FIC: The Triumph of the Skies
Title: The Triumph of the Skies
Author: Amy (alexia@innergeekdom.net)
Website: http://www.innergeekdom.net
Fandom: Firefly
Rating: PG
Archive: Just let me know.
Disclaimer: Joss's.
Summary: Blood doesn't lie. (River and Simon, or River/Simon, depending on how you tilt your head)
Notes: It's a HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERICA! Or. Okay. It WAS a happy birthday Erica. A year ago. When I wrote most of it. And then stuff happened, and more stuff happened, and it was a week late, and then a month, and then six months, and I decided it would just be THIS YEAR'S birthday fic. Except no one's really writing Firefly right now, least of all me. But hey. IT'S ON TIME AGAIN. And that's what's important. *hugs pearl_o adoringly*
Title from "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". But, um, you should know that.
2,504 words.
On December 24, River wakes up dead.
River is not dead, but she wakes up dead, and she knows this because it is Christmas. Time isn't linear but here time is, there's a sun and a moon and time passing just like it's normal (nothing is normal anymore) and a tree, a real one- not plastic- and River blinks and waits for it to disappear before her eyes but it stays solid and real.
It's Christmas Eve and everything feels warm and cozy like home, but not now-home, home-home. Now-home is cold and metal and everything tastes just slightly wrong, like it's just a mess of protein, which is all it really is. It feels like home and it smells like home and it sounds like home, even, just those tiny background sounds that make everything right.
"River. We were waiting for you to get here."
She spins around at the sudden noise, but it's Simon, it's just Simon.
But, no. There's something about the tone of voice, the way his eyes flash cold, just a little, that lets her know. It's Simon, but it's not Simon, not really; it's one of them. It's one of them and they're going to get to her through the one thing that's safe-
River is not alive, she's dead, she's dead, she will always be dead, she is a moth pinned beneath the glass and they look at every part of her and if she were alive she could escape, but she's not, and it's not Christmas, and it's not anything at all, and all she can do is scream.
She screams and screams and screams, and it echoes into forever.
***
The last Christmas River believed in Santa Claus, she was two years old, and even then she had doubted it. Yes, she had gone to bed early and woken up to presents. But too many stories were told about a man in a bright red suit with a real fur collar, who could evade laws of physics and gravity as easily as River could slip through the boundaries of linear thought.
She figured it out before her brother did. Poor Simon. So smart but so naive, so trusting. Their parents had told them about Santa Claus, so of course it must be true.
At two and a half, River had laughed, and told her older brother he was gullible and stupid.
She regretted that sometimes, but only rarely. She was the one to believe now. But Simon had chosen that. River never had that choice.
Simon, though... Simon had loved Christmas. Loved everything about it. When they were little, he had helped with everything: setting up the artificial tree in the living room, sewing fake fur onto the stockings, playing old-fashioned carols on any instrument in the house. Their father spent a small fortune on ingredients each year, so that they could make Christmas cookies. They did it as a family, both parents and Simon elbow-deep in dough while River sat hunched over at the kitchen table and read from a book her father had bought for her. He got something new for her each year, Russian folktales or Latin philosophy, and she would read the interesting portions out loud, laughing in delight before she'd remember to translate.
River wasn't much for Christmas, because it was never something that important to her, not really. It wasn't even a concept on the border planets; it certainly wasn't religious. To River it was too (commercial) (it was artificial) (it was the dominant hierarchy reinforcing itself in ways which contrasted belief systems but embraced visual images which hit closer to home) (it was too) simplistic. But it must have meant something, because that was what she missed most.
Because that was what they could exploit.
***
River is covered in blood, she is vaguely aware, bright red blood all over her new green dress. Red and green for Christmas, and she is not quite sure if this is intentional or a happy mistake. She uses it to paint on her skin, different characters for different moods, yin and yang separated by her torso. Family on one wrist, mirrored by escape on the other. Safety on the inside of her knee; learn on the opposite thigh. Awake on her left shoulder; dreamer on her right.
