Disclaimer: You'd be enjoying Firefly Season 10 right now if I did.
A/N: Obviously, my subconscious is clearly more interested in weird, concept pieces than some decent Raynefic (although, I snuck it in there - albeit discreetly) and this stuff keeps creeping up on me. So here we go: this is a River-centric piece, I'm thinking immediately post-BDM.
Spectrum: One
by Tince
Fire and ice was never a choice... not for her.
The ice used to creep through her veins, thickening her blood, hardening her heart, freezing her thoughts and emotions. It felt liquid, acid flowing and twisting and turning - its only goal her total, all-encompassing destruction. The skin on her face was taut, the parched surface being stretched and pulled - ever tighter - over the muscles and bones, too little material and too much to cover.
She felt outside herself - like losing hold of something that shouldn't be lost. Like she was watching events unfold from above, outside, without - able to see every excruciating detail in perfect clarity. But the removed perspective was worse somehow, because not only could she feel the pain, she could see it being inflicted, smell her torturers' pleasure, touch the droplets of blood and innocence floating in the air.
And it was all in blue - stifling navy and drowning indigo and blinding sapphire and... metallic cobalt, the colour the devil wore proudly, inhumanly, cruelly.
Blue could be many things, positive things, beautiful things; but they were all twisted in her mind now. Calm was artificial, relief was injected, and she only saw the skies and seas in her fevered dreams, like mockeries of what she didn't have, couldn't see... of what was beyond this endless, unrelenting, asphyxiating blue.
Blue was hell: cold, sterile, insanity.
Now there's fire in her blood, scorching her insides, flames licking, caressing, melting her frozen shell. Sometimes she can almost hear the ice cracking - the fissures spreading and multiplying - unclenching its viselike hold on her body.
Her mind is still fevered, damaged from the icy intrusion and freezing assault of blue, but now she dreams of fire and heat, of being moulded and shaped and reborn from the flames.
There's red everywhere now - the copper of life and blood, the gold and amber of happiness.
She doesn't need calm or stillness or anything else that blue can give her anymore. She's had enough, too much, more than anyone needs or can ever want or should ever have to agree to take.
What she needs, desires now is the crimson of a fight - satisfaction, resignation, and exhilaration in the control of her skills, body, and mind, the warmth of burgundy and family, the scarlet of laughter. The sighs and shivers of rose, the fuchsia of lust and the pink of love.
Red was heaven: chaos, passion, incandescence.
Being real and red was all that mattered now.
A/N: Reviews make me feel like someone is actually reading this and not - y'know - grimacing in disgust.