To dedicate unto Amelia, as always, this time, because her eyes are blue.
In a genre that I love very much. The River dreaming genre. Hopefully I won't mark it up too badly. Nothing long or serious, this time. Just a little, short, cute piece.
River has been one acquainted with the night.
Sometimes Mal dreams that Inara is a cowgirl. They go riding, in these dreams, back on Shadow. The sun throws blue highlights on her hair, which flows across her shoulders and down her back, split into two pigtails of clustering black hyacinth. Inky wisps and curls escape the red silk ribbons and creep across her face, down into her eyes. She blows them away, or Mal brushes them back. River's never seen Inara like she is in Mal's dreams, but knows that she would be beautiful even if you stripped the pretty, soft skin away, left her raw and naked.
They have picnics, sometimes, under a big tree that spreads shadows. Captain-Daddy likes to stretch out and take a nap, in the sunshine, while Inara spreads the blanket, and fusses with the basket. There are little leaf shadows running like frogs up and down her orange and white plaid blouse. River wonders, from up in the branches, maybe, if Mal's mother looked a little like this, except her skin wouldn't have been dusky, like Inara's, and River thinks that Mrs. Reynolds probably had green eyes, and round cheeks like Kaylee.
These dreams are a heap of broken images. Those aren't River's words. She borrowed them from Mal, and he borrowed them from some poet, on Earth-That-Was. Sometimes it takes a month for them to share a super ripe blood melon. Mal likes to kiss the juice away, when it rolls down Inara's chin. She giggles and tugs the stupid beard he always has in dreams. Once in a while, their whole life together will pass, in less than a minute, and then Mal will sleep, undreaming, for the rest of the night. Other times they make love. It's slow and they move in a rhythm. River feels guilty for watching, but Mal breathes poetic splinters in Inara's ear, softly, past the curls. She thinks she'll store them away, for future use. Well, she might find a boyfriend. One day.
Some nights Mal's dreams are not so nice; they're bombs and guns and a slithering, yellow gas that chokes. Most nights he'll get his gas mask on, in time, and other people will fall around him, clawing bloody divots into their throats and trying to scream. On these nights, especially on nights when Captain-Daddy DOESN'T get his mask on, and his face turns black and he starts dying too, River leaves his dreams because they stay, when she's awake. She used to visit Zoe. Her dreams were filled with laughter and Wash and a ship full of honey-brown children. Now she visits Kaylee and her brother; there are spikes, in Zoe's dreams, now. Everybody's stuck on one, screaming, still alive, and begging to get free or die. But they're not in Kaylee's dreams. She and Simon dream the same dreams. Sort of. In his they're on Osiris, at a party. She and Kaylee are his princess fairies, fairy princesses, gossamer butterflies, swirling to a music that was spun out of sugar and blown crystal.
Wash's dreams were funny; dinosaurs and flying, Zoe and stars, Zoe's face in the stars. He almost never had a bad dream, even when there were dinosaurs. He'd just ride on them, and River'd ride behind him, and he never knew she was there, and they'd both laugh. Now, instead of dreaming, Wash was the dream. He could fly through the stars and be a star, all at once. Or maybe he was with Zoe, or was Serenity. River never knew. He was with her, though, when she slipped into the night-world. She wasn't supposed to know, but she did, and he was there, and they flew together, or rode on the backs of dinosaurs.
River didn't like Book's dreams any more than she liked his discomforting hair or the inconsistensies in his metaphor. She liked Book, that wasn't the problem, but his dreams made Mal's scary dreams look like the one Kaylee had where she lived in a giant plum and had 10 kittens made of gum-drops. His dreams had been weird and angular, goblins, things that grabbed and chewed you. He wasn't flying, now, like Wash, but River hoped that he was peaceful, somewhere, and that his sweet old snowy ceiling of a head wasn't filled with snarks and grumkins anymore, nor blue-eyed white shadows that brought a cold wind.
Jayne dreams about women. This does not surprise River, nor does it surprise her that he and the women often do things that she would have never thought physically possible, even in such an unrestricted environment as the dream-verse. From time to time she watches Jayne's dreams with a sort of detached, clinical fascination. What surprises her is that Jayne is often married to the women, in these dreams. They're not chance meetings for a fluid exchange, no, they usually live in a rough house made of logs, on some moon, and there are dirty children running around. One dream in every ten (Jayne's mind is oddly sytematic; River plans to study it), the children are older and Jayne is a big, burly Papa-bear with a bristling gray beard and a ranch full of sheeps and goats and horses and grandkids. Once in a rare while, the wife in these dreams is Kaylee, and she's always plump and pink and smiling. They live on Haven, and Jayne goes to visit Shepherd Book's grave and pay respects. Instead of roses he lays purple sage, which smells so sweet that River smiles and loves the huge man, at least until he wakes up and teases her again.
Sometimes River doesn't know if she's reading dreams or the future. It's very bothering.
Inara's dreams are bothering too, because they smell strange. It's a big house, on Sihnon, with purple tapestries that grab light and hold on, bending it all the way from pink to black, and the doors are all crimson. Incense hangs heavy in the air, lemonseed and sandalwood and lavendar, the things that make River sneeze when she goes to Inara's shuttle to play with the pretty things there. Kaylee used to play with them, too, until she found Simon to play with. She still does, sometimes. There are children, here, like in Kaylee's dreams, or Zoe's, or Jayne's, but it's different, too. It's always one one little girl. She sits on Inara's lap, and Inara brushes out her long, thick, lustrous clusters of hair. It's more like the girl that Inara was, a porcelain child made of sanded smooth dragonbone glass, than the daughter she cannot have. Some nights Mal is in Inara's dreams, out of place and uncomfortable, even if they're lying in bed together, murmuring into each other on her silken pillows. This might be due to the fact that, even asleep, Inara is more practical and far less romantic than Captain Daddy. When Mal dreams of Inara, he's not in her dreams, and vice versa. River finds this odd. Often, in Inara's dreams, she's crying against Mal's chest or shoulder, and her make-up's smeared. Her voice is raw and bleeding. River doesn't find this odd at all.
Serenity dreams of River and Mal, of being touched by Kaylee's hands, and of flying with Wash. She dreams that she is River, sometimes, or that she is Wash, and, sometimes, she might be. Serenity dreams of family that cannot be, because they're not blood, but are because their blood has spilled and mixed so much that it's become the same. River dreams of all these things. She has been one acquainted with the night.