Wine Glasses and Wire Cutters

By Fish and RSB

***

All in all, it looked to be a right fine party. Nothing too fancy, nothing too drab, just the right kind of party for respectable people gathering on a fine summer evening. The servants were wearing their Sunday best, and all looked to be thoroughly thrilled to be serving such fine and dandy guests. They even looked to have real fruit being served about on those nice silver serving trays. And the band. Well, the band wasn’t playing none too loud, but Malcom Reynolds was fairly certain that if he could hear them, they’d be playing something nice and slow or reeking of a rich artist with too much time on his hands.

Mal lowered his binoculars as he shifted around. The tree he was in, a fine climbing tree to be sure, didn’t have much in the way of luxuries, and he’d been crouching in these branches for a bit longer than he’d planned.

He spotted two familiar figures just arriving at the party and leaned forward to get a closer look. The looking glass showed him a young man who certainly fit in at first glance with the rest of these moneyed individuals, but his walk was a bit stiff, as if he weren’t entirely comfortable. In contrast, the dark-haired beauty that accompanied him didn’t so much walk as glide across the courtyard; she was entirely at ease at this party, and the coolness with which she moved suggested that she would have been at ease if the estate itself were collapsing. Grace, that’s what it was. Grace, and-

The tree shook a little and that made Mal shake a little. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to- well to anything really. Trying to remain perfectly calm, he slowly turned and looked down towards the trunk of the tree. He belonged here, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be in this tree. Grace. “Hi,” he offered genially.

“Sir?”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Mal lowered himself out of the tree, and leaned up against the estate wall over which he’d been… observing. “Zoe. Didn’t hear you coming,” said Mal. He