Standard rules apply here. I acknowledge that these are Joss characteres, I'm just playing with them.

Wash walked slowly down the hallway. Every step he took seemed to echo throughout the ship with a heavy ‘Clunk.’ But the sounds of his feet were the last things on his mind. He had to find Book, Jayne and Inara and tell them the news. He had just told the Captain and now he just wanted to tell the rest of the crew just to get it over with. It was straining him to keep all the sadness and misery he felt in him under control.

He reached the kitchen and found Jayne and Book playing a game of chess. Book had control of the board, while Jayne had only about four pieces left. Jayne stared intently at the board before moving a pawn forward. Book then moved his bishop diagonally across the board.

“Checkmate.” Book pronounced with a reserved glee. Jayne slammed his fists down on the table and pouted.

“Gorram it, Preacher. You know I hate playing games like this.”

“Now son, if you want to gain respect from some of the other crew members, you need to open up. Chess is the ultimate intellectual game.”

“It’s a gorrram waste of time. If this were real, I could’ve taken out all them pawns with Vera and the king with a sniper rifle at 500 yards.”

Wash would’ve found this funny under any other circumstance, but now was not the time for laughter. Just then, Book looked up and noticed him in the doorframe of the kitchen. Jayne noticed this in Book and looked at Wash as well.

“Is there something wrong, son?”

Wash composed himself and cleared his throat. He didn’t want to lose it now, especially in front of Jayne.

“Uhhhhh……it’s gone. The baby, it’s…..it’s not going to happen.”

There was a silence that filled the room between the three of them. Book merely sat back and gave a respectful look towards Wash. He knew that he was grieving and that the most introspective advice towards him would just sound trite. Jayne, on the other hand, was about to say something.

But before he did, Wash snapped. “Jayne, please. Whatever you’re about to say or think or come up with, I don’t want to hear it. I am feeling like absolute go-se right now, both for me and Zoe, and whatever witty retort you’re about to come up with is just going to make this worse. So just shut it.”

Wash then stomped right across the kitchen towards the cargo bay, not even bothering to look at Books and Jayne’s responses. If he had bothered, he would’ve seen a dumbfounded Jayne with a look of both shock and sadness on his face. Jayne was not a man normally shooken up by death. He had killed more men that he could count and in various different ways than he could remember. But the idea of someone dying before they were even born, let alone being able to comprehend killing him, shook him up quite a bit. Especially if the mother of that child was Zoe. Wash he could do without, but Zoe was probably the only woman outside of his mother that Jayne respected. Of course he wanted to bang her like every other member of the opposite sex, but he had the same sense of mutual admiration for her like he did with the Captain. So for her to be torn up over the death of a child that never was, it threw his whole sense of things out of whack. He hadn’t felt this bad since that kid in Canton took a bullet for him. So he just sat back in his chair and looked at the Shepherd.

“Just don’t make no sense.” * * * Wash’s anger subsided as he approached Inara’s shuttle. He wanted to save her for last since he felt like he could open up and release his pent up sorrow in front of her and not come off as weak. He never really paid that much attention to Inara at all. He was always more interested in Zoe. Found her assertiveness more attractive than Inara’s sensuality. But he respected her and treated her like a normal crew member. And now, her Companion training and softness is what he needed now.

He approached the shuttle doors and knocked. He heard light clinks on the other side of the door and the hiss of hydraulics. Inara appeared, looking as elegant and sensual as she always did. “Wash” she replied in surprise. “What’s the matter?” She was clearly expecting someone else other than their jovial pilot to appear at her door. She immediately sensed that there was nothing jolly in Wash’s soul right now.

“Can I come in?” he asked hoarsely. Inara stepped aside and beckoned him into her red velvet quarters. He walked in, minding her things so that he didn’t disrupt her environment and sat down on her bed.

“Thanks. I’ve told the rest of the crew about it, but I saved you for last. I wanted to be in a warm environment when I broke it.”

“Broke what?” she inquired as she poured some warm green tea into a porcelain cup for Wash. He looked like he needed it. “The news about the baby. It’s…it’s…” he shuddered as he tried to get that last word out of his mouth. Inara took the two cups of tea as she hurriedly walked towards the bed. She sat down and took his shoulders into her hands. “It’s all right. I know what you’re going to say.” Wash looked at her through tear swollen eyes and finally let it out.

As she embraced him, he bawled and screamed and cried like never before. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!!” he kept repeating in between cries. Inara started to rock him back and forth. The parallels and irony was not lost on her. She knew what she had to do and went along with it.

As Wash let out the immense sadness and grief that was in him, she thought many things. She thought about the sorrow that Zoe must be feeling right now. She thought about how poor River must be bawling her little heart out. She thought of all the other crew members and their reactions. She thought about how for the next few days, the ship would feel like a tomb. And she thought that of all the men that came to her, Wash was the only one who came out of grief. It was rare for a Companion to be hired as someone to come to during periods of immense mourning. But here she was, comforting a man who had lost a child before it was born. She couldn’t help but feel a tear from her face dampen the Hawaiian shirt he was wearing.

After about twenty minutes of holding each other as his sobs subsided, Wash finally released his embrace of her. He sat back down on the bed and wiped the tears from his face and smiled. “Thank you. I’m sorry if I got your dress dampened from my blubbering.” Inara smiled back at him, wiping her face as well. “Not at all. I have some tea here. Would you like to talk about it?” She held out the cup, waiting for him to take it.

