He’s not breathing.

She woke with her heart pounding in her chest.

Wash? Baby?

She rolled over in the too-wide bed and its emptiness pushed away the fog of sleep. Reality and dream separated in her mind. He’s gone.

She pressed at the blossoming ache in her chest. Determined not to think about her empty bed and arms, she dropped to the floor and pumped into her new routine: morning pushups.

He’s not breathing. I can’t… Captain, I don’t think he’s going to make it.

She froze mid-exhale, in full extension. Goose bumps crawled across her skin. It wasn’t a dream.

Simon’s voice had filled the bridge like a dark presence, pushing at her until Serenity was just a soft buzz and a blur of light in her vision. He’s not breathing. She had drifted. Numb. Unable to save her own. Powerless. Again.

“Zoë.” River’s voice, like thread on loose ends, had pulled her world together. “Jayne is breathing”.

The bridge blinked into focus.

She had sat there, dry-eyed in the place where Wash died, cursing and thanking the hwoon dahn who decided who lived and who died.

She had been afraid, couldn’t be otherwise. Jayne was crew, family… he was… She shouldn’t have gone to his bunk two nights ago. In a moment of weakness the sudden need for him had overridden common sense. She had gone to him, made love to him like she never allowed herself before, said all the things with her body that she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. No, she shouldn’t have gone to him, not while she was still so shaken up.

She pushed at the sudden wave of emotion washing through her.

Zoë suddenly sat down in the middle of the floor, closed her eyes, and rested her arms lightly on her bended knees. It had to work. Pulling herself apart during the war used to come easy enough, she could do it again. The war was long done, and a thing like shutting down emotions should be left behind with it, but she needed this now. It had to work.

She released the breath she shouldn’t have been ho