(This was my second Firefly story, written in December 2002, the beginning of a slight obsession with a certain captain. Support and encouragement came from D'Alaire and Tzegha. Some of the details created here worked their way into later stories.)

Disclaimer:  This is a work of fanfiction.  No infringement is intended on the rights of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, or 20th Century Fox TV. 

No archiving, please.

Feedback welcome. Thank you.

"Bloodlines" by HawkMoth

____________

The day he handed the money over for his ship, life began all over again.  The sky beckoned, the black was wide open and waiting.  What he was, what he came from, didn't matter anymore.  He would never look back on what was past.

******

Daddy was a rich man's son, from a family whose history went all the way back to the Second Wave of Colonization.  Old money.  Some of it earned by sweat, some by luck, some by other means.

Blood money, some would say.  They worked hard to keep it, to make more, and enjoy it.  Each new generation was taught how, within the law, and without it.

So on his twenty-first birthday, he was given a spread of land and a herd of cattle on the border world Shadow, and was told to make a profit.  To keep it profitable, and pay the family back for what they'd already given him in life.

By his twenty-fifth birthday, it was a smooth, well-oiled operation.  It helped that Alliance law was fairly lax out here.  He fell in love with a local girl, who'd been originally hired on as accounts manager.  It was mostly to her credit that the ranch hadn't gone under in the first year.  He didn't mind that.  She was smart and pretty, teaching him what every ranch owner needed to know.

Momma never expected to fall for a Core-bred man, but saw the potential for a good future.  His fine ways, good looks, knowledge of Alliance law, and a willingness to overlook it if there was a profit to be made, added up to a decent package.  She got her cousin Jess signed on as foreman, and her best friend Lily as the new manager, 'cause you'd never get better help from off-world.

He might have been disowned for marrying her, except the family recognized ambition when they saw it.  She wasn't from truly good stock, but wasn't from bad, either.  They came to look things over, praising her skills, admiring how the two of them worked as a team.  A blessing was given.

They were happy, acquiring more property, increasing the herds, hiring new hands.  Within a year of the wedding they had a fine son.

For a time, he went on loving his wife, making plans for the boy and the future.  But Shadow was still a backwater, quaint and quiet.  He grew restless, remembering the life that came before.  He began to talk about making trips off-planet, for business, for pleasure.  She resisted, having no desire to lead a life beyond the one she'd known.

Soon, they acquired a name and a reputation for the best stock in the quadrant.  They began to diversify, raising horses.  Business trips became a necessity, so he made them alone.  She didn't seem to mind when they became more frequent, and longer in duration.

The boy got used to having Daddy away from home more often than he was there.  There were screen-books and high-tech toys brought back for him, and Core-world pretties for Momma.  He really didn't notice that she smiled less when Daddy was around, or that Daddy never seemed to care how much a boy his age was learning about riding, herding and living off the land.  There was talk of taking him off-planet, for a proper education.  To see that there was more to life than cattle, horses and wide-open spaces, to see the Core and meet the family, but that never came to pass.

When Daddy came home for the boy's sixth birthday, he brought the family with him.

They set themselves up in a fancy, portable compound across the creek from the main house, and stayed for three days.  Everyone smiled and talked so nice--Momma, Daddy, the doting but distant grandparents, the too-clean-to-look-at aunts and uncles.  There'd never been such food, so much genteel partying on the ranch--on Shadow--ever.

Nor ever anyone to match the pretty lady with the voice like music--not a relation, she was someone's guest--with clothes that glittered like the sun on water, and eyes that saw everything.  The boy didn't notice Lily's disapproving look, nor heard some of the hands whispering out behind the stable.  The pretty lady gave him candy, let him take her for a walk along the creek where the shade trees grew, and watched his Daddy.

Momma watched too, with narrowed eyes and a sad smile.

The boy heard nothing of what went on that night, after he was in bed.

***

"When they leave, I'm going with them."

"Go, then."

"I won't be coming back."

"You think I didn't expect that? You never really fit in here. You were never truly happy."

"I thought I was--we were--once."

"That's long past, and we both know it."

"I want the boy."

"You can't have him.'

"He's my son!"

"And mine. You best read the contract."

***

The family had insisted on a marriage agreement, and had trusted her to draw it up, as a sign of good faith.  They never gave a thought that the centuries could breed deviousness into the common people as well as the rich.  Besotted with love, he'd signed it with no more than a glance.

What he'd unwittingly agreed to was plain and simple.  If he ever left her for good, he was giving up all rights to any offspring.  The ranch was to be hers, free and clear forever.  It was all legal, and very binding.

He could have fought it--fought for the boy and the future he could give him, but truth was he'd always been more her son than his.  The family was shocked, angered--but agreed that a fight would be more of a scandal than a quick, quiet divorce.  There was, at least, the near-decade's worth of profits as compensation, plus the lesson learned to be more careful in the choosing of border worlds for future enterprises.

