an honest day’s living without paying all them taxes and putting up with purplebellies sticking their noses into everything.”
Clairce nodded. “You’re doing the right thing,” she told him, looking him squarely in the eyes. “I never said that before. As much as I hate the idea of you so far away, doing the awful things that soldiers do, it’s for the right cause. We win, we won’t never have to answer to nobody, Mal. You get discouraged, you think of that.”
“I will, Ma,” he promised, kissing her on the cheek. He had some idea of what the words had cost her.
“Enough of this weepiness,” she decided, getting up. “Clell, where’s that caterwauling-banjo of yours?”
Clell, just in from off the porch, was happy to oblige. He shuffled nearer the fireplace and took a seat on a little wood stool, picking up the banjo he’d left leaning against the hearth. Someone broke open a bottle of sipping whiskey and passed it around, a smoother supplement to the home-brewed moonshine favored by the hands. The music started up, Clell on banjo, Tuffy with his fiddle. There was dancing, the skirts of the female hands flying, the boots of the men stomping on the worn kitchen floor. Mal took a turn with Lilly and the Wen-Lee sisters, collapsing back on the bench hours later, breathless from laughter. He watched the others in the flickering lantern light, wondering when he’d next feel so warm, so at home in a place.
The evening went on and they told the same old stories about Mal as a youngster, getting in everybody’s way, pushing himself to grow up faster and be of use. Some of the stories from his adolescence made him blush, some weep with laughter. In their own way, all the shopworn hands of the Reynolds ranch did their best to tell him they loved him. There were a couple of gifts, too, one of Peterson’s hand-carved pipes and cherryroot to fill it, dried green tea from Lilly, a thick pair of socks from Clell. Conversation quieted some when Mal’s mother handed him a tiny, well-wrapped package.
“This’ll feed you in times of want,” she told him.
Mal unwrapped the tiny parcel, a silver cross and chain slipping into his hands to shimmer and glint in the lamplight. He recognized it immediately; his Ma had worn it for years, kissing it after evening prayer, fingering it idly when something was on her mind.
“I’ll never take it off,” he promised her. She patted his knee and cued Clell to start up again, the music taking some of the pain out of the air.
***********
The dock in Analine was crowded with young Independent volunteers chattering in Mandarin and English with their families and loved ones. Seemed as if the whole town had turned up to say goodbye to their young men and women, Mal noted, slightly embarrassed at the size of his own going-away party. All of the ranch hands and plenty of folk from town had shown up to see him on his way, most of them pumping his hand and predicting that “he’d show them purplebellies how they fight on Shadow!” Most predicted the war would be over in a few months and the town’s youth would be back in time for the big cattle drive to Xuia. As the volunteers began to board the shuttle, Mal craned his neck to see if he could spy Becky Kelly’s golden head. He hadn’t much hope; her father probably wouldn’t give her leave to come and see the newest Browncoats on their way, being an Alliance sympathizer himself. Still, if she’d been able to sneak out the previous afternoon...
“Final call!” came the imperious voice over the shuttle’s announcement system. “All those bound for Cicero Station, this is your final boarding call!” The message was repeated in Chinese.
Mal frowned, then turned his attention to the sharp gray eyes of his mother.
“You give them purplebellies hell, son!” Clell exclaimed, slapping him on the back. Mal barely heard the man, meeting his mother’s quiet gaze. He remembered her words from last night: You’re doing the right thing.
She mouthed, “I love you” and let her eyes sweep the collar of his shirt where her silver cross dangled. Mal nodded, turned, and climbed aboard. He took his seat, trying to locate his mother in the throng around the docks through the window. As the shuttle lifted off, he finally found her, watching her as long as he could, until his mother and the crowds and the station were tiny specks, until Analine disappeared from sight and they passed through atmo, until Shadow itself was just a bright point of light in the distance, its sun only one of thousands of stars.
He felt as though he would never see any of it again.
************
Chapter Two - March 2511
Zoe thought about death.
It had become a hard subject to avoid. They’d lost most of their battalion and had all but run out of food, water and medical supplies. It was cold on Hera, and sickness was spreading like wildfire among the enlisted men. They’d already been on this rock for six weeks, with no end in sight.
Yep, death sure looked like a distinct possibility.
“How we lookin’, Zoe?” her Sarge asked.
“Just fine, Sir,” she replied, cocking her rifle. Mal nodded, doing the same. He counted off the seconds in his head: twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven...
“You figure this to be the last big push before nightfall?”
“Reckon it has to be,” he replied, still keeping count in his head. “They ain’t got no more support coming in. Chatter on the box’s been quiet for both sides. No one’s coming to help them.”
“Or us.”
