Title: Lesser for the Loss

Author: Sullen Siren (adena (at) direcway (dot) com)

Summary: Wash and Zoe call it quits.

Spoilers: None specific, though allusions to a few throwaway lines in Heart of Gold

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Mutant Enemy, Joss, Fox, etc. Not me. Never me.

Notes: Written for musesfool's "Two Line Challenge". Song lines were Pearl Jam's Nothingman. "Caught a bolt of lightnin'/Cursed the day he let it go."

He'd had her, and he'd lost her. It wasn't a new story, and the part of his mind that wasn't wasted in regret cursed the lack of originality. He was an original – it was what she'd loved in him. Now she was gone, and he was a cliché, and he wondered how much of what she'd seen in him was only there when she was looking.

Serenity seemed a lot smaller when you had to work to keep your paths from crossing between your bunks. He slept in the empty shuttle, but his things were still in the bunk where she was, and she'd not told him to move them. He'd kept hope because of that. Because her clothes and his were still intertwined in the too-full laundry bag; because she kept the sheets on the bed after he'd left. Because she just left, silently, when he came in to get something, and didn't tell him to go.

He'd gone planet-side this morning. He'd bought her cherries because he knew she loved them, and he loved the way they stained her mouth red, and how she tasted with the juice still on her lips. His things were laid out neatly on the bed of the cold shuttle. There was no note; she didn't stay to speak to him. Ghosts on a ship, drifting within feet of one another but never touching.

The controls of the ship had been soothing, familiar, and predictable before, when his toothbrush was still on the shelf beside hers. Now he looked past them to the empty black of space and realized how alone they were. He hadn't been, before. He won