The good-byes were quick and no more emotional than any previous partings.  Still overwhelmed by the memories of the excitement, the imposing relations, the rich food and all, it was weeks before the boy noticed that things were different, changed in ways he couldn't quite fathom. Longer before he questioned it.

"Momma, is Daddy coming back?"

"No. Daddy made a choice. Someday, you're gonna have to make a choice, too."

It didn't mean a lot, not then.  He was sad, but never really missed his Daddy.  He had Momma, Jess and Lily.  There was Rafe and Lee and the other hands, taking care of him and teaching him everything he needed to know, because one day the ranch would be his.  Momma had seen to that.  He didn't need to be a rich man's son.

When he was seven, he got his first gun, and Jess taught him how to shoot.  That came in handy when there was a drought six months later, and things got bad on Shadow for time.

"We fight for what's ours," Momma said, and the boy stood with Jess and the hands, defending the ranch against water thieves.

The troubles lingered, and the Alliance sent troops in, to help the honest ranchers.  Temporary aid, it was called.  A year later, they were still there, maintaining a substation in Shadowtown.

Things were changing, and Momma decided it was time to look away from Shadow to keep up, to keep things smooth.  So the boy whose feet had never left the ground went off-planet, as his Daddy had once wanted.

He learned that there was far more to the sky than what had always been just above his head.

They spent six months on Hera, while Momma learned about new feeds and irrigation techniques, and he went to a real school for the first time.  Hera was a softer world than Shadow, but the people were tough, honest and friendly.  He thought he might like to come back someday.

For his tenth birthday, he traveled with Jess to Persephone, looking to buy new breeding stock.  It was a long haul, and he found out how deep the black really was.  It was easy to forget how confining the ship felt after a life on the prairie, when so much freedom lay around you in the darkness.

Persephone was a lively world, with touches of Core fineness, though it had plenty of rough edges.  Jess introduced him to other ways of doing business, and let him see that friendly people weren't always honest.

He grew older, was given more responsibility for running the ranch, as things kept on changing.  Trade restrictions got tougher, and there was talk of taxes.  He and Jess took more trips to other worlds, looking for ways around the laws and rules that were piling up.

On each journey, he got a little more education in the strange ways of people living different sorts of lives.  Once, about when he was sixteen, their return tickets on a liner got booted up to first class.  Being surrounded by so many fine-talking and fancy-dressed people brought back memories both sharp and dull.  They started him to thinking, which in turn led to brooding.

Which after a time led him to ask a question.

"Momma, did Daddy run away with a whore?"

She slapped him across the mouth, the first and last time she ever struck him.  "Your Daddy made a choice. So did I. You remember this--everything costs something. Everyone ends up paying a price for what they truly want."

He thought he understood.  It would be a few years before the remembering really hurt.

It got harder to do business.  The hand of the Alliance kept reaching out further, pushing decent people down.  One by one, the Rim worlds began severing all ties with the central government.  Pretty soon, some border worlds followed suit.  Life got tougher, but folks held on.  The news-feeds were soon saturated with one item--Unification.  But word came by wave and by ship of a movement, a cause, an idea to unite the like-minded.  Independence.  On Shadow, it caught on fast.

By his twentieth birthday, the young man was wearing a brown coat.  A year later, he took part in a coup that rid Shadow of Federal troops.  There was no more outside trade, except with the nearest Independent worlds.

When a transport ship touched down that spring, it brought talk of war.

"It was bound to happen," Momma said.  "The ones out there, the ones who have it all, they've never really understood."

"We'll fight for what's ours," he said.

"We always have."

So he made a choice.  It wasn't just for the ranch.  It was for Shadow, and the only way of life he'd ever known.  For Momma, and the sadness he knew she'd kept hidden from him ever since Daddy left.  To prove that Daddy had made the wrong choice.

The war waged on for five long bloody years, but he always fought with the same fervor he'd started with, the same unwavering belief in the cause.  It was only towards the end, after he learned Shadow had been overrun, that doubt and regret began to eat at him.

And when he vowed the same thing wouldn't happen to Hera, then lived through the horror of watching a world die around him, he truly felt pain for the cost of choosing.

He didn't think it could cut any deeper.  But as he and Zoe and the other survivors waited on an Alliance sky-plex to be processed and turned loose, he asked questions about getting home.  There had to be something to rebuild on.  After being shifted around from one disdainful Alliance official to another, he finally got the ear of a sympathetic aid-worker.  Finally, word came back--he had no home, no family to return to.

All he had left was a legacy of pain.

No world could hold that pain.  No world would ever hold him again.  He looked to the sky for something else he could call his own, which would always be worth fighting for.  It might take him years, but he would find it.

******

The salesman kept looking at him funny.  He didn't much care.  This was the right choice, the right ship.  He had a name all picked out.  He couldn't wait to show it to Zoe, and tell her about the life that lay ahead.

They were headed for the sky.  In the black, there was freedom.

******