Title: Cold and Empty
Fandom: Firefly
Rating: G
Length: 375
Content notes: None.
Author notes: For fan_flashworks Challenge #24, "Amnesty 4". Using the "Self-portrait" theme. Set post-BDM. (Yay, completing another achievement badge! Or two. I have to check my chart. XD )
Summary: Zoe sits and stares at the wall.



In her bunk, after her watch and a trip to the galley for one of the last tart apples, Zoe sits and stares at the wall. It's a blank space ahead of her, empty and cold. No thick curtains heavy with the scent of tea and incense, like in Inara's shuttle. No pictures and postcards, collected from every little town on every rim planet, like in Kaylee's bright room. Not even a schematic or diagram, some anatomical drawing or sketch of a tree, like River has plastered to her walls in overlapping, peeling layers.

Zoe has nothing. Her bunk is empty, lifeless. Hardly more than a shell. She settles one hand on the pillow beside her, still dented from the shape of a head that will never touch it again.

The bunk is too empty. Before, it was crowded and warm, full of life, echoing with laughs and moans and the slide of their limbs and the heat of their breaths. Now, it's only her. Only Zoe, empty as her bunk, a hollow shell where there used to be a woman.

Zoe closes her eyes and counts her breaths, waiting for the thick lump in her throat to dissolve. What's done is done, she tells herself. Can't be changed. Now she must pick herself up, dust off, and carry on. She can still crawl, she can still move. What she had then is over now, but she's not done yet.

She opens her eyes and looks at the wall again. There, in the corner, is a flash of blue. A little plastic dinosaur lays on its side. No matter how often they were collected and gathered and returned to the bridge, one always escaped. Zoe shakes her head with the barest twist of a smile and leans over to pick it up. She pets its spines with one finger, then carefully puts it on a shelf. The bunk already feels a little less cold, a little less empty.

She decides the next time Kaylee goes to look for postcards, she'll send a request along. She'll fill up the shell of her bunk with a few more dinosaurs. A few more laughing memories to hold at bay the cold and empty spaces out there, in her.