Happy fandom swap, pesha!
Happy fandom swap, pesha!
Title:On the Verge
Author: _turtledove
Fandom: Firefly
Summary: No one knows Simon like River.
Pairings: Simon/River
Rating: R
Warnings:> 'Cesty, BDM and RTS spoilers.
On the Verge
River Tam has watched Simon all her life, even if he has been out of it more than in.
Seven years separated them: he left the palatial grounds of the Tam Estate when he was twelve, and since then River has had to make do seeing him a month out of each summer and two weeks every winter holiday.
It was enough, she thought back then, because Simon never actually left.
"I can't leave you, dummy," he told her, fifteen years old and so serious, a middle-aged man trapped in an adolescent boy's body. Tutoring lessons were not the same without him, and besides, nothing satisfied the ego of an eight-year-old girl more than outstripping her gē ge in displays of mental aptitude. "Who would you brat at?"
And he loved her. He told her so at the end of his letters from Medacad; scolded her so when he refuted her accusations of siding with their parents when she's punished for angering her teachers; and reminded her after he unstuck the needle in her arm.
"My beautiful sister," Simon breathed into her dark hair, enveloping her in his arms and scent, just the two of them in his room aboard Serenity. Miranda's voices fade, become white noise to his cultured tones. "Shh, shh. I'll be here when you wake up."
River tried to be there, too.
***
It's startling, the way he moved against Kaylee Frye, discomfiting yet thrilling to watch the muscles of his back shift under the mechanic's hands. River wriggled herself out of the open hatch above them like a small lizard.
"Simon," Kaylee sighed, and River felt the lick of residual desire.
It made her eyes droop, prickled the bare skin of her exposed shoulders and arms with keen awareness. This wasn't walking in on Wash and Zoe kissing in the cockpit, feeling their love brush against her like a thousand feathers. No, this was like being flung into open, weightless space, seeking a vacuum, a hot bundle of flesh untethered in the chill of the abyss.
"River," Simon stared up at her, Kaylee pinned under him and biting back a laugh. They're nearly naked. "River, please."
"I understand," River replied. "Caligula suffered from brain fever, but he died of insanity under the blades of others."
Beads of sweat rolled fatly over Simon's smooth skin, spending themselves as they disappeared in the hollows of his throat and the shallow crevices delineating his pectorals, scapula, and lower trapezius. River thought that Caligula's lust must have been like human eyesight.
"River."
"I'm going to play with Mal now."
***
She can't claim to know all of him.
River knew her brother's first kiss was at age fourteen from a girl named Iris Mathur. When she was still in General Education, she could pick out the girls he fancied, languid-looking ones with fair hair and dark eyes, dark brunettes with light eyes, cerebral beauties around whom he got tongue-tied and embarrassed. Simon was such an easy mark.
After escaping The Academy, River found that she can read his disappointments as well. He hated being disowned more than being disinherited, his phobia of space was ridiculous, and he believed he can cure her. His belief moved her.
But she didn't remember when Simon shot up eight inches, when he lost his wiriness, or how he came to hold his chopsticks like medical shears. She wanted to know if he still slept with an arm flung over his forehead, if he touched his Capital City patients with the careful tenderness she enjoyed, and if he understood joy outside material comfort.
"It didn't work out," Simon said emptily, staring at the low ceiling of his room. He's so composed that those who don't know him would register his remoteness but not his heartbreak. "I don't know what that makes me."
Without listening, she knew he was hurting.
"You are my beautiful brother," River answered.
***
"Things don't got to be broke not to work," Kaylee explained, wistful. She's under Serenity's engine, rewiring its heart. "Sometimes, parts just ain't right together, even if they seem like it at first, you know? Simon and me..."
"'S what happens when you start takin' a shine on dandies," Jayne drawled off-handedly, passing a wrench. "Them's the kind that want fine, painted ladies."
Kaylee sighed under the layers of mechanical interface. "Yeah, yeah. Jayne, you sure know how to make a girl feel gôushî bùrú."
"Kaylee's pretty," River interrupted, a little defensively, from the rainbow-color hammock in the corner of the engine room. She liked Kaylee, liked her from the moment they met in the infirmary more than a year ago.
River heard the smile in Kaylee's voice. "Aw. Thanks, sweetie."
"Ain't done talkin'," Jayne grumbled, rolling his eyes at River as though to say, Ai-ya, can you believe how tetchy this girl's get after dumpin' your brother? "You was too good for him, anyhow. Doc don't know a nice girl if she smacked him over the head with a catalyzer."
***
Jayne's courtship perturbed the crew and sent Simon plummeting to new depths of angst.
For her part, Kaylee did the best thing to whet the strong-arm's unexpected romantic appetite: she rebuffed him repeatedly. It amused Mal Reynolds for weeks, and provided conversational fodder for a morose Zoe Washburne. Inara Serra was convinced that Kaylee was using it to cushion the fall-out of love affairs gone awry.
"It catches up with you," the Companion said to River, who skulked about the starboard side shuttle's wine-red draperies, "because no one really likes hurting people they love."
