The captain was dancing.

Zoë didn't think anyone was really surprised by this, except maybe the man himself. At least she wasn't. She had known the old Malcolm, the soldier she'd fought alongside with, the man who'd told wild stories, who loved to laugh, who whistled and sang – and danced. And she knew that deep down inside he was still that man. Even though he kept insisting otherwise.

Of course he did need an excuse these days; a drink (or five), a special kind of music or a special kind of company. But if the mood was right you could still persuade him into telling stories and get him dancing. And as one could easily observe tonight, Jo Cobb seemed to know exactly what buttons to push.

Speaking of Jo, she had joined forces with the local fiddler and they had kept not only the captain, but also everybody else dancing and singing and hooting for hours now.

Not Zoë herself though, she didn't have the energy to dance these days, and unlike Mal she'd never really been a dancer anyway. She'd often wondered whether the war had changed her as much as it had changed the captain, or if she'd always been this cool and calculated, preferring to observe life from a distance, too afraid to lose control to really get involved.

She couldn't remember. Who she'd been before all this mess.

She did remember the day the Alliance blew The Bohemia – the Traveler fleet's biggest civilian ship – out of the sky, killing hundreds, among them seven of her baby cousins. The day she enlisted. But whatever had been before that was all a blur to her now.

Another life.

Long gone, and gone forever.

But if the war hadn't changed her, the years that had passed since certainly had. She looked at Mal, smiling a little as the clearly intoxicated man made a rather pitiful attempt at a hallingkast, an acrobatic dance move they'd wit