Ask Malcolm Reynolds what happened to the war and he'd tell you they lost, that after losing they caught a boat called Serenity, and took her where the Alliance couldn't follow. He'd convince you that there weren't nothing in between, that as fast as they'd been pinned to the valley ground, he'd gone and found their new home, their escape, in an old salvage yard on the graveyard fringes of Persephone.

He'd make these things sound like God's honest truth, but really the truth's only a part of it. And it's always the worst part, like a wound that lingers long after the bullet's been scored out and the scar faded to nothing. Sure, they lost a war, and sure, they found themselves running again, by their own rules and their own means of combat. But it weren't so fast. There's none so lost as a soldier, when a war's long done.

Mal might have continued to believe his own words, had he truly been alone after the skies of Hera had cleared. They'd been losing numbers steadily throughout, but the core had remained strong to the end, and Zoe, knowing her sergeant better than any of the others, though she was the last of the 57th to leave, she was also the first to stay. She stayed with Mal when they were pulled from the camp, with nowhere to go but the first bar in the first town where the Alliance were finally scarce. She'd waited for the inevitable, and like clockwork, it came. Mal picked a fight from literally nowhere; ten minutes, not even one lousy drink, and there he was on the ground, fist to jaw, swearing through bruised lips in Chinese too filthy to bear repeating. And Zoe, without a word, had picked him up and walked him out the door, away from the bar and the apathetic glances, looks drenched more in sympathy than anger, to a dark side-street where she pushed him against the wall and gazed at him as he'd coughed and wiped away blood.

"Can't be doin' this," she'd said, propping a hand to his shoulder as he began to slump, the adrenaline evaporating with speed and the pain, she imagined, the pain coming j