Author: ghost
Disclaimer: Not mine. No profit.
Rating: R for Reaver violence
Recipient: Bud-Clare
Fandoms: Firefly, Crusade
Pairing: River/Galen, sort of
Summary: Their end is unquantified.
Notes: Both Straczynski and Whedon had dates and years and such that their shows are set in. I ignored those. For the purposes of this story, please assume that the events in Crusade happened, then a bunch of time passed, then the events in Firefly happened. Some dialogue is lifted from a few Firefly episodes (the pilot, Bushwhacked, and Objects in Space) and if I got the Chinese wrong, it's because I know nothing about Chinese. Any and all mistakes are mine.
Prologue
It was a gruesome courtship. They brushed hands in the corridors—long concrete hallways with no end—as they were dragged from one examination table to the next. She saw a glint of scalp; he saw scared eyes.
Both watched as the blue handed men walked in and out of the cells. Sometimes, as the doors shut, they got glimpses of each other.
They heard the cries of pain from rooms within the catacombs. Names were screamed; "Simon" and "Gideon." They bled from tear ducts and called for help down hallways.
At night they dreamt in tandem. She dreamed of fireflies. She pulled off their wings, froze them with cotton swabs dipped in rubbing alcohol, and then stuck pins through their abdomens. He dreamed of drumbeats echoing the pulsing stars. He dreamed of the tangled, interracial conflicts he had tried to flee when he moved towards the outer rim. It was impossible to tell which dreams belonged to him and which to her.
When they finally escaped, their naked bodies were lowered simultaneously into frozen boxes—so like coffins—and they still didn’t know each other’s names.
i. this is a dream
It is cold. She dreamed of a bald headed man in a box all alone. He was cold. The blue-handed men are coming today to poke out her eyes.
It is cold. She dreamed of a bald headed man in a cell with a gun to his head or a knife to his throat for his secrets. He is cold. The blue-handed men are coming today to poke out her eyes.
It is cold. She dreamed of a bald headed man in a ship in the sky. He is cold. The blue-handed men are coming today to poke out her eyes.
It is cold, like the morgue and the grave. Six feet underground there is no light.
"Huh."
"I need to check her vitals."
The words are soft cloth and ice cubes pretending to be words. Simon's voice is just the random firing of synapses, not auditory cues traveling through her cochlea. This is a dream; what she wishes isn't really what is there.
"Oh, is that what they call it?"
"She's not supposed to wake up for another week! The shock—"
It's cold and solid geometry, but her eyes are blind and there are so many screaming voices.
(Whatever sorta sick fantasy this fancy doc here's playing, well, I’d like a bit of it myself. She’s so young; she looks like Azure from the Academy. Oh, yeah, this is real fun, Capt’n: we’re running from Alliance, we got ourselves a spy who shot Kaylee, and there’s a frozen girl in our cargo hold.)
And there are echoes of screaming voices.
(You asking me to dance? Turn the ship around! Oh, well, that ain't hardly a mosquito bite. It’s OK, baby.)
There are so many voices.
"The shock of what? Waking up? Finding out she’s been sold to some border world baron? Or, I’m sorry—was this one for you? Is it true love? Because you do seem a little—"
This is not one of her dreams with the bald headed man. It is cold. She wakes up.
ii. here there be ghosts
It’s crowded with all the ghosts, even though they can’t see her. Someone took away their eyes.
(River still has her eyes the needle popped. But they don't see correctly, because, when she closes them, her retina picks up false input. The stimulus is non-existent: the man with computers inside and wires crawling over his skin cannot be there. He does not live behind her eyelids. It does not compute. There is too little space there for a man to live. There must be some way to fix it.)
The ghosts dream the same dream over and over. Someone chews their eyeballs blind and strings up their broken bodies, like dead marionettes dancing. Their blood becomes indoor rain. All they hear is chanting. Cattle. Cattle for the slaughter.
River also dreams. Her dreams come in flavors. Mostly it’s the cotton anesthetic, the bitter needles, the bloody vomit pooled in her throat. In those dreams she is unable to talk or move as blue hands comb through her body and mind at their own leisure. She is an insect on display. A card with her scientific name is mounted beside her body. Her eyes are forced wide open. She hears clipped, even voices.
