Disclaimer: Firefly and all related elements, characters and indicia © Mutant Enemy Productions and 20th Century Fox Television, 2003. All Rights Reserved. All characters and situations—save those created by the authors for use solely on this website—are copyright Mutant Enemy Productions and 20th Century Fox Television.

Please do not archive or distribute without author's permission.

Author's Note: Written for fic challenge #2.

Home
by Tara O'Shea

Mal isn't really sure when home stopped meaning Shadow.

It started during the war. He knows that much. Shadow was what he was fighting for. Shadow was what he was fighting to return to. His mother's ranch—his ranch. The life he'd left behind, waking up at crack of dawn to work alongside Jim, and Toby, Niels and the Chen boys. People he'd grown up alongside. People he'd hired at the fairs, and watched go from strangers to friends to family from one season to the next. Drovers were the same all over Shadow—a fellowship of sorts. You saw the same faces year to year, as you took the cattle to market—haggled over the price of feed, grazing land, breeding stock and methods with the same boys who became men working for their brothers and fathers. Danced with the same daughters are barn raisings and sweet sixteens, harvest fairs and Christmas parties.

War changed all that. Half the herd was lost when some crazy Alliance bastards poisoned the reservoirs. Chen brothers got knifed in a bar fight outside of Newhope, and that gal he was sweet on three summers running got married off to some fella in a suit, and they moved closer to the Core. When the man in the brown coat rode up the long road to the house, Mal was itching to take up the cause, even if it meant leaving home for the first and possibly last time.

Mama was gone. She was gone before the first shot was fired. But she was still in every nook and cranny