Everybody thought she was the strong one. The Amazon. The warrior, the fighter of battles, the lioness defending all she held dear. She spots her enemies, brings them down in a rain of bullets. Leaves them behind on a dusty world as Serenity tears away out of the sky.

The foes he fought were far more terrible. Doubt, fear, regret, distrust, envy.

They couldn’t be escaped. They followed everywhere, lurking just out of sight. They hung at the edge of the darkness at night—they were the darkness—waiting for his guard to drop. Gunfire would not touch them. Only the blade of his wit and the light of his spirit were strong enough to keep them at bay.

The ghosts of the past come forward in the night and threaten to consume her. She had carried their weight with her since the Valley and before, and even the force of her devotion to her sergeant, her captain, was not enough to drive them back. In his arms she found the only safety she had ever known. His embrace could banish her ghosts; it could send them howling into the vacuum of oblivion where they could harm her no more.

And in a moment, he was gone.

Everybody thought she was the strong one. They didn’t see that the short, semi-muscular man who joked more than fought was her wallguard, driving off enemies far more deadly to her than Niska or Early could ever have been. Enemies of the heart and soul.

She lays on her bunk at night, sleepless, the darkness pressing in around her even with the lights on. She clutches a pillow up under her chin, one cloaked in a pillowcase that she has not washed in weeks because it still carries the faint scent of his skin. She wears his Hawaiian shirts when she is alone in her bunk, a poor substitute for his body surrounding her in the night. She can feel the dread and the hatred and the guilt and the shame circling her, filtering into her soul through the cracks that she has never been able to fill, and that only he was able to defend.

He kept her human, but the influx of darkness she can’t flee slowl