Simon was in the infirmary, swabbing a topical ointment over an electric burn on Kaylee's right knuckles, when River wandered in. He looked at her with glass-blue eyes, concern etching itself across his handsome face. She has been feeling listless these days, and she knew without glancing in a mirror that her face was wan with fatigue.
"Secrets never die," River said, frustrated and inarticulate. Her mouth refused to work the words pressed inside her skull, a symptom of a brain still fractured. Simon's gaze followed Kaylee with unrequited affection. "They're self-perpetuating. You know how exciteable atoms get when they touch others of higher motion. The one with the highest motion draws and attracts the one with the lowest."
River was agitated. She didn't mind sharing Simon except in times of greediness; those times have been more frequent as of late.
"Ugh, Simon, you are such a boob."
"Mèi-mei," he bit his lips, and for a moment River wondered if he will lose it. But he laughed. "Oh, mèi-mei, you really know me, don't you?"
***
"This is very nice of you, River," Simon exclaimed, touched, when River served him a bowl of protein mash she prepared from the crew's rationed reserves. "Thank you."
She let her hand linger over his when he cupped her cheek. They never used to touch this much when they were young, and River suspected that he does this in part to assure himself that she was here.
Kaylee became the newest addition to Simon's list of regrets. But he forced his woes to fade with pragmatic effort, and soon he resumed joking with her, sniping at Jayne and questioning Mal to the point of madness on the ethical implications of smuggling jobs and avoiding Alliance.
"You're so far away from when you should be," River told him one night, when he joined her at one of the rear portholes. "I made you leave home."
"That's not true," Simon answered. Outside, Serenity trailed a golden wisp of transport exhaust. There were new, yet-to-be-named constellations this far out into the black, a frontier rife for new mythology. "You musn't doubt that. I - River, how could I let them harm you?"
Simon stared hard at their reflections, cast in silver by starlight filtering through thick, fortified glass. His intentions clamored inside her skull, tap-tap-tapping her, and she felt him racing toward it, sensed him approach the precipice, on the verge of what she intuited he would later deconstruct as a very uncomfortable place to be.
He froze when River tiptoed to brush her lips against his.
***
Simon stumbled back, his dark head frantically whirling left and right to see if they had been glimpsed. The corridor was empty.
"You mustn't, River."
His hands were hot on River's shoulders. A combination of fear and awe flitted in his eyes when they met River's; he shivered, sending faint tremors up her neck and down her arms.
"Musn't," she repeated. "Musn't touch."
Stepping inside his mind, she felt her smallness, her narrowness under his fingers. How deceptive her form was, to kill with efficiency but not brutality, with grace but not gusto. A girl with a weapon; a weapon in the form of a girl.
"I'm not!" River practically shouted. "I already told you: I'm all right!"
She leveled an accusatory look at him, again unable to translate her thoughts into words. You were hopeful, you were curious, lonely, and I gave.
"Hâo le ma! Stop!" Simon called after her, weary and wary. "I wish you'd stop reading my mind."
***
It had occured to her that Simon might have the same gift the Alliance found so valuable in her. Perhaps he had it in trace amounts, though what little he had would have been made useless by age and his obstinate logic.
She had it in spades, too, logic, but it failed her in the end. River was left with encyclopedic knowledge, memories which were not hers, nightmares once real and a consciousness that resembled a dream. Was this what Dr. Mathias had hoped for, she wondered, when he ordered a reader brain stripped and rebuilt for battlefield omniscience?
"Crazy," she giggled, tracing a clear path on the dusty console blinking green-green-red. "Crazy is subjective."
"Yep," Mal laughed, turning Wash's plastic stegasaurus sideways, upside down then right-side up. "And wouldn't you know it, Wash had us speedin' outta that bottlenecked place like a rich man's coin from his pocketbook. Oh, oh, I never seen Zoe so shaken and turned on. I tell ya..."
Using the pads of his thumbs, he wiped at the tears collecting in the inside corners of his eyes. He sighed, lost in merry recollection.
"Wash was a good man. I sure miss him. Sometimes I wish I'd listened to Zoe and not hired him -"
"- because you wouldn't have done him wrong." She ached with him because she understood.
***
Simon continued to treat her, but River sensed a distance between them in the following weeks. She slept dreamlessly, waking up fitful and cotton-mouthed from last night's medicine with his fingers at her pulse.
"There's a way you can go back," she said the after the crew got paid in frozen sturgeon at New Melbourne, "but you're already there. Is it the money? Do you miss Daddy and Mama?"
Simon frowned, gathered her cool hands in his. River sat up, scooted off-center so he can sit in her bed. When he finally looked at her, she's glad to note that she had struck a sore point.
"You know the answer, mèi-mei," he replied. "And I'm happy here, with you. Your safety is my peace of mind. Kaylee was - Oh, you know how I am with girls."
His hands released hers, but it's only to pull her close to his chest. His heart beat heavily, steadily under his blue cashmere sweater. River pushed her right ear against it, seeking the signal to the core, chasing it like a sliver of information too important to leave unstudied.
"I do. You're quite embarrassing." The neckline of her blouse curled a bit when she sat like this, and she's aware that Simon's eyes were wretchedly drawn to what is exposed.
