Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Firefly.

Title: A River's Rapids

Main Characters: River, Mal, Simon, Jayne

Rating: T

Summary: "All the others ever did was talk and speak. A constant idle chatter, present even when their mouths were shut. They never heard the music She did, nor did they care to listen as She did. Subliminal gestures led to possibilities only She could see, but none ever cared to listen to Her song and watch Her dance. So, She leaves the Machine open to the 'Verse and it's interpretation."

Word Count: 3,890

The river- was, but died away,

leaving behind sand and stone,

a dry river bed.

The river that once led the way,

To Rameses throne,

has no more life-dead.

The river from which reeds grew and swayed,

now dead and gone,

all that's left- a dry river bed.

The Dry River Bed

Imprisonment. A phrase She understands very well. Better than most, for She was never free. You see, monsters had followed Her since the beginning. They had given Her life, and wealth, and false happiness, and opportunity. They had stalked Her, whispered into Her ears during the night. They told Her of love and reverence but whispered of conformity and failures. They pretended to worship and in return requested obedience and docility as a daughter of the Power. Sometimes lies were sung from their lips, sometimes truths. Impossible to discern which was which really, so She stopped listening to the hostile music. Deciphering the songs was impossible, and highly improbable such an endeavor would succeed.

Instead, She learned to sing her own melodies and find harmony in The Protector. He no longer had a name, for that had been lost so long ago. A vague song, unique in it's hum, was all that remained. The Protector had been chased off by the monsters, fooled into thinking their evil was love and their hate was adoration. Foolish Protector. He longed to witness truths in the lies, and lied to himself enough for belief in such nonsense to take seed and flourish into a twisted tree of ignorant torment. It grew twisting again and again towards the Sun of Falsehoods, but the tree never knew anything else. The tree thought the Sun was good and true. Only She, the rain, knew what the Sun truly was. The rain tried to protect the tree and shade it with Her clouds, but the tree of the Protector longed to be fooled, and so it was. But She never was. She always had been the smart one...

The monsters changed and warped into something new, something worse. They never hid in Her closet or under Her bed. They had always hidden beneath the skins of their victims. Their fangs hidden in smiles, claws retracted in smooth hands, scales hidden under rich fabrics and secret tongue disguised as an understandable gibberish. Garbled shrieking tones were all that remained of the first monsters who had kept Her imprisoned in Her tower. They had kept her there, seductively whispering in Her ears that She was loved and She was good and She was perfect when all that brewed underneath was a seething loathing for a spawn that could not truly be theirs. The monsters bestowed upon her gift after gift. Education that challenged Her intellect that surpassed the greatest scholars and made them look like foolish toddlers playing with blocks. She memorized concertos, could play any instrument, could sing a song forwards, backwards, in different keys, and a mixture of them all after listening just once. She solved equations for mathematicians, discussed theories with revered scientists and philosophers, traded poetry with scholars in seven different tongues. She did everything in Her power to earn even a semblance of the monsters' love. She emulated The Protector, and still no clemency was conferred nor mercy ever found.

The monsters who hid under their silks and satins and false love traded Her to new ones for an empty tower. She almost missed them when She saw the new monsters who did not bother to hide what they were. Blue scales, Her favorite color, sent a malaise through Her that chilled even Her fiery spirit. Blue created an impenetrable armor that She immediately comprehended She could never break. Demonic songs were whispered from these, telling Her once again that She was perfect and special and good. But now She could not believe them because of the first monsters, the ones who taught her suspicion in pretty lies whispered and sung in the tune of death and melody of suffering. She wishes now She could have believed them, maybe then they would have kept Her sheltered in Her lonely tower. But all sense of security and warmth was lost to the bottomless Blue.

The Blue surrounded Her; engulfed her in wave after wave, only to spit her back out surrounded in cold corpses and inexhaustible depths of nothing. The world spun around Her, and all She could do was scream and cry and pray to any entity that might be imposing this cruel, sick joke on Her to stop and please please please make it all stop. She could no longer tell where the claws of the Blues ended and where their devices and instruments of torture began. They elicited window shattering wails from Her lithe frame that once only emitted dulcet tones and melodious harmonies. They made Her body and mind their personal playground, and like delinquent children they wreaked havoc. Her world spun around and around until directions could no longer be discerned, and voices no longer had their own tones, and faces blurred together, and memories she never had surfaced, and lives she never lived were whispered; inevitably, everything in Her was lost.

