Title: Lost In It
Author: Winter Ashby (rosweldrmr)
Disclaimer: Firefly © Joss Wheedon
Rating: T
Summary: When she sat alone on the bridge, the black of space spread out before her, like a velvet sheet, a curtain swung wide to cover the bits at the edges that frayed and tore away with the loneliness of it all, she could still hear whispers. (River & Jayne)
Timeline: Post 'Serenity'
Authors Notes: Um, first off... if this doesn't make any sense... then good. That means I've gotten River's character correct. Second, the reason I never tried to do Buffy/Ange/or Firefly/Serenity fics before is because Joss' dialogue is one of a kind. Especially on Firefly. But I did the best I could. This is for SE... it was her request. I hope you like it. Oh look... I wrote the next epic adventure of Serenity in one chapter... (let's not dwell on that too much). I was going to take out all the 'Epic-ness', but I thought it was too important to do without. I mean, that's part of Firefly... the adventures. Also, if it seems like River has a crush on Wash... that just because I do and his death impacted me deeply. Oh, and the "itallics" in quotes are thoughts or memories that River hears in her head. I hope that's clear. I use some lines right from the show/movie and I tired to integrate my own in there as well. Hopefully it all came out okay. I think that's all. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Eventually, the whispers began to fade, with time, with space, with the inky black of the silent void just beyond Serenity. Fading, disappearing.
"Whisper."
Empty, blank, blackness, space.
River felt the cold, the chill, the strange sensation of being whole, being semi-sane, and she was lost in it. It swallowed her, cradled her, shattered her, enveloped her, destroyed her with the absolute pain of singularity on a ship made of love, kept afloat with love, driven with love, busting with it, surround it with, exploding at the seams of rivets with it.
She learned to love Serenity, to love it and live with her, like a companion on the dark months when they fled from the crumbling alliance and pilfered tiny treasures, trinkets from entitled merchants who didn't need it to eat, to live, to survive.
"This is what I do, darlin'."
"Do you?"
Memories, fading, clinging, hanging, dying in the firefly light of the Serendipitous ship who lost everything, gained everything, and was named for a battle that was hopeless.
"Hopelessness," the walls whispered, beckoned, called to her.
"Take me." She followed the metal planks, her bare feet cold and calloused. She walked the empty halls and listens, listened, strained, tried to hear the echo of the vacuum just beyond the walls of metal and wires, turning, steering, flying, drifting, sifting through the memories that weren't her own.
But if a memory has no mind, no body, no life to take, to cling to, to be remembered by, then whose memory is it really?
"Mine." She answers herself, lonely, singular on the bridge.
Cold.
And when she sat alone on the bridge, the black of space spread out before her, like a velvet sheet, a curtain swung wide to cover the bits at the edges that frayed and tore away with the loneliness of it all, she could still hear whispers.
"Oh God, Oh God, we're all gonna die?"
Like Wash was there, still. And she laughed at the jokes no one heard, and smiled because she wasn't so alone in the blank spaces between living and existing.
"Leaf on the wind."
It was warm, and strange, and so heartbreaking that she couldn't breathe with the pain of it all, the guilt, the missing. It ached in her chest, gnawing, clawing, forcing its way up he spine, her stripped brain, damaged and made for nothing but feeling.
She can feel it all, all around her. She could feel when Simon held Kaylee's hands, and touched her face at night. And she watched, confused, intrigued, fixated at the way they looked at each other. The silence that stretched out when they sat, on quiet days, wrapped around and in each other. And River thought she might have known what it was to be jealous then.
"I mean to say." He smiled more, and hummed. River wanted to sing along, to dance to the tune her brother had floating, circling around him. But she didn't know this song. It wasn't something she was meant to join in.
Alone.
They slept in a bunk, too small for River, too in love for River. But she'd smile when she saw them, love; she remembered it somewhere, deep in the back of her mind. She'd loved before. A young boy at school, before, before the men with blue gloves that stripped her mind and left her bare and exposed. They took her humanity, raped her of sanity and innocence.
