A/N: I think that this story is pretty self-explanatory, although it's helpful for the Doctor Who bit if you've seen the episode "The Doctor's Wife," which was my inspiration. The timeline's a bit fuzzy, but is definitely pre-"The Angels Take Manhattan." For Firefly it takes place post-"Serenity." There are spoilers for both series.

Chinese is all from the Firefly Pinyinary and is indexed at the end. Hopefully it makes sense. =)

Sexy and Serenity

By Debesmanna

"How did you meet her?" asks the man in the bowtie.

This could be a dangerous question. Mal has met a lot of hers, in a lot of painful ways—and he's a little too drunk to remember if he's been talking about a specific "her" within earshot of this stranger. There's Zoe further down the bar, who he'd met on the battlefield. Or maybe River, who left her stool a few minutes ago (hours ago? How much has he had?) and is currently…somewhere. Their meeting makes for an interesting story, but there are far too many illegalities involved to tell it to a stranger in a bar. And he doesn't like to remember Kaylee with blood on her teddy bear coveralls.

Actually, when he thinks about it, Kaylee might be the only girl that he met without the involvement of mayhem and bloodshed. Oh, Inara too, although he associates so much danger and embarrassment with her that he tends to forget their relatively benign beginnings. Then there're his less savory women acquaintances, Patience, who shot him, Saffron, who married him and tried to steal his ship and kill him and all of his crew…

Realizing that he's been blinking dumbly at Bowtie for too long, he asks, "Who her?" and immediately hears Ma Reynolds scolding in his head: If you talk stupid, then stupid is what you become to any folk that hear.

But Bowtie just grins, rocking from side to side on the barstool next to Mal like a kid who can't sit still. "The lovely lady parked out back." When this fails to elicit anything from Mal other than a raised eyebrow, Bowtie clarifies, "She's quite attached to you. Anybody could tell. Well, maybe not anybody, but anybody who's spent as long as I have traveling in the time vortex with a particularly…willful TARDIS. Which is only me, come to think of it. Still, she's a real beauty! Nothing on my TARDIS, of course, but then, I've yet to meet a ship that is."

Several of these things don't quite make sense. If he takes a moment, then he can probably figure out what they are. But he does know that this hundan just insulted Serenity, which is more important.

"Stranger, are you callin' my boat second-best?" If he speaks a little more aggressively than is strictly necessary, then he can just blame it on the alcohol. Right? Right.

Bowtie man doesn't look fazed at all. Possibly, he's had more than his fair share to drink too. Instead his smile widens, and he leans forward a little, no doubt to slander Serenity some more. But Jayne, who is passing by with a whore under each arm, beats him to it.

"That piece of feiwu don't even qualify for second. It'd come apart if you blew on it too hard."

"Hey now!" says Mal indignantly—and, to his surprise, so does Bowtie. Jayne just laughs and makes for the back room. Mal can't quite muster up the energy to call him back and harangue him on Serenity's behalf at the moment, so he lets Jayne slip from his mind and refocuses on Bowtie.

Frowning, Bowtie says, "Now that's not fair. She looks like a tough old ship to me."

Mal nods, and finishes off his drink. He hasn't forgotten his annoyance, but he can let it go for a moment; he never misses an opportunity to compliment his girl. "She don't look like much, but she's the best ship in the 'verse."

"Well, meaning no disrespect to her, I can't agree. There's no ship can compare to my TARDIS."

And finally it registers through the haze of alcohol in Mal's brain that "TARDIS" is a name. "She your boat?" he asks. Bowtie nods enthusiastically.

"Not as flashy as yours, maybe, but there's more to her than meets the eye." His grin makes him look even more like an overgrown schoolboy in his grandfather's clothes. "That's how I can tell about yours."

What it is about Serenity he can tell, Mal isn't quite sure. But just like that, all is forgiven. Of course a captain has to think that his own ship is the best that ever flew. Even though Mal's sure that Serenity is the most gorgeous lady in the sky, he can respect that a fellow captain's loyalty lies elsewhere.

Mal grins in return. "Didn't catch your name, stranger."

"I'm the Doctor, hallo!" He holds out his hand to shake, which Mal obliges. He doesn't ask what the man's a Doctor of. He's heard stranger handles in his time.

"Captain Malcolm Reynolds. Ain't many as would call Serenity flashy. What model are you flyin'?"

"She's a Type 40 TARDIS. Probably not a class you would have heard of—only 305 ever made and, to my knowledge, only one still flying." If the stranger's enthusiasm fades for a moment into nostalgic sadness, if Mal notices the old eyes in his young face, then the Doctor quickly recovers, and Mal thinks it only polite to pretend that he hadn't noticed. Every man has shadows in his past, and he has a right to keep them in the past. The Doctor hastily changes the subject. "So she's called Serenity! Quite a lovely name. A lovely idea, that. Serenity. Ser-EN-i-ty. The state of being serene. The calm after the storm."