***
Zoe, of all people, walked in on Jayne kissing a surprised Kaylee. Two steps behind her, River ran nose-first into the first mate's straight back.
"Son of a -" Kaylee pulled away from the man, pink in the face.
"Jayne." Zoe raised a fine eyebrow. "Is there a problem here? Kaylee?"
"Gorramit, an audience!" Jayne exploded. "Māde!"
"You wore that shirt when we visited the Heart of Gold," River observed, remembering the black-and-gray print. "It's not a nice-looking shirt."
Wash's collection of Hawaiian shirts annoyed Zoe. He had them in every possible pattern: wahines in grass skirts, brown surfboards, springy-looking palm trees, sunrises, ocean waves and pineapples. No one with good sense wore them, they were just that ugly.
She slept in them after he died, ceasing only when she noticed his scent fading from the fabric. Now she kept the shirts in a separate drawer, preserving the little she had - four years in twelve shirts, three worksuits, a set of faded underwear, a wedding ring and a small box of photographs. No one could bear to remove his plastic dinosaurs from the cockpit's dashboard.
"True opposites don't attract," Zoe told River, a little unwillingly. Her boots echoed loudly while they walked a portion of the ship's thorax, away from the engine room. "They repel each other."
River nodded, full of agreement. Standard Newtonian physics, born in Earth-That-Was.
"When people find that spark of special, well, that don't make them opposites in truth, does it? Makes them a match."
***
Inara and Mal fought like the Tam siblings' parents. He can't say the right things, she's brusque and the conflict ends with a male sulking in the other side of the mansion.
Or in this case, the ship.
"They're not a match, as much as they're at odds," she murmured to Simon, rubbing the sole of her combat boot against her opposite shin to soothe an itch. His eyes traced the line of her leg; hers stayed locked on his mouth. "How long do you think this will last?"
"You women and your wiles!" they heard Mal cry out in exasperation, aware of how he compromised another decent conversation with the Companion. "I'll be in my bunk."
From the infirmary, River and Simon listened to the captain stomp from Inara's shuttle down to his quarters. Its entrance shut with a distant clang.
"Only as long as he'd allow it, I suppose." Simon doused a square of gauze with ethylene. With agonizing slowness, he dragged his gaze from her calf to her thigh, to her small breasts and then the crook of her inner elbow. "It's his decision."
River submitted to the needle. No matter how many times they do this, the sting never lessened.
Her mind stretched painfully, expanding until it's wider than Serenity itself and as vast as the universe. Just as quickly it shrunk, curling into itself until River shuddered with medicinal clarity. The pores in her arms gaped, and when she looked into Simon's blue eyes, she believed she can count the hazel specks in them.
***
Jobs were scarce at the fringes, but Mal dared not draw the attention of Alliance. It had been months since Serenity has been within a wave of a core or near-core planet, and longer since the crew was paid with currency.
They're bound for Muir. It's not an Alliance stronghold, Mal told the crew, but it's within Beylix, an even smaller border moon favored by runners for smuggling rendezvous. Both were ugly places, practically half-terraformed, but teeming with jobs.
"I can't keep paying the crew in foodstuff," Mal explained, firm and leaving no room for dispute. It's true - poorer folk in planets like Liann Jiun, Whittier and Aberdeen didn't have much money, but paid with crop harvests sometimes, mediocre lambswool another time and runny dyes. "Or stuff that's best worn. Ship needs parts, too. Can't risk being dead in the water if we intend to fly under the radar for long lengths of time."
River perked up. The captain twice took her on missions, and she hoped for a third. As though hearing her thoughts, Simon bristled. On the other side of the cargo bay's rear entrance, the bellow and brawl of dirty dealings called out to them, a siren's song of necessity.
"We're gonna trade some of our excesses," Mal continued. "Turn them cashy or into othersuch precious items that will get us coin. I need you with me, Kaylee, I learned my lesson after not payin' you heed with that compression coil. Inara, I have something in mind for you..."
Twenty minutes later, as the cargo hatch hissed shut, Mal not very apologetically told River, "I'm sorry, little one, but I can't risk takin' you with us. 'Sides, I need someone at the helm should we need a speedy escape. You be good now, and keep that wild brother of yours outta trouble. I don't wanna come back to a one-man mutiny. Well, never mind that - I'll just get Jayne to sit on him."
River smiled, even though Simon found nothing at all amusing with the suggestion.
***
Simon read in his room while River stayed at the bridge. She preferred it to her quarters, which, while considerably prettier than the crew's bunks, were not as stimulating.
Learning to fly was easy. Unlike the many things River mastered so effortlessly, piloting was fast becoming a sincere interest. She loved Serenity the way Simon loved his hospital, and she credited it for being more than an object hurtling through space. Mal's love for Serenity had rubbed off on her, though it didn't require a leap of faith on her part to assign it a near-chimerical identity. The vessel was near-sentient in the way it whispered its ghosts and hurts, and the way it flew. Those who were loved and felt love functioned even when they were beyond repair.
River spun in Mal's chair, meditating on him.
"Any word?"
She shook her head. The chair slowed to a creaky stop, Simon at the inertia's most lucid point. Again, River felt like Caligula's sight, her brother shiny and rigid as a blade.