He glanced at Zoe. “Or us,” he agreed. “Now!” Mal roared, leading the charge of 4,000 men up and over the side of their hastily-dug trench. The pounding of feet behind him was all but swallowed by a succession of gunfire, every man doing his duty and putting bullets in the Alliance front not twenty feet away. They were covered from behind and Mal dropped to the ground as bullets whizzed overhead, listening for the sound of his troops doing the same. He belly-crawled closer to the Alliance line, barely hearing the screams of pain behind and around him as bullets found their targets and ripped into the Browncoats. Finally they reached the trench, a wave of Independents spilling over into the Alliance furrow, tossing grenades, rocks and whatever else they thought could do damage onto the men below. Mal fired without thinking, reloading when he could, dropping his repeater when it finally clicked empty and using his six-shooter after that. He knew Zoe was somewhere to his left, using her knife. All of them, 4,000 Browncoats against 8,200 Alliance soldiers, were locked into death struggles. The desperation of this battle, which forced the armies to go hand-to-hand, kept him fighting, kept his men fighting. Slowly, slowly, the heat of the battle ebbed away. Some fought on, exhausted, rolling around in the mud and filth at the bottom of the trenches, throwing half-hearted punches at each other. The few who still had bullets for their guns used them sparingly. Most preferred their knifes or the bayonets attached to their rifles. A spray of blood caught Mal in the face; for an instant he thought it was his own. As the Alliance soldier dropped lifeless at his feet, Mal took stock of his own forces. The Browncoats had carried the charge, beating back the Alliance. What few purplebellies remained standing had sense enough to run, taking off into the darkness.
A loud cheer went up from the Independent forces as they watched the Alliance retreat, most of the men and women breaking into huge grins, hugging one another, their teeth very white against their blood-soaked faces. Mal began to take stock of what the other side had left behind; weapons, rations and even medical supplies were located and handled like precious gold. He put Zoe in charge of inventory and went to find the Alliance comm-box, working on rewiring it to send a message to the nearest Independent base.
“Sir?”
“How many?”
Zoe sighed. “A lot, sir. Maybe more than the Alliance, but our lines held. We lost at least a thousand.”
Mal closed his eyes, tramping down on a Chinese obscenity. “Any prisoners?”
“A few hundred. Ain’t got no way to feed ‘em, Sir.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, knowing that the decision would be his. There weren’t any junior officers left alive on Hera above the rank of Captain, and none of the senior officers had the first clue how to run a war.
“You go and ask those Alliance soldiers if they’d like a Independent uniform. Those that do, you put a rifle in their hands. Those that don’t...set ‘em to digging more trenches. The Alliance will rally by tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll have to do this all over again. Best we prepare for our inevitable deaths.”
“Yes sir,” Zoe nodded, tramping down a grin. Things were bad, but she believed in the Sergeant. She knew he’d carry them through this.
“Mal!” Tracey cried out, stumbling down the embankment and knocking over a pile of emptied rifles. “Brass is on the box, asking for a lieutenant. We got orders!”
Mal glanced at Zoe, sharing a look. They move out now, they’d lose this ground to the Alliance. “I’ll speak with ‘em, Tracey,” Mal said.
***********
Zoe held some rations for Mal, listening as Tracy jabbered on about one thing or another as she heated the food and then set to cleaning her rifle.
“You really think we can trust those purplebellies to fight against their own?” Tracy asked, suspiciously eyeing the prisoners captured during last night’s battle. They were mostly kids, younger than Tracey himself, and obviously scared. Zoe watched them down the last of the battalion’s rations, their hands shaking from fear or the shock of a meal. The former Alliance recruits lined the trench, shoulder-to-shoulder with the remaining Browncoat forces. Conversation in the trench was strained, some of the Independents muttering barely-veiled threats and insults towards the Alliance soldiers. Zoe fingered her rifle, knowing she’d do what she must in order to keep the fragile peace until Mal returned.
At last he came back down the long trench, stopping to say a word or two to the Browncoats soldiers, refocusing them, reminding them that the scared Alliance recruits had agreed to fight under the Independent flag. They grudgingly accepted Mal’s words of caution against further bloodshed, some even sharing their rations or ammunition with the new inductees. Mal settled down next to Zoe, taking the plate of food from her with a grateful nod, eating the beans and stale protein bar as he delivered their orders.
“We’re to head towards a place called Serenity Valley, about two days fast march from here. General Xeha wants to mass a big stand, push the Alliance off Hera. We’ll have air support and the 3rd battalion will meet us at the Valley.”
“You really believe we’ll get the Alliance off this rock?” Zoe asked, her dark eyes battle-weary in the dim light of the trench.
“Don’t have no choice,” Mal replied. “The powers that be don’t think there’s much point to protecting this ground. We go to the Valley, make our stand there. This could win the war for us, Zoe. We could be home by the fall.”
“If you say so, Sir,” Zoe shrugged. Those that had homes to go to spoke of them often, their talisman against the horrors of what they’d done during the war. She only had the Independent Army and the Sarge, the family she’d chosen, the war her whole world. She’d follow Mal and Tracey and the rest to Serenity Valley. As Mal had said, there was no choice.
“You think these kids’ll make it that far? Two days’ march and an army with dysentery and no food ain’t any kind of a winning combination,” Zoe pointed out, fixing the barrel of her rifle back to the stock, the weapon as clean as it could be.