Her finger in her mouth, and it's not her blood, it's their blood, not hers- she deserves it- but theirs, the innocents. Who has she sacrificed this month? Her parents, her friends, her brother? It's probably Simon; on some level, it's always Simon.
It's dinner, she hears them say. You were just making dinner.
It is red and it is green and Christmas dinner is ruined because River could never do anything as simple as a ritual sacrifice without getting blood on her dress.
***
"River," he says, "It's time for your medication."
And she doesn't know if it's really him.
"It's time for presents soon," he says, "if you'll just take this."
River tries to remember a time when there were presents instead of pain, and she fails. "I don't want any."
"It will make you feel better. I promise."
And this is where the lines blur, because this could be Simon, but who couldn't? Anyone could be Simon and Simon could be anyone and if this is Simon then she should take it but if it's them then they'll just hurt her more.
She doesn't open her mouth; bites her lips together.
His eyes grow tense, although his posture doesn't; he is frustrated with her and she feels bad because she doesn't want Simon to be mad at her but what if he's not really Simon?
"What did I get you for Christmas the year you were ten?" River asks.
She expects him to fight but he smiles at her, like he understands. And he answers.
***
River was six when she took over shopping for the family. When she was five, she'd insisted on buying Simon a present on her own, and her parents had humored her, giving her the money to get him whatever she wanted. They hadn't, she thinks, expected his reaction; while he loved what his parents got him, it was River's gift that left him speechless and giddy, filled with "I always wanted one!" and "This is perfect!" and glee.
When her parents interrogated her, she just smiled and said she knew.
And she did. People were stupid and complicated, sometimes, but not Simon; never Simon. Simon she understood the way she understood herself, sometimes even better. Simon talked to her even when his lips weren't moving. He was so easy to read. So open and gentle and just there. He was Simon. Easy.
When Christmas came that year, nobody stopped her, just gave her the money and let her go. She let Simon believe he was helping pick out the gifts for their parents, but even the adults were pretty easy. River knew those too. Little fragments of things making sense or clicking in ways that other things didn't. Not as easy as Simon, but they were close.
He was good, though. He didn't yell at her. Sometimes he knew too.
He didn't pick up on everything, or even most things. But he picked up on enough.
***
Simon is the kind of brother anyone would want to have.
When River was little, she didn't want to be like Simon. She wanted to be him, full stop. Wanted to inhabit his body, live in his skin. She wanted to go to his classes and study his textbooks and learn about everything he knew, just so they could discuss it later. She wanted to breathe in every molecule he touched.
She doesn't want that anymore. She is aware that she is Broken and Simon is Whole, and her presence would break him into fragments that shouldn't exist anywhere in the world. It is necessary for Simon to be whole, to be one, and thus it is necessary for them to be separate.
They're still the same, though. Deep down, where it matters. He knows that, and so does she. If they didn't have that, they wouldn't be there.
It's possible to look at them and not see siblings. They're both pale and dark-haired, but that's ALL; their bodies are different, the doctor and the dancer. Their clothes cover the family birthmarks. Simon's smile comes easier, more naturally. River's eyes don't tell stories the way his do. Hers are hidden, quiet. His are not.
And yet it is, unmistakably, there. It's deep down, below the trimmings, the bare-bark of the issue, molecular truth. DNA and RNA and every-which-way determining. Brother. Sister. Family.
It's in the blood, and it's tainted, and that determines everything. It keeps him from a job as a doctor on the Core. It keeps her from an asylum.
She knows she got the better end of the deal.
They don't get each other anything for Christmas this year. They lie on his bed and talk. He says he would have gotten her books, real books, all the books she could possibly want. Books are expensive; she would have been happy with one.
She tells him she would have gotten him his old life back.
***
When they stop on one of the core planets to finish a job, they find they have enough extra money to get a little luxury for everyone, and Simon pools his money with hers and gets medicine, something that's supposed to make her better, even though they both know it won't work. With the money that's left over he gets a small bottle of shampoo, the nice kind, the type you can't get farther out in the black.
