Disclaimer: I don't own Firefly or Serenity.
Prompt #14: Clear - Once the message was finished, the voices finally ceased.
Words: 551
Even when freed of the Academy and travelling aboard Serenity, she kept dreaming. Cities full of the sleeping dead. Skies full of screaming rage.
And she heard it echo, the cry of
Miranda.
The silent roars. The deafening silence. Both clashed in her mind like colliding spaceships, burning like supernovas. Both begged to be voiced, but neither could tell her how. They echoed around her head, a secret and a lie and a truth all wrapped in one.
Nothing else was more important than it, but she couldn't give it context. It hurt to think about, but it hurt to push it aside. She had to know. She couldn't handle knowing. It was a secret that could never be told. It was something that could not remain hidden.
Miranda
On and on it went, until her mind couldn't keep track of what she knew was real and what she thought was real. Her world splintered like spun sugar, like Simon's heart when he saw her struggling. Dreams of blue hands reaching for her from the dark. Labels that begged her to pick them apart. Guns shaped like branches. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Then the Odie Bar commercial came on, and her mind narrowed into a focus she hadn't felt in months. She could only think of one thing.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
People dropped around her like practice dummies. She couldn't stop.
Then Simon spoke the sleeping words, and she slept, and she dreamed of
Miranda.
When she woke up, that word was louder than it ever had been before. But there was more now. Numbers that cycled into order, a map with the missing piece in place.
When she input the coordinates and the planet appeared like Captain Ahab's white whale, she couldn't believe it. For one heart-shattering moment, she thought she was hallucinating. But Captain Mal saw it too, and he believed.
They showed the rest of the crew, and they believed. Even Simon, loving and trusting Simon, fully believed now.
Believed that something was making her crazy. That something was doing this to her.
So they gunned Serenity's engines and headed towards
Miranda
It echoed as they traveled through Reaver space, drowning out the screams of rage coming from the ships around them.
Until they touched down on a planet with cities full of sleeping dead. Until River nudged the vid-disk into position and watched the last transmission of the last sane living person on Miranda.
The PAX. The people who stopped being people, who just...stopped.
And the people who stopped being people, who became monsters worse than the bogeymen from Earth-That-Was. The rage-people who raped and ate their fellows...were actually from that dead planet too. The Alliance knew, and they buried and erased it all, and forgot about
Miranda.
Until River heard it.
Once the vid-disk finished, she threw up. Expelled the hate and pain and horror at long last. Then the silence and the screams and everything in her head just...stopped. And for the first time in years, the only one left in her head was her.
So when Simon touched her, she was surprised that she could truthfully say, "I'm all right."
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