“We’ll make it. We have to,” Mal replied, his hands slipping below the collar of his shirt to touch his mama’s cross. He finished with the meal, leaned back against the wall of the trench with his eyes closed, and immediately dropped off to sleep. Zoe contemplated his still face, thinking of all the times they’d saved each other, kept each other going, kept each other sane with banter and insults. Mal was the closest she’d ever come to family, and while she could handle the thought of her own death...
“Zoe, can I ask you somethin’?” Tracey asked, interrupting her reverie. He began sucking on the end of his chopstick, something she’d warned him against on previous occasions under pain of death. The boy persisted. “What do you plan to do, after the war’s over?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she said, shaking her hair loose from its scarf, glad it was dark so she couldn’t see if any bugs fell out. Lice had lately been a problem in the trenches. “Sarge keeps telling me about this ranch he’s got on Shadow, out in the Corelais system. Thinks he might make use of me there.”
“You ever work a ranch?”
Zoe shook her head, finger-combing her thick, curly hair. Lord, she needed a bath. “Figure it’ll be like soldiering; you learn as you go.”
“My folks have a farm on one of the outer-rim moons. They don’t grow much; place is frozen solid most of the year. It’s a hard life.” Tracey set his plate down and, like Mal, leaned against the side of the trench, resting his back. “Reason I ask about your plans is because I thought you and me could work together, sign up as mercs or bodyguards or something for some of them rich folks in the Core.”
Zoe shot Tracey a skeptical look. Boy wouldn’t last two seconds as a hired gun; he was clumsy and talked too much. She’d grown up around mercenaries and knew what kind of men it bred; Tracey didn’t fit the profile at all. Mal did, but he wanted to be a rancher. She wasn’t sure, but she hoped to hell she could fit that life. The one she’d been brought up in had brought nothing but pain.
“Tracey, I think you need to start thinking about other career options,” she told him, settling down on top of her pack, using her scarf as a pillow. “Get a job on a transport ship. It’s a safe life and the pay is more regular than what mercs make.”
They were silent now, and down the line the sound of snoring and men in fitful sleep could be heard in the darkness. Zoe thought of the impossibility of peace, how you could be a solider one day and a farmer the next. She knew what boys like Tracey and men like Mal thought they were going home to probably wouldn’t be there. The shell of it would remain, and the heartache it brought would fill them up inside, hollow them out. She wasn’t too worried about being a good ranch hand or working as a merc with Tracey; the universe at peace wouldn’t be anything like it was before war. Those that believed anything different didn’t know their history.
****************
...continued...
x-posted to fireflyfans
Author: Alexis
Rating: M
Characters: Mal, Zoe, Tracy, Other
Genre: Action
Timeline/Spoilers: Set just before and during the War for Unification.
Summary: The way it used to be. A young Malcom Reynolds leaves his homeworld to become a Big Damn Hero, only some stories don't have happy endings.
Warning: Mild war violence. This is a WIP, and I'll see if there's interest in this sort of story to decide if I should continue to post small sections, or if you'd like the whole shebang all at once (which means I need to get crackin').
Disclaimer: All belongs to Joss, for he is our lord and master. Hallowed be his name.
GIVEN TIME
Chapter One - June 2506
The ocean of ripe green wheat stretched to the horizon, rippling slightly in the wind like waves upon the sea. The breeze carried with it a faint sickly-sweet smell, methane and crushed grass from the thousands of cattle grazing far to the west. Even from his vantage point on the bluff and mounted on his big mustang Saint Clyde, Mal couldn’t see the herd. He could only catch their scent, a smell he’d know anywhere, that pungent cow-smell of a thousand cattle drives and brandings, sharper in fall when the haying started, buried under winter snow but always, always there to be revived in the spring thaw. He’d miss that smell.
Saint Clyde shifted his weight, stamping his foot in impatience. Mal loosened the reins a little, giving the mustang enough slack to nibble at the broken-open wheat grain under his hooves. The dogs, little more than white specks parting the tall grass off in the distance, yipped and barked, letting Mal know where they were. The wind picked up a little, singing through the crops and sending the wheat stalks to rattling. She was late; Mal checked the position of the sun again, smiling ruefully. The woman did know how to make an entrance.
Becky didn’t show until the sun was high in the afternoon sky. He watched her little pony pick its way through the wheatfield at a snail’s pace. Becky was wearing a soft cotton dress, blue to set off her hair. She’d braided it into a thick length that hung between her shoulders, catching like spun gold in the sunlight. She rode sidesaddle, the dress rucking up some to expose white, shapely calves and dainty little feet. He drank in the sight of her, wanting to hold on to the moment of the girl and the sun and the endless green field. Mal knew heaven wasn’t likely to waste such a sight on him again for some time.
She finally reached the bluff and waited for Mal to dismount and help her down, a blush coloring her fresh, pretty face as he allowed his hands to linger on her waist. “You’re late,” Mal chided, eyes smiling at her. Becky tilted her head, allowing him to place a chaste kiss on her forehead in greeting. She pretended to pout as Mal pulled her close, kissing her fully on the lips. Becky’s eyes widened and she pushed against him a little. Mal released her, ignoring a pang of disappointment.