"Two by two." She runs and hides in her mind, in her dreams, from the memories, the foresight, the knowledge of.
They will come again. Someday… someday.
Soon.
Time means nothing. Nothing, nothing at all, ever at all. It just passed by, melted away, leaked through the cracks in her sanity. And seventeen gave way to just another day that changed that.
She celebrated her forgotten birthday on the bridge, reliving the life that was stolen from them in this very room, the very seat she sat in, feet in the chair, arms wrapped around herself, and always, just always, a whisper of another person in the back of her mind.
"Hello?" she calls, almost sure she's alone, but still crazy enough to think that maybe he'll answer back.
She was mostly whole, mostly but never quite entirely, never completely, never complete. Like Serenity, who quaked and shook with the grief of losing Wash. Like Zoe, who River could hear cry at night, when she was asleep and couldn't stop the tears from coming in hot, angry torrents. She'd wake up, her heart sore, her eyes puffy, and her pillow misted.
River could taste the tears, and her heart ached, pounded, tore from its place at the devastation Miranda brought. And she woke up, at night, and thought the reavers were on the ship, hunting, coming to take her, to make her lie down, because it wasn't her secret to keep, but it wasn't hers to tell either.
"We meant it for the best." She dreamed of the woman who spoke, tears in her eyes, a scream strangled on her bloodied lips as she was torn, ripped limb from limb. The hologram of a memory that haunted her still.
River was haunted and empty because she didn't have love like Zoe did, like Simon and Kaylee do, like Mal and Inara someday would. And she shied away from them, the couples, the chosen ones, the touched, the charmed, the lucky ones.
Alone. Again, always… always alone.
A ghost.
"Like somesort 'o boggieman."
Instead, she existed at the edges, the fringes, the corners of Serenity that only River knew about. She slept in cubbies, hiding places; the front of the bridge packed with boxes, supplies, and still lingered with the sweep, bitter smell of Wash.
---
"Gorrammit girl, get to the flyin'. You wanna die floatin' round the middle 'o nuthin'?"
Jayne.
Jayne was an enigma, a puzzle, a quagmire. He was a question, a stranger, an anomaly on the blip of River's world. He gravitated in, on jobs, on heists, on the quiet days in-between when she'd sit in the pilot's chair and listen to the memories that haunted the bridge.
"Who's flyin' this thing? Oh right, that would be me. Back to work."
He'd caught her laughing, and crying. Wash was laughing too, sweet and soft, echoing in her mind, and she'd wept from the pain of it. Jayne quirked an eyebrow, the way he did when he was thinking, not just letting the thoughts fly by, skimming the surface.
"Ain't nuthin there, girl."
And River found that she hated him. She hated him because he couldn't shut off his thoughts, his emotions either. But not because he was stripped bare, but because everything he felt, everything he thought made it to her mind, without trying, without wanting it, without any effort at all. She could see him, what he thought of her, the seldom grief he still felt when he walked onto the bridge and didn't find Wash. She hated him because whenever he was around, the thoughts that ricochet off the stone walls she'd erected in her mind were his. Her defenses could keep him out, but trapped him in.
"More trouble than they worth."
He was in her mind, thinking useless things. Feeling pain he had no right to feel. And she could feel it, feel the pain, the loneliness, the pent-up aggression, the adventure, the longing, all the pitiful emotions he ever felt. She could feel the shift in him when he looked at her. Still crazy, but dangerous now.
"A weapon, hu? Conjure I could take 'er if it served me." And he licked his lips, waiting for the next time he could fight her. He held a grudge, for many things, for everything. But there was guilt to, sometimes, when he wasn't too drunk, and they'd been floating, drifting through space for a long enough time, he looked at her and felt pity.
"Not right, what they did to 'er, not right in a powerful way." She hated him most then, for feeling sorry because she couldn't not feel, and he couldn't shut his mind off.
But she was getting better, getting better still. Day by day, week by week. Until one day she woke up, and Wash was gone. His scent, his voice, his laughter, his spirit. Gone, swallowed up by the verse that was in tattered ruins now, without alliance control. Bandits, scams, botched terra-forming. And it was her fault, all her fault, always her fault.