Her mind became a computer's storage for nothing but data and input-output scenarios that only she could foretell. Empathy was lost and replaced by the cold, cruel biting heart of a machine's love for humanity. Her mind was reprogrammed again and again and again until She could no longer perceive where She ended and The Weapon began. She was The Weapon, but she was separate. Fighting only increased pain, but She was never one to flinch away from suffering. And The Weapon welcomed it. New methods of mind-shattering distress from an external stressor were often invoked. The Blue pushed Her to Her limits again and again until the porcelain doll was broken. Only then did they reassemble Her; the same on the outside, but another one of them, another Monster shoved under the china-doll's skin. They took the Doll and broke Her again and again until they were satisfied, and the process of more input was bestowed upon The Machine in the brainpan so The Weapon could operate, acting as the Doll. And She watched from outside as the Doll cried for clemency, for lenience, for it all to stop. She felt the Doll's pain and suffering, but She never could never recognize the Doll. The Doll was The Blue's plaything to dress and demolish at their mere whim. Monsters were created from Her, and She could not stand it.

So She watched from the outside as more data and code filtered through Her head. She learned She could delve into the minds of those around her and extract both desired and undesired information, but that rarely provided Her a solace from Her own special hell. The Blue had different faces and different forms, but they were all the same beneath their monstrous scales and frozen hearts. The goal was always the same, the minds always unified in the belief that the end justifies the means, and if the means meant breaking what was once whole then so be it. She found no consolation in the minds of The Blue, only the future of Her sufferings and the endless onslaught of data and control and loss of will and deprivation of any remote form of humanity. Even the occasional visitor would observe with a gay sort of morbid fascination, but She did not mind their perverse joy at Her loss of humanity. She thirstily dove into them, searching for any sort of sensation other than pain and torture and longing and desire and more pain, always pain. She dared to hope for a sweet oasis in Her desert of despair, and often found any semblance of empathy to be a mirage. And their minds left Her, they always left, and She was once again forced to face the hurricane of death and destruction and demons alone.

Each day She slowly lost The Human and became more and more of The Doll. The Weapon, The Machine, and The Doll all rolled into one as She lost Her. Rational thought was lost, along with any semblance of hope for forgiveness for sins of no control. The lifeline she sent to The Protector long ago must have been interrupted, or never received, or, worst of all, ignored. She was alone with only The Machine, and The Weapon, and The Doll for comfort. The needles in Her eyes and the one in Her head and the ones in Her limbs all told Her that yes, She may be numb to everything now, but She was alive. The Machine did not yet have enough input to deliberate whether this was Her God-given gift or Satanic curse. She drowned in the blue consecutively, the once beloved color becoming the hue of hatred and the endless shade of pain and suffering. It drowned Her and resuscitated Her in a constant, never ending cycle. Time passed as The Doll changed and new discoveries of the body that had once been Her's were brought into light revealing The Beast, only to be tinted and dyed blue as They once again began the breaking process. Soon, the Weapon's tact and efficiency grew with the Beast's bloodlust as support and the Machine's assimilation of data began to successfully render Her incompetent of maintaining even the simplest form of control. She lived on this way in The Doll, never truly alive. She forgot how to live long ago. The only isolated semblance of any data that remotely replicates and assimilates life and what actually living was like can be found in dreams, which The Machine finds highly illogical and unnecessary but She longs for as a drug; a remedy to Her fading existence.

But the dreams are never peaceful anymore. They pretend to be, and imitate a calm, kind, forgiving universe that She coexists in with loving peers and a docile population; but She can only dream of what she knows, so soon the monsters show themselves. Scary monsters. Hiding in the teacher, the classmate, and in the death, so much death, and in the public officer, and the lawyer, and the social worker, and innumerable others. But never the Protector. Instead, She can only ever remain a silent observer to him and the monsters as he suffers through their sadistic delight and demonic experiments. She can only ever watch as Her tree withers in the heat of The Blue, because his rain was unable to sufficiently protect his from the Sun and it's evil rays. In the good dreams, Her Protector withers away, null and void; it is the nightmares that last for hours on end, constantly subjecting him to more and more violence, and they all start with his ill-conceived attempts to rescue Her and bring back the rain. These are the only things the separate Her from The Doll now. Sick movies and demented albums that run through Her mind, portraying terrors and hate that causes Her fear and pain like nothing else soon became Her solace and one escape from the physical imprisonment The Doll provides, the mental restraints The Weapon exercises, and the moral deterioration The Machine succeeds in eliciting.