Wash sat up, took the cup, and gulped it down like a tequila shot. “Thanks, but I just needed to get it out of my system. I couldn’t go blubbering in front of the other crew members, and Zoe feels just as bad about this as I do, so I just needed someone more receptive to let it out in front of.” Wash leaned back into the pillows and cushions as Inara sipped her tea. They just sat there in silence as they let the gravity of the situation sink in.

“Inara. Are Companions allowed to have children?”

“I’m sorry to say this, but no. During our immunization periods, our reproductive organs are sterilized. It’s not good for business when a respectable client returns to a Companion to find her pregnant with his child.”

Wash squinted and nodded at this. “But if you retired, or a client asked you to get pregnant for him and his wife, like that girl in the brothel we saved, or even if you were given the choice, would you want to have a child of your own?”

Inara was taken back by this. Not by disgust or repulsion, but by the fact that she had never considered the idea of having a child of her own. She was often too busy to consider the option.

“I…..I honestly don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, it’s just that I thought you might have some advice on how to deal with a mourning wife over her child. If Mal is the father of this ship, you sometimes seem to be the mother. And as someone experienced in reading human emotions, I figured you might have some advice on how to make her feel better. Because I know that what I did twenty minutes ago is small potatoes in comparison to what she must be going though.”

Inara thought about this. She didn’t want to disappoint Wash, who came to her in his darkest time for help. But at the same time, she didn’t really have anything to say to help him out. After another lengthy pause, she sighed and shook her head. “I suppose one could just try to draw on ones own experience and work from there.”

Wash was about to interject, when suddenly it dawned on him. “Michael” he said aloud. He sat up, placed the cup on her bedside table and walked towards the shuttle door. “Thanks for the advice Inara. I’m in your debt now.” Inara just smiled and said “Free of charge.” to Wash as he stepped out.

* * * *

Wash approached the ladder door to him and Zoe’s bunk. Through the metal, he could hear her sobs. With resolve, he popped the door into it’s place and climbed down. As he descended, he saw that she was curled up on the bed with a pillow to her face. To the side, he saw the crib upended and toys, picture books and ripped baby clothes strewn all around the room.

Wash walked over to the bed and sat down. “Zo?” Zoe just lay there, not even acknowledging his presence there. “I don’t know if you want me to be here or not, but I just have to say this, and then I’ll leave you to mourn some more.” He paused and took a deep breath.

“I had a brother once.” He sensed Zoe stirring. “My parents were so excited. They had tried so hard to have a child, so when my mom found out she was pregnant, they were just ecstatic. They made so many plans, bought so many baby stuff and they eagerly waited for their child to be born. But when the big day came, there was no baby. He was a stillborn. They could never figure out exactly what went wrong. Those first few days after they buried Michael, which was his name, my parents were a wreck. Just hollow beings of their former selves. But after a while, they came out of it. Eventually, they realized that they came too far and got too emotionally involved to give up so easily. So they tried again. And you know what happened?” Zoe sat up and looked at her husband for the first time since he came in. “What?” Wash looked at her and pointed to himself. “Me.”

There was a moment of silence between the two of them. Despite being married, they never really talked about their past lives before they met on Serenity. This minor revelation seemed to snap Zoe out of her funk. He had her attention now, so now was the time to say what he really wanted to say.

“Look. Just because we lost the baby now doesn’t mean that we’ll never have a kid. We’ll just keep trying until it happens. Our time will come. Just that now is not it. But it will when we’re ready.”

Zoe looked at him with those big, brown eyes of hers filled with so much love and pain and hugged him. He wrapped his arms around her and embraced her. “I knew there was a reason I married you” she replied softly. “Same here, lamy toes” he said back to her. She chuckled at the pet name he had for her being used at a time like this. He leaned back, and then went in to kiss her. She reciprocated and then spent the next few minutes like that.

After they broke the kiss, Wash got up and started to tidy up around the small room. “So what do you want to do with this stuff?” he asked. “Well, the baby clothes I figured we could give to Kaylee to use as oil rags, or in case if her and Simon shack up and have kids of their own before we do. The picture books I think we can sell at a bazaar for some cash. But the toy’s I’d like to keep.” “You know that most of these are mine.” Wash said with a hint of amusement.

After placing most of the small stuff on the bed, he picked up the crib and placed it in the upright position. “I’d like to keep the crib, though. I spent a lot of time making it in Newhope, and I want it there just as a reminder.”

Zoe nodded as she looked at the toys on the bed. She then saw the rag doll that River had made for them. “River” she said aloud. She then got up and climbed up the ladder. “Zo? It’s dinnertime already. I imagine after all they crying that the food we have might not be as bad as it normally is.” Zoe chuckled at this joke. It was good to see her husband still be able to tell a joke under any circumstance. “I’ll meet up with you at the dinnertable later. I need to apologize to River.”

As the door closed, Wash tidied up the bunk a little more and then went over to the sink to wash his face. He looked over to the crib and then to his reflection in the mirror. “Michael Wash Warren. I like that.” He smiled for the first time that day to himself, dried his hands, and went up for dinner.