Dress
She wore her wedding dress, in the end.
She knew Wash would have laughed at her, of all people, agonizing over what to wear, but she also knew that, of course, he would understand.
The only other dress Zoe owned was the one Wash had given her for their last wedding anniversary. She remembered the almost child-like glee with which he had watched her unwrap it; "It's a slinky dress!" he had exclaimed when she had held it up to look at it. She hadn't worn it since that night, but her husband's funeral was hardly the occasion on which to give it a second airing.
So she had put it back in the closet and looked at the rest of its contents.
Most of the space was taken up by Wash's shirt collection. A couple of his jumpsuits also hung on his side of the railing, along with a few threadbare pairs of pants. None of these seemed remotely appropriate, although of course Wash would have loved to see her in his clothes…
Her own side of the closet was hardly much more likely to yield anything suitable. Zoe's clothes were functional and really not much else, and whatever combination thereof she might choose would either look mismatched or so everyday that no one would be able to tell she'd chosen it special at all.
She had sighed, feeling a sting make itself known behind her eyes. She pushed it back, as she had done so many times in the past day, and tried not to stare at all those useless clothes quite so forlornly. Maybe she could borrow something from Inara, she thought… and then quickly dismissed the notion. Wearing something not her own seemed just as wrong as any of the awful mundane things hanging in the closet in front of her.
She had nothing to wear.
And somehow, this simple thought broke through all her carefully constructed barriers, and she found herself sobbing, more loudly than she could remember ever sobbing before.
Her vision blurred from the tears and she stepped back, aiming to fall back onto the bed, but she misjudged the distance completely and ended up collapsing backwards onto the floor.
A vicious jolt shook her as she landed, and her back scraped violently down the side of the bed, but she barely noticed. Her mind was awash with guilt (maybe if she had been more alert she could have seen it coming and pushed him out the way) and loneliness (instead of her husband there was now just a dark chasm beside her) and fear (what would she become without him?), and she lay there next to the bed in a defeated heap, not even moving to hug her knees to her chest.
And then her hand slipped, and her fingers brushed against something under the bed.
Zoe froze.
Then she stretched her arm and reached further to pull the large, flat box out in front of her. Slowly, she removed the lid.
In the top of the box lay a worn but still respectable looking tuxedo. Wash had found it just hours before their wedding in a second-hand dealer's on Beaumonde. The grin on his face as he had run back up the ramp to where she was loading crates in the cargo bay was probably the widest she'd ever seen on anyone.
She stroked the material before laying it aside.
The other item in the box was her dress. She held it up, remembering what Wash had said to her when he'd finally seen her in it.
"Honey, you're always gorgeous, but I don't think I've ever seen you look so… pretty."
Zoe wiped her tears, and got dressed.