Rated PG-13 for language. Comments welcome, and no, I don't know where I'm going with this, either. But it'll be fun getting there, although the chapters may not all come this quickly.

Read Chapter One here .

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Chapter Two

“Captain?” Zoe asked.

Nathan ignored her and concentrated on not throwing up. The stars weren’t moving, but there was a very definite feeling of movement from the ship that his brain insisted on combining with the view to come up with “falling.” Alarmingly, his stomach seemed to concur.

“OK,” he said to the stars, “Not a lot of options here. Option one, I’m dreaming all this and I need to stop obsessing on my job so much before I start dreaming about repairing jukeboxes or shooting at slugs that aren’t there.”

“Maybe the doc oughtta come up here, you think? Hon?” Wash said. “For a little visit? We really don’t see him enough anymore.”

“Not a bad notion. No, don’t use the intercom, we don’t want this broadcast. Go get him, I’ll stay here with the captain.”

“Option two,” Nathan said, “I’ve gone crazy, in which case I can ride this out until they find the right stuff to stick in me to bring me out.”

Zoe stepped closer, carefully not making any sudden moves. “Sir, I really think you should sit down, get some rest. Doc said you might have a concussion from that last job. You got hit pretty hard.”

Nathan looked back over his shoulder. “Option three,” he told her, “I’m really here and I’m really him, and something is seriously fucked up.”

“I can’t argue, sir.”

A new voice said, “Where is he?” Nathan stared past Zoe to see... Simon, not Sean, coming towards him. Things were a mite confused right now but still he could tell right away that this man was a doctor and not someone playing one on TV. Cool hands lifted his eyelids; a bright light made him blink anyway. “His pupils react normally, nothing unusual I can see. You say he was raving?”

“Or possibly ranting,” Wash said. “Maybe even rambling.”

“He’s not acting like himself,” Zoe said.

Nathan started giggling. “Not my fault, no one’s yelled ‘action’ yet...” Was the room spinning a little, or was Wash doing donuts?

“Oooookay, time for all good captains to go nite-nite,” Simon said. “Wash... um, no, Zoe, would you mind...?” Zoe took Nathan’s arm and helped Simon walk him back off the bridge towards sickbay. It wasn’t an easy voyage, especially since Nathan insisted on stopping at landmarks along the way.

“Oh, look, you got the kitchen and everything all fixed up, that’s nice.” The galley cheered him up a bit. Those were always the best scenes to shoot, when everyone was around the table. Bitch to get a shot in the can, everyone laughing and trying to mess each other up, and they had to shoot all the scenes a thousand times to get all the over-the-shoulder angles, but it was homey and comfortable. Nathan had spent more than a little off-camera time hanging around in here, just for the feel of it. They all did. Especially Summer; she would spend hours in here learning her lines and getting into character and trying to find where Nathan had hidden her script. Usually he’d cram it into one of the cupboards she couldn’t reach.

Funny thing, this looked somewhere between the TV show and the movie versions. It was smaller, like on the show, but it had the realistic details from the movie like more cabinets and nets over the shelving and stuff like that. Weird. What would he find if he started rummaging around? Cans and frozen packs and whatever the hell it was that they ate? One of Summer’s scripts? If he opened enough doors, would he find the studio?

“Yes, Mal, we knew you’d like it,” Simon said. “I didn’t smell any alcohol on his breath. Has he been taking any pain medications? Like, a lot of pain medications?”

Zoe shrugged. “He ain’t much for anything that dulls the pain of anything, if you take my meaning.” They hustled him up the steps out of the galley area and headed for the stairs down to the lower levels.

“That’s right,” Nathan bellowed to the world at large. “I’m a tortured, hollow, soulless prick of a man! Captain Malcolm Reynolds, professional smuggler and part-time asshole!” He set his feet, causing both his carriers to swing around abruptly, facing him. “I’m not really him, you know,” he told them solemnly, weaving. “I am so not that guy.”

Simon and Zoe exchanged glances. “Of course not,” Simon said carefully. “You would never be... him. Him is not who you should be at all, should he, Zoe?”

“No! You should be you, obviously,” she said, smiling broadly and nodding along with Simon. “You should be a really good you, sir. A you that could walk would be good.”

Simon peered up at Nathan. “Whom, exactly, would you be right now?”

