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A Firefly ficlet by Saturn Maiden
Rating: G
Summary: Mal has good memories of home, but home means something different now
Author's notes: My first attempt at a Firefly story. I love this show so much, but I've never been able to write a proper story for it. This is the closest I've come though.
Spoilers: Just a slight one for "Our Mrs. Reynolds" by way of mentioning the name of Mal's home planet.
Mal had a few good memories of home back when it meant the ranch on Shadow. He remembered tussling in the dirt with the big sheepdog his Mama kept for herding. He must have been five or six then, the dog had been bigger than he had. He remembered the first time he'd ridden a horse without one of the ranch hands behind him, he'd been young then too. He remembers the first time he saw a spaceship. He remembers wondering why anyone would want to leave someplace as beautiful as Shadow, with it's open land and ranches and streams for fishing and swimming. It was lots of hard work, living on a ranch, but Mal had never had a problem with hard work. When he was younger he'd lived for the sore feeling he had after a good day's work. It was proof he was alive.
But he didn't like to remember home, because with every good memory came the reason he'd left. The sight of the devastation that had become his mother's ranch after the Alliance had blazed through. There'd been some fighting around, and a group of Alliance solders wanted set up camp on his mother's land. Well, she didn't like that idea one bit, neither did the boys. Mal was the only one who'd survived. He'd run, he'd run straight to the Independent army. And that was the end of him ever calling someplace home, at least someplace on the ground.
Now when Mal thinks of home, he hears the gentle hum of Serenity's engines, singing to him constantly. She quiets the memories that try to force through his mind as he sleeps. And when he wakes up in the night, sweating and panting and hoping he didn't scream, she reminds him that he's not still there amid the destruction that everything before her in his life was. Serenity was home, and her crew was family, and for that he was grateful.