Remembering Wash's self-assured treatment of Straaker, Mal picked up a blanket and walked back outside, offering it wordlessly to Wash. Wash's eyes softened gratefully, and Mal helped him wrap it around his shoulders and bury his face in the figment of shelter. Unlike Straaker, Wash wasn't crying. His haunted expression was far too tight and - numb - for tears.

"Khiloh left this for ya'," said Mal quietly, perching the puppet on Wash's shoulder, the soft fleece near his face. He figured even a grown man might find it a comfort after spending a week in a concrete cell. Wash rested his head against it with a tiny smile and closed his eyes.

Mal sat beside Wash, both of them disinclined to talk for a good while. He was profoundly grateful to have Wash back in one piece, and the presence of a friend had a soothing effect. Worrying over someone else was a good deal easier than having to focus on his own situation.

Mal trickled the small pebbles of gravel through his fingers as he remembered his one trip to solitary confinement. In a fit of boredom, he’d managed to turn the tables on one of his dull-witted interrogators and gotten him to reveal the administrative override code for the prison access controls.

The fury of his captors had done nothing to spoil his glee, and getting tossed in solitary had seemed a mild punishment. Determined to simply accept the situation and not let the psychological barbs get to him, he found the days passed easily enough. Dark and quiet are peaceful.

Finally Wash opened his eyes and shifted position. He was squinting painfully, bright daylight stinging eyes accustomed to dark.

“Looks like you’ve been having a pretty rough time, kinda makes my theory that you were on a tropical vacation fall apart,” said Mal, giving Wash an understanding grin and keeping his voice quiet so as not to grate on ears habituated to silence. Wash didn't smile back, venture a humorous reply, or even bite Mal's head off.

“Might help ta' think ahead to a time when you won’t be anyone’s prisoner. Imagine that’s hard, long as you been here,” said Mal, looking for an opening in Wash’s grave façade.

"I'll get over it," said Wash. "I always do, wú huàn yu." His eyes shifted away from Mal’s questioning gaze.

“Wash, don’t think this whole solitary confinement thing's what’s eating at you,” said Mal. Something was hurting Wash a good deal more deeply than having been locked in a cell, and Mal had a disturbing notion of what it might be.

“What?” snapped Wash in a rapid swing from grave stoicism to childlike anger. “Just being stuck in solitary not horrific enough for you, mister I-eat-enemy-soldiers-for lunch? You’re tough, I get it. I’m just the wimp who breaks down when the big bad Alliance locks him up for a few days. You don’t get it! I’m not tough, and when they go after me, I break.”

“No, Wash, you don’t get it. I don’t think you’re a wimp, and that’s why I’m concerned about how it is they managed to shake you so bad,” said Mal firmly. He was relieved to see that anger, but it disappeared in a flash, Wash's control crumbling.

“Yeah. Well if I’m not a wimp than I’m about the biggest coward that ever lived, one of the slippers fits,” said Wash. His voice was choked as he teetered between anger and collapse.

“Wash, I’ve met plenty of cowards, they don't wear slippers, an’ you don’t strike me as one. Being scared or vulnerable doesn’t make you a coward,” said Mal. After an awkward silence, Wash ventured a grateful glance in his direction.

"You know what's confounding me?” asked Mal. “I – can understand keepin' your distance from Straaker and Gray, but Zeke and Matty about worship you. How is it your best friend is a guard? You got folk in there who'll stand by you to the death, and you cotton to a prison guard and a guy who punches you. Seems a mite off, if you don't mind my saying."

Mal expected something along the lines of anger or defensiveness in response to his question; the last thing he anticipated were the tears that suddenly formed in Wash's eyes. Wash struggled to meet Mal's eyes and to answer, but he crumbled and hid his face in the folds of the blanket. "I – gotta tell you?"

"Well, you don't gotta," said Mal. "This isn't a beat you 'til you confess kinda thing." Wash looked like Mal had just slapped him, and Mal took a deep breath and tried again. “Wash,” he asked gently. “You said not long after I met you that they didn’t torture you. Wasn’t the truth, was it? They drag you in somewhere and break you?”

