Firefly: regarding the passage of time
Title: regarding the passage of time
Pairing: Gen
Rating: K
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: Malcolm Reynolds and thirty-two years of long, hard life.
When Malcolm Reynolds was five he wanted, like most other little boys wanted, to be his father. Joseph Reynolds was tall and broad and mysterious to Malcolm. His father would go out into the fields with all of the other men, smiling from Ma’s hearty breakfast and equally hearty farewell kiss and return sweaty and dusty but still with that smile on his face. Da used to tell him that when he was older he would learn to work the fields and till the soil and plant the seeds and mind the cows, he would one day know all of these mysterious things and would have a wife of his own to leave with the dawn and return to with the evening.
When Malcolm was twelve he knew he was going to be a preacher. Between the hours he grudgingly logged out in the fields, doing this or that menial task for the workers, he would stand around the south side of the massive oak tree in the western corner of the property and give sermons to the field, his mind filled with a sure and fiery love for God. For a God who had given him and everyone around him all they ever could need.
When Mal was seventeen he was fall down, stuttering, make an absolute fool of yourself in love with Bethany Leary from the next ranch over. She was Mick and Prudence Leary’s daughter, she was two years older than him and every Sunday she wore the same sunshine yellow cotton dress to Shepherd Tomas’ sermons. Her hair was gold like wheat and looked soft as the grass in the first months of spring. Her eyes were brown and warm and she laughed like a trumpet, loud and braying and it rang out into the vast spaces that Shadow was comprised of. Mal was fair sure he’d marry Bethany if she’d let him just to hear that laughter fill up the silence.
When Mal was twenty-four he worked the ranch all day and sat up most of the night dreaming of the revolution. The Alliance hadn’t shown a single kindness to Shadow and Wyatt, the Lawson’s second son, said that they ain’t done nothing for the rest of the moons way out here, clinging to survival with both hands. Wyatt said that a war was coming, and he would know on account of the Lawson’s being the only folks hereabouts what transported their goods themselves off-planet. The Alliance wanted all of universe under their thumb, wanted to take more from the working folk of places like Shadow and give it up to those Core softies who ain’t never even thought of a hard day’s work. Wyatt was a Brown Coat now. He met some folks last time he was on Persephone and now he was gonna fight the Alliance and protect all them back water moons and get all the glory. Mal figured they always need more people when it came to a war.
When Mal was twenty-nine he was sitting in the Bernadette Containment Camp, Cell Block C, Barracks 2. When he was first assigned to this hell hole he had woken up and for a brief, shining moment thought Serenity Valley had been a nightmare. Thought he was back, camped atop Hestia’s Plateau on Hera and they were going to march on that Valley and hold it until... Then the reek of so many bodies, all alive when they had been placed there but Mal wasn’t so sure after so many days, crammed into the Spartan accommodations provided by the purple-bellies. He wanted, more than anything, to be back at the ranch. Back in that field, the farthest west on the property, amidst the soft green grass and the wide blue skies.
When Mal was thirty-two he sent Wash from the pilot’s seat to go spend the night with his wife and took over the helm. At two-thirty that evening Serenity coasted over the blackened moon that was once Shadow. Malcolm sat in his ship and watched his old home through the vidscreen. Then he set the nav on auto pilot and went to bed.