“You guys know me, I’m—“

“You’re waking everybody up, is what you’re doing,” Jayne said. Jayne Cobb, the Hero of Canton, all 6’4” of him, strode into the galley like he’d just made the last payment on it and started opening cabinets. “You guys gonna yell like that, decent thing to do would be to take it outside. Be sure to close the hatch after you leave.”

Zoe and Simon both opened their mouths to respond but Nathan beat them to the punch. Suddenly he was standing straighter, taller, more confident. Captainy. “And how would you know the decent thing to do, Jayne? You read it in a book somewhere? Sorry, not a book. A fortune cookie?” He turned back to Simon. “You guys still have fortune cookies in the future, right?”

Simon nodded slowly but Nathan had already gone back to Jayne. “What I do on my boat is my business, best you get used to that, dong ma?”

Jayne spread his hands. “Hey, I got it. Just speaking my mind, is all. Not like you wouldn’t shoot me in the kneecap if I woke you up at this hour of the night, screaming about smuggling and hollow and stuff.”

Zoe tugged Nathan back in the right direction. “C’mon, sir, we have to go get our inocs before we reach Tethys, right?” she said loudly. Nathan stared Jayne down for a long moment before spinning on his heel and marching forward, leaving Zoe and Simon to rush after him.

“Damn me, I am a mean bastard,” he said. “That felt natural.”

Unusually for TV show sets, Serenity had been built in two long continual pieces for a more realistic feel and so long shots could be done without breaks. Still wasn’t as long as tromping down three flights of metals stairs, though. Nathan looked around sickbay, curious. “Hey, what is this thing, anyway? We always figured it was for pulling bingo numbers out of,” he said, holding up a round device.

Simon took it gently out of his hands. “It’s an autoclave and we treat it very carefully. Please, Mal, lie down.”

“Oh, right, got to get with the fixing up.” Nathan clapped his hands together once and fairly leapt into the chair, bouncing a little. “This is damn comfy, you don’t mind my saying so. Almost worth getting killed a bit to end up here.” He started to unbutton his shirt and froze.

He didn’t have the scars.

He didn't have Mal's scars. They’d see he was a different guy and a lifetime of science fiction had taught him that would be bad. It would disrupt the space-time continuum and all life as he knew it would stop instantaneously as every molecule in his body would explode at the speed of light, or something like that. He yanked his shirt back together. “You just wanted to look into my eyes again, right?”

“No, I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything before. I’ll need to examine you.”

“You didn’t miss anything. Zoe, tell him he didn’t miss anything. That’s an order.”

Simon put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “It’s all right. Although if you’re trying to reassure me of your sanity, you’re kind of not. Please, captain, take off your shirt.”

Nathan looked at Simon’s hand, cool and comforting, with a sudden sense of horror. Oh, God. It’s hoyay. And here he always thought they were kidding with the slash fiction. He eased back onto the bed but he sought out Zoe and stared at her, willing her to stay in the room. Don’t leave me, he thought desperately. I don’t want to find out what kind of story I’m in without armed backup. “Zoe...”

Simon said, “Huh. I was sure you’d have--”

“Oh, hey, don’t worry about it, those things heal up all the time. My cousin once had a scar went ear to ear and one day it just...” Nathan looked down at his own bare chest. There were scars there. And they didn’t look as if they’d peel off.

A crescent-shaped one was carved under his right shoulder. There were assorted old bullet wounds here and there. An angry red dimple in his side reminded him of freezing cold, gasping lungs, and metal gratings leaping up at his face. Another close to it spoke of a sword biting him on a foggy morning. And a strange, round, red scar in the center of his chest caused him to shiver uncontrollably. This body remembered getting that mark, remembered unending, rippling pain like having all the blood in his veins ignited at once, remembered dying.

He didn’t realize he’d passed out until he started coming back around. Someone was talking and they were probably talking about him, so he decided to stay asleep a little longer. He was going to have to be Mal, through and through, at least until he figured out what was going on, and one way to do that was to get more information. He listened intently while trying to ignore the gibbering fear in the back of his head. And the front of his head, come to think of it.

“—think it’s just stress, combined with the blow to the head from that smuggler,” Simon was saying. “The smuggler that wasn’t Mal, I mean. I was expecting to find signs of physical trauma that might have caused him to experience symptoms of shock but he’s fine.”

“So he’ll be all right?” Zoe asked.

“He should be. He just needs more rest.”

“You know we’re supposed to arrive at Tethys in 18 hours and the Larkin boys are gonna expect to see the captain upright and talking since the meeting was his idea and all.”

