Stars
"Stars aren't stars until there's nothing between you and them." River oneshot set during Bushwacked.
Don't you just love the expression on River's face when she and Simon are floating outside the ship during Bushwacked?
Disclaimer: Don't own it. Would love to, though.
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"There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light."
--N.P. Willis
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Her homeworld was a twilight world. It had six moons, huge ones, lumbering in an awkward dance around the little planet, like bears to an organ grinder's song. The daylight did not last long, only seven hours at the summer solstice. But the night was never truly dark, because there were always at least two moons dripping their light all over the planet. She and Simon could sneak outside to play in the middle of the night, chasing the cat through the garden and planning offensive actions against the Independents. And sometimes Simon would pull out one of his books and show her the way the stars looked from space or from Earth-That-Was, forming giant pictures stretching across a velvet sky like graffiti across a retaining wall. But unlike children in the border worlds, they could not find those stars in their own sky, because the moons overshadowed them. River Tam never saw stars.
The Academy hurt her eyes at first. The whole planet was positively swimming in the whitest light she'd ever seen, pounding down from its too-close sun. She blinked her dark eyes, let her hair fall in front of her face in hopes that it would keep a little of the light at bay. The Teachers didn't like that, of course, because they believed that everybody's business was their own and nobody should have anything to hide. Except them, of course, but she didn't know that at first. All she knew that the light was a little too harsh and that it penetrated everywhere, digging into her physically till she felt as though there was no part of her that was not open to it. And they were never allowed outside at night.
In the Lab, there were lights. They were blue, and cold, and big, and they made her blood-shot eyes hurt, even when she screwed them up tight against the pain. They hummed, too, not a soothing hum or a cracking of a fire, but a ravenous drone like monsters lying in wait just around the corner. The lights were not spread evenly through the room; they seemed attracted to her tiny body, pouring their coldness over her, letting it climb its slimy way over her body, and making her pale skin a death-like blue. Sometimes she thought she really was dead, only if she was, it wouldn't hurt this bad, would it?
There was no light in the box. She wasn't supposed to be conscious—Simon would never have done that to her—but there was a part of her he couldn't make sleep with his drugs and his gases. That part of her whimpered and keened and quaked in the foggy darkness of the box, left alone with the voices and the memories and the darkness. That little part of her didn't know how to pray, but if it had, it would have prayed for light, any kind of light, preferring even the eerie haunting slither of the Lab to this shut-up-ness.
She likes Serenity's lights, calm, sturdy lights that know their job and do it well, even if they give out on occasion. They are warm, a yellowy color that reminds her a little bit of firelight or lightning bugs that used to waltz in the summer air of the garden back home. They hum, too, but it is a soothing purr, like breathing or the cat's contentment. She likes to lie on the light-warmed metal of the catwalk, soaking it into her skin after so many years in the cold. And Simon even leaves a little light on in her room at night, a tiny, friendly one that winks at her when she looks over at it and casts comforting shadows of her brother's presence on the wall. Serenity and her lights are like new birth.
But she has never seen anything like the stars before. She has seen them through the glass, of course, when she was on the bridge watching Wash or peering up through the windows in the ceiling of the kitchen. But those were not real stars. Those were strained as through a sieve, plastic bits of light stuck on a metal sky. Stars aren't stars until there's nothing between you and them.
These are real stars: living, breathing, pulsing, singing, sighing, dancing, ringing, calling, falling, dreaming, laughing, crying, meaning.
Some may wink and go out, she knows, exploding and collapsing millions of lightyears away. Some may be born, slowly, cold at first but growing larger and hotter. But there will always be stars, right till the end, and maybe beyond, too.
They have an order, a kind she envies till she hurts, though you can never really be jealous of the stars. They look sort of like words, written on a black canvas by a hand that wanted everyone to know it was there. They look like a song, the notes climbing up the scale and then back down again, traipsing through the music. They dance around, spinning their planets and moons and asteroids around them like the hems of flowing skirts.
They dance a little closer, brushing up against her, whispering.
They want her to dance, too. Perhaps one day she'll learn the steps.
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