The Undertaker
She's the undertaker, burying them. Their secrets, their lies, their hopes and dreams and memories. She's a thief, sneaking into their mind and running away with the things they don't want and don't want to want.
Inara's longing, Mal's love, Simon's fear. She takes them away and hides them, burying them deep in her mind, dropping them down cracks that no hand can enter but her own.
She piles on the dirt and pats it down tight. Nothing escapes from her mind, it's a graveyard of people's innermost thoughts and desires. It's a jail; a garden with bars around the flowerbeds.
Gravestones jut like teeth from the soil, threatening to catch her and chew her to shreds if she comes to close.
Some of them are old and crumbling, their inscriptions almost worn away. It doesn't matter to her, she knows what they all say; it's branded into her mind and she can't lose the scar. These are the secrets from long ago and far away, the ones that she stole from the doctors and the Parliament members who wanted to visit their little pet all locked up in chains.
Others are newer, their stone facades untouched by the elements. These are the ones she pulled from the minds of the crew, the ones that make them toss and turn every night. Some of them have flowers on them, proof that the thinker returned to them all the time to turn the thoughthopedream over and over.
She takes them and buries them away, hiding them under soil and rock and grass, putting demons to rest and keeping the big bad wolf from eating the children skipping through the forest.
Sometimes they break their way through her coffins, scratching their way out of the soil. Zombies, they called them back on Earth-that-was. PleaseGodmakeitstop is what she calls them.
They come and wreck her mind, tearing away pieces and tearing away the flimsy walls that Simon's medicine builds. She shoves them away from her, sticks them back in their graves.
They don't belong there and their voices scream and scream, echoing around and around in her head. Sometimes she doesn't even know if she's the one that's screaming, out on the ship, or if it's only the voices of the buried.
Miranda came and yanked one of her graves wide open, spilling the wreckage all over her head until she exploded and, for the first time in years, actually told someone about her little graveyard. (Bad River, not supposed to tell anyone)
They came and took the wreckage away, packed it all into a video and uploaded it onto the servers. Fat lot of good it did them, and she paid for it six times over.
New graves appeared, more and more thoughts rushing in until she was almost buried alive. That wouldn't be good; who would keep the secrets buried if she was in one of the graves?
Zoe's sadness, Jayne's fear, Kaylee's betrayal (because, after everything was said and done, she still believed there were good people out there). River took it all away and left only echoes in their places.
She's the undertaker, the gravedigger, taking away all the bad things, all the things that cause sadness and pain and fear, and burying them away deep in her mind.
And one day she looks into her own mind and sees hope. Hope that she will be better one day, that she will run and play and not scream, that her sentences will make sense and that the blue hands will stop hunting her.
And then, with precise, surgical cuts, she removes hope from her mind and buries it under a willow tree, right next to Simon's loss of a sister.
Because if she gets better, who will tend the graves?