“As long as he spends 17 of those hours asleep, he should be fine. I can give him something to help.”

A new voice spoke up, very close by. “He’s very far away. He went away and left a shadow puppet behind to play the part, but the understudy doesn’t know the words, doesn’t know the steps, doesn’t know the tune, and the curtain’s rising and he’s afraid.” Nathan opened his eyes to see River inches away from him. He held his breath as she examined him closely, like an interesting pet. Her eyes were even bigger than Summer’s, more piercing, and that was saying something. They were slightly unfocused but not like she was looking at something else. More like she was looking at something in a different direction that happened to be right where he was.

Simon drew her back. “He’ll be fine, River,” he said, and Nathan had to bite his tongue to keep from congratulating Simon on finally getting his sister’s name right on the first take. “The captain’s had a rough time of it lately. We all have.”

“This one hasn’t,” she said, but she skipped out of the room to sprawl on the couch outside, still staring at him.

After reassurances, some apologies, and some of what Nathan considered his best acting ever, he allowed himself to be escorted back to his bunk. “I’ll be fine, you said so yourself and I understand you were a very promising intern before you turned to crime.”

Simon shrugged. “You rest. Someone will bring you some dinner later.”

“Not Jayne. I like my food without bites missing. And not...” Nathan sat down heavily. Inara. What the hell was he going to do about Inara?

Simon left him alone with his plight. What was he going to do about any of them, for that matter. Wash was still alive and River was still crazy, so clearly the movie hadn’t happened. Was Inara still on the ship? Was Book? Was the movie even going to happen? Maybe the show was just... going on. He’d always felt it was canceled before its time. Maybe Someone Else thought so too. A Flying Dutchman kind of thing, a show cursed to run forever through endless seasons, sailing eternally through sweeps weeks of the damned.

Which had its own horrors. Would there be commercials? When you faded to black, did it hurt?

He sat up straight in the bed. What if me being here means that Book and Wash don’t have to die?

Maybe that was the reason he was here in the first place. The events the Operative set… would set in motion would cause the havoc and bring the darkness. If Nathan just shot him in the head when he first saw him, instead of in his armored chest, everything would change and he could quantum-leap his way back home. True, the worlds would probably never find out about Pax and the Alliance’s experiments, but he could still tell Simon why River was crazy and maybe they could fix her up without having to go through all that hell.

This could work. He hoped so, there weren’t any ion-storm-affected transporters in this reality, or magic dimension hopping, or slingshotting around stars or any other funky and implausible way to get him back to 21st century L.A. “Thanks Joss,” he muttered. “You had to make it real.”

There was a knock; his hatch opened and Shepherd Book climbed down, carrying a covered plate. “Thought you could use a wholesome, nourishing meal,” he said. “Sadly, all I could find was this.”

Nathan smiled. Of the crew he’d met, only Book seemed to be a virtual duplicate of his actor. Ron had many of the same qualities as Book, apart from the mysterious and violent past. As far as Nathan knew, anyway. “Yeah, but food always tastes better when someone brings it to you. Whole societies have been based on that simple truth. Thanks, preacher.”

“Any time.” Although Book had a low chuckle where Ron had a loud and hearty laugh, Nathan noticed, like that big guy in the old 7-Up commercials. No caffeine. Never had it, never will. Ha ha ha! “I understand you were away from us for a spell. Mind talking about it?”

Whoops, here we go. “Weren’t nuthin’. Just a few bubbles in the brainpan, I expect. Ever shake up a fizzy drink? That would be me. I’m fine, now. Plus I have a wholesome, nourishing meal to enjoy.” He held up the plate. Something under the cover sloshed.

“Well, you rest easy. You’ll need to be on your toes tomorrow, from what I hear.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

Book stopped with one foot on the bottom rung. “Jake and Last Larkin aren’t going to be any too happy to see you, from what you said. You must have been pretty desperate to go to them for a job.”

Uh oh. Nathan put down the plate. This was a closing act line coming up, he could tell. “Why not?”

“According to you, the last time you saw them you killed their brother, and that's the sort of thing that stays with a person. Personally, I’m impressed you’re even going near their moon again.” He smiled reassuringly. “You must have some plan cooked up. Goodnight.”

Nathan sat perfectly still as Book disappeared up the ladder. Suddenly he knew exactly what fading to black felt like.

On to Chapter Three.