i've been slipping through the years. my old clothes don't fit like they once did so they hang like ghosts of the people I've been. - death cab for cutie "you can do better than me"

After Miranda, after Book and Wash, after River practically vaporizing a group of Reavers that by rights should have left her in pieces, after hand to hand combat and after Zoe learned to speak again, no one wanted to do much of anything. They were drifting through the black, aimlessly without intention or direction.

Simon and Kaylee were afraid to leave their safe spaces, that much was obvious. The engine room, the infirmary and Kaylee's room – they tried so hard not to leave them; by sneaking out for food so as to avoid running into everyone else. It was as though they were afraid to be happy when so much had gone wrong, afraid to thrust their happiness on everyone else.

Zoe spent most of her time in the cockpit with River, surprisingly. Mal knew that given the same situation, he would have avoided that place like the plague. No one knew how they spent their time, whether in conversation or companionable silence, but more often than not, Mal would wake Zoe up with a soft pull of the shoulder, before carrying River off to her room. They never wanted to be relieved. Mal was concerned at first, but the way River curled into him, the way Simon didn't bat an eyelash the first time he saw them, the way Albatross and captain became nicknames and terms of endearment, that made it okay.

Silence became the rule with vague whispers and the ghosts of laughter drifting through the air at inopportune moments seeming false and out of place. So when Inara finally spoke to him (only him) it was as though she was shouting.

She wasn't shouting – she knew that. In fact, her voice was very quiet in comparison to the noise that had been Serenity before. But she understood why he jumped.

"I'm not leaving again, Mal," she said when he came into the mess alone. If she were going to be honest, she had been waiting to ambush him.

Mal would normally suppress his initial reaction, go with feigned confusion or a sense that can only be gained with an archly commented "I ain't asked your plans yet." But it was exhausting and she was sitting there, overwhelming him with her voice and the line of her neck and her sad smile. So, he just sat down at the table, closer than he had originally intended but with no hitch in his movements to indicate that he had heard. He put his head in his hands.

"Please don't," he said finally, unable to muster up any shame in his hoarse voice, cracked and broken and tired. But it wasn't until he was kissing her, until she was smoothing out the lines in his face with her soft hands, until she had him face down on her bed, working out the painful, awful, guilty knots in his muscles, that he really believed her.

They had a month, a blissful month of losing themselves in each other, of blinding, white hot happiness. They weren't like Simon and Kaylee, with laughter and love and spontaneous making out in the engine room and the infirmary and pretty much anywhere (that Zoe wasn't). They were darker, quieter. They were nightmares and incense. They were shouted arguments and heated interruptions of skin on skin. They were quiet sobs and whispered stories and they couldn't stop touching each other, couldn't stop kissing. He couldn't stop whispering promises into her ear. She couldn't stop running her finger tips over his scars or wearing his clothes.

It was after about a month however, that the truth came out. Mal came down after handing the cockpit over to River to find Inara curled on her bed, paralyzed with pain, her eyes glazed and feverish and begging him to make it stop. "Simon!" He was yelling the name as loudly as he could even as he left the room, even though he knew Simon couldn't hear him yet. He hated that, after all this time, there was still pleading, still desperation in his voice.

Simon came as fast as he could, throwing on clothes as he ran, leaving Kaylee to pull a dress on and come slower. River, hearing the captain scream, left the cockpit, left Serenity to fly herself. It was a mark of his fear that Mal barely noticed.

"It's a new disease. We had just discovered it when I was in med school," Simon said carefully, examining Inara. "It manifests itself in a dehabilitation of the nervous system, with attacks of fever and immense pain that become increasingly frequent. Injections of Seron help, but there's no cure." His voice seemed to die as he said the words, but he looked Mal square in the face as he said it and that made Mal less inclined to punch someone in the face. Simon pulled him aside. "She's had to have known for a while. There is no way she'd still be alive if she hadn't been getting injections. But it's going to start getting worse. The injections are only going to ease the pain; they aren't going to stop it."

"How long?"

"What?" The question shouldn't have caught Simon off guard, but he had been so hoping that Mal wouldn't ask; that if he did ask, he would do so in a strong captain voice, not with desperation, with fear, with love.

Simon reached out his hand unconsciously to take a sobbing Kaylee's.

"How long, Simon?"

"No more than a year."

At this, Mal looked at Inara. The evidence of her betrayal, of his love and fear was written all over his face, and it was her undoing. The pain enveloped her, until she was shaking and whimpering and her fingernails were creating white half moons in Mal's calloused hands. Simon gave her something to knock her out and something for Mal to stop the shaking.

When Inara woke up, it was to hard lines in Mal's face, to that same look that broke her. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, though she had to clear her throat several times before she was able to speak.

"Why ain't you tell me?"

She was quiet for quite a while before she answered. He watched her carefully, for signs of pain, for signs of a lie. "Because I wanted everything to be alright for a little while," she said finally. "We've all been through so much. It was either lie, or leave. And I didn't have it in me to leave again."

He was angry. He was so angry, she could see that, but it wasn't directed at her. She knew that by the relief that tempered the anger on his face.

"I love you," he growled after a few more minutes of silent examination. He stood up, careful not to disturb her. She watched him warily as he began pacing. "I love you, but I ain't got a gorram clue what to do."

"You aren't going to-" she started to ask, unable to keep the fear out of her voice, hating it with the same breath. But she was cut off when he started smashing the furniture against the wall. So she waited. He yelled until he felt like his throat was tearing, braking everything in the shuttle she barely slept in anymore.

When he finally stopped, when he was calmer and panting and he stopped muttering curses under his breath, he sat down on the bed beside her, pulling her gently and ever so slowly into his lap. "I ain't goin' nowhere," he breathed into her hair.

When eventually she died, she left behind a year. A year he spent giving her sponge baths in ice water during episodes. A year they spent fighting over decorating his room (he won), getting a bigger bed (she won), cultural superiority and whether or not Jayne could actually hear them. A year they spent with scathing comebacks interrupted by kisses, interrupted by sex. A year he spent smashing furniture and yelling loudly until he went hoarse, dry heaving sobs when he couldn't yell anymore. It was a year of hard lines in his face, unflinching knots in his shoulders, a year he snapped at his crew and snapped at Inara and a year he hated himself.

It was the hardest year for them both. Hard to die, knowing how it would hurt (so badly) the people you loved. Hard to watch someone you loved die, to decay before your eyes. Hard to believe you wouldn't just perish right alongside her, just blink out of existence with her because what are you without her? Hard to watch people you loved hurting because of something you were doing, even if you couldn't help it.

So when she died, Mal felt himself blink out of existence, for just a moment, because he had been in love with her for so long he didn't know who he was without it. It took days before it hit, before he got in a fist fight with Jayne that the mercenary wouldn't win or lose. Jayne just let Mal keep slugging until the captain was too tired, too sore to keep going. It was days after that that Simon and River found him in the infirmary, throwing bottles around in search for something that would make the pain go away, before River screamed and Simon started locking the door to the infirmary and Zoe started sitting with him at night.

Eventually he learned to breathe again and eventually his heart beat in a normal rhythm and his lungs stopped constricting when he smelled her perfume. But he never stopped smelling it. He sprayed it on his sheets, on his pillow until the day he too died. By a gunshot wound to the heart. God, he thought, I wonder what that would feel like…