Blame.
Blame.
Blame.
But she had more secrets still. She gulped them back, pressed the down, twisted it back around the void that existed in her mind. She hid them from herself, because if she didn't she'd break, split, cut open with it.
"The Earth-that-was." A secret that wasn't hers, 500 years too late to change.
---
"We're journeyin' to the core." Mal says on her forgotten birthday, another year older, another year gone by. Nineteen now, and still never been kissed.
"Ariel?" Someone asks, and sounds excited. Kaylee.
But River doesn't notice, doesn't watch the way Simon's eyes light up. She's too busy trying not to feel the overwhelming waves of panic that leak from Jayne, like a flood and she's drowning in it. Gasping for breath, trying to escape it.
"But—"
" Alliance don't concern us none. Not since Jasper…"
Rebellion, death, coup, revolution, genocide, war. It clings to her stomach in putrid and utter uselessness. The air in the small dinning room grows thick with it, smothering. A blanket that everyone can feel, but no one talks about. A River is caught in the middle, unable to block it out like they can. And she's envious, envious of their apathy.
"Just let them die." Whispers.
"It won't work." River says and twists a strand of hair around her finger. "Won't."
Mal smiles, wicked, cunning, planning, scheming.
"…Payload…"
"…Shiny…"
"…Core's worse than the rim." Shivers of pleading fear. "Reavers been attackin' sumpin' fierce ever since…" ever since, ever since, ever since…
"Miranda."
"We've faced worse." Zoe says now, festering with rage.
"And not all 'o us made it to the surviven' part, now did we."
River is up and moving before Zoe can draw her gun or Mal can extend a fist. It should have been a slap, should have been. For Wash, who's gone now, but was here for so very long even after he was gone. He made her laugh, and sat with her on cold nights when the whole ship shook with love she knew nothing about.
Her fist is clenched, but she doesn't use it. She swirls, dances, spins and extends a graceful, painfully graceful leg. The arch of her foot connects with his neck, his windpipe and there is a crunch. He sputters, and stumbles back, and she looks at him, narrow eyes, hair falling to cover her face, breathing deep, and dangerous. So close to loosing control, becoming the weapon.
His body falls, hard and fast. The air in his lungs pushed out by the fall, his limps splayed out on the floor, his eyes wide. And she stands, menacing, proves that she's just as dangerous as he fears. And she can feel it, that anger, hate well up in him. He's emasculated and she quivers with the pleasure of seeing him so helpless.
"Well, that was dramatical." Mal laughs, his hands hanging from his belt.
But Zoe still quakes, still full of bitter rage. River can feel layers of anger like soil on the worlds, sinking down, compacting, solidifying. And all the layers cover mountains of the worst grief she's ever felt. It's so strong, it's sickening, makes her hands shake.
"It's work, point in fact, and nearly honest at that. Now, our time for hidin' and runnin' is practically at a close. It's time we paid a visit to the core, and Ariel is a good'a place as any."
River knows this will all end very far from Ariel, or the outer rim.
And she's connected again. The weapon is pushed back down, swallowed by the images she sees.
"Reavers won't come." She knows, the way she always knows.
Eyes on her. Jayne on his feet, fuming with rage, but thankful still. Gun in hand, shuddering, quaking with it… the rage. Rematch at hand, so close, so unfulfilled.
"Later," he thinks. A promise to himself and tucks the gun in its holster.
"Later." Zoe promises.
"Least she's useful for sumthin'." And River draws away, fades into the shadows by the pantry, as if space could make his thoughts stop filtering in.
"Reavers ain't so much the problem…" Coupling mount, technical… technical… (good point). Nodding. Technical… "Sure 'nough, we'll be bracin' for a crashin'."
Suggestions, suggestions.
Problems, objections.
Yelling.
Calming – Inara – solution.
Mal, final, ultimatum, threats.
Jayne shakes with rage, so angry he curses a red streak through River's mind.
She turns her head.
