Chapter Text
“You yelled at River today,” Inara says, massaging some scented oil or ‘nother into Zoe’s shoulders; she don’t much care to find the name of it, but she’s gotta admit there’s a certain appeal to all this, the velvet curtains and quiet simmering candles and the like. If one were itchin’ to find it.
Zoe rolls her shoulders, tense in a different way than before. Earlier that morning, she’d seen River fiddling with the nav settings while at the wheel, perfectly functional but different than how they used to always be set. Not even the first time, but today, it snapped something in Zoe she didn’t herself much like. She hadn’t known Inara had overhead, but she shoots back, all the same, “Apologized, too, you might recall.”
Inara’s hands, soft but clever, travel to Zoe’s back and presses the hollow there gently a moment, until Zoe gets the point and leans forward again, resting her head in the negative space between her arms as she clasps her hands together. Most others, she’d be on alert by now, especially with her eyes closed. She supposes she still is, a bit, but even seeing the knowing intent behind her friend’s eyes earlier as she offered the invitation back to her shuttle, Zoe hadn’t quite been able to shake the desire to just let go for a while. Not today of all days.
Inara hums. “I know.” Then, just as smooth in her voice but her grip growing shades firmer, the way she must know by now Zoe likes, she adds, quietly, “She isn’t him.”
A year ago, Zoe would have stared, blank-eyed and silent, at a comment like that. Now, she bristles, startled out of her reverie enough to push herself up and look over her shoulder, sheet slipping, propriety and whatever the hell else Companions are supposed to care about be damned.
To her credit, Inara seems to have expected it and don’t so much as blink when Zoe snaps out, “You think I don’t know that?” She watched her husband skewered right in front of her very eyes; she don’t got any illusions that he ain’t around no more, not as himself and certainly not as the freshly eighteen-year-old prodigy pilot who’s more clear-eyed than before, says more logical things in a more logical order, but still is somewhere far away in her head, in a lot of heads, most of the time.
“I think today was hard, and you’re angry.” Zoe blinks, then sighs. She figures the day’d have been just exactly this hard no matter what, one year to the very date, but especially since Miranda’s in the news again, too. An anniversary all around. Mal’s message hasn’t exactly turned any great tides, but hasn’t entirely faded, either. Seeing articles about it crop up on the Cortex that morning was just one more thing. One more way to be reminded.
“I ain’t angry with River,” Zoe sighs. “I’ll talk to her again.”
“Zoe, I know. She knows. That’s not what this is about.” Zoe tries to maintain a stony expression, though she feels her eyebrow pop up quizzically. Inara sighs herself then, before reaching out a hand so gentle, Zoe almost bats it away on instinct, sure something dangerous is coming for a moment, but Inara, god help her, only touches her cheek and looks her directly in the eyes. “You’re angry with him,” she says, not unkind or accusatory, but out loud, and that on its own is enough to get Zoe casting her eyes down, feeling the strain in her neck from looking back this way for this long.“For dying.”
Inara guides her back to lying on her front, then, and Zoe lets her.
“That don’t make no kind of sense.”
Inara just hums. “People grieve in whatever ways they need to, for as long as they need to.” A pause then, as Inara reaches to open the bottle of oil again and Zoe hears her pour out a little before beginning to work lower, on her legs, and she bites back a shiver. Grieving’s right, she guesses, though she’s hardly set much time aside to think on it. On him, on the future that was burning bright right before them before the flame got stomped all over and put out.
Hasn’t let herself think about the children they’ll never have, that he’d insisted on waiting on, thinking they had so much time. About how he was joking, sorta, just before, how he was a leaf on the gorram wind one minute, and nothing at all the next.
Lately, she don’t talk to no one much; she’s especially unkeen on seeing River or the doc more than necessary, not when she still feels this pool of resentment anchored in her belly any time she does. It’s neither’s fault, really, that her husband would probably still be alive if it weren’t for the pair of ‘em, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Medbay’s easier to avoid. The bridge, not so much.
Point is, Zoe supposes her brand of grieving’s had her sheltered away from more than a few people. Even with Mal, things aren’t tense, exactly, but they sit in silence more often than they talk on anything.
The first time Inara offered this to her, months back, was the first time she’d let anyone touch her at all since Mal gripped hard enough for his fingertips to still be lightly bruised into her skin days after, forced her away from the pilot’s chair so she didn’t get impaled herself.
