Chapter One
Serenity Valley, The Battle Of
Cira Valdis knows when she's dreaming—at least, she knows it in the back of her mind well enough. There's always that emergency button there, and if she feels her mental fingers along the sides and the walls of her brain (which pulsates and shivers at her rough touch), she can find its case, lift the glass, and press it. It'll eject her immediately out of her dream—or nightmare—something she's taught herself so well that it's been permanently ingrained into her subconscious dream-scenes. After the things she's seen, the things she knows that she's had a hand in (directly and not so directly), this is a self-defense mechanism more than anything else: one of the few ways she hopes she can preserve her sanity, or whatever's left of it.
The dream passes incoherently, and there is nothing upsetting enough to trigger the well-set alarms in her mind; there is space, the Black, and there are ships that run past her, through her, within her. There are people who faces she feels she almost recognizes, but they only reveal themselves in wisps of familiarity, half-truths, and the other side is always framed in that dream-shadow substance, something that sparks like lightning in a wet summer storm, but clamps down tight before you can get any closer.
Serenity, something shifts within her—there is thunder in the distance, but this is so close that it's a whisper, a hiss behind her ears (or where her ears would be if she were whole, not in this incorporeal dream-state). She feels her non-existent heart seize in her non-existent chest, absently pumping some surreal adrenaline through her, and she sees it running through her veins—veins that stretch like vines over the unfolding battlefield.
Serenity Valley, the Battle of, she feels the words rumble from her lips, the sound of gunfire and grenades and wounded men and women. No, dying men and women. Dying, dying, can't keep flying their ships, not here, not at-
Serenity Valley, the Battle of. Of course, it's nonsense. Dream babble. Garbage. Even if she knows that her mind is generating it in this dream, she can't control it, can't stop it. She knows what comes next, and her gut turns—but you can't close your eyes in a dream. When she tries, it only coats everything in that much more fire—like staring at a sun through closed eyelids, with the fleshy red setting everything aflame.
Her non-real throat closes, tightens. Browncoats fight the Purplebellies, but we all die as purplecoats and brownbellies. We swell and we suffocate and we roll in the goushi of our sickly lives and it consumes us, bloated little discolored bodies that don't make no difference out in Black.
"That's not true." The voice that finds her is so real that Cira thinks that maybe she's waking up, but even then she knows that its there with her, in the dream. It's not her own voice though, and that scares her; she reaches for the escape-button, smooth and red and promising release. What her mind's grasp finds though is even more frightening—it's not gone (this intruder couldn't have the ability to completely tear out something she's incorporated into her subconscious for years) but there's a padlock to it. "Some of us are cut to bits first, or burn all up."
Who are you? Cira is lucid-dreaming now, and turns what consciousness she has mustered to look at the invader, this outsider that's somehow managed to sneak inside of her head.
"Not all of us drown," the girl says, and Cira sees her for the first time in years—long years. The sound of the battle dies behind her, choked off in a short whimper: that is not real, not now, though it was once. Instead, the scene changes, like falling, and Cira can feel some ground underneath her feet. Of course, she is still in bed, back on some pathetic little moon colonized by thieves and cutthroats in the Georgia System, only a Mudder's spit worth of Black between it and that crazy bastard Niska's Sky Plex.
River? River Tam? There are stars in front of her, but instead of being a part of them or free among them, Cira is inside of some kind of ship, standing out from the bridge. River is behind her somewhere; she can feel the girl there—powerful as an ocean, like someone poured one into the girl's delicate (misleading) frame.
"Not all of us drown," River repeats, and Cira feels her flesh go cold and hot at once. "You and him, you think very much alike. Did you know that? Perhaps I should tell him someday, though words are limping, crippled things, and I don't think he'd understand."
Who wouldn't understand?
"Shh. You'll wake him up, you know." Cira begins to realize that there are other figures in the room. Though she can't see the girl anymore, now that she's on the ship (River must be behind her somewhere), there are shadows—one darker place to her right, and one occupying one of the pilot seats. It's a disturbing thought, that maybe not all of her is back in that miserable, bug-ridden bed, and that maybe if she… what, thinks? dreams? too loud, then those shadows will be able to find her, see her. "You both think it's like drowning. Like being slowly pulled down beneath the surface of things, everything weighing on you the way it does. It's either suffocating you, too much to bear, or you're choking on it."
Who are you talking about?
"But at least he has Her." Suddenly, the ground she is standing on seems to shift and vibrate, and Cira fights to maintain her balance. Neither of the shadows appear to notice. It's a ship—of course it is—but it's alive. Not alive in a thinking way, but all the same alive in a feeling and remembering and breathing way.
"Not it. Her. Serenity."
The Battle of, Cira thinks quietly, but of course it's impossible to whisper in ones thoughts. She can sense River nod behind her.
"Yes."
River, I don't understand-"No you don't. And I am sorry for that. Listen now." Cira notes that River's sentences are choppier, her words more hasty- "I am not speaking in words. I am speaking in thoughts. It is much easier."
I didn't know you could read-"I have not read your mind. You are just thinking very loudly. Please, you must be quiet, or he'll wake up-"
Who will wake up, River? How is this happening? Where are you? Are you hurt-in trouble-captured?
"There can be no more talking now. Be near. Questions then."
River no, I don't understand what you're- But her thought is caught off as the shadow nearest her, the one standing, turns—and for a second it seems that the starlight crosses his face and illuminates it, and it is a profile that she had seen a hundred times before: one that she knows in her spine, one she has kept close to her heart (though certainly not for any romantic reasons). It is the face of an enemy, and even more, the face of a savior, if that isn't too strong of a word—she certainly thinks it's accurate enough."Be near!"
River!
Chinese-English Translations.
Pronunciation refers to how it has been pronounced by the
actors on the show.
goushi: pronounced 'go-suh', meaning shit or dog excrement.