FIC: Think Too Hard
Title: Think Too Hard
Characters: River Tam
Pairing: None
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Timeline: Post-Objects in Space
Word Count: Approx. 1000 words
Comments make my world go 'round.
The most efficient way to break a human heart consists of permitting it to fall through a super-cooled chamber, such that by the time it collides with the ground it has already frozen and is able to shatter into thousands and thousands of pieces.
She has explored all other possibilities, and determined the answer.
It took twelve seconds.
When her brother broke mother’s twelfth-favourite vase, she learned an important lesson about those things which shatter. You can’t put them back together the way they were. The cracks will still show, and two to ten of the pieces(or more, or less, depending on size of the object in question and the force with which it struck the surface which caused its doom) will be lost and missing in the final reconstruction.
She is stuck in a coffin carried by six mourning pallbearers, led by a man with no faith, while her brother tries every trick he knows to make her breathe. She’s taking a ride on a spaceship crewed by broken hearts, put together again, badly, by people trying to continue their lives in spite of God’s command.
She has her own bible, now. Book made her a present of one, one which he found on one of the closer worlds. He said “As I understand it,” in that way of his, “this is one of the better-preserved versions.” Then he handed it to her, and he said something about how he expected her to stop defiling his own, but he had barely one one-hundredth of her attention, so fascinated was she by his gift.
The shepherd is the greatest puzzle of them all. River has more than a little difficulty disguising her emotions; Book is so used to hiding them he surprises even himself when daylight shines upon evidence that he has them.
She’s no mind reader. She reads patterns, and it can’t be River’s fault if people are more honest with their bodies than with their voices. She does not know Book’s secret. But she knows he has a secret.
So few things are mysteries to her, now. Having one feels like the breeze of new air when the Captain opens the rear hatch for the first time on a new world. When they reach a new place, with new people, all she really wants is to go out to meet all the new people, all the different people, and to... But her brother and her fear are obstacles, a quiet barrier and a loud wall, and they cannot be overcome, by any means she has yet found.
Sometimes it seems as if there is insufficient space in her mind for everything she knows. She tried to use her friends to hold the information, but in spite of her protests they continued to seek to understand what she was telling them. She tried computing devices, but the Cortex continued to attempt to insert its flawed conclusions into her precisely measured patterns. The margins of her new bible served as an effective journal if she used a very small shorthand. She has occupied the white space through most of 4 Maccabees.
It has not helped.
Her brother’s new medicines are some small measure of help. On some days she has mornings of clarity, on days like these, but even these are hurt by the knowing: this too will fade. Entropy at one hundred million times speed, brings chaos to the systems of her body; she thinks she is an old, dying star, the heat leaving her, leaving her frozen and brittle, feeling broken like her mother’s vase, her mother’s vase, and her parents, robbed of their two children, and her brother, robbed of his family, and of everyone, and she wonders what kind of time it is that she has been born into that everyone she knows seems to have had their heart broken already. There’s no time like the present, says a voice in her head that she thinks is hers, but may be the language of the blue hands, one of their jokes, because everyone has a sense of humor, however cruel.
River knows much of cruelty. She knows not to tell anyone of the fantasies of revenge that are her better dreams, the ones in which she is the one cutting into their brains, poking and prodding just to see how they react at the loss of control, at the pain, just to see how much pleasure she can derive from watching them scream.
Fortunately her brother only asks her about her dreams when she has the bad ones, the ones in which she wakes up screaming two hours after she fell asleep, the dreams in which all Serenity is a dream, and she is still in the place so perversely called the academy, and they leave her awake, or sleeping, and she can’t tell which, or what, anymore, and her brother says “It’s time to wake up,” but she is not certain what he means and he sounds just like the man who thought he knew what she was thinking when he held up inkblots in his blue hands. It’s starting to slip away, now, because she thinks she’s about to wake up again, or fall asleep, and the information is running in front of her head so fast that she finds herself unable to spell the words of her thoughts, the only order is in a peculiar Greek dialect she heard once and never remembered until now, all her thoughts coming into her head in that language, now. She does not know all the words but she is able to extrapolate them based on the others and the patterns she has identified in other languages. By the time she has determined the whole language she is already fitting the pattern into her calculus, and she can feel her brain finally running at full speed, running too fast, overheating, and she throws up.
It is all lost.
