Title: Dark Before Dawn
Author: Rigella
Characters: Zoe/Wash
Prompt: Redux, light
Rating: PG (T) for themes
Word Count: 300
Disclaimer: I own the words, Joss owns the people, places, and generally all the cool stuff. And I am so not worth suing...
Author's Notes: Triple-drabble (300 words), written for the firefly100 drabble community on Livejournal. Thought I'd post it here, too, seeing as I've been AWOL a while... Set after the BDM. Or maybe during. Take your pick. You'll know when, I'm pretty sure.

Dark Before Dawn

The hours pass, unmarked, unnoticed. She sits on their bed – her bed, she reminds herself – and waits.

She shifts her position, internally restless although the war taught her long ago never to show it. Her cheeks are dry, eyes clear; but her fingers knot in her hair and her heart just feels like a stone.

She keeps the little room dark. Maybe its symbolic, she thinks bitterly. She was always the dark to his bright, airy manner, the shadow to his easy smile. She worried, he reassured. Except when there was actual trouble, of course, the kind that required guns. Then it went the other way.

So, she wonders, is this it? Sitting in the dark, day after day, waiting for a man who can't ever come back, stilling her anxious, restless, tired body with the force of long habit every time it tries to fidget or pace or sigh? She rests her chin on her knees. Blackness laps like water at the edge of her soul – cold water, so seductive, so enticing; and yet, so dead.

A hand breaks free from her rigid control and she rubs her palm across her cheek, her fingers through her hair. It would be so easy to just sink into the black…

But she never was one for the easy way out. She calls up his face in her mind, and the first thing she sees is his smile – big, goofy grin etched across his face – and the light playing in his eyes.

She gets up from their bed – her bed now, but always their's – and strips off the plain dark clothes she's worn for days now. She dresses herself in colour, she brushes back her hair.

Zoë inhales deeply, puts her hand on the ladder, and steps up and into the light.