This story is set before the series, so there are no spoilers to speak of.

This is the third story in my "Tales" series, so check out the others if you take a liking to this one! They can be found here:

River, Wash, Kaylee, Zoë, Simon, Inara, Jayne, Book

Rated PG for some adult language.

Thanks go out to my much appreciated beta-ers. Thanks ladies.

Go-se=Crap

Wong Ba Duhn=Son of a bitch

Ni Bu Ying Duh Jur Guh=You don’t deserve it

Dohn-ma=Understand

*****

Malcolm Reynolds felt the gravel crunch beneath his feet.

As Mal walked alone along the edge of Serenity Valley, he made a point to keep his head low, under the trench. There used to be grass here, but the Alliance had killed all of it. The Alliance was like some damnable sickness; everything it touched shriveled up and died like a calf that got rejected by its ma. He looked over to his left and then to his right. The bodies were still there, everywhere. He’d figured that his nose might have done him a kindness and just ignored the gorram smell. He was wrong, again.

It wasn’t like Mal hadn’t ever seen death before. He’d been in the war for years now. He’d liked to have said that he’d lost track of everyone who’d died, but he hadn’t. Their faces kept coming back up in his head. Their names weren’t ever far behind. Some of those folks were friends, some weren’t. But he still remembered them. A body couldn’t forget it when a man died in his arms. Every detail got imprinted in the brain like a snapshot. Mal could remember the look in the eyes, the sounds of the last breaths, and the feeling of a body going limp.

He remembered the first man he had ever seen die. He was a private on Ezra with a hole in his belly, who kept begging him to fi