Through half-lidded eyes, she watched him approach her, uncertainty punctuating his gait. Oh, you know how I am with girls. She was tempted to peek outside-in-outside his brilliant head, but she musn't, musn't touch.
Except he was touching her. Disbelief and yearning made his fingers tremble as he lifted strands of hair from her face. The gesture had been imbued with countless intentions before, and now, with this singular act fixed in his mind, there was another.
"Well?" she asked, impatient.
He planted his hands on either side of the chair's worn armrests and kissed her.
***
Simon tasted like sadness and copper.
She drew him into her, bringing him to his knees and trapping him between hers until he gasped for air. Simon murmured something unintelligible, and River dove back in to roll her tongue inexpertly in his mouth.
"I'm so sorry," he sighed when her lips found the sensitive spot behind the shell of his ear, submitting to her mouth with a moan, one hand splayed on her thigh while the other pressed against her back. "This isn't what I had in mind -"
Simon picked at the thin fabric of her cream-colored shift, inviting cold air to lap at her skin. But it's he who shivered.
River startled. "Oh, but, Simon. I saw -"
Her hands crept under the hem of his shirt, reconciling first memory with with first touch. His skin burned, and when River gave his neck an experimental lick, he all but slid her off Mal's chair and over his lap, groaning into her shoulder at the resultant friction of her skirts and weight against his crotch. He's unmistakeably hard under his trousers.
"It's not right." She broke the kiss and rolled off him in a tangle of limbs and loose hair. There's a maddening pressure between her thighs, wet, primal like rain.
Simon flushed, mortified.
"River," Mal's voice was tinny over the radio. "Looks like we're not welcomed here after all. Think you can improvise a Barn Swallow roundabout, oh, the southwest corner of town? Call up the topographical map on file, that should - oh, qingwa cào de liúmáng, those sumbitches" - static. Then - "Soon is good, but now is even better -"
"Copy that, captain," she said into her radio. She chanced a look at a dishevelled-looking Simon. Her heart swelled. "You can be so literal sometimes."
***
Serenity broke atmo so fast that she gulped a quarter of the day's fuel in less than thirty seconds. The crew's escape was marked by an arcing orange burnout, the tailspin of two smaller vessels in pursuit and a wave from a man who bore a striking resemblance to a bear.
"You best not come back fer awhile," he said, pulling at his long, Hun mustache like a contemplative marauder. The aqua tint of the visual-comm couldn't disguise the blood coating his crooked teeth and fingers. "I been trying to get Takayama and his boys to quit from calling them grunts at Allied Enforcement, but -
"Don't got to tell me twice, Monty," Mal responded, dabbing his bleeding mouth with the sleeve of a torn brown shirt. "Who'd have thought Fanty and Mingo would turn colors on us?"
"They supported Unification, the jackals," Monty said in a tone indicating the twins' political sympathies explained all.
The captain's gamble succeeded, but not without some losses. Jayne's lip compromised their cover and they lost a small fraction of money they couldn't afford to lose. The supplies sitting in the cargo bay were half of what Zoe and Mal traded. River sensed Inara's qualms like a pang of hunger.
"Serenity'll fly good for awhile," Mal half-lied. Inara silently left the bridge, presumably for her shuttle or to join the others at the common area.
"We should leave," River said. "Leave this place, join your old compatriots. Other planets are giving birth, some reviving themselves. Safer there, Mal."
"Little one, I know you ain't vain." With careful gentleness, Mal repositioned the straps of her sundress over her shoulders, looking away with the courtesy of a gentleman - or older brother - when the fabric stretched over the soft swell of her breasts. "But you got to be more meticulous with the way you put on your clothes."
***
The people couldn't help but lie down. Trees stretched their arms, helpless they bowed. Oceans, seas, rivers and lakes boiled, froze and then evaporated into air lighter than hydrogen, lighter than aitherium.
No sound. No one was home.
"That there's Shadow." God turned Mal to stone. "The history books said it was a 'crossfire' that burned her, that the Independents were infiltrated by a spy that fed them wrong intel. Victors were partly right, little albatross. That spy flipped colors. That moon was a Browncoat stronghold, strategic one, too, out here. Alliance rendered it uninhabitable. No one lives there now. No one can."
Serenity slouched by in a death march presided by one for millions no longer in attendance.
"Home is here." Sorrow tightend his voice. Long-festering anger weighed it down. "Right here."
River put Serenity on auto-pilot when Shadow became a ghost in the grid. She came around to Mal to put her chin on the top of his head. Her hands were small on his wide shoulders. "Come home soon."
"The captain is alone," River announced to Jayne when they met at the foot of the stairs connecting the bridge to the corridor.
Jayne made to continue, but she stopped him with a palm to his solar plexus. "Gorram it, girl," he said, pushing it away, "I got no time for your moon-brained notions, I got to talk to Mal."
She let him pass. "It's your funeral."
The sentence disturbed him, a hard pebble breaking the still surface of a pond.
"Wait, what? Bù kê néng! Come back here, I ain't got a hunger for another lashin' if that's what you're prophesyin'."
