He often wondered why he loved her. Simon could probably tell him the chemical reasons, and River for sure could spout their formulas in their entirety, but that didn’t explain why Mal felt the way he did. It wasn’t that he was questioning it, not as such, because she made him complete, made him feel like he could take on the ‘verse and come out victorious the other side, or at the very least not dead, but that wasn’t why he wondered.

He thought he’d loved Inara. Those long months between her first coming on board and taking over his shuttle and her leaving to take up a post at the Training House ... he knew he hadn’t said anything, but he thought he was in love. Maybe it was proximity, with her never being far away on a small ship like Serenity, seeing her every day, but the feelings had crept up on him until their fights became some kind of foreplay, until the day she left.

In the long nights between the stars he’d wondered why he hadn’t said anything, hadn’t declared his need. Yes, she was a Companion, and that very profession was at least one of the things that had stood between them. But he hadn’t said, hadn’t asked, hadn’t begged her to stop, to be only with him. He had consoled himself with the imagining that she would have refused, would have told him it was who she was, indivisible, and even if she had accepted him as her lover she wouldn’t have stopped taking other men into her bed. Except he didn’t know . It was easier to put the words into her mouth than ask her.

He’d led men into battle, taking on overwhelming odds, done what he thought was right at the risk of his own life, and yet he couldn’t take that final step and ask. So she’d left, and all he had were possibilities that drove him almost to the edge of insanity.

Then came Miranda, and she came home, back into her shuttle, giving him a second chance.

He would spend the rest of his life wondering why he didn’t take it.

He wasn’t, he admitted, a man who could take inactivity easily. It bred introspection i