Author's note: Consider this my study in characterizing a character I don't usually write, in order to learn how to characterise him.

She’d been different from the first second, all tiny and translucent. She looked as if someone with no good idea about human anatomy had picked up a dull pencil and attempted to draw one. She mewled, rather than cried. But she had damp dark curls, luminous dark eyes, and her daddy’s nose. She had ten fingers and ten toes and a heartbeat, and as far as Mal was concerned, she embodied perfection. Simon weighed and measured her. He tapped her feet and listened to her heartbeat and pricked her doll-sized finger for blood. Wordlessly, he swaddled her up in a sheet from the infirmary and handed her to Inara, and then he pulled Mal out into the connecting hallway. “I need to take the baby into isolation for further observation and care.” “Like hell!” “I don’t, and she’ll be dead by morning.” Mal looked in at Inara, hair matted with sweat, dozing pleasantly with her newborn daughter. “I’ll take that chance,” he said, and then his throat closed over. But she made it through that night. And the next night. And several nights thereafter. On the eighth morning, Mal let himself into the shuttle, kissed Inara’s forehead, picked up the baby and said, “Well, missus, I think it’s about time we gave this little beauty a name.” And so the baby was christened Setareh Judith. In an ancient language that nobody spoke anymore, Setareh had once meant star. “Star.” Mal looked at the baby. “Huh.” Three weeks later, Simon proclaimed Setareh a living miracle and told Inara that it was safe to take her out of the shuttle. “Well hell,” Mal snorted. “I coulda told you that.” Setareh chose that moment to yawn and open her eyes. As she gazed up at Mal, he could’ve sworn he saw her smile at him. Weeks passed, and eventually months. Setareh grew and thrived and never failed to have a smile for her daddy. She would look a little more like Inara’s side every day, and Mal was half-glad she’d be b’ought up in the blackness of space, so as not to be chased down by every merchant’s little snot-nosed brat. No daughter of Malcolm Reynolds’ was going to end up a common whore or a merchant’s wife. Setareh was less than a year old, but Mal had plans for her. Inara could teach her to be a lady, and he could teach her how to fly a ship, make a deal, and hold her own in a swordfight against the best duellist on Persephone. As far as he was concerned, she would be perfect. If, that is, it was possible for her to become more perfect than she already was. One morning, Mal woke up and realized what day it was. He crept into the kitchen before anyone else and carefully began setting out ingredients for protein cakes. They pretty much tasted the same as everything else that they ate on the boat, but Setareh particularly liked them. He hummed cheerfully to himself, but stopped when he heard tiny, graceful footfalls down the hallway. “Happy birthday, bao bei,” he said, opening his arms in invitation. Setareh was turning six, and if there had been something “wrong” with her when she was born, there was no trace of it left in Malcolm Reynolds’ long-legged, beautiful little dancer of a daughter. That evening, Mal stood on the bridge, watching River attempting to execute ballet lessons. “She certainly beat the odds,” Simon said. Mal glanced down at Setareh, then over at Simon. “Well hell, I coulda told you that.”