Hey, thanks so much to everyone who read the first part. I appreciate the support. I wasn't gonna post this so soon, but I figured it was hard to tell if you wanted to keep reading or not just from that little prologue, so here's a little more to help you make up your minds. It's a bit shorter than I usually like my chapters, but oh well.

Thanks again!

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Chapter 1

Three Hours Earlier

Wash carefully drove the mule through the crowded streets of Corinth’s open-air marketplace, trying to avoid people, animals, and everything else. The sun was warm on his face and arms and his lips had settled into a comfortable smile. The Black was his home, it called to his soul, but that didn’t mean he didn’t like a good day planetside, mingling with people and enjoying the sights and sounds and smells. Well, most of the smells…

He had at least a couple hours before he was needed back on the ship, so he took his time with the purchases. Their last job had been one of the highly illegal kind which made for bad blood pressure while doing it, but nice payoffs when done. For the first time in a long while, they had real coin, and Mal had told him to splurge a little and go for some of that, what did people call it…oh yeah, real food.

Who knew shopping for little green vegetables could be so much fun?

Once he’d bought all the nice, fresh, yummy things he dared, including using a little of his own coin to get Kaylee a few of those strawberries he knew she loved so much, Wash moved on to the more practical, mundane parts of the shopping. He bought a case of protein, just to be safe, arranged for someone to stop by and top off Serenity’s water tanks, and grabbed the other stuff they were running low on like shampoo, laundry detergent, band-aids… Finally, after fifteen minutes of serious haggling, he added the two engine parts and the new screen for his console to the stack of purchases on his mule and surveyed the sight with satisfaction.

Yup, he done good.

The warmth of t