He wasn’t too happy with Jayne’s conclusions.

How could he be?

He was surprised that Jayne was considering going into a dangerous situation with him as backup.

Concerned….scared out of his mind actually.

He hadn’t noticed the curtains though.

Once they were pointed out to him, he wondered how he could have missed something so obvious. But he hadn’t noticed them.

What he had noticed was how quiet it was.

That had made him nervous.

Living people weren’t that quiet.

And since leaving Osiris he’d learned to notice when something was too quiet.

Dead quiet.

He gripped his gun, palms sweating, causing the distinct metallic smell to rise.

He hated the gun.

Hated using it.

Hated wearing it.

Hated Mal for making them all practice with them.

Hated Miranda for making him realize that in this life he led, he couldn’t get by without it.

When he first started practicing it had felt like an alien thing in his hand.

It was a distasteful sensation.

But the more they practiced, the more comfortable he became with it.

He had felt for a long time like his hands and his eyes had betrayed him.

Like somehow in his sleep someone had grafted new ones onto him.

His hands were surgeon’s hands.

Healer’s hands.

It wasn’t right that the same hand that could heal could also kill.

But they could.

Because they had too.

Still, as he sat beside Jayne as he calmly drove the rest of the way to the house with his gun resting in his lap ready just in case, he hated it.

She had left the basement.

Not because she wanted to. But because she recognized that she would have to eventually.

Besides there was a ship.

A cargo ship.

They hadn’t listed a need for passengers, but in her experience most folk that lived out here, on the rim would consider just about anything if enough credits were involved.

And she had a lot of credits.

So too did her parents, and theirs was in the safe in her father’s office.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted to live.

Actually she knew that she didn’t.

But they had died for her, so that she could live. And she couldn’t bring herself to waste their lives.

So she had gathered the money, and left the basement to see if any of her clothing was left untouched.

The only way she would live was to get off this moon, and that ship was her only hope.

It was the only ship that had landed here in the last three months and would likely be the only ship for the next three.

She knew that she needed to hurry, knew that she should avoid the living room. But her feet carried her there anyway.

She didn’t want to see. Tried to close her eyes, leave the room, but she couldn’t. She had to see.

Her Father was tied to his arm chair, his eyelids sewn to his eyebrows; they’d made him watch…what they did to her Mother.

She tasted bile, tried to swallow it down, but it came up anyway.

She threw up until there was nothing left to throw up.

They had cut on him, shot him, beat him, and forced him to watch.

But what they had done to her mother was worse.

She lay on her heirloom rug.

She had treasured that rug, gone to great pains to keep it clean, keep it from fading.

It was given to the first bride in the family, passed from Mother to Daughter.

It brought good luck, a good marriage.

The intricate pattern her many times great grandmother had woven was gone.

Hidden by her Mother’s blood.

Her clothing was gone, her face beaten into an unrecognizable pulp.

When they had tired of raping her, they had gotten her scalpels from the infirmary, and begun flaying her.

Both of them stared sightlessly, while their blood congealed.

The smell was so thick she could taste it, the sound of the flies buzzing through the room so loud she could hear nothing else.

Her stomach heaved again, and again.

All thoughts of escape disappeared as she sank slowly to the ground.

He stopped the mule so close to the porch that he could hop out and take a few steps and be at the door, which ominously hung open.

He slipped through the door soundlessly, the Doc on his heels.

They were in a big hall, a set of wide ornate stairs straight ahead, just down the hall a few feet and to the left there was an opening.

Kinda like an archway.

From which came the coppery smell of blood.

Old blood.

Whatever had happened here had happened a few hours ago.

He signaled for the Doc to go to stay here, and lightly he moved forward.

Carefully he peeked around the edge of the archway, expecting the worse.

His eyes passed over the bodies, wasn’t like they could do anything to him, past them there was a doorway.

And sitting in that doorway, sightlessly staring at the gore, was a young woman about the doc’s age.

“Aw Hell!”

She jerked up when he swore, gun materializing in her hand.

The Doc pushed around him, and paying scant attention to the girl and her gun he holstered his gun and went to the woman lying on the floor.

The girl made a broken grating sound that was meant to be a laugh.

“They are long past the point were anyone can help them.”

She lowered her gun, took a deep shuddering breath and retreated back into herself.

He grabbed the com unit from his belt and called Serenity.

“Mal, we’ve got a problem.”

The girl snapped back into herself when the sound of the ship landing in the yard echoed through the house.

She helped Simon strip the infirmary of useable supplies, even showed him where the entrance to the basement and her Mother’s underground storage was.

She let Kaylee loose in her Father’s workshop, giving her any tools or parts that struck her fancy.

She packed up her clothing and put it in the guest room Mal had agreed to let her use until they came to a good place for her to stay, in exchange for all the goodies she was letting them take.

She didn’t say a thing when he and Mal dug graves for her folks, refused to witness them putting them in the ground and covering them.

The only time she showed any signs of life was when she badgered Mal into loading all them damn plants and the crap she needed for them from the basement onto the ship.

Otherwise she was like a robot.

No feeling, no life to her.

He didn’t like the fact that Mal refused to let him take her gun away from her.

Didn’t like the fact that he let her keep the other guns she had, and the knives to.

She was a threat, liable to explode at any moment, and she didn’t need to be having no guns on her when she did.

Zoë and Inara agreed with Mal.

Said she was in shock.

That she’d come to terms with it in time.

Even Moonbrain agreed.

Didn’t mean that she wasn’t gonna go off the deep end.

He was gonna have to keep an eye on her.

They sure as hell didn’t need another crazy on the ship.

Especially one with her own guns.