It's settled now, decisions made, agreed on. The not-quite thieves and sometimes big damn heroes are back in business.
River flies, and drifts back to days gone by and the false memory that barely skims the surface.
It's coming soon.
She can feel it, in her bones, her mind, her hands. She wishes Wash still laughed with her now.
"Set the course." Says the captain to the would-be pilot.
"Already done." She smiles, because she knows it bothers him.
"Unnervin'."
She turns her eyes back to the black, the blank.
"He's gone." She tells him.
"Who?"
"Wash."
"Yeah." But he doesn't understand.
---
She sleeps on the bridge and dreams of a blue/green world with a moon and a secret. Not hers, hers now.
There's banging in the alley and she's pulled from her dreams. Jayne. She can hear him, banging, smashing, drinking.
"Throwin' our lives away for respectability…" River holds her hands over her ears and shuts her eyes. She imagines pulling a sheet up to cover her mind, a barrier between her and him and his easy thoughts and surface emotions. She knows exactly what he's thinking, and yet, still somehow, he's unpredictable. Not safe. Thoughts are always just at the surface, like he doesn't exist deep enough to force them down and back.
"Not right makin' us come along… damn near suicide…lookin' for trouble we ain't seen since…" She can't take it, doesn't want to listen, doesn't want to feel the pity, resentment, wayward anger.
She stands and glides through the dark, her fingers graze over the walls, soft and barely there. She's only ever barely there at all. Ever. Any more.
"Better be right. Don't want no trouble with gorram reavers. Had 'nough for a lifetime." He has no right to think of her. She tastes anger on her tongue. She's drunk on it. She stands at the doorway and watches him fumble with a bottle.
She can smell the alcohol in the air. It's bitter and burns her lungs.
He always smells like a dusty saloon. Muddy, drunk, kinda like a barn, stale straw and gritty soil.
"Got a score to settle with you." He says and lurches forward, not steady, his boots clang against the metal floor and she could easily step around him. But the closer he gets, the louder his thoughts come. Anger, always anger. An ocean of it, drowning in it. Sucking it in, breathing it. She lets the tide of his emotions sweep over, dragging her down, down, down again.
His hands are on her skin, his hot, putrid breath on her face. "You owe me." His leather half-gloves are rough and scrape over her skin. He holds her neck and backs her against a wall. And he's so close, his thoughts all a jumble, usually are, but especially now.
And she can feel him, his body, pressed against hers. He wants her; she can see it, feel it, taste it. He's thought about this before, imagined it. She sees herself in his mind bend and let him press against every inch of her.
Her back against the wall, his eyes dangerous and watching her closely. Drunk still, she can taste him on the air of the galley.
His lips are rough, chapped, hard. He pressed them against hers, his hand finding its way up her spine, cradling her head. And she lets him. She lets him, because it's easier than fighting, just this once, just for tonight, just forever, it's easier to let him win. She closed her eyes and lets his thoughts play through her mind.
She takes them, drinks them in, soaks them up. She sees herself reflected in him, and all the sick fantasies he's ever had about her.
"Shoulda kill you." He mumbles between the breaths he takes and River slides her tongue against, over his.
"Like you could've?"
He twists his fingers in her hair. He pulls her hair, turning her head to the side and grazes his teeth over her neck.
"I could kill you right now."
She doesn't believe him, because she can see what he really wants to do right now.
And he kisses her again, but it doesn't feel like a kiss. It feels like an attack. And this means nothing, his hands on her skin, in her hair, his thoughts floating threw her mind, stirring something, forgotten, not recalled, another memory, a phantom specter, not hers, never hers. But it stirs all the same and River is desperate for it. She claws at his back, her nails running gashes down his arms and he purrs into her mouth.
She doesn't draw back, but pushed him forward, inching ever closer to the table. And she pushed, watches, feels him fall. His knees give way as he reaches the bench-seat. And she's straddling him, her bare legs against his rough pants, kneeing on the cold metal bench-seat, her dress riding up her legs, his hands on her skin, his mouth on hers, his mind in hers.
