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"I need you to take me into town," River said solemnly the moment the ramp was down on Harvest on September 20th.
"If this is part of some sort of hare-brained scheme your brother cooked up to keep me from my time honored tradition of gettin' into a fight for U-Day—“
"I need to buy a pomelo," River informed him.
"Oh. Right. For moon festival."
She nodded.
“Couple days late for that,” he pointed out.
“Can’t buy a pomelo in the black,” River countered. “So I will get one now.”
"Sure," Mal decided. "Yeah, we can go into town for that."
It turned out to be the first time Mal hadn’t felt someone’s nose break under his fist on U-Day, but it was hard to care, or at least hard to drum up any actual resentment towards River. She’d read up on the history of Harvest and he was treated to his own private walking tour as they made their way through the downtown. She knew what she was looking for and selected an appropriate pomelo after smacking every single fruit the stand had available. After paying, she pulled Mal into another store and bought a gift bag for the pomelo and a package of rice candy, which she handed to him.
“Thank you for taking me shopping,” she said.
“Don’t need to be buying me candy about it.”
“Don’t need to be buying candy, don’t need to buy a pomelo, don't need to get fresh air or play card games or eat anything other than protein mush. Don’t need to do much of anything, really. But how miserable would that be?”
On their way back to Serenity, they passed Wash and Kaylee and Book, who were apparently planning an entire belated moon festival dinner, based on what Mal could see in their shopping bags.
“Didn’t celebrate most holidays before you showed up, mèi mèi.”
“Lying,” she said immediately. “Started having holidays right when Wash signed on.”
“You could sense that, huh?”
“No, he told me,” River said. “He likes talking.”
When they returned to Serenity, River skipped off to prepare her pomelo gift (Mal was pretty sure that it was meant for Simon), and Mal took a bit of a nap. Zoe looked genuinely surprised to see him coming out of his bunk later.
“Thought I ought to be doing scouting in town to find out what jail you landed yourself in.”
“Harvest’s only got the one jail, I think.”
Zoe rolled her eyes.
“Good to see you’re not in trouble or dead,” she said. “The party planning seems to be in full swing.”
Pears were plentiful on Harvest and they’d bought what looked like two whole crates. Inara had given herself the job of arranging them artfully on the table alongside the ends of lotus root that the Shepherd had already started chopping.
“Looks like no one bothered to ask the captain of this ship permission for an unusual something,” Mal said as he took a seat.
“Oh, sorry,” Simon muttered from his spot at the table where he was tying glowsticks onto twine. “I guess we can cancel everything if you like.”
“Now, I—“
“Captain you wouldn’t!” Kaylee exclaimed.
“Of course I wouldn’t!” Mal assured everyone. “I just…I would like to be made aware of things.”
“What do you need to know?” Jayne wondered. “It’s moon festival.”
“Sure. We just having dinner or do I have to scare up some presents?”
“Just dinner,” Inara assured him.
They hadn’t been able to buy a whole duck, but a few duck breasts would do the job, along with the lotus root dish Shepherd was working on.
“It's hard to find osmanthus wine out here," Inara added once they'd shown off the groceries. "But…" she smiled at Kaylee, who grinned right back.
"But! I bought a bunch of dried apricots that no one wanted last year on Kerry, and I made a wine out of them and it sorta almost tastes the same," she said. "So we have that for tonight."
Jayne whooped.
“Now it’s a real party,” he declared.
“We got some mooncakes too,” Wash announced, proudly displaying the two tins. “It just says an assortment but I figure we’re getting lotus and red bean and mung and five nut. The usual.” He grinned at River. “And I hear that Kaylee and River get to fight it out for who gets which empty tin.”
“I want the patchwork one,” River said immediately, and Kaylee made a silent gesture of victory in her chair.
"What was your favorite moon cake filling when you were growing up?" Kaylee asked Simon. "I bet you had some real fancy ones back home, right?"
"I'm sure they were available on Osiris," Simon said. "But our parents were partial to the traditional. I always liked the lotus paste."
"That right? How long can you stretch one?" Jayne asked.
"Stretch it? I always just ate a lotus paste mooncake in one sitting," Simon said.
"All in one sittin'?" Jayne scoffed. "By lookin' atcha you wouldn't think you'd be the kind of man to eat mooncakes all at once."
