Zoe focused on the altar in their--her--bunk. The smoke from the incense in front of Wash's picture curled up in tight gray spirals.

Her gaze was hot, tearless. She burned. She felt that the skin on her hands, pressed, fisted, to her thighs, was too taut. She felt as though she would split, down the back, emerge something bloody, dark, held together by only its own willpower.

She wanted blood.

Wash's face smiled at her, blank from behind the glass. If he'd been alive she'd have killed him.

Everyone treated her as though she were behind the glass, she thought. Normally she was above such thoughts...

Normal, she thought with a tight, aching bitterness. Nothing was normal. She wanted blood--she wanted her own...Her eyes burned, her fists tightened. The rage grew. She had to hurt, had to kill...had to...it was something, it grew like a cloud over her until she split, split a thousand times, but the tears did not come, nothing came, and she waited... she was waiting... she wanted it... she wanted something to take her, something to hurt her, something she could hurt...

Inara raised her head from her hands. Mal was gone; it was, Inara realized vaguely, better that way-- She was alone, and that, too, was better. The fights. They made sex hotter, she realized with the same external part of her brain that had acknowledged the necessity of his leaving. He had taken his crew (his family, she thought, and jealousy left a slight undertaste in her mouth) to dinner; she loved his generosity. He was a mystery; she loved his mystery. She loved his touch. Her body acknowledged this; she shoved the acknowledgment away almost forcibly.

She stood, her arms skimming the peach silk of her dress. Her eyes half-closed--something in the touch of skin against fabric--touched her...

She shook her head, her curls brushing the nape of her neck in a disturbing fashion. Maybe a cup of tea would calm her...nerves. Or she could raid Jayne's bunk for some jiu. Anything to make her system forget Mal. It couldn't