Session Twenty Nine: You're My Best Friend

River Tam has never liked fighting.

That River Tam is good at fighting is only a fact of her physical makeup, a genetic pattern as surely as heart disease on their mother's side or male-pattern baldness on her father's. Had she told Simon about that genetic marker yet? She should, when she got the chance. He deserved an early warning. Or maybe it was Kaylee that deserved the early warning. Had to consider the possible consequences.

Irrelevant minutia, cluttering her brain like cobwebs in the attic, thick and clinging and never easy to shake off no matter how hard she tried. That's all her head was these days, a ruin cluttered with junk and debris, except some of the toys in her attic were dangerous, explosives hidden by some malicious prankster a long time ago. She was poisonous, and she had learned to enjoy her poison. It was so much easier to give in to the lies of the Hands of Blue, and believe herself a tool to be wielded by others.

We do not have time for self-pity.

What River Tam had liked—what River Tam had loved—was dancing. Dancing was art, dancing was a way to transfigure your body into music, to weave yourself into soaring melodies that existed beyond the material and make yourself a part of that immortal cadence. Dancing was as close as humans really came to godhood.

And while River Tam has never liked fighting, doing it alongside Spike Spiegel makes it bearable. Fight at his side is like dancing—their is an implicit understanding, motion mimicked and made grander. Though River Tam has never had it, she has felt the orgasmic wonders of sex enough times on the ebb and flow of Serenity to see the parallels; pleasure reflected, refracted, made prismatic with glory by two bodies devoted to one another.

River and Spike had devoted their bodies to violence, but that intuitive understanding, that devotion, was the same. She towered above her body now. She was in some timeless realm where violence was music and she couldn't help but dance.

The Academy students may not be quite at her level, but they are each talented and dangerous and prepared to capture them alive. They can read her and Spike's thoughts, in some sense. They should have long been defeated and returned to this place that she had hated.

But no one had bargained on dancing partners like River Tam and Spike Spiegel.

They whirled together, hand in hand, flowing effortlessly into each other in a mesh of counters and blocks and flowing attacks. Their enemies—dozens of Academy students harvested from worlds in the Core and on the Rim and on all the myriad planets between—rushed towards them, bodies honed to be weapons as sure and strong as any laser rifle or gun, the best and brightest stolen from every world and sharpened into killing machines.

But they were up against two far sharper weapons. A dancer who had been made into a killer. A killer who dealt death like dancing. Against each other, they had found a rare equal in two universes' full of disappointments. Besides each other, they had discovered what true partnership was—a natural equilibrium that could be nether disrupted nor opposed. One a madman whose violence had been so ingrained in his soul that he could live no life free of killing; the other, a young dancer who had been turned into a murderer against her will. But together they found both pleasure and regret; together they found both joy and atonement. Together...

Who could stand against them?

River fell back before two of the children, and Spike whirled in from her right and drove back her attackers in a flurry of frenzied kicks. River swept low beneath his legs, a frenzy of prodding blows targeting pressure points across their bodies, aiming to cripple and incapacitate. Her left arm was still numb from an attack that had made it through her guard, so she swung it clumsily, deflecting the worst of their attacks.

Just at the edges of her vision, movement flickered. Spike lunged forwards, and River threw herself into him, pivoted over his shoulders and snapped one chopping hand into a child's throat and sent them gagging backwards. The room was littered with the kneeling and the fallen. None knocked out—they couldn't afford to cause that kind of trauma or damage to these innocents.

Dozens of trained killers, but River and Spike were still standing, even fighting handicapped by concern for life and limb. They were too agile, too powerful, too effortlessly aware of intention, action, aim, technique. They blended together and threshed their way through the room, whirling into each other, snapping kicks and palms, shielding each other so naturally that all the fury and force of their opponents still could not stop them.

Even if River hadn't been able to see into peoples' minds, she suspected that she and Spike could have done exactly this. There was a rhythm to their interactions, a fundamental understanding predicated on the raw level of instinct. They were dancers, and there's always something a little mystical between such creatures, something that exists beyond the body and blood and flesh and thought, something that could only be spoken at the level of the soul.

They were not meant to win. They were a glorified distraction, a circus so that their enemies would see the true dagger aimed for their heart. But that didn't meant they couldn't enjoy their performance.

So River was happy, in spite of herself and this violence she hated. She was dancing, taking this thing that had been forced onto her and owning it, weaving it with Spike's own talents. They struck at necks and joints, threw the other Academy students through the air, whirled together to counter their attackers, flicking kicks and spins and tosses and always always always they were close at hand, moving into each others guard, over each others shoulders.

She was glad she could revel in the ecstatic violence. If she couldn't, the voices of the Hands of Blue might have driven her mad.

Well. Madder.

They babbled phrases in Chinese that sent her muscles spasming. They were her triggers—sleep, fight, turn, stand down, hurt, punish, wait. Each one brought with it hours of memories—the way they'd carved these phrases into her psyche with drugs and pain and casual kindness, shaping her to be the monster they wanted.