“’S awful rude of you to make a fella cool his heels like this, his last night in the world,” he joked, hoping to make her smile.
“I couldn’t get away,” she explained, brushing at her dress. “Pa was watching. Waiting long?”
She sounded concerned but Mal suspected she wasn’t; Becky did like to know when she was missed. He shrugged off the question, threading his fingers through hers as they left the bluff and began to wade through the wheat.
At his silence she frowned, biting her lip, making a show of being anxious. “You could just come talk to Daddy. Make him understand. Then we wouldn’t have to wait ‘til the war’s over to get married.”
Mal closed his eyes and sighed. They’d been having this conversation for years, it seemed like. Becky just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.
“You know your father’d never let you marry an Independent. Hell, he ain’t said but two words to me since the succession vote, and that was before he knew I’d volunteered for the cause.”
“You don’t have to go,” Becky said, sunlight catching her azure eyes as she squeezed his hand. “Daddy couldn’t object, not if you stayed out of the war.”
Mal met her pleading gaze, those eyes he’d known since childhood anticipating his nod of surrender. He’d never denied her, not since they’d played cowboys and Reavers in the shadow of the old schoolhouse in Analine. And even if her eyes had taken on some of her father’s calculating coolness in recent years, Mal knew he would never be able to deny Becky Kelly anything.
“You know I can’t do that,” he said, giving her some truth. “This war’ll change everything, change the whole gorram ‘verse. A man can’t just walk away from his shot at being a big damn hero.”
“You don’t care about being a hero, Malcolm,” Becky corrected him, her soft little hand warm on his cheek. “You just want to do what’s right. So stay on Shadow. Take care of your Ma and me.”
Mal fought off the smile inspired by the idea of his Ma needing any kind of caretaking. And as for Becky, he knew she wasn’t as fragile as she pretended. Neither of his girls needed him as much as the Independent Army. There was a war to be won, and he sure as hell couldn’t help win it by staying safe on Shadow, working the ranch and setting up housekeeping with the mayor’s daughter.
Under the warm afternoon sun he told her as much, watching her face collapse in the kind of pain she didn’t see fit to hide. It itched at him to be the cause of her unhappiness, but Mal had given his word. No matter how much he loved her or the fields or the cattle or the world, he couldn’t go back on the Cause.
She didn’t cry as he’d feared she would. Just reached up on her tippy-toes to brush her lips against his, her blonde hair a halo around her face. His angel. He’d called her that so many times, whispering it to her when they’d stayed out in the fields all night or gone skinny-dipping in old man Fueng’s pond. All those times, and his Angel had never given him what he’d wanted so much. He’d never asked for more than what she was willing to give and had lived for the day the waiting came to an end. Even now, with war on the horizon and their world coming to an end, Mal knew what she’d say. No, because she was an angel and it would hurt her too much when he didn’t come back.
“And if you never come back?” she asked, echoing his thoughts.
“Then you find yourself the biggest, meanest, fattest piece of go se in the ‘verse, preferably someone with a fierce affection for wood alcohol, and you spend the rest of your life pining after me.”
“Mal!” she huffed, slapping his arm. “You low-down, dirty hundan!”
He caught her wrists, laughing a little. “I’ll WAV you every day,” he promised, hoping she would believe he meant it. She nodded, then looked to the sky and the fast-disappearing sun.
“It’s getting late. Daddy’ll notice I’m gone.”
He nodded, wanting her to say something more, something he could look to in the bad times ahead and carry with him across the wide ‘verse. But she only said, “I’ll miss you” and kissed him again, shyly. He cupped her hips and pulled her up against him, his mouth coming down on hers in a breathless kiss. Becky’s mouth remained slack, unresponsive, and he finally set her back on her feet.
“Goodbye, Becky Kelly. I love you.”
She didn’t reply, silent as he helped her back up on her little paint. He watched for a long time as her pony worked its way back across the field, dropping out of sight beyond the horizon.
“Gorram goodbyes,” he muttered under his breath.
************
The sun was just setting as he cleared the northern fence and found himself in sight of the big ranch house. Saint Clyde broke into a canter, eager to be back in the stable with a nice bushel of oats and the mares for company. Mal gave the mustang his head, keeping his eyes on the house. The place was lit up like Christmas, a lantern burning in every room. He could see shadows moving across the windows down in the kitchen. It looked like all the hands had gathered to give him a big send-off. He could almost smell Ma’s chili on the wind, and the scent of fresh-baked biscuits with gravy. Woman knew how to feed a man before he packed off to war, that was a certainty.
After he’d settled Saint Clyde, Mal ran a few pumps of water over his head from the well around back and came in through the kitchen entrance, water dripping off the ends of his hair to speckle the shoulders of his worn red shirt. A voice from the shadows on the back porch made Mal pause.
“Yer ma’s been looking for you.”
Mal grinned, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against one of the porch’s wooden supports. “She’s determined to make my leavin’ into a big to-do, huh?”