Her brother will try new medicines tomorrow.
Characters: River Tam
Pairing: None
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Timeline: Post-Objects in Space
Word Count: Approx. 1000 words
Comments make my world go 'round.
The most efficient way to break a human heart consists of permitting it to fall through a super-cooled chamber, such that by the time it collides with the ground it has already frozen and is able to shatter into thousands and thousands of pieces.
She has explored all other possibilities, and determined the answer.
It took twelve seconds.
When her brother broke mother’s twelfth-favourite vase, she learned an important lesson about those things which shatter. You can’t put them back together the way they were. The cracks will still show, and two to ten of the pieces(or more, or less, depending on size of the object in question and the force with which it struck the surface which caused its doom) will be lost and missing in the final reconstruction.
She is stuck in a coffin carried by six mourning pallbearers, led by a man with no faith, while her brother tries every trick he knows to make her breathe. She’s taking a ride on a spaceship crewed by broken hearts, put together again, badly, by people trying to continue their lives in spite of God’s command.
She has her own bible, now. Book made her a present of one, one which he found on one of the closer worlds. He said “As I understand it,” in that way of his, “this is one of the better-preserved versions.” Then he handed it to her, and he said something about how he expected her to stop defiling his own, but he had barely one one-hundredth of her attention, so fascinated was she by his gift.
The shepherd is the greatest puzzle of them all. River has more than a little difficulty disguising her emotions; Book is so used to hiding them he surprises even himself when daylight shines upon evidence that he has them.
She’s no mind reader. She reads patterns, and it can’t be River’s fault if people are more honest with their bodies than with their voices. She does not know Book’s secret. But she knows he has a secret.
So few things are mysteries to her, now. Having one feels like the breeze of new air when the Captain opens the rear hatch for the first time on a new world. When they reach a new place, with new people, all she really wants is to go out to meet all the new people, all the different people, and to... But her brother and her fear are obstacles, a quiet barrier and a loud wall, and they cannot be overcome, by any means she has yet found.
Sometimes it seems as if there is insufficient space in her mind for everything she knows. She tried to use her friends to hold the information, but in spite of her protests they continued to seek to understand what she was telling them. She tried computing devices, but the Cortex continued to attempt to insert its flawed conclusions into her precisely measured patterns. The margins of her new bible served as an effective journal if she used a very small shorthand. She has occupied the white space through most of 4 Maccabees.
It has not helped.
Her brother’s new medicines are some small measure of help. On some days she has mornings of clarity, on days like these, but even these are hurt by the knowing: this too will fade. Entropy at one hundred million times speed, brings chaos to the systems of her body; she thinks she is an old, dying star, the heat leaving her, leaving her frozen and brittle, feeling broken like her mother’s vase, her mother’s vase, and her parents, robbed of their two children, and her brother, robbed of his family, and of everyone, and she wonders what kind of time it is that she has been born into that everyone she knows seems to have had their heart broken already. There’s no time like the present, says a voice in her head that she thinks is hers, but may be the language of the blue hands, one of their jokes, because everyone has a sense of humor, however cruel.
River knows much of cruelty. She knows not to tell anyone of the fantasies of revenge that are her better dreams, the ones in which she is the one cutting into their brains, poking and prodding just to see how they react at the loss of control, at the pain, just to see how much pleasure she can derive from watching them scream.
Fortunately her brother only asks her about her dreams when she has the bad ones, the ones in which she wakes up screaming two hours after she fell asleep, the dreams in which all Serenity is a dream, and she is still in the place so perversely called the academy, and they leave her awake, or sleeping, and she can’t tell which, or what, anymore, and her brother says “It’s time to wake up,” but she is not certain what he means and he sounds just like the man who thought he knew what she was thinking when he held up inkblots in his blue hands. It’s starting to slip away, now, because she thinks she’s about to wake up again, or fall asleep, and the information is running in front of her head so fast that she finds herself unable to spell the words of her thoughts, the only order is in a peculiar Greek dialect she heard once and never remembered until now, all her thoughts coming into her head in that language, now. She does not know all the words but she is able to extrapolate them based on the others and the patterns she has identified in other languages. By the time she has determined the whole language she is already fitting the pattern into her calculus, and she can feel her brain finally running at full speed, running too fast, overheating, and she throws up.
It is all lost.
Her brother will try new medicines tomorrow.