***
Simon rolled on top of her, deepening the kiss, telling her shh, shh, are you sure? when her hands moved below his waist, clenched his buttocks, adjusted his hips so he rested in the cradle between her legs. He gasped when her fingers grasped his half-hard cock. He tasted of sleep.
Nothing happened.
"You have to, um."
She examined it with her fingertips: tickling the lengthening shaft, circling and grasping round and round, up and down, up to its head and down to cup his balls. Odd.
"Odd? I suppose they are, yes -"
"No. Odd. No one is awake. Someone's always awake."
"We're awake."
Simon's shyness with girls extended to her as well. He handled her delicately, tentatively, as though she was on the verge of changing her mind - or worse, about to break. But River was rarely moved to change her mind. To love, to need, to cross from one point in the black to the other - it's as sure as gunfire, as final as an executioner's swing, as firm as love.
It's her turn to gasp when she felt Simon's fingers part her lips, touching the deliciously uncomfortable pressure between her legs. She leaked into his hand, dripped hard when his thumb found her swollen clit, and saw stars bloom behind her eyelids when he scooped up her juices and scissored his way inside her. Her thighs went numb.
"This is so bad," Simon whispered harshly, rubbing his erection in the cleft of her naked buttocks. He's behind her, calling her home.
***
"No," River turned her head to kiss him hard. "No. It's good." She fought with his blankets, pushing him on his back so she could straddle him. He didn't resist. The thick silhouette of his penis was harsh in the spare light. It jumped at River's touch. "My turn."
Simon held her steady as she lowered herself on him so he could fly. The sting flared and then it was gone. The human body was an amazing instrument.
"But it can only take you so far," Inara said. Her mind was red lacquer, dreaming of immortality and beauty. Although she's sure to miss the Companion, River felt little sympathy for her. Not everyone had two worlds to call home. "Do you understand, River?"
River kept her eyes shut as the woman ran a brush through her long, dark hair, its small teeth scratching her scalp. It made her want to curl in the woman's lap and fall asleep. A long time ago, her own mother made brushing River's hair a ritual. "Yes."
"This is why you must take care of yourself. Kaylee, too," Inara continued. This was the distance love would take her, a woman who travels to sate the passions of strangers, visiting her intentions on the ship's most junior crew member. "Mal, too. Everyone. Simon will work himself to the grave, he frets over you all so much, for all his coldness. Well, perhaps not Jayne so much."
The video-recorder gave a tiny whine as Kaylee toyed around with it, capturing these moments as if they were their last. She held up the machine, her hazel eyes steady on the view finder. River held her hands out for it so the mechanic could take her turn under the brush.
"Kê ài," Kaylee said admiringly when she plopped on the bed next to River, stroking the glossy locks Inara took so much time untangling. "Don't you look pretty."
River smiled.
"Don't worry, everyone will endure," she told Inara assuringly. And almost like an afterthought, she added, "Simon's strong. Brave. I know. I've been watching him all my life.”
Title:On the Verge
Author: _turtledove
Fandom: Firefly
Summary: No one knows Simon like River.
Pairings: Simon/River
Rating: R
Warnings:> 'Cesty, BDM and RTS spoilers.
On the Verge
River Tam has watched Simon all her life, even if he has been out of it more than in.
Seven years separated them: he left the palatial grounds of the Tam Estate when he was twelve, and since then River has had to make do seeing him a month out of each summer and two weeks every winter holiday.
It was enough, she thought back then, because Simon never actually left.
"I can't leave you, dummy," he told her, fifteen years old and so serious, a middle-aged man trapped in an adolescent boy's body. Tutoring lessons were not the same without him, and besides, nothing satisfied the ego of an eight-year-old girl more than outstripping her gē ge in displays of mental aptitude. "Who would you brat at?"
And he loved her. He told her so at the end of his letters from Medacad; scolded her so when he refuted her accusations of siding with their parents when she's punished for angering her teachers; and reminded her after he unstuck the needle in her arm.
"My beautiful sister," Simon breathed into her dark hair, enveloping her in his arms and scent, just the two of them in his room aboard Serenity. Miranda's voices fade, become white noise to his cultured tones. "Shh, shh. I'll be here when you wake up."
River tried to be there, too.
***
It's startling, the way he moved against Kaylee Frye, discomfiting yet thrilling to watch the muscles of his back shift under the mechanic's hands. River wriggled herself out of the open hatch above them like a small lizard.
"Simon," Kaylee sighed, and River felt the lick of residual desire.
It made her eyes droop, prickled the bare skin of her exposed shoulders and arms with keen awareness. This wasn't walking in on Wash and Zoe kissing in the cockpit, feeling their love brush against her like a thousand feathers. No, this was like being flung into open, weightless space, seeking a vacuum, a hot bundle of flesh untethered in the chill of the abyss.
"River," Simon stared up at her, Kaylee pinned under him and biting back a laugh. They're nearly naked. "River, please."
"I understand," River replied. "Caligula suffered from brain fever, but he died of insanity under the blades of others."
Beads of sweat rolled fatly over Simon's smooth skin, spending themselves as they disappeared in the hollows of his throat and the shallow crevices delineating his pectorals, scapula, and lower trapezius. River thought that Caligula's lust must have been like human eyesight.
