Firefly Glen (m) Have I known you twenty seconds or twenty years?

And then the lights went out.

The stars zipped away, as if a great breath had been drawn through the glen, and when Ibis turned her eyes upon the shape she recognized it as some kind of beastly thing; not a woman nor a man, something androgynous and threatening, with a voice not unlike distant thunder rumbling in anticipation to a storm. A part of her was enthralled - charmed. She did not immediately shrink back from the domineering presence like she should have (like she would have, too, on any other day) but stood boldly before it.

From behind her came the voice of Mal; Ibis looked away for a split-second and traced his mottled silhouette in the dark, finding relief in his presence, a sigh easing some tension from her chest but not abating her fluttering rabbit-heart. The feeling of heat in her belly grew stronger as she looked at him, and with an almost sleepy droop of her eyelids she smiled to him, drugged up on hormones. The girl remained somewhat oblivious to the third wolf that arrived; only vaguely peering around to where two glowing eyes were set among the trees, around which some of the tiny glen bugs had begun to resurface.

Evil-doers? Ibis drawls softly, speculative. Has she done something wrong? She did not understand - why couldn't they all get along?