"What in the 'Verse does that even mean?" Simon wondered. Jayne gestured at him.
"Skinny fella."
"Oh. Well, I'm only eating about one or two a year," Simon pointed out. "Do you…ration them, Jayne? Where you're from?"
"Not so much ration ‘em as have to cut ‘em up and space it out. ‘Specially the lotus paste ones. They taste like a toothache.”
“A well balanced lotus paste cake shouldn't be too sweet."
"Well I didn't grow up with something well-balanced," Jayne countered.
"What’s your favorite, Jayne?" Shepherd wondered.
“Sesame.”
“Ah, that one’s my favorite too,” Shepherd said. “Though I have to admit I don’t eat them very often. Not seeking them out, I’ll say.”
"I had a jelly one on Bernadette once," Wash said. "Peach jelly insides and a white mochi skin. It was really good!
“Jelly!” Inara exclaimed. “It sounds sacrilegious. I think you can never go wrong with red bean.”
"I dunno,” Kaylee said with consideration. “I wouldn’t say no to trying some jelly mooncakes. The little lychee cakes from new year were sorta like that. Captain, what's your favorite filling?" She asked.
"Five nut."
Out of the corner of his eye, Mal saw Zoe still.
"Really?"
"Sure is," Mal confirmed.
"I was always under the impression that Shadow's traditional filling was a sort of white bean paste," Shepherd Book said.
"Yeah, well. Never really took to that stuff," Mal said.
"What is it that you like about five nut filling?" Inara asked. "The tradition of it? I've always found them so heavy they're practically inedible."
September, 2511.
Crawling out of Serenity Valley was near about as hard as fighting in it had been. Mal was extraordinarily lucky to still have all his limbs and both eyes, and maybe a week ago he would have been thanking God for that luck, but now, as he crawled through mud that was one part dirt, one part water, and one part blood, he couldn’t drum up a single positive sentiment for the Lord. They’d had to leave Graydon and Bendis to rot in the trench if they wanted any hope of surviving to see a relief ship of any kind come in, not to mention all the troops that Mal wasn’t familiar with, piled on top of each other, crushing their friends and comrades into the ground. Mal wondered if there would be body recovery of any sort, maybe a mass cremation, or if they would stay there and turn into the dirt of Serenity Valley. The smell was starting to register to him, despite his not inconsiderable tolerance; the guts and blood and shit all starting to blend and fester in a way that told the most primal part of his brain get out get out of here get out of here right away get as far away as possible.
So he did, and his unit followed him, or what was left of a unit he’d decided was his and any other stragglers they could find alive and able to move. Mal took turns with Zoe and a private named Irene carrying Tino, who was concussed and missing a foot, and other trios were sharing the load of other casualties.
The only shop in all of Serenity View Township with an intact roof and some kind of structure to bunker down in was what appeared to be a sort of stationery and gift shop. There were greeting cards fluttering around still, stacks of tissue paper had turned to soggy messes behind the cashier, odd little trinkets that a younger soldier told Mal were pencil toppers were scattered across the floors.
Nothing useful, but the electricity infrastructure of the region had long been destroyed so it was unlikely a grocery store would be any better. They’d passed one, and it had stank to high Heaven and clearly already been picked clean for shelf stable foods.
There was water. Miraculously there had not been enough time for any sort of city authority to shut down the utilities, and despite the shelling, there were still enough pipes left to keep them from dying. Who knew what sort of heavy metals or other toxins were in the water, but that wasn’t important now.
With the issue of water settled, they just had to settle in and wait either for relief ships or to die of starvation, whatever came first.
They’d already resorted to sharing a can of beans between groups of ten to fourteen and supplementing with speared trench rats during the battle itself, but it seemed like Serenity Valley might, for years, see a dip in the rodent population like an overfished sea, and there were no critters during their excruciating journey to shelter. Corner stores and apartment buildings were picked clean already, likely by fleeing civilians.
There were now just tubes of vitamin nut butters they were trying to reserve for the seriously wounded and a few precious protein bricks that were shrinking rapidly. Mal had nightmares of the survivors turning on each other, biting into their comrades’ flesh before their hearts were even completely still. He considered putting his service pistol to his own temple when the protein bricks were finally gone. He still had enough meat on him to keep Zoe alive for long enough to get out of here, surely, and she had family she could go looking for. Mal did not.
