Mal had witnessed many a crisis of faith in his days as a browncoat. Despite being religious himself, he had never tried to prevent his friends' apostasies; they were inevitable during wartime. No war had ever failed to strip a sane man of his illusions. Mal, of course, had never been remotely sane, so the illusions remained.
He had kept his faith because to lose it was to lose his hope in winning the Unification War. Only God's grace would have born the Independents through, and Mal had accepted that from his first day in the trenches under hellfire.
Then the crushing defeat at Serenity Valley had struck his faith dead, just as it did the rest of the 57th unit and browncoats with no number to them. Amazingly, it had taken five whole years of fighting to reduce Mal's religious belief to a corpse.
Six years fraught with thievery and government evasion had passed since then, but each had been a year devoid of faith. Oddly, Mal had clung to his hope of the border planets seceding - but that hope now rested on his own, singlehanded ability to take down the Alliance. Without God or comrades sympathetic to his cause, he had become a lonely man indeed.
Now, as the captain cleared up a shuttle for the companion Inara Serra to move into, he was reminded of his loneliness by the steel rosary that turned up at the bottom of a drawer - alongside heaps of other paraphernalia that had long lost its sentimental appeal.
The absurd temptation to rend the beads apart, cast them to the floor, made Mal clench his fist around the sacramental necklace. He felt bitter, angry with God - even if there was nothing to be called such. God, or at least Mal's own foolish belief in Him, had given the sergeant false hope and ultimately no one to rely on or trust but himself.
Though Mal would always uphold the goodness of mankind (excluding Reavers, which weren't human by any account), his trust could no longer be granted freely.
In the heatless vacuum of space, the captain was cold.
The new tenant unsettled Mal, with what his veneer of innocence and moral integrity. It was hard to believe that such a man still existed in the 'verse, let alone one who would willingly board with Mal and his thieves.
The shepherd's name was Derrial Book - or so he claimed. Typical Mal: trust issues at every turn.
One night not long after his arrival, Shepherd Book lingered on after dinner to exchange a few pleasant words with Mal. "Kaylee tells me they call you Captain Tightpants?" he asked, perhaps to lighten the atmosphere after the meal's conflict.
Mal smiled thinly, worried Shepherd Book was going to dig into him for making the utterance of "grace" off-limits. "'They' just bein' Kaylee." He paused. "Everything still shiny with you, Shepherd? I didn't mean to offend you or noth -"
"Oh, it's all shiny," Book smiled amiably. "Actually, I was worried things were not-so-shiny with you!"
"Why's that?" Mal asked.
"Well, you immediately suspected Simon of being a mole when that beacon was sent out to the Alliance. And you still don't trust each other - correct me if I'm mistaken."
"Shepherd, what's between me and Dr. Tam stays between us." Something suddenly occurred to the captain that seemed so laughable it might just be true. "Shepherd, you - you're not trying to confess me, are y - ?!"
"No, Mal!" Book laughed, somewhat taken aback. "I'm a Protestant minister! We...we don't do Reconciliations."
Mal laughed weakly in relief. "...Uh, that's good to hear. Anyway, like I said just a moment ago, you got no place inquiring into our relationship."
The Shepherd eyed Mal, a note of sadness in his face. He was an honest-spoken man even if his identity was false; yet his honesty had done little to loosen the captain's own lips. "Fine," Book sighed, "but one more thing," then reached into the pocket of his clergy robe.
He held out a rosary to Mal. The light glinted off the cross, hurting the captain's eyes like the smoke-filled memories that flashed before them in that instant. He felt the cross's steel on his lips again and the old sentimentality came rushing back - his nostalgia for a time when two unacquainted men, fighting for the same cause, would trust each other in a heartbeat.
"Inara found this in her shuttle," Book said. "She said it wasn't hers and I might have some use for it. But, well, I thought that naturally it must be yours."
And in that act of needless generosity, Mal saw the error of his ways - it felt sorta like he'd had a revelation, except of course without the arch-angel in the secluded cave. Shepherd Book had chosen to trust Mal - needlessly - while Mal had denied him that courtesy merely because of his bitterness about the past.
Trust had to be given freely or it could not be given at all. And that meant that occasionally it would be proven unwise - but the world was built on mutual trust, and if the captain had any hope of beating the Alliance, he would need other heads and hearts more capable than his own to stand beside him.
"Thank you," he said, his words veiling a second, undisclosed meaning. "But I've got no need for it."
A/N: I'm not looking for constructive criticism, but you're welcome to give it. Just let me know if you enjoyed, and if so, why!