And he's everywhere. Jayne is in the air, in the dark, the blank, the velvety black. He's everywhere and no where, because he hasn't stopped the ache he started that spirals for completion.
"Kill me." She says, because she doesn't know what she means.
"Bee-jway." The Chinese stings as she swallows the command. "Shut up." Still echoing inside his head. "This don't mean nothing'."
"Dahng rahn, dahng rahn." She nods as his hands find the back of her neck and press her against him, holding her down, letting her drown in him.
"Of course, of course." She hears it register in his mind.
And she lets him. Because it didn't mean anything.
Anything, anything… eve—ry—thing.
---
River wakes up in his bunk, struck by the silence of the room.
There are no thoughts, no whispers, nothing but the echoing space outside Serenity, swirling around them.
And for the first time since forever, River feels normal. A normal girl, wrapped in the sheets of a man's bed, and blissfully quiet. She can hear his breathing, and when he sleeps, she thinks he's almost pretty.
She smiles and lets the sheets slide down her chest. The guns on his bunk wall gleam and shimmer, and she thinks they are beautiful, like Christmas decorations. And it's enough, for now. To feel the guise of normalcy, she wears it like a mask as she lies back down against his warm skin and dusty smell.
It's enough to make her forget that there is something on the horizon that will destroy everything. She slips out of his room, unnoticed, before the rest of the ship can stir. She feel the change, the subtle shift in the air that surrounds her.
Not alone. Not so alone, anymore. Evermore, she wonders and chews on her swollen lip if he will take her again. She hates him, but that is slowly fading as she recalls the ease with which he conjured the fantasies he'd harbored for her for too long. Too long, and she's happy to make those thoughts a reality.
He comes to her again, that night. She thinks maybe, she already knew he would. His outline framed in the light against the door of the cockpit. He is broad and menacing, if it wasn't for the stirring desire she could feel, taste radiating from him.
And so their pattern goes unnoticed by the rest of the crew. Not even Inara, a trained companion notices the way the air hums around River's head or the way Jayne doesn't bother to fight with her or about her anymore.
They chalk it up to smarts catching up with him, to Mal finally sinking in some sense, much needed and sorely lacking. But really, he still yells, still fights. But now he does it with his hands on her hips and his body, lips, skin against hers.
They are fights she doesn't mind losing.
When he doesn't drink, he's almost sweet, like the lingering memory of strawberries and a summer years ago when he first betrayed her. She doesn't know why she recalls those few months when she was thoroughly disjointed, fragmented, shattered in the head, lost in herself as happy. Wistful, almost. Nostalgia, she supposes.
They lay together, curled, wrapped, suffocating in each other on the empty bridge where Wash and Zoe used to make love.
"This is all going to end badly."
"Well, you would know." His voice is dry and scratchy. It grates at her like sandpaper.
And he wonders if she can see his thoughts at that moment.
"Yes," she says and he smiles, leers. And it bothers her that it doesn't bother him.
"Ain't got nuthin' to hide." He thinks.
He doesn't know how right he is. He's an open book, the pages all splayed out in front of her, but out of order so that one line doesn't flow to the next, but interweaves and falls away. All the pages are out of order, and rearrange. He's a jumbled mess. And the pages have no numbers, so she follows one sentence to another that doesn't really follow, and once again, always again, she's lost in him.
"Reach Ariel in 2 days time." It's a question, one that River doesn't know the answer to.
What would she do when they reached the planet that stole her mind?
"Reached the end of the verse, saw a vast nothingness, and went bibldy over it." She can hear an echo of Kaylee, before Miranda, before this new secret that's burning away at her mind.
Jayne makes it easier to forget, because when she's with him, around him, near him, all she can do is drown in him, his thoughts, his feelings that always, always comes so easily. And she thinks, maybe it's not so bad that she can see everything about him.
It's the only way she knows how to answer his unasked question.
"Won't change a thing." She lies easily now.
---
'Eta kuram na smekh.'