“Seems that way,” Clell replied, puffing on his long-handled pipe. He smiled at Mal, the creases in his weatherbeaten face making him appear older than his forty-odd years. Clell had been his mother’s right-hand man for as long as Mal could remember. He’d learn to ride and ranch at the man’s feet; they’d gone hunting together and Clell had been the one to teach Mal to shoot. Mal had noted that Clell had gotten a little slower of late, spending more time smoking out on the porch than he did riding the fences, but Clell still seemed damned near immortal to Mal.
“How old are you, son?” Clell asked, blowing a thin ribbon of smoke out into the night air.
Mal shook his head, smiling. “Twenty, as if it weren’t a fact you’re familiar with.” Clell didn’t smile in return, just puffed on his pipe until Mal grew serious. “I’m twenty, sir,” he said again.
Clell nodded. “I was a bit younger than you, went off to the boarder worlds to fight an uprisin’ there.”
Mal waited for the older man to continue. He’d known Clell had been a soldier, once, long before he’d come to Shadow and the Reynolds ranch. It was a part of his life that Clell didn’t talk much about. Clell had always said that a man’s past was his own, his to hold and his to tell. Hadn’t stopped Mal as a young boy from begging for details about violence and slaughter on the frontier, but Clell had always refused his childish requests.
“I know you never killed no one, Malcolm,” Clell sighed, trying to relight his pipe. “You’ve always been a good, decent sort of man. You grew up right, no denying that. But war has a way of making a man familar his own darkness.” Clell paused, and Mal wondered what he was reliving. “I’ve done some things in my life I ain’t proud of. I found a way to live with them. I just worry...I just worry you ain’t gonna be able to do the same.”
Mal swallowed hard. He’d never heard Clell talk like this, not in the twenty years he’d known him. “What do you mean?”
Clell pushed with a booted foot against the porch railing, setting his seat to swinging. Mal had put in the swing-bench the summer before, a surprise for his ma’s birthday, but the way the chains creaked against the wood was grating on his nerves. The wind was chill and he was hungry; Clell wasn’t making any sense. “You saying I’m gonna turn coward? Or worse?”
Another puff, and Clell shook his head. “You ain’t never gonna be a coward, boy. But you set an awful lot of store in doing the right thing. War makes those distinctions a tad difficult.”
“And you know this for a fact?”
“Bitter experience. The only kind worth a damn, ‘cause it hurts so much you don’t ever forget it.”
Mal nodded, turning to face the wide prairie. His hair had dried in the cool wind and the sound of music and conversation carried from the kitchen to the little porch. Whatever darkness had been in Clell’s voice, it had passed. “I appreciate the warning,” Mal told the other man. “Ain’t much I can do about experience, I suppose.”
“Just don’t let it tear you up too bad. Yer ma’d never forgive you.”
Mal smiled a little ruefully. “Thanks, Clell.”
He turned and headed towards the kitchen.
The loud chatter of the hands paused for an instant as he entered the room, a few cheers of greeting swallowed up as the conversations resumed. Forty hands worked the Reynolds ranch, more in the summer and fall when haying and branding brought people from Alaline and Maidenhead and Xuia. Work was plentiful, the pay was good and Ma provided the best food in four sectors; they’d never had any trouble finding capable, hard-working men and women to work their ranch.
Right now, most of the faces filling the kitchen were the familiar ones Mal had known since early childhood. Tuffy and Bishop, still stuffing biscuits into their mouths, rose to clap him on the back. Lilly handed him a laden plate, a smile on her soft, sun-worn face. The other hands were arranged along the scarred surface of the old oak table, which was big enough to seat twenty and often served the needs of more. People were always dropping into the Reynolds kitchen, sharing stories, seeking advice on the running of a herd, trading friendly insults with Mal. For six generations, since the terraforming of Shadow finally took and turned a rocky, sulfur-and-iron-dense little planet into the fertile green fields of a ranching world, the Reynolds homestead had been famous for good food, good company and good beef.
“You thinkin’ on how you’re gonna miss it?”
His mother’s flat, matter-of-fact tones made Mal shake his head. He turned to her, the tall, lean, statuesque woman who had raised him, and met her warm gray eyes as she set a bowl of her cooking down before him.
“I don’t need to think on a thing to know the truth of it.”
She nodded, pleased with the only answer he could give. Clairice sat down next to him, spooning an extra portion of chili onto his plate. She watched Mal as he ate, joking and laughing with the hands, well-aware that this might be the last time she would ever have a meal with her boy. Her son was a fine young man, cursed with her stubbornness, spared any of his father’s failings. At nineteen, he was the light of her life, tall, strong, upstanding and brave as they came. He was a hard worker and, like her, lived through the land. She wasn’t sure how well he’d do on a ship up there among the stars, or on a planet that didn’t give him space to breath. She worried for her son, the first time she’d had cause to do so.
“Ma?” Mal asked softly, his hand on hers. Clarice smiled at him, not wanting Mal to remember his mother as a worry-wart who couldn’t speak for the lump in her throat.
