Mal lay down and closed his eyes, hoping to vanish into that blissfully drugged sleep. Reality was moving awful fast, all of a sudden. They'd been holding him in a cocoon of caring and safety all week, letting him recover from physical and emotional bruises. And in another week he'd be on his own.

"Look - none of us are going to forget you," Gray said in a halting voice.

"Do me a kindness?" asked Mal.

"Sure - anything," said Gray.

"Don't talk like I'm dying? You been the best company I could ask for this past week. We'll enjoy the next, and you walk out of here an' move forward."

~~~~

The image on the screen didn't affect Mal the way it did the others. They hadn't lived with death and blood up close and personal the way Mal had. But for all that, it still bothered him. This was the gruesome capture Gunderson had talked about, and it made a couple of things abundantly clear.

"We didn't do it," said Mal. "I know every army has its sociopaths, but that's not the work of Browncoats." All this fury, even Gunderson’s blind hatred, suddenly made sense. A capture like that could haunt a man, get into his mind.

"Who did, then?" asked Matty.

"Reavers," said Mal. There were uneasy glances all about the room.

"They exist?" asked Matty, frowning.

"They do," said Mal. His tone didn't invite further questioning. The scene had changed, a familiar face on screen. Dye. Looking tired, pale. It wasn’t an interview, just him reading a statement from a sheet of paper. His voice was sincere, and Mal guessed that the stilted words were largely his own.

“What we did was not justifiable in any way. We subjected a man to some of the most sickening treatment imaginable, because we imagined him guilty of crimes he didn’t commit. We wanted a target and we used him, and that is a shame I will always carry with me. My personal hatred of the Independents got in the way of any sort of humanity.” He looked down, staring at the paper in his hand for a moment too long. “As a human being and as a representative of the Alliance, I apologize. I will accept whatever sentence results from my court-martial, and I beg for God’s forgiveness.”

His hand dropped, the script discarded. He looked directly at the screen. “Xie xie, Linda.” His voice cracked and the picture cut away.

~~~~~

Mal lay on his bunk, twisting the cross around in his hands. Taken it off a week after the surrender, moments after shooting one of his own men. The boy was dying, and when rescue didn't show there was only one mercy Mal could show him. When shooting a man in the head became an act of caring, the world was turned too far upside down to be able to see any god. He'd spent a week praying with all his heart for help that never came. He didn't want to believe in a God capable of turning his back on such suffering, and it had just been easier to decide He didn't exist.

He felt eyes on him, and looked over at Zeke. He was lying on his bunk, waking from a nap.

"You're a Christian man," said Mal.

Zeke rolled over on his side and looked at Mal thoughtfully. “Yes.”

“Hope you’re not over inclined to preach,” said Mal.

“I’m a pilot, not a shepherd,” said Zeke.

Mal nodded, fingering the cross. He was going to regret this conversation. “He talked to me, in that cell."

"What happened?" asked Zeke, his voice soft, almost like a shepherd's. Man might be a pilot, but this seemed one of his secondary talents.

Mal swallowed. "I was chained up, after they finished with me. Dark and about as miserable as they come. He commenced talking, and then – I was floating about up in space. No pain, just floating. He took me out of there, easy as can be."

He lay silent for a moment, tension and rage building within the core of him. "He ignored me and everyone else in that valley. Two weeks of death and starvation and suffering beyond what man can imagine in nightmares. The valley of the shadow of death come to life, an' it was more than a shadow. He let the Alliance slaughter a whole planet, and stepped back and watched while men broke me to bitty pieces. All – all times when I – I was desperate for His help.”

Regretting it already. Among the multitude of perfectly good reasons not bare a soul was how much it knocked a man about. All manner of unpleasant, the tightness in his throat, and that buzzing noise. “I didn't ask him to come for me in there, an' he shows up in the middle of what I least need 'im for. What kind of bastard betrays you on a field of battle, an' then wanders by to help you through torture if it fits into his Almighty schedule?"

"Maybe one we don't understand?" suggested Zeke.

Mal rolled his eyes. "Thought we established the not understanding."

