Malcolm Reynolds was in a hurry.

Serenity would be touching down soon on Beline, and that meant he needed to quit screwing around with work and get himself ready. Jayne and Zoë could see to the rest of the cargo prepping. No that there was a great deal to prep. They were transporting fuel cells which had somehow managed to get mislaid at an Alliance weigh station, and being paid quite well for them, the first really good coin they had turned in about a month.

This, however, had absolutely nothing to do with why mal was in a hurry.

He was in a hurry because in a short bit of time, they would physically be on Beline, and on Beline was a hotel, the Abelard Arms. Mal didn’t have the slightest idea what the name meant, since the town it was in was called Winston, not Abelard, nor did he particularly care. Inside the Abelard Arms was a woman, and this woman held a spot in Mal’s heart that no one on Serenity had any idea about.

Her name was Annabelle Syrtis, and after what seemed like a lifetime of silence, she was waved Mal aboard Serenity, asking him how he was. No one on board Serenity knew anything about this. Mal had a secure comm channel in his quarters, enabling him to reach out or receive without anyone on board knowing about it.

Mal had very nearly fallen over when her wave came into him, and he wasn’t too sure how actually to respond. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure whether or not to respond. The silence that had existed between them had spanned well over a year, with a few feeble, ham-handed attempts on his part to reach out to her, none of them ever amounting to a hill of go-se. Mal had run the gamut of emotions during this time: loss, resentment, anger, self-doubt, but all he ever had to work with, largely, was pure silence. Every voice of logic living inside his head told him not to respond to her wave, even while he was doing it.

Beline was the planet where Mal had actually found and purchased Serenity. In a way, the planet was a birthplace to almost every aspect of Mal’s life after