She had come here prepared for that—with Ed and Ein's help she'd already begun peeling back the old layers, making sure she couldn't be taken out or turned against the others with a chance phrase. But nothing could prepare her for their voices. For their calm menace, and all the reminders that came with it.

"River Tam," said one.

"Stronger than we thought," said the other.

"And we always thought you were strong."

She might have been able to ignore her own memories—God knew she'd had enough practice, trying to shake those wretched ghosts. But hers weren't the only memories she had to deal with. The other Academy students...

Listen to yourself, using their word, programmed and altered and ticking along to the clockwork they designed for you, ticking only as they told you, tolling only as they need, listen listen STUDENTS

No, not students at all. Students was a lie, a word chosen by those Hands of Blue so their superiors could deceive themselves and pretend that they weren't breaking children and turning them into monsters.

The victims of the Academy had their own ghosts, buried beneath the professional masks they had been carved into by months and years of careful conditioning. But those voices brought them screaming back in earnest. She was in the beating heart of a hell carefully and intentionally designed by those terrible voices, because the suffering it produced was valuable to them. Because they believed the end justified the means. She had felt that belief on too many occasions to name. They did not harbor doubt.

And their belief had left its scars on the souls of every person in this room save one. All save Spike Spiegel.

But where her wounds slowed her down—how could they do otherwise, when she was fighting so hard to escape the shape they'd chiseled her into—it sharpened the other victims, whetted their blades. It was all she could do to keep moving

A frenzy of attacks, blows ringing them in all directions. She staggered into Spike, who somehow moved with her, flung her into three attackers. She was grateful for his instincts—plunge her right into the heat of the violence so she could drown her ghosts.

But they were not so easily drowned.

"Slowing down, River Tam," said one.

"Lagging," said the other.

"Weakening."

"Worsening."

"Remembering."

"Your place is at our side, River Tam," said one.

"You fight against your very nature," said the other.

"Don't you remember?"

"You wanted this."

"You wanted to join us."

"You wanted to be made strong."

She staggered and almost fell. It was all she could do to flee backwards, away from the hounding fists of the other victims of the Academy, shelter in Spike's shadow and cling to the tattered shreds of their divine rhythm. It was all she could do to escape those memories.

Yes, she'd applied to the Academy, to situate herself among the bright and beautiful of the world, and the truth was that first month had been one of the best in her life, pushed to her limits both physically and mentally, in the presence of peers who could match her for the first time she could remember. And even in that heady company, she excelled.

It would be easy to say that when the first troubling shadows presented themselves, she had been suspicious. But there had been others first, Others who objected to the strange lessons and the violence and the peculiar machines. Weaker ones, in River's eyes. And as much as River Tam had always hated violence, she'd hated weakness more. She had always been strong. She'd be strong now, even as her doubts harangued her.

Now it was too late. The Academy had gone too far and done too much, but River had had asked them to do it. Had wanted them to.

She had wanted so badly to be strong.

"Give up," one said.

"Come back," the other added.

"Take your rightful place here."

"Lead the other students."

"Build a brighter future."

"Build a better future."

"Build a more perfect world."

A more perfect world. Had River Tam ever dreamed of that? Surely not. Surely she hadn't been so arrogant. Surely she'd known how powerless and fragile she was. Hadn't she?

The Academy loomed in her mind—not the way it had been, not the nightmare and terror and pain that had broken her, but as it had been in her young dreams. That dream had sustained her far longer than it should have. She had believed their lies because she had so wanted to imagine that world. A world where she was powerful enough to make everything behave the way she said it should.

But they were lies. She knew that. She knew that because of them. Because of the Hands of Blue.

two by two two by two by two two by two

hands of blue hands of blue hands hand hand hands of

blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue

"Oh, screw you," Spike said, settling a protective hand on River's shoulder, and River was filled with the strangest sense of clarity. As though she were perched on a tall rock in the midst of a raging river, watching it whirl by her. Not separate it from it, exactly, but somehow able to stand through it. To see above and beyond it.

"It's not your world to make," River whispered. "It's not any of ours."

They were surrounded by broken souls like her who'd dreamed of grandeur, driven by the terrible words of the Hands of Blue. They had all been tortured and turned for the sake of being able to go everywhere, to see into the minds of dissenters and weed them out. She wanted no part of that world. More, she wanted to dismantle it. She wanted to be free; part of the tumbling maelstrom, moving according to its currents, finding her way through the tumult.

She wanted the serenity she'd only found in these last few months.

River Tam and Spike Spiegel stood shoulder to shoulder against the victims of the Academy, bruised and hurting but determined to hold the line.

The door behind them opened. A squawk of surprise from the speakers.

"Who is that?" demanded one of them.

There was no one visible. But River heard a question that made her grin.

Are you well, Rivergirl?