They soon ran out of the last of their supplies and it truly felt like going out with a whimper, because they’d been rationing so severely they were basically starving already. A few braver (or more foolish) souls gathered their strength and decided to leave in search of food.
"I'll be back soon," they all said. None of them ever returned. Mal hoped that they'd walked to some faraway abandoned farm and found grain stores and just didn't remember the way back. He hoped they had simply calculated that the journey back with supplies weighing them down was simply too strenuous. He hoped they'd decided to save themselves.
The rest of them all tried not to do much but lay there and drink water and crawl outside to piss. Don’t talk don’t grumble don’t move too much.
Mal didn’t listen to his own orders. He couldn’t help it. He was restless and he was angry and he wondered if maybe some hapless employee of this gŏu cào de gift shop had brought something good for lunch on their last day and forgot about it. Canned tuna or trail mix or even a packet of chips, crushed to dust but still providing something.
He’d never been a locksmith but he jabbed some forgotten bits of metal he couldn’t identify into the back room’s lock until the door gave up and swung open.
Crawling into the room didn’t offer much: this part of the store had taken some kind of ordinance to the roof and half of the stock was destroyed, and what was still intact was boxes of Autumn festival themed stock, mostly. Fake pumpkins, paper garlands of colorful leaves, stacks of lanterns. He brushed a matte metal tin to the side as he crawled along and then laid down on the floor. Part of him wondered if he was doing this because he was going to die soon, like the barn cat back home that had hidden in the cellar before it kicked the bucket. He turned his head to the side.
Mal's eyes slid over the tiny text on the tin. Some words stood out, words like "winter melon" and "pumpkin seeds" and "jinhua style ham" and "800 calories".
He jolted to full awareness and his heart started beating faster. He nudged the tin again and from the way it moved he could tell it was full. A closer look showed that the thin plastic tape around the seam of the top and bottom of the tin was intact. Trying to keep his breathing under control, Mal pulled out his knife and opened the tin.
Four shiny tan mooncakes lay there, nestled in clamshell packaging and still in their plastic wrapping. Mal was trying to calculate how many times he'd need to cut all of them for even distribution when he glanced at the ground in front of him and found himself looking at what must have been a few dozen tins, scattered around from the chaos of such a harrowing battle and some wayward shelling, but all still intact and neatly held closed with little bands of shrink wrap. He could have cried. The important part now would just be keeping everyone as calm as possible. Mal hesitated but in the end, he knew he would be far more effective a leader if he allowed himself a bite, so he tore one packet open and let himself enjoy the overwhelmingly dry sweetness of a mass market moon cake for a moment before tucking it into his pocket and crawling back into the main room of the store.
"Zoe."
"Sir?"
“Found something,” he muttered. She turned and crawled to meet him and he pulled her as out of sight of everyone else as he could manage and pressed the moon cake to her mouth.
“Sir—“ she mumbled around a small crumbling mouthful, and he could hear the worry in the single word.
“Ain’t hiding ‘em,” he promised. “No special treatment, neither. There are boxes full. Just need your help with distribution and you gotta have energy for that.”
He brought her to the storage room.
“If all of them are full, everyone could have at least two," she said. “Never mind if there are more tins in the rubble, which wouldn’t surprise me.”
"Let's divvy 'em up, then."
"Not whole ones," Zoe told him quickly. "They'll get sick, with how we've been eating for the past few weeks.”
They each took another bite and sat quietly for a while, letting the cake settle, and then they stacked the boxes by the door.
"Listen up," Mal said, raising his voice as much as he could, and a few heads turned or, if they were on the floor, rolled over in his direction. "We've found a bit of food. Stay where you are. I will be dividing it up and distributing it so everyone gets some, okay?"
He'd been prepared for pushback, for someone to rush him, for a fight to break out almost immediately. Instead, all he got was one clear thumbs up from a young woman who was leaning up against the shelf stacked with collapsible lanterns. The lack of response scared him more than anything else had.
“Whadja find, Sarge?” Pat asked. "Protein bars?"
"Beans?" Someone else guessed.
"Mooncakes," Mal told them. "Five nut kind."
Someone started crying.
"No cryin'!" Mal scolded. "It'll just tire you out. I’ll start cuttin’ ‘em up and I’ll be making my way around to everyone so you don’t get too tired.”
“You sure, sarge? Don’t tire yourself, neither.”
