Shuǐ dǐ lāo yuè - Dredge the moon out from the bottom of the water. An effort expended in vain, a foolish pursuit.
River Tam liked to crawl up beside the windows in the nose of the cockpit, and pull her knees up to her chest. It gave all kinds of messages to the others.
[I want to be small.]
[I don't want to be convenient for you.]
[I don't want you to touch me, don't approach me.]
[I want you to come and touch me.]
[I am very vulnerable right now.]
[Don't forget that I'm not like you. I can't.]
She was more lucid these days, but shortcuts were still better sometimes. She knew she was supposed to use them less. Use words. Explain things. Talk down to their level. Simon said it was polite, and Mal said he didn't care what it was, as long as it didn't happen on his gorram ship or during a fucking mission. River found it hard to follow how complex they were inside, and how long it took them to take one, add two, and get three.
[If she is acting vague, they can guess she is reading someone's mind, surely.]
[If she is anxious, something is dangerous.]
[If she is preoccupied, it's important.]
[If it involves hiding objects, she is testing herself.]
[If there's a symbol, it means what it means.]
There's this moment, when she's walking with Jayne in a settlement somewhere. Small, dusty, desperate. People who have learned how to pick their favourite shade of brown from a bog full of mud, because when your world is reduced, you fill it with your own complexity. Jayne is drinking from a hip flask and keeping an always nervous eye on the horizon. He doesn't know it, but he's using his own shortcuts, to avoid having to talk to her.
[Don't like being here with crazy.]
[I'm a jerk, not her fault.]
[Fukken bored. Fuck.]
[Quiet. Too quiet. Shit. Now Wash is gone there's no-one who'd laugh-]
[Yeah, hits the spot.]
River doesn't have to be a reader, to figure it out. It's offensive that everyone else can register these signs, Jayne's signs, and not hers. She knows that you shouldn't do it consciously. Shouldn't fake it. People do it without thinking. It's who they are. When you focus on it, it ruins it. Like watching a pupeteer behind a shadow box.
There's this reservoir, in the settlement. Where they're standing. Water for the people. One look at it, and Jayne thinks,
[Wonder what'll happen if I piss in it.]
and also,
[Damn, think of the hot showers that means!]
and finally,
[If the dam breaks, me and floaty girl here are dead meat.]
But River just looks at the reflections of the spotlights and torchlight on the water, and up at the stars she cannot see, and realises that they are standing *on* a moon. If you dredge the bottom of this water, you'll come up with muddy moon-dust.
Not a futile exercise.
When Simon takes her away, safe, she is relieved. Brother, safe, away. No more blue. No more screaming. No more needles.
But there's needles, and screaming, and it's all hers. At night, it's all Simon's. She curls in her bed, and she's not herself enough to realise what she does. She uses shortcuts without thinking.
[Help help help help help.]
[Stop touching me!]
[I can hear the words in your head and I know it's rude to say but it's rude not to say.]
[They hurt me. You hurt me more.]
And Simon doesn't even use shortcuts. He says things, to her, to himself, to the others in the crew. He wants her fixed. He wants to cure her. He wants to get his cute and clever little perfect sister back. He feels guilty because he has had a lovely little girl taken away from him, and when he went looking for her, he was given a patchy mess of a human being.
He buys her pink things. She likes them, but it feels wrong. He doesn't buy them because she likes them now, but because once upon a time she also liked them. There's a distinction there that she cannot explain. It all comes back to the moon. An idiom. School.
He was trying to understand it. Dredging for the moon. There wasn't really any dredging, in the core, and when they looked it up in the bilingual dictionary, it didn't make any sense to him.
'Why would someone dredge for the moon,' he said slowly. 'Why? You'd never get anything, it's not actually in the water. Or even at the bottom. It's just a reflection.'
'I think that's the point. It's a metaphor,' River said. She was bored of the conversation already. Simon had been really slow, sometimes, when he was younger.
She wanted to tell him, remind him. Don't try to dredge for the moon, because you'll just come up with rocks and dirt. You will never capture that image, that idea. You can never recover a memory, all you can do is cherish what you have. But metaphor and truth fail her, and their voices are pushing in through places they shouldn't be able to.
She needed time and space. So she took a shortcut, and hid in one of Serenity's many corridors.
Jayne makes a face, which she recognises as his shortcut unspoken way of saying,
[What the hell is the crazy chick laughing at now?!]
Which reminds her, she is standing on a mud and stick wall, beside a reservoir on a very dusty little terraformed moon, and she can touch it. She's part of it. On it. More than that. Symbolism. Metaphor. She's Simon's moon, and she's been imagining him as this foolish moron in the Core, trying to capture something he cannot touch, and here she is after all this time, after Miranda, in the rim, with her feet planted firmly on her own surface.
'What the hell is up with you, I don't want to know,' Jayne says. He takes another sip from his hip flask, and as she calms down, breathes slowly, puts a hand to her chest and watches the water sit there, he snorts. Smirks. Shakes his head.
'What's so funny, then, hey?'
She shrugs. 'Shui di lao yue,' she says, as he takes another sip. And because it's not that uncommon a phrase, and he's familiar enough, he chokes on his mouthful and falls over himself laughing, and she's off again, and Simon is waiting for her back on the ship, and so is everyone else, and even Jayne knows her well enough now to hear what she's saying.