Disclaimer: The characters depicted are the property of their respective owners who are not me.

A/N: This is just a bit of frivolity to get through the crippling writers block, so that I can finish The Promise.

The idea arrived after reading "A Ballad Of Burdens" by Algernon Charles Swinburne

This story is un-beta-ed, please forgive it its many faults.

Reviews are manna.

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The Burden Of Dead Faces

She loves the ocean. Loves its constancy and it's great void. Apart from the black, the ocean in what she finds most calming. They've built a life for themselves here. It isn't the life her parent had wanted for her. Nor the life the academy almost convinced her she would never have.

But they had built a home here, on the edge of this world. Time passed and she takes stock. Surprisingly, for all its cruel twists of fate, her life has been kind and rewarding. She married Jayne. Because she knew he loved her before he knew himself and she knew too that he would die for her. She almost thought it inevitable. But it hasn't turned that way. She survived herself.

The sun sinks deeper into the horizon. She was surprised to find herself enjoying retirement. Thirty five did not an old woman make, but if once could retire, then why not? Besides, if she were honest with herself she'd admit the job began killing her a while back.

She never saw herself as the monster the academy told her she was. It just so happened that there were people in verse in need of being dead and she brought with her death quick as lightning.

So what if she took money for their deaths? She deserved a right to live. Her and Jayne deserved a right to be happy. So she chose her jobs and she killed the monsters.

It had all started after Miranda. Suddenly there was clarity in her mind where before only confusion reigned. And in that new found clarity lived the faces of the men and women who had made her their experiment. Made countless others lab rats, like her.

Business was better after Miranda, less hiding, more money. But there was still more money in killing off these sons of bitches. And a modicum of pleasure. Of a job well done.

She had now qualms about it. They made her a living weapon, she just showed them how good a job they'd done.

Jayne caught her sneaking around. Caught her after a hunting night, with blood on her hands and the smell of blood on her skin. He didn't ask her a single question. Just told her to shower. She knew he loved her then. They married soon after and together made their way through the world.

They'd made a pact that she'd stop before she became what the soul-eyes doctors and shrinks of the Academy had always said she was.

River Tam Cobb counts the passage of time by dead faces. Some loved, some detested, all carefully catalogued in her head.

The first to be hunted was Nathaniel Ko and her knife slid through him like butter. She remembered he liked using knives. His death was almost a tribute. A student outshining the master. She remembers the cold winter on Bellerophon spent in hunting Doctor Zimev. He'd been particularly wily, but in the end predictable. He died as much from surprise that she'd found him as from his broken neck.

No compassion lives in her for these deaths.

But there are other faces, beloved and familiar that mark the passing of time. Shepherd Book. Ezekiel. There are faces and names she hardly remembers, hardly knows that are meaningful to her. All those boys and girl who had been in the academy with her. So many dead, So many she could not get out.

She watches her husband tying off their boat at the shore.

He'd let her name it. Jiu En. She always said it is named for him.

River Tam Cobb is not a sentimental woman, but she counts her blessings with grace. Jayne, on a best day, is not a perfect human being. Neither is she.

But salvation takes on many forms.

Jiu En – salvation (Mandarin)