She’s been in the Black a long time.

Serenity is home, place of character and chaos, love and loss, resurrection and final rest.

The light inside her smile has dimmed in recent months, since Early came, since the bad times. She’s still hopeful, still pining for a love that may never come, but she doesn’t know if she’ll live past the week. It’s been that way since the beginning, but for the first time, she feels the precipice.

There’s a boding feeling in the stars, heavy with news of Reavers and deals gone south, bits falling off the ship, her engines turning in her hands and breaking.

She’s been having dreams of a great crash on a graceful concrete planet under a sparking-arcing sky. And a city of bright industrial stone, gone cold and still, no breath. In the distance the whispered scream of rage. The dream feels like death.

It’s always the same dream, every night the same. She forgets the details as she wakes.

The city in her dreams is windswept but still, silent as the grave. Maybe it is one. Maybe it’s hers. Or maybe, and this is the part she wants to forget and so, each morning, manages to send away, maybe it’s death for the Shepherd. Or Wash. All she knows is that she wakes each morning thinking *harpoon* and *chaos* and *crash* and *plastic dinosaurs* and *Book, where’s Book?*

Shepherd us through the Valley, as God did for Mal. Cap'n will never acknowledge it, but he was lucky.

Any one you walk away from, right?

Kaylee is too young for these thoughts, but Serenity has brought them into her.

*Once you’ve been in Serenity, you never leave.*