"River."
"I'm going to play with Mal now."
***
She can't claim to know all of him.
River knew her brother's first kiss was at age fourteen from a girl named Iris Mathur. When she was still in General Education, she could pick out the girls he fancied, languid-looking ones with fair hair and dark eyes, dark brunettes with light eyes, cerebral beauties around whom he got tongue-tied and embarrassed. Simon was such an easy mark.
After escaping The Academy, River found that she can read his disappointments as well. He hated being disowned more than being disinherited, his phobia of space was ridiculous, and he believed he can cure her. His belief moved her.
But she didn't remember when Simon shot up eight inches, when he lost his wiriness, or how he came to hold his chopsticks like medical shears. She wanted to know if he still slept with an arm flung over his forehead, if he touched his Capital City patients with the careful tenderness she enjoyed, and if he understood joy outside material comfort.
"It didn't work out," Simon said emptily, staring at the low ceiling of his room. He's so composed that those who don't know him would register his remoteness but not his heartbreak. "I don't know what that makes me."
Without listening, she knew he was hurting.
"You are my beautiful brother," River answered.
***
"Things don't got to be broke not to work," Kaylee explained, wistful. She's under Serenity's engine, rewiring its heart. "Sometimes, parts just ain't right together, even if they seem like it at first, you know? Simon and me..."
"'S what happens when you start takin' a shine on dandies," Jayne drawled off-handedly, passing a wrench. "Them's the kind that want fine, painted ladies."
Kaylee sighed under the layers of mechanical interface. "Yeah, yeah. Jayne, you sure know how to make a girl feel gôushî bùrú."
"Kaylee's pretty," River interrupted, a little defensively, from the rainbow-color hammock in the corner of the engine room. She liked Kaylee, liked her from the moment they met in the infirmary more than a year ago.
River heard the smile in Kaylee's voice. "Aw. Thanks, sweetie."
"Ain't done talkin'," Jayne grumbled, rolling his eyes at River as though to say, Ai-ya, can you believe how tetchy this girl's get after dumpin' your brother? "You was too good for him, anyhow. Doc don't know a nice girl if she smacked him over the head with a catalyzer."
***
Jayne's courtship perturbed the crew and sent Simon plummeting to new depths of angst.
For her part, Kaylee did the best thing to whet the strong-arm's unexpected romantic appetite: she rebuffed him repeatedly. It amused Mal Reynolds for weeks, and provided conversational fodder for a morose Zoe Washburne. Inara Serra was convinced that Kaylee was using it to cushion the fall-out of love affairs gone awry.
"It catches up with you," the Companion said to River, who skulked about the starboard side shuttle's wine-red draperies, "because no one really likes hurting people they love."
Simon was in the infirmary, swabbing a topical ointment over an electric burn on Kaylee's right knuckles, when River wandered in. He looked at her with glass-blue eyes, concern etching itself across his handsome face. She has been feeling listless these days, and she knew without glancing in a mirror that her face was wan with fatigue.
"Secrets never die," River said, frustrated and inarticulate. Her mouth refused to work the words pressed inside her skull, a symptom of a brain still fractured. Simon's gaze followed Kaylee with unrequited affection. "They're self-perpetuating. You know how exciteable atoms get when they touch others of higher motion. The one with the highest motion draws and attracts the one with the lowest."
River was agitated. She didn't mind sharing Simon except in times of greediness; those times have been more frequent as of late.
"Ugh, Simon, you are such a boob."
"Mèi-mei," he bit his lips, and for a moment River wondered if he will lose it. But he laughed. "Oh, mèi-mei, you really know me, don't you?"
***
"This is very nice of you, River," Simon exclaimed, touched, when River served him a bowl of protein mash she prepared from the crew's rationed reserves. "Thank you."
She let her hand linger over his when he cupped her cheek. They never used to touch this much when they were young, and River suspected that he does this in part to assure himself that she was here.
Kaylee became the newest addition to Simon's list of regrets. But he forced his woes to fade with pragmatic effort, and soon he resumed joking with her, sniping at Jayne and questioning Mal to the point of madness on the ethical implications of smuggling jobs and avoiding Alliance.
"You're so far away from when you should be," River told him one night, when he joined her at one of the rear portholes. "I made you leave home."
"That's not true," Simon answered. Outside, Serenity trailed a golden wisp of transport exhaust. There were new, yet-to-be-named constellations this far out into the black, a frontier rife for new mythology. "You musn't doubt that. I - River, how could I let them harm you?"
Simon stared hard at their reflections, cast in silver by starlight filtering through thick, fortified glass. His intentions clamored inside her skull, tap-tap-tapping her, and she felt him racing toward it, sensed him approach the precipice, on the verge of what she intuited he would later deconstruct as a very uncomfortable place to be.
He froze when River tiptoed to brush her lips against his.
***
Simon stumbled back, his dark head frantically whirling left and right to see if they had been glimpsed. The corridor was empty.
"You mustn't, River."
His hands were hot on River's shoulders. A combination of fear and awe flitted in his eyes when they met River's; he shivered, sending faint tremors up her neck and down her arms.
"Musn't," she repeated. "Musn't touch."