River scribbles it on a sheet of paper, she can't say it. The folded scrap is heavy in her hand as they wait to disembark. She stands next to Jayne, too close but not close enough. And she slips the paper into his hand.
No one else notices, as the air lock vacuums open and Ariel stretches out before them like a red carpet made of anarchy and despair. Jayne doesn't look at the sky this time.
He unfolds the sheet of paper and stairs at it.
"Just in case." She tells him, lies to him.
"Just in case." Serenity echoes back, hallow and empty now.
"I don't need it." He says as he pushed it into his pocket, resolutely avoiding the scenery as they all walk shoulder to shoulder. "I could take ya." He lies too, better though and she almost believes him. Or believes that he believes.
"Like last time?"
"I wasn't proper prepared last time for a dancin' killin' machine." He doesn't laugh or smile, but River hears the humor in his voice, or maybe she feels it coming off of him in waves.
"What makes you think you could take me now?" she jests, because really, he never stood a chance. She was designed for it, made, molded, created to kill, expertly, without hesitation or remorse.
"I know how you move now." He comments, off back, casual, like he hasn't been inside her and tasted her. "I'm intimate with it." His voice drops low and deep and rumbles her stomach, makes it ache for him. His hands, his lips, his dusty smell and sickly alcohol-breath. She knows he's been drinking.
She stops and turns to him, overwhelmed with the 'what ifs' that dance in her head, always have, but she never gave them much thought before.
What if I die? What if he dies? What if we live? What if I go crazy and kill them all?
And her 'sight' fails her again, because he's moving before she can react, and his lips press against hers, his hands already know just the right places to hold her so she can't, won't squirm away.
"HEY!" River can hear Simon, but for the life of her, she can't make herself care as she falls into Jayne. "Get off my sister!"
Jayne only uses one hand to hold him back and River runs her tongue over his lips. He growls and shoves Simon to the dusty ground. He swallows her up in his arms, wrapping himself around her, the safe-word stuck in his pocket and he only thinks of her.
"Well, that's not something you see every day." Mal shrugs, River can see it in her head, and she kisses on. Because for once, Jayne in safe, safer that what's to come. So she takes solace in his comforting openness and the thoughts that block out the looming cloud of uncertainty her blessed/cursed sixth sense can't see past.
Finally, he lets her go, and she spins back to reality, to the broken planet that she helped destroy, and she'd glad for it.
"River?" Simon asks as Kaylee helps him to his feet.
"Just in case." Jayne says and swings Vera on her strap from his back, his thumb on the trigger and looks back to the horizon. And she's happy as she drowns in his thoughts, and walks on to meet her destiny.
---
"The Earth that was" wasn't depleted. It was destroyed. Utopian society and the integration of two ancient global powers weren't as seamless as history says. Because it's those who survive who write the history. And usually, it's the ones who save themselves that survive to write history. So 'Atomic War' turned into 'Global Integration' and 'Genocide' became 'Environmental Degradation.' And the only men in the whole verse who actually knew about it, knew where the 'earth that was' orbited, uninhabited, and fledgling, stood in front of her when she was at her worst.
"She has her lucid moments"
"What good is a physic if she's crazy?"
Yes, this will all end far from here, another secret she couldn't keep, another world left for fodder, and an ending she's not sure she'll live to see. But at least she won't die a virgin. At least she won't die without love. Because as she watches his back she's convinced herself that that's what she's let it become. Fast and unexpected, for all the wrong reasons, it was right, still is.
"She always did love to dance."
Another secret, waiting to be unearthed, discovered, revealed. But at least this time, River has someone to share a bed with. So the long night before the final push doesn't seem so alone. Wrapped in him, breathing him in, fingering the rivets of his gun, she tells him that she loves him.
"Gorramit, girl. That ain't necessary."
She laughs lightly.
"I know." She says and kisses him again, it's become familiar and yet, no-less thrilling that their first kiss in the galley months ago.
"I know," he thinks and falls into her.
Holy-Unholy COW! Was that fluff there at the end? I don't know what that's about, really. This was supposed to be all angry and angsty.
What did you think? Let me know.