Title: Shadow

Rating: pretty G for now

Characters: the whole crew, plus toddlers Kacey and Lolly, Baby Abey

Pairings: Heavy on the M/I, trying not to neglect the rest of canon (S/K, Z/W, J/Vera)

Summary: Set 4 years post-BDM, Mal and the crew has a job on Shadow.

Author's Note: As has been stated in earlier PC fics, I'm playing with Mal's and Inara's histories here. In this fic, this means that Mal still has family on Shadow and that Shadow isn't a dead rock, as I've heard tell. I'm working on two other PC stories at the moment, but this one is getting the most attention. I know people wanted more of the kids (and they'll get them eventually) but I wanted to try my hand at more of the series characters this time. It's an experiment. Please be constructively critical.

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Laney Reynolds Stokes lives a simple life on Shadow. She and her husband run a cotton plantation on the river with their six children and ten grandchildren (and counting, liable to be eleven any moment now). She wasn’t raised to be a cotton planter, but after marrying Silas Stokes, heir to the largest plantation on the St. Mary’s River, she left the grassy ranch of her youth, taking her younger brothers, Jack and Emmerson, along. Her younger sister Margaret stayed on the ranch, raised a little boy of her own, and passed away shortly after the War of Unification. Despite the size of the plantation, the Reynolds-Stokes family live moderately, working their own fields alongside hired day laborers and making most of their own clothes. Life is just simpler that way, and Laney’s family has always been about simple.

She doesn’t think about Maggie very much, doesn’t have time to between playing matriarch, seeing to the books, and stopping her grown brothers’ squabbling, but every time she does think of her baby sis, she wonders on the nephew she hasn’t seen since his mama’s funeral. The boy disappeared the moment the funeral was over, stoic lady friend in tow, and hasn’t been home since. From the few times she saw him growing up, she knew