He lets her use it, once or twice, and it smoothes across her scalp like it's him. It feels like Simon is under her skin, the way she once wished she was under his, and he is inside her more thoroughly than anything she can imagine.
When she showers with his shampoo, her hair is clean but her mind is too. She thinks like Simon, she realizes; everything is calm and logical and in the right place, and words are oversimplified instead of too complicated to process.
The crazy comes back with the dirt, but River sees the slivers of color that come between the darkness, strings of Christmas lights threaded throughout the black, and they're all covered in Simon.
***
At night there should be carollers, but it's dead silent (don't want to die), and maybe that's why the noise feels deafening around her, even though she knows there's no one there but Simon, and he's asleep. He snores lightly, gently, in-and-out almost like breathing. Simon used to snore, when they were little, when he had a test the next day. Or later, when they were running, and he thought they might get caught. Simon snores when he's nervous, when he has a bad dream, when REM is DOA and everything around them could disappear in a second. But now Simon is usually calm (serenity) and River is sedated and there's not really a difference when you get right down to it. Her breathing is regular, breathe in breathe out, but when she thinks about it it speeds up again, as bad as his snores when it catches in her throat.
It's noisy around her, not just the snoring but the music, and she can pick out a few of the forests through the trees, Come all ye faithful and how still we see thee lie and olden times twine with ancient rhymes to give her a message, but she doesn't quite know what the message is because language collided with song in a supernova of sensation that drowns out meaning and logic. And she tries to shut herself off from the noise, but that just makes it grow even louder.
When River hears music she dances, twirling around the 'verse like it's her own private ballroom, and she slips in and out of time like chronology is a new dress. When she's dancing the cacophany dulls into a calm whir that flows through her skin out her feet. The mice are still stirring in the basement when there's no food in the cupboard but their hunger makes her feet move faster as she steps through the holes in time and space.
Simon catches her arm and at first she pulls away, his nails skidding across her skin and leaving bright red scratch-marks that should burn but don't. He doesn't give up, though, grabs again, and the second time she can feel it in him, regularity, in-out-in-out like the pulsing drum, and she dances around him but obediently slows, and follows his requests (he doesn't say, he gestures, even though his hands never move; she can see it in his eyes). She goes back to their bed. His head has left a mark on the pillow. His snores reverberate gently through the fabric, even though he is no longer there, and she smiles.
***
He tucks her in bed and he kisses her goodnight, and she relaxes at his touch. Simon is stupid, sometimes, but Simon is also smart and sentimental and brave, and she loves him. His frailties are human weaknesses, and she doesn't have those because she has so many others. He does, though; his skin and his brain are like everyone else's, and his mistakes are theirs too, and so are his triumphs. She understands; she knows. Without Simon she is nothing; with Simon she is whole.
He tells her that tonight Santa Claus is coming, and that if she's been very good he'll bring her presents come morning. He tells her that Santa's magic means he can fly all over the 'verse in a night (although a night, she reminds him sleepily, means different things on different planets, and on some of the outer moons one night could be an eternity) and that it means that sometimes special wishes come true, just because it's tonight, just because it's Christmas, and what does she want this year?
She wants a million things. Books and games and toys and everything. She spins a tale for him, full of magic and mystery and mayhem and a princess who wins all the prizes in the world. She makes up things she wants and somehow it has both a stuffed bunny and a prize for nuclear physics. And somehow it fits all the same. And her brother looks confused, but he laughs when she smiles, and that makes her laugh too.
She wants, she wants, she wants. But she doesn't either. Because she has Simon. And that's enough.
They lie together for hours, breathing like a single organism, and for a few minutes everything is calm. River dreams of jingling sleighbells and hot figgy pudding and nine flying reindeer, and the nightmares do not wrench her from her bed, and Simon does not snore.