Stepping inside his mind, she felt her smallness, her narrowness under his fingers. How deceptive her form was, to kill with efficiency but not brutality, with grace but not gusto. A girl with a weapon; a weapon in the form of a girl.
"I'm not!" River practically shouted. "I already told you: I'm all right!"
She leveled an accusatory look at him, again unable to translate her thoughts into words. You were hopeful, you were curious, lonely, and I gave.
"Hâo le ma! Stop!" Simon called after her, weary and wary. "I wish you'd stop reading my mind."
***
It had occured to her that Simon might have the same gift the Alliance found so valuable in her. Perhaps he had it in trace amounts, though what little he had would have been made useless by age and his obstinate logic.
She had it in spades, too, logic, but it failed her in the end. River was left with encyclopedic knowledge, memories which were not hers, nightmares once real and a consciousness that resembled a dream. Was this what Dr. Mathias had hoped for, she wondered, when he ordered a reader brain stripped and rebuilt for battlefield omniscience?
"Crazy," she giggled, tracing a clear path on the dusty console blinking green-green-red. "Crazy is subjective."
"Yep," Mal laughed, turning Wash's plastic stegasaurus sideways, upside down then right-side up. "And wouldn't you know it, Wash had us speedin' outta that bottlenecked place like a rich man's coin from his pocketbook. Oh, oh, I never seen Zoe so shaken and turned on. I tell ya..."
Using the pads of his thumbs, he wiped at the tears collecting in the inside corners of his eyes. He sighed, lost in merry recollection.
"Wash was a good man. I sure miss him. Sometimes I wish I'd listened to Zoe and not hired him -"
"- because you wouldn't have done him wrong." She ached with him because she understood.
***
Simon continued to treat her, but River sensed a distance between them in the following weeks. She slept dreamlessly, waking up fitful and cotton-mouthed from last night's medicine with his fingers at her pulse.
"There's a way you can go back," she said the after the crew got paid in frozen sturgeon at New Melbourne, "but you're already there. Is it the money? Do you miss Daddy and Mama?"
Simon frowned, gathered her cool hands in his. River sat up, scooted off-center so he can sit in her bed. When he finally looked at her, she's glad to note that she had struck a sore point.
"You know the answer, mèi-mei," he replied. "And I'm happy here, with you. Your safety is my peace of mind. Kaylee was - Oh, you know how I am with girls."
His hands released hers, but it's only to pull her close to his chest. His heart beat heavily, steadily under his blue cashmere sweater. River pushed her right ear against it, seeking the signal to the core, chasing it like a sliver of information too important to leave unstudied.
"I do. You're quite embarrassing." The neckline of her blouse curled a bit when she sat like this, and she's aware that Simon's eyes were wretchedly drawn to what is exposed.
***
Zoe, of all people, walked in on Jayne kissing a surprised Kaylee. Two steps behind her, River ran nose-first into the first mate's straight back.
"Son of a -" Kaylee pulled away from the man, pink in the face.
"Jayne." Zoe raised a fine eyebrow. "Is there a problem here? Kaylee?"
"Gorramit, an audience!" Jayne exploded. "Māde!"
"You wore that shirt when we visited the Heart of Gold," River observed, remembering the black-and-gray print. "It's not a nice-looking shirt."
Wash's collection of Hawaiian shirts annoyed Zoe. He had them in every possible pattern: wahines in grass skirts, brown surfboards, springy-looking palm trees, sunrises, ocean waves and pineapples. No one with good sense wore them, they were just that ugly.
She slept in them after he died, ceasing only when she noticed his scent fading from the fabric. Now she kept the shirts in a separate drawer, preserving the little she had - four years in twelve shirts, three worksuits, a set of faded underwear, a wedding ring and a small box of photographs. No one could bear to remove his plastic dinosaurs from the cockpit's dashboard.
"True opposites don't attract," Zoe told River, a little unwillingly. Her boots echoed loudly while they walked a portion of the ship's thorax, away from the engine room. "They repel each other."
River nodded, full of agreement. Standard Newtonian physics, born in Earth-That-Was.
"When people find that spark of special, well, that don't make them opposites in truth, does it? Makes them a match."
***
Inara and Mal fought like the Tam siblings' parents. He can't say the right things, she's brusque and the conflict ends with a male sulking in the other side of the mansion.
Or in this case, the ship.
"They're not a match, as much as they're at odds," she murmured to Simon, rubbing the sole of her combat boot against her opposite shin to soothe an itch. His eyes traced the line of her leg; hers stayed locked on his mouth. "How long do you think this will last?"
"You women and your wiles!" they heard Mal cry out in exasperation, aware of how he compromised another decent conversation with the Companion. "I'll be in my bunk."
From the infirmary, River and Simon listened to the captain stomp from Inara's shuttle down to his quarters. Its entrance shut with a distant clang.
"Only as long as he'd allow it, I suppose." Simon doused a square of gauze with ethylene. With agonizing slowness, he dragged his gaze from her calf to her thigh, to her small breasts and then the crook of her inner elbow. "It's his decision."
River submitted to the needle. No matter how many times they do this, the sting never lessened.
