Fic: Recognition (Firefly, Gen, PG)
Title: Recognition
Rating: PG
Words: 304
Characters: Shepherd Book
Summary: He never looks them in the eye, when they tell their war stories.
Notes: Written for comment_fic off the prompt "Book was in the war too." Book's a tough character to write for, for me at least, and he tends to be my least favorite of the crew; maybe that's why I write him as so melancholy and conflicted. Poor guy.
Recognition
He never looks them in the eye, when they tell their war stories. He's too afraid, if he's being honest with himself, that he might recognize the look there, that haunted bit of distance that never quite recedes from the eyes of someone who's lost their innocence through too much killing. And he's even more afraid that they'll recognize that look in his eyes in return.
Not that he'd had any innocence left in him by the time the war came around. No, he'd long since filled that hollow up with belief, the hard kind of faith that allowed for no other possibility. The kind of faith that let him close his eyes on the deaths laid at his feet, let him not count their cost as part of what had to be done to achieve victory.
Until, of course, it hadn't been; when he had come out of a massacre of a battle horrified at himself, finished with death and lying and being unclean. When he'd found a new faith, and a new purity, in the eyes of God.
He wonders, sometimes, listening to the Captain speak, what would have happened if he'd been in Mal's place, if he'd have lost his faith in that valley. He knows now, though it's a hard lesson to learn, that God leads you where you need to be, not where you want to be.
But it's troubling him now, that when they tell their new war stories, tales of the ship's own personal battles, that he can join in easy as the rest of them. It doesn't seem right, that he should be slipping back into an old role so easily, treating these people as comrades in arms.
And now he feels God's voice telling him that maybe he belongs here just a little too much.
Rating: PG
Words: 304
Characters: Shepherd Book
Summary: He never looks them in the eye, when they tell their war stories.
Notes: Written for comment_fic off the prompt "Book was in the war too." Book's a tough character to write for, for me at least, and he tends to be my least favorite of the crew; maybe that's why I write him as so melancholy and conflicted. Poor guy.
Recognition
He never looks them in the eye, when they tell their war stories. He's too afraid, if he's being honest with himself, that he might recognize the look there, that haunted bit of distance that never quite recedes from the eyes of someone who's lost their innocence through too much killing. And he's even more afraid that they'll recognize that look in his eyes in return.
Not that he'd had any innocence left in him by the time the war came around. No, he'd long since filled that hollow up with belief, the hard kind of faith that allowed for no other possibility. The kind of faith that let him close his eyes on the deaths laid at his feet, let him not count their cost as part of what had to be done to achieve victory.
Until, of course, it hadn't been; when he had come out of a massacre of a battle horrified at himself, finished with death and lying and being unclean. When he'd found a new faith, and a new purity, in the eyes of God.
He wonders, sometimes, listening to the Captain speak, what would have happened if he'd been in Mal's place, if he'd have lost his faith in that valley. He knows now, though it's a hard lesson to learn, that God leads you where you need to be, not where you want to be.
But it's troubling him now, that when they tell their new war stories, tales of the ship's own personal battles, that he can join in easy as the rest of them. It doesn't seem right, that he should be slipping back into an old role so easily, treating these people as comrades in arms.
And now he feels God's voice telling him that maybe he belongs here just a little too much.