Wash shook his head, falling miserably silent while Mal waited. “That’s just it,” said Wash finally. “They didn’t have to. I was so scared I told them everything.” In a low voice, Wash told Mal about the interrogations where he’d spilled everything in sheer terror, about the night he’d spent tied to the chair, and about the terrifying weeks that had followed as he’d tried to convince them he was cooperating with them.

Mal focused his gaze very intensely on the pattern of grey and brown pebbles at his feet. Keeping his anger this contained was a difficult task. The anger and horror he felt about the war crimes charge needed only Wash’s calm voice recounting nightmares to push him over the brink. Mal didn’t hold that repressing anger was good for a man, but he didn’t have an abundance of options.

Of course they had to interrogate him. Be incompetent not to. It was how unskilled and needlessly cruel they’d been in the process that made Mal want to kill….someone. It didn’t take an expert at reading people to see that Wash was a sincere, unguarded person who wore his feelings on his sleeve. Given the man’s forgiving nature, it wouldn’t have been hard to do cleanly and even somewhat humanely.

He remembered a wounded soldier he and Zoe had interrogated in the field. They hadn’t hurt him, but they had frightened him badly. He didn’t think he’d ever forget the heart-wrenching terror in that young man’s eyes, or ease with which that fear had faded when they accepted his answers and Mal reassured him that it was over. And we were gorram field soldiers. We weren’t even supposed to know what we were doing, he thought bitterly. There's a difference between scaring a man and traumatizing him. It’s not rutting hard.

Wash was having an increasingly difficult time keeping his voice steady. "Wasn’t anything they did that was all that horrifying. They never hurt me, but - I spent a long time being screamed at and threatened, kept awake and hammered at and – and just begging them to believe me, to stop – and knowing the reason they didn’t was they couldn’t believe I was such a wimp."

Wash took a few minutes to collect himself before he spoke again, clenching his hands to keep them from shaking. "It’s the worst feeling, knowing they broke you, and - I cried. Right in front of them. They – put me in solitary confinement after a while, as sort of a last-ditch effort. I was alone and stuck there in the dark for weeks, and I kinda lost it."

He wasn’t tortured? If locking a cooperative and shattered prisoner up alone in a concrete box for weeks isn’t torture, then what the gorram hell is? A horrible image flashed into his head, leaving Mal very grateful that Wash was sitting here relatively unharmed, glad Wash hadn’t had to suffer physical agony along with the rest of it, but the effect wasn’t much different.

Mal had no doubt the little bastards felt very enlightened and proud of themselves, not using physical torture. But if the point was to avoid using terrifying interrogation methods that left people traumatized, then he reckoned it was a bit ironical that they’d simply used psychological torture to terrify and traumatize Wash.

You’d think if they're so gorram civilized they'd pay a little less attention to the rutting landscaping in the interrogation rooms and a little more to using interrogators with enough skill to recognize a terrified man telling them the truth, and heaven forbid, enough compassion to help him through the inevitable rutting aftermath.

Wash gulped nervously and glanced at Mal. "That's – I've never been able to handle it since. It feels like the whole world's gone and I'm gonna to die in there with nobody to notice. Every week they pulled me out, and when they'd stick me back in - I never cried that much in my life. Worst part was knowing I really deserved it."

It was that last that got him, more than any horror story Wash could tell. I deserved it. Those unmitigated, worthless, soul-sucking bastards. “No, Wash,” he interrupted with iron firmness. “No man deserves to be treated without mercy.”

Except the ones that did this. And destroyed Shadow. Oh, and them that wanna jail me as a war criminal.

Zoe’s fierce face flashed before his eyes, rebuking him with a glare. Okay, fine. Maybe he didn’t mean that, didn’t wish true suffering on anyone. But like he’d wished the men beating him could feel for even a split second the pain they were inflicting, he wished Wash’s interrogators could’ve sat in his place for just long enough to know what real fear and helplessness felt like.

Wash looked squarely at Mal for the first time, finally trusting the former Sergeant enough to let him see the deep pain in his eyes. His expression softened when he saw the compassion on Mal’s face.

“They did break me, Mal,” said Wash. “I was terrified, and I gave them everything they wanted, and then I get out and meet all these guys – these wonderful, brave people who – I betrayed them and everything they stand for, what, because some interrogator tied me up and yelled at me?”

