Miranda
When she was five, she dreamed of the Black. She dreamed of dancing through it, a comet gliding through open space. Clear, beautiful, silence. She dreamed of finding a planet, alone, all her own. To pirouette across a surface free of loud, angry, unthinking people. As she dreamed, others dreamed the same thing, but different; a place for people with no people.
She hadn't imagined what that meant.
Now, she did not dream of dancing through the black. When voices did not infiltrate her thoughts, when screaming didn't invade, when foreign feelings did not interrupt, she dreamt of Miranda. When she dreamt, she was Miranda. Spinning, eerily empty. Quiet, but not. Filled with voices so silent, they screamed. Nothing saying everything. Fade to black.
She was Miranda. The cold rage, boiling out into death and pain and fear across her surface. Things not right, nor sane, nor safe. She was alone. Hopelessly, bitterly, alone.
"lie down and sleep"
Her eyes wide open and body alert as her children turned off. As they stopped. It was removed from them, a willingness to continue, that which rage was born from, now gone.
It was strange, now, to think that Reavers had been born from something. They were looked at as just there. Twelve years here, and no one could put the numbers together and decide.
"just lie down now"
She was safe, here. Here, she was not Miranda, and she was not a weapon, and she was not feared or hated, and here she was finally understood. Here, she could be River, who she had lost and thought was gone, but found again while she was Miranda.
But whether she was the girl, or the planet, or the weapon, she could never leave the others behind. They were always there, waiting for their rotation. Waiting for their turn.
No matter how she tried, or how far she went, she would always be them all.
And she would never leave Miranda, no matter how much she wanted to.