But suddenly the pain stops. The Doll's eyes open, and She sees out of them into blue. An iron hand suffocates Her heart, shattering the breath in Her lungs. Blue means inevitable suffering of the mind and spirit, and blue eyes exhibit a soul made for damnation and suffering of others. But a voice accompanies the blue, a humming harmony to Her once joyous melody that She had long since forgotten... The Machine runs through the files in Her mind until they reach one buried and forgotten except for the nightmares and terrors that had mercilessly resurfaced them. But never did She allow Herself to dwell on a file that was for so long thought to be unnecessary. The hum was quickly identified to belong to The Protector, but the iron hand did not fade. Rather, it strangled Her life-bringing organ. Compressed it until, squelch! It beats no more, but no that is another nightmare outside of a dream. The Blue must have located The Protector to create a new method of destruction of Her mind, another way to break the china doll they so loved to play with. Trickery was highly likely, as The Blues often liked to crush Her spirits while she was physically and mentally depleted of ample amounts, as She was then.

The silence She had not originally registered upon waking from yet another nightmare suddenly shattered as the hums became a strong voice in the forefront of a symphony of screams and pleas and glee and madness from all around. They pulled at Her, demanded Her attention, and refused to relinquish their grasp on Her now fragile conscious. They swallowed her whole as they dragged her into a suffocating darkness that encompassed eternal night in the midnight blue of Hypnos and Thanatos as their mother called them back...

"River," sang the harmony, strong and clear in the ruckus of lost souls. "Wake up. Please, it's Simon. River. It's your brother. Wake up..." The nervous yet arrogant tone faded to the background as a far more desperate tone took place in his voice. The Protector identified himself as... Simon. Overpowering screams and deafening voices all at once stopped in the midst of the forte of the mind breaking melody and became a rest in the chaos of chords. Blissful silence reigned over Her mind for a moment, and sanctuary was granted to the lost pilgrim. But She had learned that sanctuaries inevitably fail in their purpose due to corruption. The Machine pushed Her aside, searching through shelf after shelf of tomes of knowledge that had been forced upon Her. Blank. Nothing. Data displayed first in Mandarin, then English. Tam, Simon. Firstborn son of Gabriel and Regan Tam. Birth: November, 2490. Occupation: Surgeon. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Blue. Threat Level: Undetermined. Proceed with caution.

The Machine glided towards the Target, years of strife inflicted upon the Doll having no effect. Fractures were obvious, yet not a hindrance to the functioning of the Weapon. Lithe arms twitch once, twice, testing control; mind over matter, orders over soul. The Machine's orders to detain threat until accurate danger level of the Target is determined. Cause no harm to Tam, Simon as Tam, Simon is a citizen of the Alliance. If harm is unavoidable, ensure it results in as little damage as possible. Filed data of Tam, Simon contributes to the formatting of possible outcomes, creating the most likely result of a skirmish. Best plan of attack: grab arm, bend wrist at an angle exactly ninety degrees, force elbow forward into approximately one hundred eighty degrees and allow leeway for resistance or compliance within the joint depending on the flexibility of Tam, Simon. From there, spin Tam, Simon into wall, twist elbow behind to approximately ninety-five degrees, lean body into target to ensure struggle is futile, and provide resistance on the head to limit movement. Await further instruction.

Time divided into fractions as She saw what the Machine intricately plotted. Impressive plan, but highly unlikely to be a necessary action as the target had an irrefutably blemish-free record of non-violence and compliance with those in authority. The only action required by the Doll was to step forward, and allow the Machine to take control. Fractions became thousandths of milliseconds as the Machine raced forward, and She screamed for control. A porcelain hand reaches forward, the Doll complying with the Machine so the Weapon could be unleashed, and She kicks and screams and writhes and claws and nothing works. The hand is an inch away from the Target's collar until suddenly She is there, and it is ripped back, and the Target becomes the Protector once again.

"Simon?" She speaks. A foreign tongue from what She's known, lost over the screams and howls that had become Her indigenous language over the courses and streams of time lost to the hell She was put in. The sound seems forgotten, but as She mutters the tune it registers again as a forgotten melody She once loved. Peace is awash, quieting the machine for a fraction of time as She revels in the comfort of a remembered harmony. The fragile glass is shattered in the passage of time after as foreign screams and alien tones are forced into Her again, along with the Machine's faint hum of power from its database. Quickly, it sorts through the tones and songs of alien minds until a consensus is reached; security breach.