“Dusty in here, ain’t it?” she tried, wiping at her eye. “I done told Bartel to make sure and keep this kitchen swept clean.”
Mal smiled a little, seeing through her ruse but not letting his mother know it. She and Clell were more emotional tonight than he’d ever seen them, even more than that time he’d been trampled by a wild horse and spent three months laid up in the guest room at the foot of the stairs, not knowing if he’d ever walk again. Most his mother and Clell had done was shake their heads and lecture him about breaking horses too soon. Neither one had spared a worry for him or his future, at least not to his knowledge. It seemed that war did funny things to people, even before the first bullet was fired.
Mal traced the long, curving scar on his mother’s cheek with his eyes, its contour extending from her sharp cheekbone to beneath her jaw. His father had given her that, the most visible of all the scars his mother carried from that ill-fated marriage. It was part of the reason his Ma was so set against his romance with Becky Kelly; she’d told him to get out, see the ‘verse, meet a girl who wanted more from life than to marry a wealthy rancher’s son.
“Unions made because there’s no better options don’t make for any kind of a marriage,” she’d told him the morning she’d caught him sneaking back into the ranchhouse after a night out in the fields with Becky. And Mal didn’t disagree on that point, deferring to his mother’s bitter experience with the close-knit society of Shadow and the limited options it offered. But he’d loved Becky since they were nine years old and if not for the war, he’d already have married the girl and started up a family. Life was too short to go on denying your heart, he figured.
“I talked things over with Becky,” he told his Ma, hating to see her expression close up and her hand withdraw from his. She looked like she was preparing herself for some luh-suh news. “She’s content to wait until after the war is over to get hitched.”
Clarice let out a sigh of relief; when Mal had left early in the morning to meet the Kelly girl, she was sure she’d find herself with a new daughter-in-law that evening. “You came to the right decision, Malcolm.”
He nodded, unhappy at his mother’s obvious relief. “I’m just tryin’ to be fair to everybody. Ain’t no favor to Becky, me marrying her and then dying in some far-flung corner of the ‘verse.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Clarice said, shaking her head. “You’re coming back from this. Who you think’s gonna take over the ranch? Bartel?”
As if on cue, their clumsy, well-meaning kitchen hand Bartel McDonald dropped his dinner plate on the floor. The dogs set on it at once, much to Bartel’s despair.
“It’ll be a lot different, the Alliance gone from Shadow and all the trade routes,” Mal mused, settling back in his chair. “Be a lot easier to make an honest day’s living without paying all them taxes and putting up with purplebellies sticking their noses into everything.”
Clairce nodded. “You’re doing the right thing,” she told him, looking him squarely in the eyes. “I never said that before. As much as I hate the idea of you so far away, doing the awful things that soldiers do, it’s for the right cause. We win, we won’t never have to answer to nobody, Mal. You get discouraged, you think of that.”
“I will, Ma,” he promised, kissing her on the cheek. He had some idea of what the words had cost her.
“Enough of this weepiness,” she decided, getting up. “Clell, where’s that caterwauling-banjo of yours?”
Clell, just in from off the porch, was happy to oblige. He shuffled nearer the fireplace and took a seat on a little wood stool, picking up the banjo he’d left leaning against the hearth. Someone broke open a bottle of sipping whiskey and passed it around, a smoother supplement to the home-brewed moonshine favored by the hands. The music started up, Clell on banjo, Tuffy with his fiddle. There was dancing, the skirts of the female hands flying, the boots of the men stomping on the worn kitchen floor. Mal took a turn with Lilly and the Wen-Lee sisters, collapsing back on the bench hours later, breathless from laughter. He watched the others in the flickering lantern light, wondering when he’d next feel so warm, so at home in a place.
The evening went on and they told the same old stories about Mal as a youngster, getting in everybody’s way, pushing himself to grow up faster and be of use. Some of the stories from his adolescence made him blush, some weep with laughter. In their own way, all the shopworn hands of the Reynolds ranch did their best to tell him they loved him. There were a couple of gifts, too, one of Peterson’s hand-carved pipes and cherryroot to fill it, dried green tea from Lilly, a thick pair of socks from Clell. Conversation quieted some when Mal’s mother handed him a tiny, well-wrapped package.
“This’ll feed you in times of want,” she told him.
Mal unwrapped the tiny parcel, a silver cross and chain slipping into his hands to shimmer and glint in the lamplight. He recognized it immediately; his Ma had worn it for years, kissing it after evening prayer, fingering it idly when something was on her mind.
“I’ll never take it off,” he promised her. She patted his knee and cued Clell to start up again, the music taking some of the pain out of the air.
