Title: Bullet Tears Summary: For Firefly Friday. Inara has a breakdown shortly after she comes to the Black. Rating: G Word Count: 771

Bullet Tears

She collapsed onto her bed, pushing her nose into the silky-soft pink sheets, breathing in the latent scent of incense with greed and hunger and utter desperation as the white hot tears she’d been holding back all afternoon began to stream mercilessly down her cheeks. They rained out of her like a winter monsoon on Sihnon, each droplet of moisture falling out of her eyes with fury hitting the bed sheets like an angry, iridescent bullets looking for a target. They left her shaking there on her bed, shriveled and dehydrated, a tangled mess of thoughtless limbs curled into nothing. This was real crying. This was real, ugly, undignified crying, the kind that leaves you shaking for days. This was crying that was loud and frightening and without pride. Inara let it wash over her, unyielding.

She could have stopped it. She knew how. But she just didn’t want to. Not even if it was loud and ugly, certain to be heard by the six strangers on the ship who she’d shared the last two months with. Not even if the captain, such a mystery and full of judgment, heard her and used this against her tomorrow when they were trading quips at the dinner table. Inara didn’t care about the consequences. She didn’t care about tomorrow. All she cared about was today. All she cared about was what she was feeling right now.

She was lost. She was lost, alone on a chè fēn bié in the middle of no where, million of millions of miles away from everything and everyone she had ever known and loved. She was lost, utterly and truly, in every sense of the world, and she was crying, sobbing, and she didn’t care.

She’s sent her day at a tar processing facility. A tar processing facility. In her mind lingered violin concertos and dulcimer quartets that played at dances on Sihnon, the smell of all the women’s flowery perfume flooding the floor, and the feel of her silk dresses across her shoulder blades, tickling the too smooth skin of her exposed back. A tar processing facility. She smelled like it now. The stench of burnt rubber had seeped into her clothing, her curls, everything.

She was supposed to have it all.

It seemed so silly, part of her acknowledged, crying over the loss of the privilege she had forsaken when there were people in the universe who didn’t just visit tar processing facilities as the crew they boarded with picked up cargo, but lived there. People who woke up every morning at sunrise not to admire the changing light but to strap on thick, rubber-sole boots and hard hats so that they could work in a tar-processing facility. Day after day after day. It seemed so petty to miss parties and fine music when half, maybe even all, of the crew members on the ship had never had the opportunity to learn about symphonies in music class, much less see one perform. Well, maybe Inara was small. Maybe she was petty. She could name at least a dozen people who would grin smugly if she ever admitted it, at least a dozen people who were waiting for the high and mighty Inara Serra to fall from her thrown.

But the thing was Inara hadn’t fallen. She had chosen to leave it all behind.

She took a deep breath, concentrating on the sensation of the air moving through her body, going in through her nose, down her throat, filling her lungs. She held it there, inside her, counting silently in her mind yī, èr, sān, sì... She exhaled through her mouth, the steady stream of air chilling her lips as it escaped her body. She breathed. She breathed again and again and again, breathed until her control of the air defeated her melancholy tears. It was finished. Everything was silent. Everything was still.

The smell of the tar still lingered in the room. It brought Inara back into herself. With a heavily sigh she pushed herself up. She pushed herself onto her elbows first then sat up properly on the bed. With the back of her hand she wiped wayward tear streaks off her cheeks, wiped away the evidence that she had ever broken down like this. There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she chimed.

The captain poked his head inside. “Super’s in ten,” he said, already on his way out before the words had completely left his mouth.

“Thank you,” she said to his back in the doorway.

She stood up, walked over to the mirror, and began silently reapplying her makeup.