Author: Kurukami
Title: Voices
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy own the concept and characters of Firefly. I'm just trying to fill in some of the spaces in between the lines. Don't sue me, I'm broke enough as it is.
Author's Note: Spoilers up through "Objects in Space". This is just a quick little 1000-word (OK, so I ran a bit over) character sketch on River that popped into my head. There was so much mystery surrounding her and the other characters that we'll probably never get the opportunity to unveil, so this is a bit of a tribute to her and to Summer Glau's great performance.
Noises, and the stink of chemical propellants, crowd the air. Serenity is no stranger to either, but River sees the possibilities all around, understands what has occurred in the emptiness where the captain was, knows what all of them, kin and crew alike, are going to do even though some haven't yet realized it. She looks, and sees what approaches, comprehends instantly that if she does nothing those she values will be lost.
Observe; analyze; intervene; calculate; execute.
At the critical moment, she finds herself crouched beside Kaylee, hidden by the sill of the cargo door, picking up what the other has let fall. When she holds the gun's grip, feels and realizes the cool oiled efficiency of the mechanism, this causing this culminating in that, the old, hateful voices spring immediately into mind, demanding, insistent, and this is just another task to be mastered to earn their respect and a night's peace from the perpetual tests and sessions and expectations. The calm falls into her like a gun sliding home into a familiar holster and a fragment of a dream murmurs of stimuli provoking a heightened alpha state in a voice that she knows she should recall but can't. The calm makes her think of the wooded acres behind what was once never will be again home, birdsong in the air, leaves falling to the autumn winds.
She glances around the door's edge, quick as a rabbit darting through the brush, sees the wolves in the hatchway, howling without sound inside her head. The old voices challenge her, can't look, can't look, but she hears the songs those now outside silently voice, and it's much simpler than perceiving where to shoot a thin paper target without benefit of sight –
– why am I here there must be something better than Niska if I run he'll take my little sister and give her to the work crews –
–wo de tian a, so many dead, have to kill them before they kill us all –
– foul vermin, challenging us, we'll crush them like roaches beneath our heels –
– because each is a value to be slotted into the equation, and all that needs be done is discover the derivative, reduce the expression to its simplest form, just three critical points to be found to be found in the region and the steel in her hand promises the elegant rational solution. It's child's play, this problem; she could solve it with her eyes closed.
She does.
"No power in the 'verse can stop me," she says to Kaylee. And even though she can see the look on Kaylee's features, the uneasiness and fear hiding in the other girl's gaze, the solace she finds inside her head as she holds her solution is far more comforting than any chemical Simon has given her.
She hides the pistol in one of the dusty forgotten spaces, one that perhaps even the captain doesn't know about. She wonders why she hadn't remembered this peace before. But it was so noisy when she first came out of the cold, her thoughts chaotic and unfocussed and scrambled like the eggs she never gets to have anymore. And there are spaces, vast gaping hollows where memories should be and aren't anymore. The tranquility her solution brings lessens that emptiness, tells her the notes and melody of its history, reduces the babble to a dim background vibration only heard when she wants to hear.
That calm doesn't belong only to the weapon she used at the skyplex; others sing too, each different. Late in what passes for night in the black she wanders the hallways quiet as a churchmouse, finding where each voice raises itself. The locker in the cargo bay is soprano and contralto and tenor all mixed together. Jayne's bunk is a Gothic choir of disparate voices somehow both glorious and melancholy. A dozen and more others call to her, single or paired voices raised in wondrous harmony. And each voice raises new ghostly images inside her with the calm they speak of: flying a kite in a wooded meadow, dipping toes in cool water as the heat of summer fades, watching the moons set behind the distant hills.
Their voices promise the steadiness that the medicines Simon uses don't bring as well as they used to. She goes to them when thoughts bull in like rude passengers on the monorail, when its so crowded inside the ship of nine that all she wants to do is shove everything away, ball her mind up like a fist and let nothing inside. But it's like trying to hold her breath, it can't be done forever. And so she starts to rely on the gunmetal song to lead her towards the calm that is so difficult for her to hold on to.
They aren't the only things with voices. A hundred or more echoes, memories, experiences whisper at her each time she walks down the corridors, but the weapons' voices soothe them into muffled, distant atonality.
Then, one day, deep in the black, there is a new voice that has no resemblance to the others. It rouses her from sleep, sets her to wandering the cool metal passageways, barefoot and curious, hearing the truths behind words that can never be spoken to another.
She can't find the new voice amidst the clutter. Simon, loving yet longing for what he lost. Kaylee, silent in the purity of her optimism. Jayne, filled with fear and anxieties. Shepherd Book, so harshly different from the face he wears. Wash and Zoe, caught up in the currents of passion. Inara, desperately wanting to find what she goes through the motions of. Mal, hollow, a battered iron shell hidden deep inside an emptiness that was once certainty and faith.
But the voice isn't there. Uneasiness slides over her like a rising tide, and she opens her perceptions wider, trying to comprehend the new voice's nature, until she begins to drown in the clamor, panicking, and desperately seeks for the serenity that has been her foundation for weeks now.
"It's just an object. It doesn't mean what you think."