When she wakes up on December 25, there are red and green ribbons on her pillow.
Author: Amy (alexia@innergeekdom.net)
Website: http://www.innergeekdom.net
Fandom: Firefly
Rating: PG
Archive: Just let me know.
Disclaimer: Joss's.
Summary: Blood doesn't lie. (River and Simon, or River/Simon, depending on how you tilt your head)
Notes: It's a HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERICA! Or. Okay. It WAS a happy birthday Erica. A year ago. When I wrote most of it. And then stuff happened, and more stuff happened, and it was a week late, and then a month, and then six months, and I decided it would just be THIS YEAR'S birthday fic. Except no one's really writing Firefly right now, least of all me. But hey. IT'S ON TIME AGAIN. And that's what's important. *hugs pearl_o adoringly*
Title from "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". But, um, you should know that.
2,504 words.
On December 24, River wakes up dead.
River is not dead, but she wakes up dead, and she knows this because it is Christmas. Time isn't linear but here time is, there's a sun and a moon and time passing just like it's normal (nothing is normal anymore) and a tree, a real one- not plastic- and River blinks and waits for it to disappear before her eyes but it stays solid and real.
It's Christmas Eve and everything feels warm and cozy like home, but not now-home, home-home. Now-home is cold and metal and everything tastes just slightly wrong, like it's just a mess of protein, which is all it really is. It feels like home and it smells like home and it sounds like home, even, just those tiny background sounds that make everything right.
"River. We were waiting for you to get here."
She spins around at the sudden noise, but it's Simon, it's just Simon.
But, no. There's something about the tone of voice, the way his eyes flash cold, just a little, that lets her know. It's Simon, but it's not Simon, not really; it's one of them. It's one of them and they're going to get to her through the one thing that's safe-
River is not alive, she's dead, she's dead, she will always be dead, she is a moth pinned beneath the glass and they look at every part of her and if she were alive she could escape, but she's not, and it's not Christmas, and it's not anything at all, and all she can do is scream.
She screams and screams and screams, and it echoes into forever.
***
The last Christmas River believed in Santa Claus, she was two years old, and even then she had doubted it. Yes, she had gone to bed early and woken up to presents. But too many stories were told about a man in a bright red suit with a real fur collar, who could evade laws of physics and gravity as easily as River could slip through the boundaries of linear thought.
She figured it out before her brother did. Poor Simon. So smart but so naive, so trusting. Their parents had told them about Santa Claus, so of course it must be true.
At two and a half, River had laughed, and told her older brother he was gullible and stupid.
She regretted that sometimes, but only rarely. She was the one to believe now. But Simon had chosen that. River never had that choice.
Simon, though... Simon had loved Christmas. Loved everything about it. When they were little, he had helped with everything: setting up the artificial tree in the living room, sewing fake fur onto the stockings, playing old-fashioned carols on any instrument in the house. Their father spent a small fortune on ingredients each year, so that they could make Christmas cookies. They did it as a family, both parents and Simon elbow-deep in dough while River sat hunched over at the kitchen table and read from a book her father had bought for her. He got something new for her each year, Russian folktales or Latin philosophy, and she would read the interesting portions out loud, laughing in delight before she'd remember to translate.
River wasn't much for Christmas, because it was never something that important to her, not really. It wasn't even a concept on the border planets; it certainly wasn't religious. To River it was too (commercial) (it was artificial) (it was the dominant hierarchy reinforcing itself in ways which contrasted belief systems but embraced visual images which hit closer to home) (it was too) simplistic. But it must have meant something, because that was what she missed most.
Because that was what they could exploit.
***
River is covered in blood, she is vaguely aware, bright red blood all over her new green dress. Red and green for Christmas, and she is not quite sure if this is intentional or a happy mistake. She uses it to paint on her skin, different characters for different moods, yin and yang separated by her torso. Family on one wrist, mirrored by escape on the other. Safety on the inside of her knee; learn on the opposite thigh. Awake on her left shoulder; dreamer on her right.