Tears were trickling down the pilot’s face in grief. “The best people I’ve ever known are in this camp, and – I – I’d do anything to be able to look you guys in the eyes and not feel like the lowest person in the world. I can't take it when Zeke stands there as the rutting embodiment of everything that's strong and brave and looks at me like I'm a hero.”

Wrapped in a blanket with a stuffed toy held close and trying to battle his tears, at that moment Wash wasn't an adult, a prisoner, or a highly skilled pilot; he was a hurt kid, desperate for reassurance and comfort. His father got killed and he he finished growing up in prison, no wonder he acts like a kid half the time. Mal wrapped an arm around his shoulders and spoke softly. “Wash, its okay. You did your best, an’ that’s all any of us have.”

One thing he’d learned in the war was that sometimes simple human contact was a world better than words to reach someone devastated by fear and violence. Wash relaxed, and Mal sat silently, wondering if his questioning had been a good idea.

Many a panicky kid had turned to Mal in the raw, immediate fear and grief of war. It took surprisingly little to get a man through horrors if he had a confident leader to turn to, someone to set him back up on his feet and make him laugh. That, he could do in his sleep. Probably had, a time or two. This was a vastly trickier thing than getting a man through a battle. What if those soldiers had been stranded alone on a battlefield and the only people they could turn to told them they were worthless cowards and their lives were over? What if they had to live with that for years?

Wash tensed as they heard footsteps in the gravel, and they looked up. The day guard was standing just outside the gate. The officer studied them for an agonizingly long minute, and Mal forced himself to maintain a neutral expression. The guard was a decent man, but Mal’s hatred and contempt at the moment extended to anyone who ever thought to call themselves Alliance. Finally the guard’s face softened, and he walked away.

The flicker of concern in his expression sent images through Mal’s head of Lee reaching out to him with intelligence and wisdom, Khiloh trying desperately to support a friend, of not five minutes later being relentlessly shocked by a sadistic Sergeant he'd never even challenged. Being viciously beaten one minute, and supported and cared for the next as his friend was dragged off to solitary. It was as masterful a mind-game as any, and the fact that it was entirely unintentional struck Mal as hilarious in a dismal sort of way. The road to hell is paved with good intentions? Alliance should have themselves a ten-lane highway to the place by now.

“Listen to me, oh knuckleheaded pilot,” said Mal gently, his quiet manner hiding seething anger. “Every heard of a little thing called psychological torture? Might be a little more subtle than ripping out fingernails, but you were tortured. And worse, it was bein’ done by them that were too stupid and too rutting clueless to see they’d already got what they needed.”

“I’m not stupid, Mal,” said Wash, rebuking him with a look. “'Course I know it was psychological torture, and I can see where the scars from it lie. Mostly over them, except when something like this brings it all up again. My problem would be the knowing I broke because I was scared, because I knew I couldn’t handle physical torture and I thought that’s what they were going to do. And knowing if I’d just kept my mouth shut, I could have handled the worst they'd have done to me is just as bad. It’s being a coward that I can’t get over.”

"You say you betrayed us – you think it did much harm, what you told them?" asked Mal.

After a long pause, Wash shook his head. "Didn't – didn't get anybody killed, or caught –least I hope not. I just told them how we planned the attack, and what we knew about their defenses, who was involved – stuff like that. A – lot about our training and procedures."

"In other words, what they could've figured out on their own or got out of some other pilot they grabbed or bribed or bugged?" asked Mal. "And wouldn't you've tried a lot harder if someone's life'd been on the line?"

Wash looked reluctant to concede the point. "Yes. But it wasn't brave," said Wash. "If you disagree with that, I'm calling bullshit."

"Okay," said Mal. "Wasn't brave, or heroic, or any other noble adjective. But I've a powerful distaste of cowards, an' they aren't overly difficult to spot. The coward's the guy who ducks out and lets another man suffer for what he's done, or what he ain't doing. You, I've had to hold back from a losing fight to protect another prisoner, and you got yourself locked up with your nightmares to spare me a few blows."

Wash smiled unevenly and fell silent, closing his eyes to rest them. Someone shouted far outside the yard, and he flinched, startled by the noise. “Wash?” questioned Mal, on the verge of utter fury. “What’d they do to you in there?”