And it was certainly the first time she’d let anyone touch her anywhere near half as intimate, even, as Wash had in the stillest hours of the night.
“Then why’re you giving me such a time of it?” Zoe asks finally. She means it to bite, but it mostly comes out breathy, tired.
The question hangs in the air a moment, making it heavy. Zoe waits. “It’s hurting you. I worry. Roll over.” Zoe does, pulling up the sheet from where it’s slipped and sitting up while Inara turns, she knows, to go collect tea. Zoe scans the room, more familiar to her than it ever was in the days before Inara came back, but in many ways still strange.
Thing is, a room like this—the space a person keeps, what they put on display, what they don’t, who they invite in, who they don’t, it all says something. Curtains and nav settings and the quarters Mal never lets anyone into and Kaylee’s colorful sign and the doctor’s tidily kept drug cabinets all mean something; she knows that. Just like she knows River’s never once touched Wash’s dumb little dinosaurs, never moved ‘em.
Zoe herself oughta not be nosy, but she sees the drawer by Inara’s bedside left slightly open, the littlest slip, telling her Inara is more tired, less one-hundred-percent keenly aware than usual, and she reaches inside it.
Tools for injection. Zoe sweeps her palm over them before picking them up, weighing them carefully in her hands. She’s seen them before—once, when she’d come calling on Inara unexpectedly, and she’d known what they were then, too, she realizes. Just didn’t call the other woman on it.
Zoe’s angry with a lot of people, it seems. Maybe herself, more than anything. For letting any wall down, by any degree.
When Inara comes back, tea tray in hand, the look on her face isn’t one of shock… more like exhaustion. Resignation pooled under her eyes in dark little circles. Nothin’ could ever do much to melt her beauty, Zoe figures, but she realizes that over-tired look has been there to see, if one were looking. Zoe’s been looking, then looking away. But none of that now.
“When are you gonna die on me, exactly?” ‘Least this time around, she can get some warning.
For the first time all evening—maybe ever, actually—Inara gives her a hard look.
“I’m not him, either.” The air is perfectly still while Zoe waits. “I was given a year. It’s been several. That’s what I know.”
Nodding, Zoe turns the needles in her hands again, studying them. “These?”
“For managing the pain. I’m due for one soon, actually,” Inara admits in a small voice, and Zoe looks up again, at the barely-there tears collecting in the corners of her eyes. Zoe can see it: the weight of something unspoken lifted. The dread of having someone know.
Inara took her makeup when she went to make the tea. That means something too. And for all the world, she looks very much like a young woman who isn’t ready to die.
“You’re getting sicker,” Zoe realizes, and Inara flinches. Figures someone who can read others so easily wouldn’t like turnabout. To be as equally seen. “Come on, then,” Zoe says, and after standing a moment, for once lost for words, Inara finally moves to set the tray down and sits next to Zoe on the bed, offering her arm. Zoe reaches for it, using her thumb to trace the mark where Inara must have done this for years herself on her own smooth skin.
“Here?”
Inara nods, so Zoe does it as quick as she can; Inara hisses quietly anyway.
“I’d think you were used to it.”
Inara shrugs. “I never have liked needles, to be quite honest with you.” Inara leans back then, still in her dayclothes, a simple but pink slip of a dress. Goes to show how spent she is, Zoe figures. “Are you angry with me as well?”
“Yeah. Go to bed.”
Every other time they’ve done this, Zoe’s gone on her own back to her room after. Now, without asking but knowing the answer, she reaches to tug the lamp light off and sets the needle down before she pulls the covers of Inara’s bed over both of them. She places a hand on Inara’s hip and stares into the darkness, heart hammering in her chest as she thinks about the lover who died and the not-yet lover who has not yet died. Who made her talk, the way Wash would with a laugh and a friendly push, instead with the care in her hands, her relentless perception.
She thinks about how Inara allowed her into this space, and that it’s about more than what’s in the room, more than what can be touched. How soon, it will go away.
And how she once said she wasn’t too afraid of losing something to still have it. How she meant it then and means it still, gripping tightly to it like a lifeline. The one thing in the ‘verse she still knows.
Inara turns to face her, like she knows just what’s on Zoe’s mind, and looks at her through the darkness with ease before leaning in to kiss her.
That makes Zoe angrier. She kisses back.