Mal snorts. He finds himself enjoying this stranger's babble, when before it would probably have annoyed him. Perhaps his new and not entirely sane pilot is acclimatizing him to babble. He responds, "More like the eye of it. We do our best to keep our own peace, but that don't mean those around us are like to let us."

"Do you now? Keep your own peace? That doesn't sound very fun."

"I've had a bit more fun recently than I like." And if Mal's own shadows sound in his voice or show in his face, the Doctor returns the courtesy of letting them lie.

Or at least, he intends to, as he asks no questions, only tilts his head to one side in a posture willing to listen. And it's easy, somehow, to talk to the fellow captain, with his young face and fidgety limbs overlaying a bone-deep weariness with which Mal himself is intimately familiar. It's easy to let recent wounds spill over, to describe the faces that came to Serenity and found their home with her only to be taken in battle, in a war that Mal had thought he had stopped fighting years ago but which always seemed to catch up with him. He gives the Doctor Wash, and Book, and even Inara, not dead but also not come home again. In return, the Doctor gives him hints of who has come and gone from his own ship and home, gives him Donna, and Martha, and Jack, and Mickey, and Rose. With this last, he cuts himself off and Mal knows better than to ask. He knows that the Doctor's list of the lost goes on, as does his own, back to Tracey Smith and every other soldier that he lost in the war, back to his Ma and Shadow itself. The Doctor's war isn't the same as Mal's. That much is clear. But whatever it is, he too has paid with empty bunks on a boat that's too quiet.

But still, the Doctor smiles, and Mal wonders where he finds the strength. Then the Doctor says, "But you're still a captain of a working ship, so you must have a crew."

And Mal points them out, one by one. Jayne, who wouldn't reemerge till morning if he could get away with it, he'd met. There's his own doc, and his mechanic and surrogate meimei, having a cuddly moment on a couch on the other side of the room. It never ceases to amaze Mal how Simon can remain so proper and shy in his starched shirts and Kaylee so innocent and blunt with ever-present engine grease smeared on her cheerful face, and yet the two of them still manage to come together and stay together.

There's River, who is currently walking on the sane side long enough to use that big brain of hers to wipe the floor with anyone who dares to challenge her at billiards. Despite how Mal and River started out, fighting back to back with a woman tends to make a body kindly disposed toward her. It happened with Zoe, and it happened again with the little albatross.

And there's Zoe, the one who has stuck around the longest despite all odds, apparently trading tales of her own with a young couple farther down the bar. A red-headed woman smirks at a thin man sitting beside her, who is sputtering and coughing and turning an impressive shade of red. Mal is surprised to see Zoe brought to a rare moment of laughter.

"Poor Rory," says the Doctor mournfully. "He doesn't stand a chance."

"They your crew?"

"The best crew in the 'verse. The Ponds, Amelia and Rory."

"Well, they can't be the best, given who I've got," says Mal. But he concedes, "I'll give that they must be somethin' special. I ain't never seen nobody pull a real laugh out of Zoe exceptin' her late husband. At most a smirk. Maybe a chuckle."

The Doctor argues, "No, definitely the best. I only take the best. My old girl would never have anything less."

Something occurs to Mal then, and again, the reminder sounds suspiciously like it came from his Ma. "Now I have been remiss in my manners! You know Serenity, and I ain't even asked the name of your boat."

For a moment, the Doctor hesitates. "Well, other than just the TARDIS, which she mostly goes by…Sexy."

When Mal laughs, there's no meanness in it, and the Doctor joins him. The Doctor's sentiment is something that Mal understands. For the first time in a long time, the nagging pain of lost family lifts enough for him to remember the family he has left, Serenity included. And she's certainly the sexiest Firefly in the 'verse. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

A/N: Cheesy ending is cheesy! I'm not entirely happy with this story, but it was a lot of fun to write and there are certain things that I really like, so I decided to share it anyway.

As far as I can find we don't know how Mal and Zoe met, just that they fought together in the war, so I assumed that they hadn't met before then. If you know otherwise please correct me! Also, the only reason that I limited the list of the Doctor's lost companions as I did is because I've only watched New Who, so I thought it best to stick with what I know. =)

I appreciate feedback, both positive so that I know what I've done right and can do more of that, and negative so that I can get better! But regardless, thanks for reading!

Chinese:

Hundan—jerk, bastard, scoundrel

Feiwu—junk, trash

Meimei—little sister. In the series, Mal consistently uses it as a term of affection for Kaylee.