***********
The dock in Analine was crowded with young Independent volunteers chattering in Mandarin and English with their families and loved ones. Seemed as if the whole town had turned up to say goodbye to their young men and women, Mal noted, slightly embarrassed at the size of his own going-away party. All of the ranch hands and plenty of folk from town had shown up to see him on his way, most of them pumping his hand and predicting that “he’d show them purplebellies how they fight on Shadow!” Most predicted the war would be over in a few months and the town’s youth would be back in time for the big cattle drive to Xuia. As the volunteers began to board the shuttle, Mal craned his neck to see if he could spy Becky Kelly’s golden head. He hadn’t much hope; her father probably wouldn’t give her leave to come and see the newest Browncoats on their way, being an Alliance sympathizer himself. Still, if she’d been able to sneak out the previous afternoon...
“Final call!” came the imperious voice over the shuttle’s announcement system. “All those bound for Cicero Station, this is your final boarding call!” The message was repeated in Chinese.
Mal frowned, then turned his attention to the sharp gray eyes of his mother.
“You give them purplebellies hell, son!” Clell exclaimed, slapping him on the back. Mal barely heard the man, meeting his mother’s quiet gaze. He remembered her words from last night: You’re doing the right thing.
She mouthed, “I love you” and let her eyes sweep the collar of his shirt where her silver cross dangled. Mal nodded, turned, and climbed aboard. He took his seat, trying to locate his mother in the throng around the docks through the window. As the shuttle lifted off, he finally found her, watching her as long as he could, until his mother and the crowds and the station were tiny specks, until Analine disappeared from sight and they passed through atmo, until Shadow itself was just a bright point of light in the distance, its sun only one of thousands of stars.
He felt as though he would never see any of it again.
************
Chapter Two - March 2511
Zoe thought about death.
It had become a hard subject to avoid. They’d lost most of their battalion and had all but run out of food, water and medical supplies. It was cold on Hera, and sickness was spreading like wildfire among the enlisted men. They’d already been on this rock for six weeks, with no end in sight.
Yep, death sure looked like a distinct possibility.
“How we lookin’, Zoe?” her Sarge asked.
“Just fine, Sir,” she replied, cocking her rifle. Mal nodded, doing the same. He counted off the seconds in his head: twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven...
“You figure this to be the last big push before nightfall?”
“Reckon it has to be,” he replied, still keeping count in his head. “They ain’t got no more support coming in. Chatter on the box’s been quiet for both sides. No one’s coming to help them.”
“Or us.”
He glanced at Zoe. “Or us,” he agreed. “Now!” Mal roared, leading the charge of 4,000 men up and over the side of their hastily-dug trench. The pounding of feet behind him was all but swallowed by a succession of gunfire, every man doing his duty and putting bullets in the Alliance front not twenty feet away. They were covered from behind and Mal dropped to the ground as bullets whizzed overhead, listening for the sound of his troops doing the same. He belly-crawled closer to the Alliance line, barely hearing the screams of pain behind and around him as bullets found their targets and ripped into the Browncoats. Finally they reached the trench, a wave of Independents spilling over into the Alliance furrow, tossing grenades, rocks and whatever else they thought could do damage onto the men below. Mal fired without thinking, reloading when he could, dropping his repeater when it finally clicked empty and using his six-shooter after that. He knew Zoe was somewhere to his left, using her knife. All of them, 4,000 Browncoats against 8,200 Alliance soldiers, were locked into death struggles. The desperation of this battle, which forced the armies to go hand-to-hand, kept him fighting, kept his men fighting. Slowly, slowly, the heat of the battle ebbed away. Some fought on, exhausted, rolling around in the mud and filth at the bottom of the trenches, throwing half-hearted punches at each other. The few who still had bullets for their guns used them sparingly. Most preferred their knifes or the bayonets attached to their rifles. A spray of blood caught Mal in the face; for an instant he thought it was his own. As the Alliance soldier dropped lifeless at his feet, Mal took stock of his own forces. The Browncoats had carried the charge, beating back the Alliance. What few purplebellies remained standing had sense enough to run, taking off into the darkness.
A loud cheer went up from the Independent forces as they watched the Alliance retreat, most of the men and women breaking into huge grins, hugging one another, their teeth very white against their blood-soaked faces. Mal began to take stock of what the other side had left behind; weapons, rations and even medical supplies were located and handled like precious gold. He put Zoe in charge of inventory and went to find the Alliance comm-box, working on rewiring it to send a message to the nearest Independent base.
“Sir?”
“How many?”
Zoe sighed. “A lot, sir. Maybe more than the Alliance, but our lines held. We lost at least a thousand.”
Mal closed his eyes, tramping down on a Chinese obscenity. “Any prisoners?”
“A few hundred. Ain’t got no way to feed ‘em, Sir.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, knowing that the decision would be his. There weren’t any junior officers left alive on Hera above the rank of Captain, and none of the senior officers had the first clue how to run a war.
“You go and ask those Alliance soldiers if they’d like a Independent uniform. Those that do, you put a rifle in their hands. Those that don’t...set ‘em to digging more trenches. The Alliance will rally by tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll have to do this all over again. Best we prepare for our inevitable deaths.”
“Yes sir,” Zoe nodded, tramping down a grin. Things were bad, but she believed in the Sergeant. She knew he’d carry them through this.