"They know you've come." For once, She is in control. A tremulous whisper of strength in a world of weakness and fragility that undeniably had been forced is found. Pressure is exerted upon Her mind as the Machine attempts to remove Her from the Doll and allow the Weapon to operate functionally; yet She is able to refrain and feign exercised rigidity in her placement as commander. She is the captain of the vessel, and leads Her ship forwards, past the comforting allied ship. An unintentional glance into His hull clearly communicates that his intentions are in Her best interest, and He was sent to provide a path of retreat from enemy waters. She must attempt escape while the Blue Flags have been provided a distraction.

Exactly four minutes and twenty-nine seconds remain until the cause of the breach and objective will be determined, providing exactly four seconds to walk towards the door from Her current location. She steps forwards, running through the door, turns right, left, then right again. Exactly two minutes and forty-nine seconds have passed. She encounters a disturbance. He hisses to hide, must assess most logical method of concealment and ascertain that adequate cover will be provided. Most logical step is to hide where no one looks; plain in sight, yet hidden to the unseeing eye. Ignorance to surroundings provide Her best cover. Assessment costs two seconds, She has fifteen to provide herself cover, and then four seconds to resume previous retreat tactics. Approximately one minute, three seconds remain, allowing leeway for the variable of human response in allied vessel. She reaches the end of the map in Corridor 32, sub-basement AF, directly inside of window 2803. Enemy vessel intercepts Alliance, placed at approximately eighty-seven and four tenths degrees southwest of current position. Exactly enough time to retreat out escape route planned by Her Protector. Goal of freedom achieved for the time being.

Brown eyes that had thus been busy refocus upon the Knight. Two tenths of a second of time has been used upon calculation of most successful route; chance of success is about 63%, assuming that He complies at rate consistent with trends examined from past behavior of about 55% in Her favor. She steps through the gates of Hell and into the passageway that determines survival or recapture. He follows at Her heels as She leads them down the unwritten map, following his route and adhering to her scheduled seconds. The disturbance is encountered, and She quickly scales the barriers of the corridor to hide in plain sight where the unseeing do not see. As the Blue Ship neglects to turn her telescope upwards, the success rate increases to approximately 74.8%. Another left is taken before She leads them down a straight corridor, ending with Her passage into the garden to taste the forbidden fruit that is so close to being in reach.

He surpasses Her, as She has led him onto the final point. She senses the trepidation his extended limb displays as He breaks the clear pool of solid liquid in front of them. He grasps Her hand and drags her forward as the enemy vessel appears as projected at exactly eighty-seven and four tenths of a degree southwest of Her location, but She remains unconcerned. Scylla's head descends from her frame at an estimated 320 feet up from her current position. She leaps on as a prisoner, and is lifted as a bird freed from its cage. Endorphins rush through Her as She leaves the Intrusions and alien emotions, hormones, voices, and objects behind. The needles are gone, no longer in her eyeballs to force visions; the scalpel no longer in the brain pan. Suppression has been suspended as of the current moment. Foreign emotions fill Her. Identical to the symptoms of endorphins that accompany the sentiments of elation, joy, or ecstasy. The apple is at the edge of Her lips. Finally, She bites the air of freedom for the first after far too long.

The river- beautiful, no words could say,

left behind- a dry river bed.

-Dry River Bed, Esnala Banda

A/N: Alright! It's over! It took me a long time to write and try and get into the mentality of River. I'm not totally sure I did her justice, but I really tried to incorporate the insanity and instability she would definitely be suffering through. I didn't want to go too far into the torture River had to suffer through, but I did try to communicate the effect it had on her. The writing is pretty scattered to show what her thought process would be like. Essentially, this is a narrative of what River went through. There were quite a few words in this that I had to look up in order to use them properly. But I thought they were fitting, especially since this is River. What'd you guys think?

There's a few allusions to Greek mythology in this. For anyone who didn't quite understand or catch them, I'll explain it here. Scylla is a multi headed monster who guarded the entrance to the sea of monsters with her sister Charybdis. In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men sailed under Scylla's cliff and lost several men to her heads that would grab a soldier from the deck and eat them. Hypnos and Thanatos were the twin sons of Nyx, goddess of the night. Hypnos was the god of sleep, and Thanatos was the god of peaceful death.

I'm thinking about continuing this through the series, and maybe beyond. What do you guys think? I'd really appreciate it if you'd just scroll down to that lovely little review button at the bottom of the page and leave a message! Even if it's just a few words, it would mean the world.