Wash sat in his bunk enjoying a rare night off, going over transmissions from friends and such that had been backed up for the last month. Mal had decided he wanted to play pilot for awhile and since the course was already laid in and the were hundreds of thousands of leagues away from anything, Wash had agreed. Agreed is perhaps too strong of a word for it, Mal was the captain after all and calling the shots. After nearly a year on Serenity Wash was still adjusting to that idea. He’d never had anyone telling him what to do, at least not since he left home. Even on other ships he’d really been left to do his own thing. But now he was part of a crew, and crews took orders. He didn’t like it, but the pay was good and so was the company. He liked Mal, had respect for him, which made taking orders easier. Not easy, but easier.

Quickly deleting three unopened transmissions that were too old to bother with, Wash skipped ahead to one that looked promising.

Adrienne Lee.

Wash smiled and shook his head a bit.

‘Man it’s been a long time,’ he thought.

Reading it over, twice, his smile grew larger. She sounded exactly the way he remembered her: brash, hard-assed and arrogant. Only thing that seemed to have changed was her address. She was now living on an out of the way planet called Medea. More importantly, she wanted to see him.

Wash jumped off the bunk and headed up the ladder to the bridge. As he expected he found Mal there with Zoë. He didn’t understand their relationship. When he’d first come on board he’d kind of assumed they were together, but it didn’t take long for him to see it wasn’t like that. If anything what they had, though seemingly platonic, meant more.

“Hey Mal,” Wash interjected as soon as possible, “how close are we going to get to Medea when we drop off our latest cargo?”

Mal looked up at him for a minute and kind of shrugged.

“You’re the pilot. You tell me.”

Wash thought he’d seen the corners of Zoë’s mouth lift momentarily, almost smiling. He was ta