Title: Bullet Tears

Summary: For Firefly Friday. Inara has a breakdown shortly after she comes to the Black.

Rating: G

Word Count: 771

Bullet Tears

She collapsed onto her bed, pushing her nose into the silky-soft pink sheets, breathing in the latent scent of incense with greed and hunger and utter desperation as the white hot tears she’d been holding back all afternoon began to stream mercilessly down her cheeks. They rained out of her like a winter monsoon on Sihnon, each droplet of moisture falling out of her eyes with fury hitting the bed sheets like an angry, iridescent bullets looking for a target. They left her shaking there on her bed, shriveled and dehydrated, a tangled mess of thoughtless limbs curled into nothing. This was real crying. This was real, ugly, undignified crying, the kind that leaves you shaking for days. This was crying that was loud and frightening and without pride. Inara let it wash over her, unyielding.

She could have stopped it. She knew how. But she just didn’t want to. Not even if it was loud and ugly, certain to be heard by the six strangers on the ship who she’d shared the last two months with. Not even if the captain, such a mystery and full of judgment, heard her and used this against her tomorrow when they were trading quips at the dinner table. Inara didn’t care about the consequences. She didn’t care about tomorrow. All she cared about was today. All she cared about was what she was feeling right now.

She was lost. She was lost, alone on a chè fēn bié in the middle of no where, million of millions of miles away from everything and everyone she had ever known and loved. She was lost, utterly and truly, in every sense of the world, and she was crying, sobbing, and she didn’t care.

She’s sent her day at a tar processing facility. A tar processing facility. In her mind lingered violin concertos and dulcimer quartets that played at dances on Sihnon, the smell of all the women’s flowery perfume flooding the floor, and the feel of her silk dresses across