Look at her; she’s so beautiful.

Wait, what?

No. No.

Don’t be thinking like that.

Snap out of it man.

In the weeks following the Miranda broadwave, this was a common struggle inside the head of Captain Malcolm Reynolds. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts, especially knowing that the person he was thinking about could hear every single thing floating through his head. What would she say if she knew? Hell, what would any of them say if it got out that Malcolm Reynolds was secretly pining for his 17-year-old pilot? But as he sat on the bridge of his ship, Serenity, and looked across to her snuggled up asleep in her co-pilot’s chair, he couldn’t help thinking she might just be the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

But when did it happen? And how? How did it come to be that this cold, broken man had developed a schoolboy’s crush on the youngest member of his crew? Not even he could answer that for sure. He just knew that at some point, River Tam stopped being just a spooky, troubled child in his eyes and transformed into a strong, tough, beautiful but still admittedly spooky young woman. If he had to pick a moment though, he’d settle on that fateful day in The Maidenhead on Beaumonde. Where the Alliance had triggered her killer instinct conditioning they’d imparted into her and sent her on a rampage of the entire bar. But even after thoughtlessly and effortlessly beating the senses out of a couple dozen people, for some reason, she couldn’t take him down. There they stood, guns trained on each other but neither one fired, giving Simon his opening to rush in and command her to sleep.

Ever since that day, the scene had replayed itself hundreds and thousands of times inside his brain. It became a kind of obsession for him. Why did she hesitate? Why couldn’t she pull the trigger? It couldn’t just be that she recognized him because Jayne had attempted to stop her himself but like all the others, she calmly knocked him out and continued her assault. So what was it about him that m