1.
Mal enlists early, back before New Kashmir and Du-Khang, back before the Alliance started gaining ground, back before people start to lose hope in themselves. Even then, there's not enough to go around—not enough people to fight, or food to eat, or weapons to use. There's so little ammo that the captain tells all the new recruits to make every shot count, but so little ammo that there's not enough for the target practice that would make that possible.
He learns to make do with what he's given, mostly; bunking down on old straw mattresses, helping to teach some of the kids from the Core how to fight, choking down food that's just this side of palatable. But Mal keeps a hold of some things from before, refusing to carry one of the regulation firearms everyone was given in their first week's training.
Instead, he keeps his old revolver holstered at his side, the one his mother showed him how to use out in the pastures of Shadow, the one Zach showed him how to clean. It's not as fast to load as some of the newer models; but it's never jammed when he needed it, and it was his mother's before she gave it to him, and her father's before her. The grip is worn smooth from generations of use, and in the evenings, sitting round the fire with Zoe and the others, Mal lets his fingers brush against it, over and over.
2.
Months in an Alliance holding cell, longer in a jail cell, bound by strong walls and laws he doesn't believe in. Even when they remove the cuffs and let him have an officer's freedom, to walk around the exercise yard until exhaustion lets him sleep, Mal still feels like the walls are too close around him, compressing him, stopping him from breathing freely.
When he's finally released, he stands in front of Aberdeen Rehabilitation Facility One, tilts his head up to a blue and white sky, and breathes in. He's got nothing more than the clothes on his back, the gun strapped to his hip, and the freedom conferred in the release papers he has clutched in one hand. At that moment, he doesn't want anything more.
3.
Shadow is long gone by the time the Alliance releases him, nothing left of it but a ball of rock and soil and poisoned air, orbiting a distant sun. There's nothing to go back to, and Mal doesn't want to try.
He finds a ship in a junkyard on Whittier instead, Firefly-class and outdated and as battered-looking as he feels, and he belongs to it from the moment he first sets eyes on it. Mal begins to live with the thrum of a thin metal skin around him, the Black beyond that. Engine grease gets trapped under his fingernails as permanently as soil ever was back on Shadow, and slowly, he learns to make a home.
4.
They gather around him slowly over the years; or he gathers them; or to another way of thinking, they find him and make him theirs. Sometimes, Mal thinks, it's all of them at once. Zoe, first, steady at his side, who never leaves. Wash, later, and then Kaylee, all innocence and joy. Inara and Jayne, Book and River and Simon; they come and they leave and they return. He keeps them as close and as safe as he can, his crew; he loves them, and he keeps them at arm's length.
5.
Mal wears the absence of his faith like a prize, something hard-won and worth the earning. The Book his mother gave him, the cross and chain that all the hands chipped in to buy him the day he turned sixteen, his faith in a merciful God: he leaves them all behind in the dirt of a planet best forgotten. It's a kind of love he has, for the lack of it; the more so if it helps him hide what he never lost, the faith he's only gained.