It was like the bad memories were on a screen, looping in her mind. Sometimes, the picture would get fuzzy and the volume would get low, like when she was playing with Kaylee, or when a new cocktail of Simon's took effect. But she was too strong for any of those interruptions to last long. There was something disturbingly satisfying when the screen consumed her senses again. Like some part of her had reigned victorious over the rest of her conscious mind. She could function, interact with the others, but only on the periphery. She had to devote most of her attention to the screen; she couldn't not.
Sometimes new scenes showed up on the screen. Scenes that weren't hers. Images that had red edges, left behind by too much color, too much rage or fear, in someone else's mind. She could analytically decipher what the psychological associations meant, but understanding didn't help. That was the worst part. She could understand what was happening, but she couldn't express it to anyone, not even Simon, who so desperately wanted to know. She could see his need, light blue and steady, like a strip of sky in an open field of a border planet with a pure white sun. She tried to communicate with that need, tried to send her own wavelengths, but she knew he didn't understand.
And she knew that it hurt him – not just emotionally, like when she tried to show him she was scared and she could feel him tensing in panicked terror. Her waves were too strong, they didn't flow with his, they overpowered him. When she tried to show him the red scenes, he bled from his nose and she never tried it again. Another color entered into her mind when that happened - dark blue, like gloves that hid hands from their unspeakable acts. She knew there was an association there, but she didn't think about it. Didn't want to. Kaylee made things worse. She didn't mean to, and River didn't hold it against her. It was just that Kaylee tried so hard to connect with Simon, when River tried to connect to him, her feelings passed to Kaylee too, and that was too much for River to control. She couldn't thin the stream enough, and she knew that the mix of emotions confused everyone involved.
Words didn't work either. She knew they sounded like gibberish once they left her mouth. Inside, they were clear, telling Simon that she loved him and that she was ok. That she could never thank him enough for saving her, for bringing her to a new home that gave her what she needed. Insulation. Eight people and infinity. She could usually balance them, distract herself from their thoughts and emotions enough to do things for herself. Make food, do chores, feel almost normal. But she still couldn't manage to communicate with them the way she wished she could. The most confusing was when she tried to explain what had happened at the school. It was like she just couldn't come right out and say it; her mind forced analogies on her, made her speak in riddles and disjointed phrases.
Music helped. Anything that held everyone's attention worked, but music was best. If there was music playing (and better, if the people around were really focused on the music, dancing), minds quieted. People's thoughts buzzed but were unclear, drawn and tied to the music around them. It was intimate but not personal - the dancing didn't have anything to do with who the people were, it just had to do with the fact that they felt the pull of the rhythm and the melodies. This was comforting to River, familiar. Listening to music, watching people dance, dancing herself; these were the only times she really felt connected to other people, the only times she didn't feel alone.
But when she got a chance to go outside the ship, into space, she was much better, and for longer. Being outside was better than Simon's drugs, better even than music. Music was just a distraction, though a powerful and relieving one. With the drugs, she could still tell that the screen was there – but like a shield had been put between her and the screen, buffering her from the things she didn't want to know about the people on the ship, about the people from the "school", about herself. Outside, the screen was off. Outside alone, there was no screen. It was like she could feel the vacuum of space sucking all of the scenes from her mind. Just an infinity of darkness and light. Black and white. No sounds, no images, no colors. She didn't even feel herself outside, and it was the best feeling she ever had.
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Ok, that was my first Firefly fanfic, and my second overall. Did it make sense to anybody else?