Title: Shadow

Rating: PG. "So there /is/ kissin'..."

Characters: the whole crew, plus toddlers Kacey and Lolly, Baby Abey, the Reynolds-Stokes clan

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 have a job on Shadow.

Author's Note: Thanks for the encouragement. Here's some more!

Part 4

Malcolm Reynolds doesn’t believe in God anymore. He lost Him in the Valley and isn’t likely to ever find Him again. But he re-found faith. Faith in Serenity, her crew, the family they formed. Faith in the woman who made him feel again, who loves him for reasons he often times has trouble understanding. Faith in that tiny infant who looks up at him with total trust in wide brown eyes, whom he felt grow in his wife’s womb over nine months. One could even say he found a new religion, because he rocks his son and makes love to his wife with devotion akin to worship.

But his mama believed in God, had until the day she died, and raised him to believe in Him. She saw Him in every aspect of their daily lives on the ranch, in the ceaseless plains stretching out around them, in the births and deaths of the ranch’s cattle, in the beams of the old ranch house where seven generations of Reynolds grew up. There’s nothing left of the old ranch house now but a concrete foundation and a few charred beams. It’s a shock to him. He didn’t know it burned down. Something feels funny in his gut, his childhood lost forever in the ashes that had long since blown away.

Abe begins to cry behind him. He can hear Inara try to calm him, can imagine her bouncing him gently, whispering soft comforts. The poor thing’s hungry, exhausted, his routine all out of whack, what with the fawning of relatives and being carted three hours in a shuttle to yet another unfamiliar place.

Why is he here? There’s nothing left. Most of the land has been sold off, the forty odd ranch hands scattered. His Shadow youth lives only in his memory now. Maybe it’s better