Inara found no consolation in Mal’s plan. None.

Miranda was slowly fading to a blue-white orb behind them as Wash hit the thruster and hit full burn out of atmo.

What the government, the Alliance, had done there was monstrous. After nearly a year on Serenity, and seeing the ragtag band’s disregard for the central authority, there was always a part of her that clung to the notion that the government she supported – supported in their retrospectively ill-conceived notions of unification – had some part of it that was good and wholesome. After all, she had spent the majority of her life on a core world where only the good and wholesome was seen.

But after what she saw on that moon, there was no denying it.

The Alliance – it was monstrous.

There wasn’t a way that she could forget what she saw. The dead bodies, huddled in there peaceful positions of sleep. They had just laid down and died, peacefully. She remembered the children too, not even held close in there parent’s limp limbs. There was no trace of emotion on their pale corpses, not anguish, no horror. Worst of all she couldn’t remove the images of the Alliance scientist on the holo, her sorely repentant glances, knowing in full truth what had been done there, and the inevitability of her own demise.

When Mal had gathered them in the mess, she felt out of place, surrounded by people, her friends who had no love for the Alliance. It was guilt. She was guilty that she had fervently supported an entity that had caused so much pain and suffering; guilty that as Mal harped his stories of the Independent cause, she regarded them as almost fictitious, like a child telling a far-fetched fairy tale that he had just heard.

She was ashamed. Disheartened.

And she found no consolation in his plan.

She should have, too. She would have laughed any other time when Mal said “I aim to misbehave.” Mal had always aimed to misbehave. Only now he meant it. Now he had a purpose, a belief.

Inara looked away from the small ceiling