“I had a bite,” Mal admitted. “And you’re all gonna get one too. And you gotta eat it slow," Mal told all of them. "Savor it."
Someone laughed and Mal allowed himself a rueful smile.
"I know. But you gotta try."
Mal and Zoe settled into cutting the mooncakes into slices and when they’d piled enough of them all into one tin, Mal began shuffling around on his knees, handing out the bits. He had to feed a few folks, gently pressing the filling into their mouths one little nut and seed at a time between tiny sips of water, but eventually everything had been distributed. The last soldier to get one was Frank; a younger man that Mal kept thinking was Tracey whenever he saw him out the corner of his eye. Frank’s hand trembled as he took his piece and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.
"Slow! Slow, I said," Mal snapped, hooking an arm around Frank's neck and making him spit it back into his hand. "If you eat it fast you'll throw up and then it'll really be wasted, unless you wanna eat what you've tossed up, like a dog."
“God, I’m trying, Sarge.”
Mal kept a grip on Frank until he’d finished half of his allotment nice and slow.
“There’s more,” Mal promised. “Corporal Alleyne and I will keep distributing for as long as we have supply. Might be long enough.”
"You know, I used to pick out the bits of pork," Pat said quietly from his corner. He was helping Tino eat. "When I was little, I mean. I didn't think it fit with the rest of the filling. I'd feed it to the family dog."
"I did the same with the cured egg yolk that you get in some of 'em," Chunjiang said. "God, what I wouldn't do for an egg right now."
"Anybody ever put a table out?" Irene asked. "My mom and I used to put the incense table outside with fruit and cakes and dumplings and everything."
"My sisters used to do it," said special operations soldier Hàoyǔ with a fondness that Mal had never heard out of him. "They set out pomegranates and little pumpkins and melons and all that. They saved the really fancy incense for the festival and burned it in this holder we had that looked like a wolf howling at the moon. It felt appropriate for the holiday."
"Just your sisters? You didn't wanna participate?" Mal asked. Hàoyǔ shrugged.
"It's a traditional thing," he said. "Moon worship is for women."
“Oh. Huh. Didn’t know that,” Mal said.
“You Buddhist?” Hàoyǔ asked. Mal shook his head and reached for his cross.
“I’m…well. Maybe I gotta think about it,” Mal grumbled. Hàoyǔ graciously didn’t say anything.
Two weeks later, mercy ships arrived at Serenity Valley and the surrounding fields and townships. Medic teams in bright blue bearing stretchers and immediate emergency supplies descended on the giftshop while Mal and his comrades still had two tins of mooncakes left. Mal divvied those last eight cakes up too as the relief workers evacuated Tino and the other visibly injured amongst them first. The nuts and seeds sure went down smooth with the help of the little packets of optimized vitamin protein milk slurries and the promise of survival.
"I just like it," Mal told Inara, shrugging. "It grew on me. I never say no to a red bean paste one though.”
“Fair enough,” Inara said. “Can we depend on you to help with the clean up?”
“Yeah, ‘course.”
“It’ll be nice to have a dinner with friends,” Zoe murmured. “Rather than getting in a fight.”
And it was.
The duck was a little over-seasoned, likely because everyone cooking had gotten used to having to mask the flavor of stale protein, but it was still tender and tasty. Book steamed the lotus roots with sesame oil and added a few carrots, and there was a dish of some sort of green vegetable that Kaylee and Wash did not seem to be able to agree on the name of. Mal was pretty sure it was bok choi but Wash was adamant that it was something else, although he didn't provide an alternative. The glowsticks that Kaylee had found in some supply crate and had given to Simon to string together served as a perfectly adequate replacement for lanterns, hung between the two pillars in the galley over the stove, and River's pomelo gift for her brother went into the middle of the table as part of the centerpiece.
Mal and Jayne and River did most of the clean-up right after dinner, not wanting to have to be confronted with the bulk of chores after they'd had cake and wine, and soon enough there were dishes in the drying rack and Kaylee and Simon were putting out the mooncakes and little cups of wine and tea out for everyone. One of the little mooncakes went onto its own plate and Kaylee sat it down in front of Mal's chair.
"There you go, Captain," Kaylee said. "Five nut mooncake, all to yourself!"
"No, no, no," Mal said, and reached into the utensil basket to take a drying butterknife. "No, everyone's gotta share it with me."