Author's Note: I figured, this being another fic about River's ranting, that I should give some background. This ficlet is set in-between scenes during "War Stories"; River briefly wakes up from the dream she's been living for the last few years.

Sleepwalking

By Trisana McGraw

He is in her bunk again. She would enjoy his visits more if he weren't trying to find yet another solution to the impossible equation. Rather than cure the ailment in her mind, the medicines he brings also make her body sick.

He reaches out an arm to hug her, but his other hand holds a needle. The light glints dully on the drop of medicine that hangs on its slender tip, and for a moment she can see a myriad of colors in the fluid.

She thrashes against him and wails like a baby in a tantrum. "You're not supposed to fight doctors," she remembers her mother always telling her. But doctors are supposed to cure you, and this one isn't doing his job right. When he treats her, he tells her that going to sleep is good for her, but what he doesn't understand is that she has been sleeping all this time. He tries to wake her up, but the medicines only make her dream of more of the deadly slumber.

Without her realizing it, the needle pierces her pale flesh, and she finally quiets, resigned to another dragging night with no solace. But as she sits still, she becomes aware of a tingling thrill creeping through her body. It spreads warmth to her limbs, and when it finally touches her sickened brain, she knows in her heart, This is the one.

* * *

Like the fairy tale from Earth-that-was, the Sleeping Beauty drowned in slumber for the many rises and falls of the sun, until days slipped away from her and ceased to have real meaning. There was no way for her to walk, talk, be a normal girl until she was awakened by the warm, sustaining kiss – the kiss of life.

The sun ascended the horizon, flooding everything in its reach with pure light. For the first time in a long while, she opened her eyes when the sun passed over the ship. It slid beneath her skin, making her entire body glow healthily.

She sat up in bed, and for the first time the world was right side up. Like a previously malfunctioning machine that had been repaired, her gears were suddenly in perfect alignment, and, rather than spin in all directions, they smoothly obeyed her mental commands. When she walked, it was on her feet, not in her mind, and her destination was a real place.

The mist before her eyes cleared, and she saw things with a new pair of eyes not veiled by a dizzying blur. Every color, shape, and texture was, for the first time, solid and distinct, not the half-formed shadows that constantly flitted from object to object.

The silence was deafening. The voices inside her head had fled, and the open space they left behind made her feel lightheaded. All at once, new sounds rushed through her ears to fill that emptiness; they chimed sweet and clear like bells, not rough and grating like the voices were. She could hear the other eight people around her, and it was their surface voices, not their hidden yearnings and laments, that her mind picked up.

Everything fit precisely into place; everything made sense. There was no tumult of voices and images clogging her brain, no searing pain in her body or mind. The blue hands couldn't reach her now.

She ate one of the apples that Jayne bought, and the bits went down without a fight. Then she wanted more, but Kaylee reached for the same treat. Before she knew it, they were off, soaring like two birds simply enjoying the pleasures of flight. Her legs carried her through the ship; the `verse stretched out before her invitingly; every laugh and breath made her body hum like a live wire; and she was invincible. "No power in the `verse can stop me," Kaylee said, but it really applied to both of them.

She skipped to her room, but a sudden tremor – not in the outside world, but inside, where the resting armies began to battle again – knocked her off her feet.

With the sun's slight dip behind a planet, the light dimmed. She tried to absorb it all, tried to keep it for as long as she could. Whispers chafed at the fringes of her mind, clawing their way back inside. A harsh, acidic taste started climbing the wrong way, up her throat. She shook her head from side to side and stumbled back into the light, but its golden shaft was nowhere in her path.

The light began drifting upwards, out of her skin, and darkness seeped into the holes left behind. The all-too-familiar voices scraped against her ears, encasing her entire body in sandpaper. Her blood thundered behind her eyes, and for a time she saw only red. She gasped for air like a beached whale, but the light escaped through her mouth and darkness choked her to silence.

Serenity strayed from her route, and the remaining light was overwhelmed in pitch-blackness. The sleep dragged heavily at her, once more eclipsing her soul in its frigid touch. She was again like the black through which Serenity floated: cold, empty, and dotted all over by pinpricks of something warmer that could not reach inside her but could exist only on her surface.

Someone else was giving the orders now, and she was powerless to do anything but follow. Her stomach turned the wrong way and shoved a rancid taste up her throat. As she coughed up fluids, the apple bits tumbled out. Even though Jayne said, "Nothing buys bygones quicker than cash," she knew that the deed he was trying to cover would come up soon, just as this had.

Now she had to cover up something too; the voices told her that the others couldn't know that she had briefly been just like them. Under another person's leadership, her hands smashed the tiny, valuable bottles against the wall, draining them of their life-saving essences. She didn't stop until the special medicine – the one that brought her happiness when all the others couldn't – was gone, and then she curled up in a tiny ball on her bed, her body and brain wracked with convulsions.

A day was a vestigial mode of time, a measurement of solar cycles. Out here it wasn't applicable because they passed by the sun at times different than on a planet. Her day came and went in a flash. The thing was, you weren't supposed to wake up a sleepwalker, because you caused damage to that person. The medicine forced her awake; look where she was now.

Simon found her like this; just like before, he discovered her, broken into mismatched pieces. If only he had found her when she was whole. He wrapped her in a warm blanket and asked what happened. "Going . . . Going back, like apple bits, coming back up. Chaos," she answered, her voice halting because the voices were clamoring at her, louder than they had ever been, and making it harder and harder to concentrate.

When he asked her what she did, she told him the truth. "I woke up, played with Kaylee. Sun came out, and I walked on my feet and heard with my ears." The pure, lucid memories were so sweet that they made her cry. "I ate the bits, the bits stayed down, and I work. I function like I'm a girl." But it wasn't meant to be. The hands of blue changed her, made her not a girl. The parts they gave her didn't fit correctly in her body; the gears spun in all directions except the right one. "I hate it because I know it'll go away," she sobbed, feeling the bittersweet agony of that day stab a fresh wound in her heart. "The sun goes dark and chaos has come again." The voices brought her to her ruin; they told her to get rid of the one joy she had known since they invaded her mind. "Bits. Fluids. What am I?"

Simon would later find the broken bottles littering his bedspread and the stains on his pillow. He would ask himself the same question she had, he would wonder what she was, but she was the only one who knew the answer. She was a killer. She would take lives, but first she would forever destroy any chance of her own recovery; it was shattered with the bottles of medicine.