Nothing Left to See

by AHGrayLensman

Disclaimer: "Firefly", Serenity, and related characters are property of Joss Whedon. Please don't sue me for borrowing from it a little.

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The Operative watched as Serenity lifted away and disappeared into the storm clouds. Once she'd gone, he set his mind to the task at hand.

They take you down, I don't expect to grieve overmuch. Like to kill you myself, I see you again.

You won't... There is nothing left to see.

The Alliance Parliament would almost certainly send men for him soon, to make him pay for his failure. He had no intention of idly waiting for them.

In certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.

There was a pattern to this: a ritual to be followed, formalities to be observed. He'd helped perhaps a dozen men die like this, and he'd long suspected that it was how his own life would end. He tried to tell himself that he had no regrets.

As with so many other things in his life, he knew that was a lie.

He'd been so sure of the rightness of what he was doing. He'd kept telling himself that the atrocities he'd committed would be balanced out by the better world he was helping to create. Malcolm Reynolds had destroyed that illusion utterly, both by Reynolds' dogged determination to protect River Tam and by showing him the nature of the truth that had almost driven her mad.

He forced these thoughts from his mind and lost himself in the minutiae of what he was preparing to do. He spent a few hours giving final orders to his troops, sending farewell messages to his superiors and colleagues, and sharpening his sword. Then he returned to the landing platform where Serenity had been, which seemed as appropriate a place as any for his last act. The rain continued unabated.

He placed his sword on the ground, removed his armored coat, and knelt before the sword. After a few minutes of meditation, he grasped the sword and thrust it into his abdomen, making first a horizontal cut and then a vertical one. He toppled forward on his face as he feebly tried to remove the sword.

The pain was almost as excruciating as he thought he deserved it to be.

As shock and blood loss took hold of him and consciousness began to fade away, he found himself with one final regret.

I should have asked the Tam girl to be my second in this. There would have been a perfect sort of symmetry in that.

The rain, impassive, began to wash away the blood. Soon there was nothing left to see.