Archive: Do not archive without permission.
Notes: Written for the ff_friday drabble community weekly challenge on live journal. The community allows works to be up to 1000 words long. That week's challenge was first kiss.
Alliance Cruiser Qixi Jie wasn't a prestigious post or even an exciting one, but Gideon felt it suited him just fine. His CO was an easy person to work for, yet Gideon was learning a lot from her. Gideon didn't even mind that he'd been assigned to monitor the off-hours cortex traffic. Most of the crew thought it was a boring job on a boring ship. Gideon could have told them that it could be a lot more exciting than you'd ever want.
He recognized her right off, though it was a terrible picture. A stranger might think she looked cold and blank. But River still had the same long, dark hair and Gideon knew just how soft and silky it felt. Her eyes were the same. A bit more haunted maybe, but Gideon thought they still sparkled. In person, River's eyes were deep and bright like the crystal pools of Beaumonde. The kind of eyes that had something new to say every day. He knew that, because he'd watched her long before they'd ever talked. There was no reason for the gardener's son to talk to the daughter of the house. No reason until the day he'd burned his arm with a bottle of Lucky Kill herbicide and pest spray.
"What in the gorram verse is in this ruttin stuff?" he'd said. He'd heard a voice behind him. "Cloransulam-methyl, Lithium Perfluorooctane Sulfonate, N-Methylneode—"
"What?" he'd said and turned to find River grinning at him.
"You should wash that," she'd said.
After that, they'd talked in snatches. By unspoken agreement, they ignored each other when they could be seen by others. Gideon had thought River was pretty, but he learned that she was smart too. When Gideon was with River, the world was a bigger place.
Gideon saw River for the last time a few days before she left for the academy. He had never told her how much he enjoyed their friendship, how much he liked her. Gideon had never been a big talker, but suddenly his mind was full of words. He tried, but they simply wouldn't move past the lump in his throat. He'd reached out instead and touched her hair. She leaned into his hand for a moment. Then she'd smiled, lifted herself up and kissed him.
It was her first kiss. His too. More importantly, it was theirs. It was soft and sweet and lasted only the space of a heartbeat. "I'll write," she'd said. She had. Gideon got one perfect letter about the campus and her room, the dance studio and the laboratory. His parents were furious, worried about losing the job at the Tams. When he failed to get a second letter, he blamed them. Eventually, he realized there were other girls. But he kept the letter.
And when it came time for him to strike out on his own, he became a peace officer so that he could see for himself some of the things that River had read about.
Gideon looked at the picture again. How much can a person change in three years? Sometimes charges were left off of warrants by carelessness. Not repeatedly, though. It wasn't until the fifth warrant that a charge was attached: mass murder on Ariel. Gideon thought about River's long, graceful fingers. Did they belong to the hands of a killer?
The best part off Gideon's job was that it gave him long hours by himself to think. About a school that no one had ever heard of before. About the shuttered faces of River's parents. About a first kiss. For the fifth time, he deleted the warrant instead of filing it.
River had loved stars. She was always setting up complicated telescope arrangements and begging her parents to take her on a shuttle trip so that she could see them unmasked by the lights of Capital City or the atmosphere of Osiris. There were a lot of stars in the black. Millions of them between him and River Tam. Gideon hoped it would always stay that way.
The End