Recline. Gaze into a night

of asterisks – sky of footnote, exception.

And you, the skeptic, hopes

for a constellation of consolation.

**

"Mal, why did you stop believing?"

Her voice comes from nowhere, her words from nothing but wonder. He looks up to the sound, movement that shifts the blankets and lets cool air run into pockets of warmth, an interruption where skin and skin have been touching, softly, intimately.

"Believing what?" he asks.

But her eyes are closed. He watches her, blinking sleepily, wondering if they were really words or that he had only dreamt them. In the quiet he listens to her breathing, and in the background everything else--murmurs of the night, the long sigh of Serenity's engines as regular as his own heartbeat. Girl and ship, ship and girl; and right now the girl has her fingertips pressed lightly to his sternum, the pale hand moving as he takes in one slow breath after another. There is a rough patch on her thumb, the beginnings of an infant callus where the skin has rubbed repeatedly against muzzle and trigger. He knows it has come from practice, to be like him, the best; as it has come from life, to be beside him, alive. He knows because she has told him a hundred times, in safety, in danger, under public gaze and private confession.

But never with words. Maybe they scare him because he understands they are useless things, because he only has to look at her over the sweep of a cabin that is too small for a girl reader and a foolish, brave soldier, to know the reason why.

He pulls a hand over his eyes, blocking out whatever vestige of light there is left at this hour. Prayers, he thinks suddenly, blinking into the dark. Those are spoken. Mal once told a Shepherd he could speak to his God only if it weren't in his hearing. He never gave his reasons, but back then, he didn't have to.

River wakes. She stares at her captain with eyes like water.

"The book. His book." She moves the hand off his chest, presses it to her own. "I cut it up. Wasn't