The ghosts dream. Someone slices along arms and legs (iliopsoas, pectineus, adductor longus all mauled). Ragged cuts match jagged blades. All they hear is chanting. No mercy, no resistance.
River also dreams. Sometimes her dreams taste like the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yangtze. These dreams are the library at Alexandria, World War Two, the Shadow War, the Drakh plague, the Supernova destroying Earth-that-was. The lost and forgotten things, like what the Reavers saw when they pushed to the outer rim (or was it farther?) and back. In her dreams River tastes the things she thinks made the Reavers mad. Her feet touch the black and brackish water as she waits for the ferryman. She hears faint moans as the water laps at the river's shore.
The ghosts dream. Teeth (pulp, dentin, enamel, cementum surrounded by periodontal ligament, thirty-two total) are dragged against muscle, hard enough to leave marks. Lips play with peeled off skin. Tongues caress livers and slip over spines. Hearts, for once, lay bare, exposed. Blood fills mouths, tasting like the rust on a ship. Knives up vaginas, drops of sulfuric acid, gutted babies. The ghosts scream, but all they hear is chanting. Open up, see what's inside.
River also dreams. Sometimes her dreams taste like cool air and starlight. They are dreams of things she already dreamt, in the confines of the academy walls, sitting with the bald man, comparing horrors and telling stories. These dreams are illogic, because it's not logical that she ever watched the worlds and planets spin and the younger races grow weary. She couldn’t have seen those aliens travel beyond the outer rim, where the wheel keeps turning and everyone gets caught on the rungs. She couldn’t really have talked about the logistics of hyperspace or his memories of Earth-that-was. She hears the faint beating of drums and firefly wings.
"Shh, shh, it's okay, it's okay, I'm here. Bad dreams again?"
The ghosts dream. They are restless water, drowning dead, and screaming.
"River, there is...there is no screaming."
There is always screaming. Ghosts talk to her and she answers, her footsteps quiet on the bare metal. They are all ghosts here: the corpses, the memories, and the crew, all haunting back through time.
Interlude
You lay in the corner, almost naked, ribs against the cold floor. You don’t know what year it is or what day and you have no idea how long you have been a prisoner. Waking and non-waking are now the same side of a bronze coin. Your life has become the measured clip of footsteps, the scrap of a metal door against cold concrete, the two voices above your head.
"Who are you?"
"What do you want?"
They grab you under your armpits and haul you from the floor. Your head rolls forward and there is a dry itching beneath the blood on your lips and neck.
You smell formaldehyde and latex and open your eyes to see four blue hands, white overcoats, two matching expressions: blank, vacant, lethal. What torture do they have for you today?
"Tell us your secrets."
They took your ship, your staff, drugged you while they systematically striped away your body's secrets.
You try to tell them nothing of your own free will and time lurches forward and back. Maybe they go or come while you pass out or continue to stare at the floor.
"We have cracked the rudimentary workings of your technology."
"We have accessed your ship’s data."
"We know the fourteen words to make someone fall in love."
"We know about the Shadows."
"We can create telepaths."
"It seems, we have no need for you anymore."
The final click of the door, a brief echo, then silence. Soon after, the dreams began.
iii. penny for your thoughts
She is dangerous, picks sticks off the floor and makes gaping holes in people. Her shipmates don't want her. Or, they do, but don’t want the voices (their voices) inside her head.
People's voices aren't supposed to be in other people's heads. Only, despite logic, that's the way things are working. She can hear brainwaves. She isn’t crazy, just crowded and confused.
Bare feet on metal rungs, she wishes that she could melt away, mix her molecules with the ship and drift. But the physics involved with dissolving flesh into metal are complicated. Quantum phenomenon can't be performed within the time frame of a conversation.
"What, are you—are you saying she’s a witch?"
"Yes, Jayne. She’s a witch. She’s had congress with the beast."
"She’s in Congress?"
"How did your brain even learn human speech? I’m just so curious."
River knows things, knows Jayne learned to speak from his mother. She'd stand, shoeless and proud, with her twelve children round her feet and a gun at her hip. With the wash on the line and a baby in her arms, she taught Jayne to write, shoot, and say his prayers, though he only ever learned the first two.
"Bi zui, nin hen bu ti tie de nan sheng! This isn’t a joking matter. This is about our lives and River's."
"Thank you."
