O for a brain that works again, to have cleared out the debris from the storm so the roads are clean to walk on; I'm jammed halfway through and there's no moving back or forth, just—stuck.
It's like having no corpus callosum, only the disconnect is between sense and thought, not left and right. I think things straight and say them crooked; I hear sights right and see music tumbling sideways and those I can describe.
Sometimes I know what's wrong but it won't come out except in shouts. I can say nothing. Nothing and again nothing. I can connect nothing with nothing.
Like living in the Waste Land and I a River, too. All dried up. If there's no water in the land, how can the king fish?
The land is waste, the king is broken, the River is dry, the boy heals with the right questions he doesn't know to ask. Oh, Simon, how sorry I would be if that were something left in me but they took it. Those are pearls that were my eyes; I drowned in myself. Nothing to swim out of, the Riverbed is all that's left. Wounds and death.
Simon, ask me. My brain the Grail keeps itself hidden, twisted. Ask me, please; I want to let it out. Can't. Don't know how.
"River? River," he says in that voice and I can't speak because it hurts he's hurt I'm not me and it's a spear in his thigh.
"What's wrong?" he says and I want to tell him I feel everything and nothing, I can connect nothing with nothing. Because I feel everything it is all nothing. Everyone feels so much that I cannot. Or: Simon, brother, they've raped my amygdala with a scalpel, cut a little around the frontal lobes and maybe after all did make a dent in the corpus callosum, I'm only 90% sure about that, I may be a genius and I was trying very hard to keep up but it was slightly disorienting, with the impromptu brain surgery and the lights in my skull and the hands taut and false and so very wrong at the ends of evil wrists.
With men like those I don't know why I am. When I'm clear now, it's so very clear, all the way to the bottom of the very deep dark River. No niggling sensitivity in the back of my mind, just solutions without pain behind them. Body counts are numbers nothing more. I feel Simon still. Kaylee, Mal, Zoe, Wash, Inara, Book. Even Jayne—I wouldn't be wholly indifferent to his dying. Balance shifts, pieces fall, everything breaks and Serenity's the only thing not broken, or anyway fixable, as long as the pieces are there. But others-? River-brain says, "Yes, wrong," but River-heart just beats on and on anyway. Instinct like a guard dog to protect my ship, home, crew.
Maybe that's why I wish I were her: ships are easy. Parts are parts. Switch out the stripped-down, thinned-out, shot-up old bits for new and she'll still run. Brain cells don't regenerate. The fragile network of a mind is so hard to rebuild, and with Simon never asking the right questions I can't.
How only tells less than half. Mechanics are one thing, but a brain is a thing of subtlety, nuance. You can't get at the core of what's been done to it unless you know why. And a good part of why—Simon, please, you know this.
"A bitter bargain was struck 'twixt me and happiness," I say instead of the answer, the question.
"What does that mean?" Simon asks like he wants to know. Still not right.
"Chemical imbalance. Fluids rush to the site of an injury. Healing tries to start but something's in the way."
"What is? River?"
"Instructions." Simon, look. Look at what I'm saying to you.
"Instructions for what?"
"Not what."
"What?"
"No."
"For who, River? Instructions for who?"
Two letters off, Simon, the man's about to hang.
"Me, but not for."
"What?"
"No!"
"Instructions to do what?"
"Not the point."
"River, just tell me."
"Can't. Perceval has to do for himself."
"Perceval?"
Focus, Simon.
"Instructions."
"Yes. Instructions. Instructions from who?"
And I can start to breathe out loud again. I fill and flow and slowly seeds begin to grow. Memory spins toward the surface and hurts because I yearn up toward the sky so hard. Not sprouted yet, but soon. Spring is coming.
A/N: River quotes and paraphrases T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and her "bitter burden" comes from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. The Waste Land alludes to the Arthurian tale of the Fisher King, and Parzival tells a version of it. The main thing is that the king is the keeper of the Holy Grail, but he is wounded, and magically so. His land is also wounded, unable to generate life. Only the action of a great hero (Gawain, Perceval, or Galahad, depending on the version of the tale) who asks the proper question (whom does the Grail serve?) can heal the king and the land. I picked Perceval because he's a naïf, like Simon can be sometimes. River herself obviously feels she is both the wounded king and the Grail, and in order for her mind to start to release its secrets and heal, she must be asked the right questions.
This isn't really set anywhen specific besides pre-BDM. The last lines refer obliquely to the beginning of Eliot's poem, "April is the cruellest month,/Breeding lilacs out of the dead ground,/Mixing memory with desire" , at least if my memory serves. Sorry to do another drabbly River lit-fic, but inspiration happened, and I jumped at the chance to connect River and my favorite poem. I'm thinking of expanding on this idea, possibly doing a multichapter more broadly based on this idea of River as Grail. And sorry if she's a little OOC—I always think she's at least a mite more coherent in her own head, sometimes, but has trouble getting it out. I get the sense she always understands exactly what she's trying to convey, she just can't explain it, or doesn't want to.
Thoughts?