Zoe didn't like the pilot, it was true, but at the moment, she could have kissed him.

The four of them had been eating dinner while Bester droned on about a "smoking hot chick from Osiris" and it seemed a question of whether Mal or Zoe would be the one to shut him up. To everyone's surprise, it was the pilot.

"Don't you have some mechanic things to be doing?"

Bester looked taken aback for a moment before replying "Don't you have some pilot things to be doing?"

They argued for a few minutes before settling into a stony silence, and Zoe remembered that she didn't like the pilot.

She wanted to like him, she really did. He was an excellent pilot, and Mal wasn't likely to get rid of him anytime soon, so she really tried to like him. She tried to at least figure out why she didn't like him.

He was childish, certainly. But he had been perfectly professional during the interview, and he had still bothered her. The mustache was definitely part of it. It seemed to attract the eyes, like something grotesque and alien that had landed miraculously on his face. There was more to it than that, she knew, but, she couldn't quite place it.

The pilot had been deterred by her coldness toward him, and, for the most part, given up on trying to get a conversation out of her, but he still attempted the occasional kind words her way. He did so now, but she was too distracted by the patch of dirty-blonde fur growing above his upper lip to hear what he said.

"Would you just shave the damn thing off?" she yelled. Everyone stared at her. There were a few moments of stunned silence followed by an outbreak of talking.

"So that's why you didn't want to hire him?" Mal said, half amused and half irritated.

"You didn't want to hire me?" Wash asked, looking hurt.

"So you don't like mustaches..." Bester said thoughtful, stroking his upper lip where he'd begun to grow one.

"...the best pilot in the 'verse, and you don't want to hire him because of a mustache?"

"I like my mustache!"

"Enough!" she shouted, silencing everyone. "It just bothers, me is all," she siad to Wash, before striding out of the room.

She slept badly that night. Whe she finally fell asleep after hours of simlpy laying in bed, she had a strange dream. The captain was dancing with the pilot, whose mustache was steadily growing bigger and bigger, while Bester was trying to get her to dance by bribing her with an orange. She had begun to tell him that she wouldn't dance with him for a hundred oranges, when suddenly there was the sound of a machine gun and they were all in Serenity Valley. Dark shapes were coming over the hill, and no one seemed to notice. Mal and the pilot (whose mustache now reached his knees) kept dancing, and Bester offered to throw in some grapes. One of the shapes seized the pilot and as she raised her gun to shoot it, something grabbed her from behind.

She awoke with a gasp and turned on the light. Nothing happened; the bulb must have burnt out. People on the core had heat-free ligts that could last millions of years, but they were stuck with fei oo that was old on Earth-that-was.

There were some candles in the drawer of her desk, and she tried to feel her way over there. She tripped on the chair and they both toppled over with a loud crash. She heard running footsteps above. Standing up, she fumbled in the drawer for a candle and the matches. She lit the candle just as the hatch opened and the pilot climbed into her room.

"Are you all right? I heard a noise," he said, looking worried.

"I'm fine, I just fell," She said, gesturing to the fallen chair.

"Oh," he said, and there were a few moments of awkward silence before he said "So, uh, what's with the candle?"

"Light went out, had to- You shaved your mustache!"

"Oh, yeah. I just thought…" he trailed off. "Um, what were we talking about?"

"The candle that's likely to burn me alive in my sleep."

"Oh, look on the bright side," He arranged his fingers in front of it so that the shape of a rabbit flared against the wall, then said in a squeaky voice, "It's very good for shadow puppets!"

Zoe laughed for the first time ever in front of the pilot. He smiled and continued, adding a shadow wolf to the cast. "'Arr, I do not like you, rabbit, for you have a mustache'" he said in a rough, evil voice, before reverting to the shrill tone for the bunny's reply. "'Well, that's- wait, how does a bunny have a mustache?' '…well, um… it's a shadow puppet show, not Shapespeare!'"

As she laughed, Zoe realized what it was that had bothered her. He was too nice. Ever since the war, all she thought of nice people was that they were the kind who would get killed early on, or else become the ones who simply sat there, empty, with a hollow look in their eyes. With him it was worse, because she knew that if he ever died, if he ever got hollow eyes, the world would have lost something precious, something purely innocent and good, and she didn't like to think of that.