Silence
Silence.
Over the top of it, muffled shouts and thumps from behind the blast doors where Zoe only hoped that River was still doing her thing, and not dead and being fought over by the passel of hungry Reavers she had gone in to fight.
Next to that, Kaylee struggling to start breathing again after getting the antidote for whatever it was she had been hit with.
Behind that, Simon's pained voice instructing Inara on how to treat his bullet wound.
Overall, it was best to just listen to the silence.
Zoe propped her gun up against her leg and tried to not think about the strong stinging all up her back, or how small the chances were of getting out alive...
Or Wash.
She set her jaw, chasing him from her mind.
But she had never been terribly good at that.
He trickled back into her thoughts through one of the little, almost non-existent cracks in her walls that always seemed to open up just for him.
The muscles in her jaw tensed so much she thought they might snap with the pressure with which she was trying to keep him out.
Then Zoe heard Jayne whimper in pain through the silence, and the mental flinch this caused within her made the cracks widen just that little bit more and let Wash come streaming through.
He was all she could see, all she could feel, all she could hear...
His head fallen forward in the red of the emergency lights.
His skin cold and clammy against hers.
The absence of his voice in the silence.
Zoe swallowed back tears. She couldn't break down now; any second now she could be called back into action against any number of threats.
But the silence...
Wash, her Wash, the one she should able to count on to make her feel halfway human again if they ever got out of this, he wasn't there. He wasn't coming back.
...How could she be human without him?
If he were here right now, he would be cracking jokes, making light of the situation, letting her smile in the face of death because she knew he was by her side. He would be touching her, his hand on her shoulder, her knee, words of comfort not being spoken but nevertheless present and acknowledged. Every time she looked in his eyes she would see into his soul and resolve once more to survive at all costs, for him.
But he wasn't there. All there was was silence, darkness, emptiness. And that was all there would ever be from now on.
Again, Zoe pushed back tears and forced herself to focus on the job.
But for the first time in more years than she cared to count, she hoped that this would be the one she didn't come back from.
She waited, trying not to hear the silence.