Wash shook his head. “It’s – it’s just something that happens after – after I’ve been in solitary for a while. Things startle you.”

Not knowing what else to do, Mal simply continued to hold him. If Wash was revisiting being a scared, devastated kid in need of comfort he hadn't gotten the first time around, Mal figured on giving it.

Gradually Wash relaxed and started breathing normally, and Mal spoke again. "Folk don't usually come out of being traumatized and locked up for years as stable individuals. Being sane and kind as you are - that takes strength of heart, I imagine."

"I'd prefer my strength a little – stronger sounding," said Wash dryly. "But thanks for the attempt."

Mal's lips twitched in a smile. It was the first glimpse of the Wash he knew. "You'd prefer to turn off the part of you that cares and feels? Tells you not to kill your fellow man, tells you to feel for a person in pain, an' feels horror at the thought of being subjected to abject cruelty?"

"Well – no," protested Wash. Mal let go of his shoulders and he relaxed back against the fence, calmer and looking halfway human. His unnaturally sober expression had faded, and his eyes were clear as he slipped his hand into the colorful puppet and regarded it speculatively.

"You think maybe there's some coping strategy lets you do these things without killing a part of your soul?" asked Mal. "You refused to do that. That makes you – maybe not a soldier. But could be it makes you a better human being."

"I didn't shut down," said Wash reflectively. "But – I gave up." He spoke calmly, the guilt and horror no longer in evidence. The puppet was starting to sneak stealthily across the gravel towards Mal's hand, and Mal watched it warily out of the corner of his eye, a smile twitching at the corners of his lips.

Mal nodded. "I get that," he said. "Everyone's gotta have a way to cope. It's not a bad one, I suppose. Not one I'd be able to choose, but you're talkin' to a war criminal, so," he shrugged with a dark grin.

Wash’s brow creased briefly at the war crimes comment, and Mal opted to distract him quickly. "Odd, how you remind me of the strongest person I've known," he said. Wash raised his head in question. "Zoe. You, walkin' beside me to meals? That's a thing Zoe did for me more times'n I can recall. You got a way of being there, just the way she does. She's a deadly soldier and brave as a bull, too. Not bad company to be in."

Wash's pleasant, unobtrusive empathy had made him a welcome companion in those early weeks in the housing unit. His easygoing smile and relaxed manner had been just the balm Mal's bruised soul had needed. "You helped me through a lot of fear and hurt doin' that, just like she did," said Mal.

Wash's eyes softened in compassion and a different kind of hurt at Mal's words, and Mal smiled internally at how deep Wash's kind streak ran. "Not many come through times like these and have your kindness," said Mal. "Cruelty has a way of stamping that out of a man."

Wash glanced down for a second. "They weren't cruel," he said with a shake of his head. "Not really."

Mal sighed. He closed his eyes momentarily in frustration, forcing himself to leave well enough alone. He's gotta live here, an' he does well enough. Don't be tryin' to take away how it is he copes.

Wash caught the awkward silence and asked, “You come away from that mess in the cafeteria okay?"

"Shì," said Mal with a smile. "Took me to the hospital, patched me up neat as can be. Even got coddled by the nurse."

Wash smiled. "Good. Hospital guys here are nice."

"Seem like it," agreed Mal. "I could do with seeing a little less of 'em, personally."

"I wanna get coddled by a nurse," said Wash with a pout.

"'Fraid you'll have to cultivate a few more enemies first," said Mal.

"Or – I could borrow one of yours," suggested Wash.

"I do always keep a couple extras on hand," said Mal. "Keeps life from getting boring."

Footsteps caught their attention; Zeke was standing near the building, his gaze asking permission to join them. Wash smiled in greeting, and Zeke walked over.

"Welcome back," said Zeke, looking at Wash with concern.

"Xie xie. Missed you xiao wáng bä dàn men," said Wash. "And – you know –beds." He closed his eyes in exaggerated bliss. "Ahh, beds."

Zeke extended his hand to Wash and helped him to his feet. "You okay?" he asked.

Wash nodded, smiling at Zeke and meeting Mal's eyes for a flash. "I'm fine."