Five Things Mal Brought Out of Serenity Valley
1. Zoe. Course, it might be more fair to say that Zoe brought him out. Took the Alliance more'n a week to come in and round them up, and he was dog-sick by that time, half-healed wounds and two months of near-starvation on top of everything else. He remembers stumbling up out of the trenches into the light with his arm over Zoe's solid shoulder, weak, dizzy. It's the last thing he remembers for a long time.
2. His gun. He expected them to take it, but it was there when he woke up on the bare floor of the Alliance cell. No bullets. It was the guards' idea of a joke, but he strapped it in the holster they'd also left him, the weight familiar and comforting against his hip.
3. His body with all its parts in working order. Which is more than half a million other poor bastards can say. He tries not to think on that part much.
4. The brown coat he bought on Shadow when he joined up. They took the medals off, but the coat was still there along with the rest of his clothes. A blessing, Zoe told him. "You ain't much for decoration even with your clothes on, I oughta thank them for saving my eyes."
They took Zoe's clothes after she took a good chunk out of a guard's face with a knife she had on her. Mal gave her the coat. Didn't cover much, but it was enough to keep her from freezing of a night.
5. His mother's cross. That was Zoe's fault too. He tore it off his neck when the carpet-bombing started, the fragile chain snapping like gossamer, sliding through his numb fingers to land in the mud and blood at his feet while he stared at the sky. Like something marking a grave.
It was in his pocket when he woke up, chain tangled beyond repair, arms bent, shining in his filthy palm when he fished it out. He glared at Zoe from across the cell, and she leaned her head against the force field and met his eyes calmly. That was the worst thing about Zoe. It was gorramn hard to yell at a person who'd just sit and look at you like that.
He never did get a new chain for it, but the first night he bunked down in his ship he took it out and looked at it for a long while before stowing it in the back of his dresser.