Her finger in her mouth, and it's not her blood, it's their blood, not hers- she deserves it- but theirs, the innocents. Who has she sacrificed this month? Her parents, her friends, her brother? It's probably Simon; on some level, it's always Simon.
It's dinner, she hears them say. You were just making dinner.
It is red and it is green and Christmas dinner is ruined because River could never do anything as simple as a ritual sacrifice without getting blood on her dress.
***
"River," he says, "It's time for your medication."
And she doesn't know if it's really him.
"It's time for presents soon," he says, "if you'll just take this."
River tries to remember a time when there were presents instead of pain, and she fails. "I don't want any."
"It will make you feel better. I promise."
And this is where the lines blur, because this could be Simon, but who couldn't? Anyone could be Simon and Simon could be anyone and if this is Simon then she should take it but if it's them then they'll just hurt her more.
She doesn't open her mouth; bites her lips together.
His eyes grow tense, although his posture doesn't; he is frustrated with her and she feels bad because she doesn't want Simon to be mad at her but what if he's not really Simon?
"What did I get you for Christmas the year you were ten?" River asks.
She expects him to fight but he smiles at her, like he understands. And he answers.
***
River was six when she took over shopping for the family. When she was five, she'd insisted on buying Simon a present on her own, and her parents had humored her, giving her the money to get him whatever she wanted. They hadn't, she thinks, expected his reaction; while he loved what his parents got him, it was River's gift that left him speechless and giddy, filled with "I always wanted one!" and "This is perfect!" and glee.
When her parents interrogated her, she just smiled and said she knew.
And she did. People were stupid and complicated, sometimes, but not Simon; never Simon. Simon she understood the way she understood herself, sometimes even better. Simon talked to her even when his lips weren't moving. He was so easy to read. So open and gentle and just there. He was Simon. Easy.
When Christmas came that year, nobody stopped her, just gave her the money and let her go. She let Simon believe he was helping pick out the gifts for their parents, but even the adults were pretty easy. River knew those too. Little fragments of things making sense or clicking in ways that other things didn't. Not as easy as Simon, but they were close.
He was good, though. He didn't yell at her. Sometimes he knew too.
He didn't pick up on everything, or even most things. But he picked up on enough.
***
Simon is the kind of brother anyone would want to have.
When River was little, she didn't want to be like Simon. She wanted to be him, full stop. Wanted to inhabit his body, live in his skin. She wanted to go to his classes and study his textbooks and learn about everything he knew, just so they could discuss it later. She wanted to breathe in every molecule he touched.
She doesn't want that anymore. She is aware that she is Broken and Simon is Whole, and her presence would break him into fragments that shouldn't exist anywhere in the world. It is necessary for Simon to be whole, to be one, and thus it is necessary for them to be separate.
They're still the same, though. Deep down, where it matters. He knows that, and so does she. If they didn't have that, they wouldn't be there.
It's possible to look at them and not see siblings. They're both pale and dark-haired, but that's ALL; their bodies are different, the doctor and the dancer. Their clothes cover the family birthmarks. Simon's smile comes easier, more naturally. River's eyes don't tell stories the way his do. Hers are hidden, quiet. His are not.
And yet it is, unmistakably, there. It's deep down, below the trimmings, the bare-bark of the issue, molecular truth. DNA and RNA and every-which-way determining. Brother. Sister. Family.
It's in the blood, and it's tainted, and that determines everything. It keeps him from a job as a doctor on the Core. It keeps her from an asylum.
She knows she got the better end of the deal.
They don't get each other anything for Christmas this year. They lie on his bed and talk. He says he would have gotten her books, real books, all the books she could possibly want. Books are expensive; she would have been happy with one.
She tells him she would have gotten him his old life back.
***
When they stop on one of the core planets to finish a job, they find they have enough extra money to get a little luxury for everyone, and Simon pools his money with hers and gets medicine, something that's supposed to make her better, even though they both know it won't work. With the money that's left over he gets a small bottle of shampoo, the nice kind, the type you can't get farther out in the black.
