Eyes I dare not meet in dreams in death's dream kingdom these do not appear: There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column. There, is a tree swinging and voices are in the wind's singing. More distant and more solemn than a fading star.

T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men

Whimper

"Huh...that's interesting."

Jonathan Lasenby, captain of the ship officially designated Ark F-1 and unofficially designated whatever its individuals chose to call it, raised an eyebrow. In the nine years of travel across the stars, "interesting" had become a somewhat ominous word. Just before a viral contagion swept through the ship, things became "interesting." Just after the Ark ships passed Mars and were nearly fried by a solar flare, things had been "interesting" in the star system left behind, its star long rendered indistinct amongst the billions of others in the Milky Way. So now, having heard the fateful word from communications officer Turse, all manner of interesting ways of dying started popping into his mind.

Making his way across the bridge, Lasenby repressed a shudder. That word had gone through his mind half a dozen times in the last minute and he hadn't liked the experience one bit.

"What's interesting lieutenant?" asked the captain, making his way to one of the many consoles used for inter-exodus fleet communications. "Has the universe decided to screw us over again? Another gang war? Did Tauri decide to suddenly vanish and leave us for dead?"

"Um...no sir," murmured Turse, evidently not as much of a pessimist as his superior. "It's not bad news at all. Well, actually it could be, but..."

The comm. officer trailed off, though not to Lasenby's irritation. Usually, when things went bad on an Ark ship (and ranging in size from a municipal stadium to a small city, you found you found out pretty quickly), it was easy to pinpoint exactly what the problem was and take any and all steps to contain it. So if Turse didn't know what the problem was, either nine years of space travel had gotten to the man or there was no genuine problem and this was actually interesting in the good sense. And with "good" about as foreign a word as...well, any other word that indicated well being, the captain decided to indulge the possibility of good interest.

"Speak to me lieutenant," murmured the captain, leaning over on Turse's chair to watch the screen. "What have you got for me?"

"Actually sir, it's what I haven't got."

Hmm...even more interesting.

The system Turse was using was ancient, though had the benefit of using low power. After all, a 120 year trip from Sol to the 34Tauri star cluster, or "the Verse" as some called it, was going to use a lot of juice and even after strip mining every bit of energy Earth had to provide, that hardly meant that power was in abundance. Still, it served its purpose, monitoring chatter from the rest of the Arks in the fleet, even when spread out over millions of miles in the empty space between star systems.

Odd...thought the captain, looking at the blank screen. If we're monitoring incoming and outgoing communications, where are the rest of the ships?

"Lieutenant..." began Lasenby slowly. "Are you trying to tell me that we've lost the rest of the fleet."

"No sir. Ark C-3 is within a few hundred miles of our location. It's communications from Earth I was monitoring."

"Earth? What the hell are you doing that for?!"

Turse didn't answer. And all in all, Lasenby couldn't blame him. Not out of shame, not out of fear of punishment, but rather from the knowledge that it was the captain, not the lowly comm. officer, that was being an idiot. True, Earth had become a hellhole. True, Earth was something that humanity had to get over if they were going to survive in the Verse. But still, that didn't stop homesickness. And in the knowledge that he'd be long dead before Tauri34 was reached, Lasenby was well aware that not only was humanity's homeworld the only world that he'd ever known, but the only world he ever would.

"So..." Lasenby continued, looking at the blank screen and hoping that the next few decades of uneventful space travel would be enough to brush out his outburst. "You've been monitoring communications from Earth, presumably those not directed at us, but rather light and radio waves that we inadvertently picked up. And now they've stopped, right?"

"Yes sir," murmured Turse, looking more uneasy than the captain anticipated. "One moment the radio waves are filled with the usual God help us or fuck the GEA crap. And now...nothing. I don't know what's happened."

Lasenby snorted. As idiotic as his outburst had been, Turse's musing further proved that the average human IQ had gone the same way as Earth's biosphere. He knew full well what it meant. How he felt about it was another matter.

"The people down there..." Turse continued, seemingly talking to himself more than his captain. "The people we left behind..."

Lasenby drowned him out, his mind flashing of the cesspool that Sol's third planet had become. A cesspool that he still missed. Was it wrong for him to feel more sorry for the planet itself than the people on it? True, there were probably exceptions, but the only individuals the GEA had left behind were either too frail to make an extended trip through space or scum more poisonous than what was the majority of the planet's surface.

And we did this. We screwed the world. We screwed up so much that it didn't even have enough energy to screw us back.

Maybe that was why a solar flare had struck the fleet. Maybe the sun had taken on the role of punisher, its favoured child of a world too weak to even lift the executioner's axe.

And that was what did it, thought the captain sadly. The guards are gone, the executioner died and the prisoners died in their cells instead of meeting capital punishment.

It wasn't a pleasant thought, but it was only since the 21st century that humankind had begun facing the truth. Had they faced it earlier, this might have been avoided.

"You might as well stop monitoring communications lieutenant," murmured Lasenby, declaring the conversation closed. "Elliot was right."

"Who? What?" the comm. officer asked. "What are you-..."

"They're dead, Turse. Everyone on our old home is either dead or too weak to even pick up a phone and are therefore as good as dead anyway."

The lieutenant didn't say anything. Maybe he was still trying to take this all in. Maybe he was wondering who Elliot was. Either way, the captain didn't care. All he cared about now was that all that was left of humanity was now in space and it was his duty to ensure it stayed that way. Even so, that didn't stop him from looking at the screen, nor being the one to deliver the only eulogy for a dead world he could think of...

"...and thus the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper."

A/N

The idea for this stemmed from the release of The 'Verse in Numbers, with the history and astro-geography of the Verse being fleshed out. It also struck home with the portrayal of Earth's decline, a decline that Firefly used more as a vague plot point than as a sense of regret or loss. In a sense, I guess that might have been counterproductive, given that the outcome of the Unification War is the main source of loss and regret in the series, at least for the likes of Mal and Zoë. Still, even if Earth's decline ended with a whimper, it deserves a proper eulogy in my mind.

Or maybe I'm trying to justify a oneshot with minimal ties to the series itself. Go figure.