based on the world of Firefly by Joss Whedon

Follow up to 'Smells Like Wash'

-------------------------------------------

She lay perched in the handmade hammock in the corner of Serenity. It was high enough that no one but she could reach it and close enough to the ceiling for her to still feel the calm of the engine. It was where she went to think, but even more so, to be alone.

Alone...why for a being that was designed bascially be a loner was the concept so hard to achieve. Every minute of every day she was with someone. Maybe not in body or in presence, but by the smells of them or their voices, even whispers that might as well been shouts for her sensitive ears. Sometimes, especially at moments like these, when the ship was almost completely quiet, she longed for her cage. It wasn't the bars that she needed, but the silence.

Something below stirred the hair on the back of her neck, a shadow passing under that seemed to be looking. Her nose filled with the rich scent of warm musk, leather from a pair of boots that had not only seen the surface of Miranda, but also the blood lining the grass and dirt of Serenity valley, and of course, one of her very favorite smells...of a ranch where horses roamed and cattle grazed with fresh wheat lining fields graced by the sun of Shadow.

"Cat?" His voice calmed her even more than she tended to realize, a slight gravel it had aquired over the years from barking orders at his men.

"Here." She called, but had already begun to slide out of the grip the netting kept her in and fell to the catwalk below. It reminded them both of times before when it had been tree branches she had dropped from, heights that no human could fall without a few broken bones.

"Zoe said you talked to her. About Wash?" He touched her, fingers slighlty rough from labor of being a Captain and a smuggler, still to Cat, they were soft.

"Found her crying. Isn't it polite to cheer one up?" She looked at him in her usual way, of still trying to find her place in the world an