"She’s deeply intuitive. It’s true that sometimes..."
"I don’t think she’s intuitive, Doctor. I think she's a reader."
River knows Jayne learned to read with the Bible as the only book to practice on. But he didn't hold with no God, religion, or ideology, so, by the time he was fifteen, he had split, tracking down the only thing he did believe in. When his first paycheck came, for some crime or other, he sent it to his mother, because he believed she needed it more than she needed a bit of faith that never helped put food on the table. Job after job he sent some money on, got piss drunk, and moved on, believing in nothing, slowly forgetting he knew how to spell.
"Psychic?"
"Is that even remotely possible?"
Possible? Impossible, but still the only probable solution. It’s just a talent; it doesn’t mean what you think. River knows this, but she doesn’t have facts.
What she has are the scars on the back of her eyes and the names of forgotten things. She has the ghost languages of all the Babylons: Latin, Greek, Sumerian, Sanskrit, Minbari, Narn.
River has heard many languages. She knows the ones still living inside people’s mouths: English, Chinese. She knows the silent, private ones that last the span of a lifetime and only ever have one fluent speaker.
There is the language Inara. It is the reading of bodies: how to pleasure, how to comfort, to how defend. Silk, incense, and smooth skin, meaning is found in the curves of muscle and the color of eyes.
There is the language Book. It is faith and spirituality, the search for Tongues. A language simple and beautiful. A language subtle enough to cover the secrets hidden behind open eyes.
There is the language Kaylee: the Braille of moving parts. There is the language Zoë: orders given and orders carried out. There is the language Simon: heartbeats, whispering ailments, and x-rays. There is the language Wash: the motions of the phantom wings attached to every day objects. There is the language Mal: the meaning in the pauses between words.
And there is the language of the bald man whose name she never knew. His is the language of dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. His is the language of belief and mathematics and thought and magic.
And is there a language River? Is there a cadence of signals, syntax of noises, grammar of thought all for her? No. River doesn’t have a language; River is language. She is a psychic, a reflection of everyone else. She knows their thoughts and speaks with their voices. She is the tower of Babylon and, sometimes, she thinks it would be easier to crumble to the ground and fade away, becoming just another strain of thoughts in the din.
iv. just fade beyond the rim
She is sweating before she is off Serenity and in the throng of junker ships and grafting workers. Her eyes dart and it is so unlike last time, when the sides of the container gave her freezer burn and she only saw the backs of her eyelids.
This is Persephone. A tale within a tale, like the nesting dolls she got on her sixth birthday.
Persephone: a mythical woman who ate the seeds of the now extinct pomegranate and was then forced to stay in Hades for two thirds of the year. A myth, from a place that has become little more than one.
The women's namesake is dust and dry heat, as if Demeter were angry all the time. River wanders through the crowd and no one notices. She is just a girl with long hair and a patched dress passing by the ships.
It's almost like it used to be. But there is no Simon, no mother and father, no imported wood furniture, no canopy bed, or silk dresses, or dedicated source box.
She smells cinnamon and sweat, rusted metal and rancid garbage. She smells Earth.
The noise and crowd of the shifting masses is different here, more real, louder than the voices in her head. She sees the dirt browns of clothes and the flecked paint of ships and closes her eyes and listens, the crowd moving all around her. The bits stay down.
A hand touches her shoulder and a man’s voice, deep with a British accent asks her, "What's your name?"
"River." Without turning around or opening her eyes, she asks, "Where's your ship going?"
"Just beyond the outer rim."
Smiling, she turns and opens her eyes. "Mind a passenger?" For the first time in years she is finally awake.
Epilogue
It was an unorthodox courtship. They met in a bughouse where the patients got dissected for diseases they never had. It was a well documented, if classified, beginning. There were medical charts, security logs, and identification badges.
But then they escaped and the official record stopped.
Myth states the source of the river Styx was a waterfall on Earth-that-was, but that its mouth was somewhere uncharted. Ships and planets and people move and fade away, but no matter what path they take, what lives they lead, they're all said to cross over that river. Is it so hard to imagine that two bodies thrown out into space would spiral, together, past Charon and beyond all the stars?
It was an unorthodox courtship. They met, they parted, and, if they ever died or came back to life, the knowledge is like the mouth of the Styx or the space beyond the outer rim. Their end is unquantified.