Zeke smiled slightly. "Mal – you came out of that a different person. You hold your head up high, you look people in the eye, and you mean it when you smile. You're the man you've been trying so hard to be ever since they stuck you in here with us. Torture and prison sentences don't do that to people. Quite the opposite, really."

"I fought. They pushed me too far, and I fought. If I found myself in the process, it sure as hell wasn't God's doing.”

"Okay," said Zeke. "When you were a Sergeant, did you ever make choices that got people killed?" Mal nodded. "Injured? Did you do things and make choices and give orders that sometimes made people hate you?"

"Yes," said Mal. He said it grudgingly, knowing full well where Zeke was going with this.

"Did you have good reasons for those things, even if sometimes people hated you for making them? Maybe never even learned why you acted as you did?"

"Believers always have an answer, don't they?" said Mal. So had he. For near six years of war, he always had an answer. Always found a way to explain the random pieces of tragedy that tried to tear at him.

"Sounds like you believe well enough," said Zeke. "Man doesn't get this bitter towards something he doesn't think exists."

"Oh, I got it figured he exists, all right. No mistakin' it now. But I ain't looking to a leader who makes noble promises and then abandons his followers in all their darkest hours. I was an infantry Sergeant, he's an omnipotent being. Biig rutting difference.” Mal closed his eyes. "I ordered things that got people dead. Did things they didn't understand, and I was rough on ‘em. But I never once turned my back on a man looking for support. I never let any man suffer without knowing there was someone who cared. I never abandoned anyone. Dì yù, a few times I did more for enemy soldiers than God ever did for me through this."

Those last few words were hard to get out. He wasn’t accustomed to his voice failing him, or the thick pain of ripping into a wound that ran so deep inside him, it felt like the act of speaking was surgery that could kill him. Or heal him enough to go on. He was used to rage and hurt, now. Not used to this kind of pain.

He opened his eyes and looked at Zeke. He was watching with the sort of gentle understanding that a body only tended to see in a man of God. Definitely a chaplain at heart. "There was nothing. Just me, alone, screaming inside. Only ones reached out to save me've been other people. So why – why in the sphincter of hell does he show up when I least need him?"

It was Zeke’s turn to grow quiet, for his eyes to take on that look of deep pain rarely visited. "I don’t know. Look – I been asking myself for years now….what purpose or good could possibly have been served by my crew being killed, and – and why I was the one to live. I don't get it, but I know he was there with us when it happened."

Mal's face hardened. "There with you? As in watching, as in standin' by and doing nothing?" The rage again. Wash, abandoned in a solitary cell. Zeke, watching his crew die. These were good men. You didn't turn your back on people like this.

"Comforting us," said Zeke quietly, his voice faltering a bit. "When they killed my loadmaster, it took him a few minutes to die. I was tied up, and he crawled over to me. My heart's breaking, and he looked at me with this total peace and love in his eyes. Wasn't scared, didn't even seem like he was in pain any more. He just smiled and said he'd see me there, closed his eyes and went to sleep. I never felt more loved, like God was holding us both."

Mal closed his eyes, caught in a maelstrom of emotion, his throat tight. It was the goodness in people that still had the power to move him. Death and violence and horror no longer made it much past skin deep. But the love and courage people were capable of - "Offering comfort? Love? Without doing anything to stop it, even though he had power to?"

"Mal," said Zeke gently. "Free will applies just as much to the bad guys. Tell me he wasn't at your side in battle, didn't help you to your feet a time or two."

"He was there," said Mal. "Leastwise I thought he was. Makes the betrayal all the deeper for it."

"Maybe it wasn't a betrayal," said Zeke. "Maybe it was His plan all along that the Alliance would win this war. That wouldn't stop Him from loving and supporting those on the other side."

Mal's eyes stung. "There's no way this Alliance is – if it's God's will, then he and I part ways forever." And like that, it was over. His vision cleared, and he drew in a deep breath, relaxing. It wasn’t okay. But it was clear. God had made a choice he would never accept.

"So, no church services?" teased Zeke, lightening the mood.

Mal stood, put the cross back in his locker, and slammed the door. It was what the almighty had done to him, and it seemed fitting.