He lets her use it, once or twice, and it smoothes across her scalp like it's him. It feels like Simon is under her skin, the way she once wished she was under his, and he is inside her more thoroughly than anything she can imagine.
When she showers with his shampoo, her hair is clean but her mind is too. She thinks like Simon, she realizes; everything is calm and logical and in the right place, and words are oversimplified instead of too complicated to process.
The crazy comes back with the dirt, but River sees the slivers of color that come between the darkness, strings of Christmas lights threaded throughout the black, and they're all covered in Simon.
***
At night there should be carollers, but it's dead silent (don't want to die), and maybe that's why the noise feels deafening around her, even though she knows there's no one there but Simon, and he's asleep. He snores lightly, gently, in-and-out almost like breathing. Simon used to snore, when they were little, when he had a test the next day. Or later, when they were running, and he thought they might get caught. Simon snores when he's nervous, when he has a bad dream, when REM is DOA and everything around them could disappear in a second. But now Simon is usually calm (serenity) and River is sedated and there's not really a difference when you get right down to it. Her breathing is regular, breathe in breathe out, but when she thinks about it it speeds up again, as bad as his snores when it catches in her throat.
It's noisy around her, not just the snoring but the music, and she can pick out a few of the forests through the trees, Come all ye faithful and how still we see thee lie and olden times twine with ancient rhymes to give her a message, but she doesn't quite know what the message is because language collided with song in a supernova of sensation that drowns out meaning and logic. And she tries to shut herself off from the noise, but that just makes it grow even louder.
When River hears music she dances, twirling around the 'verse like it's her own private ballroom, and she slips in and out of time like chronology is a new dress. When she's dancing the cacophany dulls into a calm whir that flows through her skin out her feet. The mice are still stirring in the basement when there's no food in the cupboard but their hunger makes her feet move faster as she steps through the holes in time and space.
Simon catches her arm and at first she pulls away, his nails skidding across her skin and leaving bright red scratch-marks that should burn but don't. He doesn't give up, though, grabs again, and the second time she can feel it in him, regularity, in-out-in-out like the pulsing drum, and she dances around him but obediently slows, and follows his requests (he doesn't say, he gestures, even though his hands never move; she can see it in his eyes). She goes back to their bed. His head has left a mark on the pillow. His snores reverberate gently through the fabric, even though he is no longer there, and she smiles.
***
He tucks her in bed and he kisses her goodnight, and she relaxes at his touch. Simon is stupid, sometimes, but Simon is also smart and sentimental and brave, and she loves him. His frailties are human weaknesses, and she doesn't have those because she has so many others. He does, though; his skin and his brain are like everyone else's, and his mistakes are theirs too, and so are his triumphs. She understands; she knows. Without Simon she is nothing; with Simon she is whole.
He tells her that tonight Santa Claus is coming, and that if she's been very good he'll bring her presents come morning. He tells her that Santa's magic means he can fly all over the 'verse in a night (although a night, she reminds him sleepily, means different things on different planets, and on some of the outer moons one night could be an eternity) and that it means that sometimes special wishes come true, just because it's tonight, just because it's Christmas, and what does she want this year?
She wants a million things. Books and games and toys and everything. She spins a tale for him, full of magic and mystery and mayhem and a princess who wins all the prizes in the world. She makes up things she wants and somehow it has both a stuffed bunny and a prize for nuclear physics. And somehow it fits all the same. And her brother looks confused, but he laughs when she smiles, and that makes her laugh too.
She wants, she wants, she wants. But she doesn't either. Because she has Simon. And that's enough.
They lie together for hours, breathing like a single organism, and for a few minutes everything is calm. River dreams of jingling sleighbells and hot figgy pudding and nine flying reindeer, and the nightmares do not wrench her from her bed, and Simon does not snore.
When she wakes up on December 25, there are red and green ribbons on her pillow.