Leaving had been the hardest thing she'd ever done. She'd left the only true family she'd ever had behind. Had left him behind. It had filled her with pain to look into his confused eyes and tell him that she was leaving. It was nothing compared to the ache that slowly killed her when he never came, not to tell her goodbye or to even convince her to stay.

It had taken every last drop of strength she possessed in her body to walk down the gang plank and to the vehicle loaded with her possessions. The vehicle that would take her to the Guild house and away from her family and Serenity, the only home she'd ever really known.

Her head told her that if he cared for her the way he had his crew that he would never have called her the horrible names he did. At first his usage of “whore” had stung, but over time it became a knife twisting in her heart until she thought she would die from the pain.

What hurt the most was knowing that he would share what she so longed for with Nandi, a woman, while wonderful in her attributes was more the name he so lightly used for her. He took what Nandi had to offer with more thought than what she gave to him on a daily basis.

She knew that day while in Nandi's spare room that to him she was nothing but a whore, no worse than the girls at the bordello, but certainly no better. She was nothing to him, but the role she played on Serenity as its ambassador.

Many of the girls wondered why since her return she had set up no appointments with anyone, client or otherwise. She couldn't tell them that the thought of someone touching her other than him turned her stomach. That even with all his hatred and cruelty toward her, she wanted no one else, that she loved him and always would.

Even know looking out over the city from her balcony she could picture his eyes and they way that they twinkled the few times she had ever fully seen him laugh. Could picture him ruffling Kaylee's hair, when he was in a rare playful mood, or bickering with Jayne over the choice of weaponry. It was those kind of thoughts that got to her the most and it made her inside's fuel with jealousy. How many times had she seen his affection and kindness toward others, but toward her, it was always jibes and insults against not only her profession but her.

She loved him with all of her soul, but her training had also taught her to love herself, and it was that love that had given her the strength to walk away. The Guild had taught them all about the pleasures of the flesh, that confidence on the inside was the true honey for the flies, emotional attachments to men would only bring heartache and betrayal. They were right. Look at where love had gotten her.

There had been many nights when anger at the memories and pain she felt in her heart made her want to scream. But she silenced her cries, locking them away inside where at times they seemed to burn her from within. At least the burn was better than the cold.

She stood here every night, sometimes until her feet and legs could no longer stand and she watched the sky. Looking for Serenity and trying to contain the small glimmer of hope that he would come back for her, finally realizing his mistakes and asking her to come with them. Parts of her heart would give anything to be in his arms where she had always imagined it being safe and warm.

Safe was something she had never known until the Guild. Having been found on the street at seventeen, an urchin who fought every day just to survive. It had been a teacher that had found her and over the course of a summer convinced her that she could have a good life as a companion. A better life than leaving on the streets, and stealing just to eat. She had worked harder than any companion to get where she was, doing in five years what girls usually trained their whole lives for. No one alive knew of her past, her teacher having died shortly before she found the ad for the shuttle on Serenity, and the only link to her past dying in an alleyway a knife through the chest. He had accosted her for money, having been blackmailing her for some time. When she had said no, and that she was leaving he had ran at her with the knife, saying that he would get his pay out of her one way or another. Life on the streets had taught her many things that people were not aware of and with a twist of her arm she had fought off the attack using the man's leverage against him to where he buried the knife in his own chest.

That day she had ran and hadn't looked back, vowing to put the past behind her and move on with her life. Serenity was supposed to be that start, vowing to only spend a few months there until she could locate a position on another moon. Her plans worked against her and on Serenity she had finally found a place that she felt could be home, that was until he had to flummox up her plans and leave her with no choice but to go back to a life on her own.

The pain of losing her family at nights was more than she could bear, she even missed baiting Jayne like she supposed a sister would to a brother. They were her family and he had ripped them away from her, leaving her no option but to leave. It was these thoughts that fueled the rage inside while keeping her composure cool on the surface and away from the ache in her that tried to whisper it's undying love for him.

Why did he have to hurt her, could he not have gotten past her profession to see her, to see the person she really was inside? Did he never really look to anything below the surface? Had she not tried to prove to him that she could be relied on in a crisis, that she could handle the mischief and the carnage that often went with it? Should she have tried harder to get through to him, stayed and fought it out with him until he gave up and finally saw reason? Maybe, if he'd never been with Nandi, she probably would have stayed, laughing and fight not only with them, but for them, with him.

Tonight was no different, her mind was in its continuous rotation of questions with little to no answers. Her soul reaching out for that one little glimmer on hope that someday he would come for her, the foolish little girl who refused to give up on the fairytale of knights on white steeds, or roughed up, war burdened criminals who rode in dilapidated spaceships. Her heart every night would grieve for them, for him and the love she longed to give him in her the recesses of her very being. She locked them away with her tears and the sobs that caught in her chest, every night as she watched the sky turn from inky black to the scarlet red morning of a new day.

Turning she left her heart and soul staring out the window waiting for him and curled up in her bed from exhaustion and a heart and body that ached to much for Mal to last another minute.

Leaving was the hardest thing she'd ever have to do and it was the leaving that killed her a little every night that she was away from him.