“Mal!” Tracey cried out, stumbling down the embankment and knocking over a pile of emptied rifles. “Brass is on the box, asking for a lieutenant. We got orders!”
Mal glanced at Zoe, sharing a look. They move out now, they’d lose this ground to the Alliance. “I’ll speak with ‘em, Tracey,” Mal said.
***********
Zoe held some rations for Mal, listening as Tracy jabbered on about one thing or another as she heated the food and then set to cleaning her rifle.
“You really think we can trust those purplebellies to fight against their own?” Tracy asked, suspiciously eyeing the prisoners captured during last night’s battle. They were mostly kids, younger than Tracey himself, and obviously scared. Zoe watched them down the last of the battalion’s rations, their hands shaking from fear or the shock of a meal. The former Alliance recruits lined the trench, shoulder-to-shoulder with the remaining Browncoat forces. Conversation in the trench was strained, some of the Independents muttering barely-veiled threats and insults towards the Alliance soldiers. Zoe fingered her rifle, knowing she’d do what she must in order to keep the fragile peace until Mal returned.
At last he came back down the long trench, stopping to say a word or two to the Browncoats soldiers, refocusing them, reminding them that the scared Alliance recruits had agreed to fight under the Independent flag. They grudgingly accepted Mal’s words of caution against further bloodshed, some even sharing their rations or ammunition with the new inductees. Mal settled down next to Zoe, taking the plate of food from her with a grateful nod, eating the beans and stale protein bar as he delivered their orders.
“We’re to head towards a place called Serenity Valley, about two days fast march from here. General Xeha wants to mass a big stand, push the Alliance off Hera. We’ll have air support and the 3rd battalion will meet us at the Valley.”
“You really believe we’ll get the Alliance off this rock?” Zoe asked, her dark eyes battle-weary in the dim light of the trench.
“Don’t have no choice,” Mal replied. “The powers that be don’t think there’s much point to protecting this ground. We go to the Valley, make our stand there. This could win the war for us, Zoe. We could be home by the fall.”
“If you say so, Sir,” Zoe shrugged. Those that had homes to go to spoke of them often, their talisman against the horrors of what they’d done during the war. She only had the Independent Army and the Sarge, the family she’d chosen, the war her whole world. She’d follow Mal and Tracey and the rest to Serenity Valley. As Mal had said, there was no choice.
“You think these kids’ll make it that far? Two days’ march and an army with dysentery and no food ain’t any kind of a winning combination,” Zoe pointed out, fixing the barrel of her rifle back to the stock, the weapon as clean as it could be.
“We’ll make it. We have to,” Mal replied, his hands slipping below the collar of his shirt to touch his mama’s cross. He finished with the meal, leaned back against the wall of the trench with his eyes closed, and immediately dropped off to sleep. Zoe contemplated his still face, thinking of all the times they’d saved each other, kept each other going, kept each other sane with banter and insults. Mal was the closest she’d ever come to family, and while she could handle the thought of her own death...
“Zoe, can I ask you somethin’?” Tracey asked, interrupting her reverie. He began sucking on the end of his chopstick, something she’d warned him against on previous occasions under pain of death. The boy persisted. “What do you plan to do, after the war’s over?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she said, shaking her hair loose from its scarf, glad it was dark so she couldn’t see if any bugs fell out. Lice had lately been a problem in the trenches. “Sarge keeps telling me about this ranch he’s got on Shadow, out in the Corelais system. Thinks he might make use of me there.”
“You ever work a ranch?”
Zoe shook her head, finger-combing her thick, curly hair. Lord, she needed a bath. “Figure it’ll be like soldiering; you learn as you go.”
“My folks have a farm on one of the outer-rim moons. They don’t grow much; place is frozen solid most of the year. It’s a hard life.” Tracey set his plate down and, like Mal, leaned against the side of the trench, resting his back. “Reason I ask about your plans is because I thought you and me could work together, sign up as mercs or bodyguards or something for some of them rich folks in the Core.”
Zoe shot Tracey a skeptical look. Boy wouldn’t last two seconds as a hired gun; he was clumsy and talked too much. She’d grown up around mercenaries and knew what kind of men it bred; Tracey didn’t fit the profile at all. Mal did, but he wanted to be a rancher. She wasn’t sure, but she hoped to hell she could fit that life. The one she’d been brought up in had brought nothing but pain.
“Tracey, I think you need to start thinking about other career options,” she told him, settling down on top of her pack, using her scarf as a pillow. “Get a job on a transport ship. It’s a safe life and the pay is more regular than what mercs make.”
They were silent now, and down the line the sound of snoring and men in fitful sleep could be heard in the darkness. Zoe thought of the impossibility of peace, how you could be a solider one day and a farmer the next. She knew what boys like Tracey and men like Mal thought they were going home to probably wouldn’t be there. The shell of it would remain, and the heartache it brought would fill them up inside, hollow them out. She wasn’t too worried about being a good ranch hand or working as a merc with Tracey; the universe at peace wouldn’t be anything like it was before war. Those that believed anything different didn’t know their history.
****************
...continued...
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