"Mal"
Mal stared out into the Black. Inara was behind him, somewhere, in the soft focused shadow. She slid in on slippered feet, but you didn't last as long in this line of work as Mal had if you didn't hear everything, even where there wasn't any sound. It was a nervous way to live, but...
He didn't think of the living ones, much, on nights like this. There were too many of the dead clamoring for his attention for the living to keep up. His mother, Book, all those men left in Serenity Valley. Aint much of a sergeant, Mal thought, that lets all but one of his people die, and then lets half of her die, too. It was as impossible to NOT think about Wash as it was painful to think about him, sitting in his chair like this, stroking a dimetrodon's ridged back. The stars didn't care. Neither did the Black. Mal sometimes wondered about the Shepherd and his God, where that God lived, out in all this nothing, and if the Shepherd was there with him, now. Mal hoped he was. It was all the poor old fellow deserved for caring about those poor miners and a certain pack of dirty space-rats as much as he did, even if it did drive Mal crazy sometimes to hear him go on and on about God this and Jesus that. He wanted to talk religion, all the time, except when he was drunk, and that was the only time that Mal WANTED to talk about it. "Shepherd where was God," he'd ask, "when I was in Serenity Valley that he didn't hear my prayers? Where was he when we was eating rats, getting blowed the hell up, drinking piss and looking mighty hungry at our own dead and wounded? I want to know that, Shepherd."
Book would always look really tired when Mal brought this up and say, "Same place he was when I..." and then take a long drink of something nasty when he thought better of finishing. Their late night go-she sessions, more than a year's worth of them, weren't very productive, when you got right down to it, but it was good to have someone to get drunk with that didn't sing or get naked or start sobbing or try to kiss you, all the time. Mostly, Mal reflected, it was just good policy in general to get ripped with someone who wasn't named Jayne Cobb.
The living wormed into his thoughts, too, on nights like this, but it was a Top 40 From the Core of all the bad stuff. How Nara's face contorted with fear when Gulchak had his heavy arm around her neck and the gun pressed to her curls, Kaylee whimpering after Niska's men had done their worst to her, Zoe's long silences. Well, longer silences. There was no one to drink with, any more, and it was bad, Mal knew, to drink by yourself. He'd seen enough ranch hands trying to throw that monkey off their backs to know there wasn't any winning that way. Land had been drunk when the horse threw him and he broke his neck, and so was Jon when he got stabbed in that bar fight at Shadow's one small saloon in Ranch Town, where all the cowboys met to drink and whore when they drove the cattle in to sell to merchant men on ships almost as reputable as Serenity.
The idea of saying something to her crossed his mind. It'd beat sitting here alone, even if they did get into a scrape over something stupid. They fought over the same stuff, over and over again. He'd stopped calling her a whore, though. That ba dan Ranch Burgess... Mal didn't have any high flown conception of himself as an overly intelligent man, but he did know where that line of thought ended up leading you. There's another dead one for you, Reynolds, Mal thought. He tried to remember Nandi as the sassy, tough frontier bitch that he'd slept with and laughed with, winking green eyes and wicked mouth, not the twisted smoking corpse she'd ended up as.
Instead of opening his fool mouth, Mal decided to sit here, alone with the emptiness outside, but not inside. Calling yourself empty inside was a way to cover up the hurt under a big blanket. Something that was empty COULDN'T really hurt, but nothing could be really empty, could it? Not even the Black was empty, even though you thought of it that way. It was full of stars and planets and ships and everything other thing else there was. That's how your innards were, just a big ol' vacuum like the Black, and it sucked in every face twisted in pain, every ragged, hurting breath, every pair of dead, open eyes. Inara slid back into the darkness, to her shuttle. Mal shut his own eyes and took a deep breath. If you can't fix it, he thought, you've gotta stand it.