Ficlet: Blade Dancer, Firefly, Rayne
Title: Blade Dancer
Rating: Teen I guess?
Disclaimer/Notes: Not mine (more’s the pity). They popped out of Whedon’s brain. Italics are flashback/memory. I held on to this one for a while, not sure it was finished but I can’t find anything to add.
Summary: River reflects and remembers.
Words: 339
“He looks better in red.”
A quick slice, just enough to break the skin. Never saw it coming. Blood salty, bitter in her mouth.
It will scar nicely.
Love is like that, she thinks, studying the gleaming blade. Bright and gleaming and deceptively sharp. Dangerous. It slips in before you know, before you can feel, and by the time you react the death blow is dealt.
Hurts. It hurts and stings and it burrows deeper. Cut it out. Grind it to dust. That is the way of things.
One finger traces the curve of blade from hilt to tip of the dagger, the pressure and angle just so, and there’s no mark. No cut, no berry-bright blood, no stinging steel-on-flesh kiss as the blade withdraws. It terrifies her, this bright and burning thing, and yet she comes back, time and again, handling the blade with precise movement. She has mastered this one, like so many others. Gleaming blades, singing axes, guns that roar and whisper--even her own limbs and a mind that is, when the training takes over, detached at best from the reality of it.
Simon. He came. Rescued the princess in the tower. But the princess is the witch. The hair is false and he’ll fall from the top if he tries to climb. So much screaming without a voice. They know.
Angles and vectors and pressure and force. There is no probability, only the certainty of the killing blow. And that, she reflects, tracing the blade outline again, is the danger of emotion. Emotion enters and the equation is unbalanced, leaning too heavily on rage/hate/anger/longing/fear. Aim shifts. The blow goes wide.
“She feels everything. She can’t not.”
It’s a mistake. They cut in, removed the extraneous matter, honed the weapon. No one saw the flaw.
“Also? I can kill you with my brain.”
It’s not her brain that’s the danger, he tells her, breath heaving as they lay entwined, sticky with sweat. Body. Mind. Soul. Heart.
The danger lies in some of the parts.