The Doctor usually kept his old clothes after regeneration. He never wore them, but still, sometimes the memories were nice.

He was upset when they stole his long brown coat.

No, he was pissed off.

Just one body ago, that coat had been his signature. Bloody hell, he'd only taken it out of storage to hide his fancy clothing. (Shiny, the robbers had said. Also something about not belonging on the Rim.)

But bandits weren't really worth his time, so he moved on to trying to get back to his own reality.

(He ended up spending five months with Rose and his not-so identical clone. It was awkward.)

Eleven months later and three trades/sales/bribes, the coat ended up two moons away, on a lump of rock named Shadow, just in time for Malcolm Reynolds's ma to wrap it for his eighteenth birthday.

The ranch boy never took it off, and his ma diligently fixed the holes with coarse leather.

He went to fight in war, and it left the battlefields with twice as many patches.

Mal wore it even more proudly as a reminder of his passed ma and the soldiers he watched die. Browncoats, they were called.

Every year, he found himself in an Alliance bar. Every year, some hundun took the coat as bait.

Symbol and tool. That coat was really useful.

He would never let someone take his brown coat, not for five million platinum.

Five million credits, maybe.

Probably not.

Five years after the gorram Miranda disaster, the Doctor once again found himself in the 'verse.

(The universe is too wibbly wobbly timey wimey for an accurate timeline from the Doctor's perspective.)

As he tried to explain his unique situation to the terrifying man with a gun and the cocoa woman who looked sad and deadly, the Doctor couldn't shake the feeling of déjà vu he got when looking at the captain.

It was probably nothing.

After all, he would definitely remember that horrid brown coat.

A/N: Yep, I really have a talent at pointing out optical similarities. There's probably tons of differences between the two coats, but this is kinda cute or something. Review, favorite, whatever– I'm not a pushy writer.