All in the Timing ---------------------- based on the world of Firefly by Joss Whedon

If she had felt sorry for the man she had just given up to be killed for not completing his assignment and letting out one of the Alliance's big blunders, Cat didn't show it. It was how it had always been done. How many had her clan been responsible for killing during the War, how many lost their lives because it was a necessary evil?

Mal had been her sixth that month, each one executed with her rifle, never once begging to be let free or turning on the other. In a word, Loyalty...to everything that it meant to wear brown. For her, each one became harder to kill, a sense of honor pouring through each vein as she watched their heads cease to be.

He had been different somehow. Be it the way he ran into battle without a thought for himself or the way he seemed to care for his men above anything else. There was just something about Malcolm Reynolds that deemed exploring. So she had put away the bullet and joined the party, even though she knew it was a losing battle and strangely, that was out of context for her.

Had they not taught her winning was everything. It had been programmed into her head before she could even walk and while others should have been playing with toys, she was learning how to assemble rifles with a blindfold.

Cat also remembered the beatings. If you didn't get it right, you would the next time or they would take you to the Machine. Needles into the brain reserved for those who weren't born in a test tube and for those who refused to do what was asked of them.

Germiphobic assholes wearing blue gloves as not to touch the flesh of their soldiers, for fear the stench of what they were doing would somehow infect the rest of their pitiful lives. She didn't even have a name. Only Cat and a number 1313...she didn't even have a belly button.

Her lips curled at the thought. When Mal had taken her for the first time, in a foxhole near a mine field. There was no room at the inn, sort of speak. He had been shocked for the lack of it, but as any good man with an appetite for a woman, it hadn't stopped him. Of course, now he had her.

Companion...the word seemed to dance circles in her head. Trained as she only in the arts of pleasure and seduction, of all the women he had to find attractive, why did it have to be one she could not contend with? Happiness seemed something only meant for those who were normal and she was definitely not.

Her green eyes lifted as she stood higher and straighter. Dust kicked up around her as she approached the one thing she seemed never to find....Serenity.