Her mind stretched painfully, expanding until it's wider than Serenity itself and as vast as the universe. Just as quickly it shrunk, curling into itself until River shuddered with medicinal clarity. The pores in her arms gaped, and when she looked into Simon's blue eyes, she believed she can count the hazel specks in them.
***
Jobs were scarce at the fringes, but Mal dared not draw the attention of Alliance. It had been months since Serenity has been within a wave of a core or near-core planet, and longer since the crew was paid with currency.
They're bound for Muir. It's not an Alliance stronghold, Mal told the crew, but it's within Beylix, an even smaller border moon favored by runners for smuggling rendezvous. Both were ugly places, practically half-terraformed, but teeming with jobs.
"I can't keep paying the crew in foodstuff," Mal explained, firm and leaving no room for dispute. It's true - poorer folk in planets like Liann Jiun, Whittier and Aberdeen didn't have much money, but paid with crop harvests sometimes, mediocre lambswool another time and runny dyes. "Or stuff that's best worn. Ship needs parts, too. Can't risk being dead in the water if we intend to fly under the radar for long lengths of time."
River perked up. The captain twice took her on missions, and she hoped for a third. As though hearing her thoughts, Simon bristled. On the other side of the cargo bay's rear entrance, the bellow and brawl of dirty dealings called out to them, a siren's song of necessity.
"We're gonna trade some of our excesses," Mal continued. "Turn them cashy or into othersuch precious items that will get us coin. I need you with me, Kaylee, I learned my lesson after not payin' you heed with that compression coil. Inara, I have something in mind for you..."
Twenty minutes later, as the cargo hatch hissed shut, Mal not very apologetically told River, "I'm sorry, little one, but I can't risk takin' you with us. 'Sides, I need someone at the helm should we need a speedy escape. You be good now, and keep that wild brother of yours outta trouble. I don't wanna come back to a one-man mutiny. Well, never mind that - I'll just get Jayne to sit on him."
River smiled, even though Simon found nothing at all amusing with the suggestion.
***
Simon read in his room while River stayed at the bridge. She preferred it to her quarters, which, while considerably prettier than the crew's bunks, were not as stimulating.
Learning to fly was easy. Unlike the many things River mastered so effortlessly, piloting was fast becoming a sincere interest. She loved Serenity the way Simon loved his hospital, and she credited it for being more than an object hurtling through space. Mal's love for Serenity had rubbed off on her, though it didn't require a leap of faith on her part to assign it a near-chimerical identity. The vessel was near-sentient in the way it whispered its ghosts and hurts, and the way it flew. Those who were loved and felt love functioned even when they were beyond repair.
River spun in Mal's chair, meditating on him.
"Any word?"
She shook her head. The chair slowed to a creaky stop, Simon at the inertia's most lucid point. Again, River felt like Caligula's sight, her brother shiny and rigid as a blade.
Through half-lidded eyes, she watched him approach her, uncertainty punctuating his gait. Oh, you know how I am with girls. She was tempted to peek outside-in-outside his brilliant head, but she musn't, musn't touch.
Except he was touching her. Disbelief and yearning made his fingers tremble as he lifted strands of hair from her face. The gesture had been imbued with countless intentions before, and now, with this singular act fixed in his mind, there was another.
"Well?" she asked, impatient.
He planted his hands on either side of the chair's worn armrests and kissed her.
***
Simon tasted like sadness and copper.
She drew him into her, bringing him to his knees and trapping him between hers until he gasped for air. Simon murmured something unintelligible, and River dove back in to roll her tongue inexpertly in his mouth.
"I'm so sorry," he sighed when her lips found the sensitive spot behind the shell of his ear, submitting to her mouth with a moan, one hand splayed on her thigh while the other pressed against her back. "This isn't what I had in mind -"
Simon picked at the thin fabric of her cream-colored shift, inviting cold air to lap at her skin. But it's he who shivered.
River startled. "Oh, but, Simon. I saw -"
Her hands crept under the hem of his shirt, reconciling first memory with with first touch. His skin burned, and when River gave his neck an experimental lick, he all but slid her off Mal's chair and over his lap, groaning into her shoulder at the resultant friction of her skirts and weight against his crotch. He's unmistakeably hard under his trousers.
"It's not right." She broke the kiss and rolled off him in a tangle of limbs and loose hair. There's a maddening pressure between her thighs, wet, primal like rain.
Simon flushed, mortified.
"River," Mal's voice was tinny over the radio. "Looks like we're not welcomed here after all. Think you can improvise a Barn Swallow roundabout, oh, the southwest corner of town? Call up the topographical map on file, that should - oh, qingwa cào de liúmáng, those sumbitches" - static. Then - "Soon is good, but now is even better -"
"Copy that, captain," she said into her radio. She chanced a look at a dishevelled-looking Simon. Her heart swelled. "You can be so literal sometimes."
***
Serenity broke atmo so fast that she gulped a quarter of the day's fuel in less than thirty seconds. The crew's escape was marked by an arcing orange burnout, the tailspin of two smaller vessels in pursuit and a wave from a man who bore a striking resemblance to a bear.
"You best not come back fer awhile," he said, pulling at his long, Hun mustache like a contemplative marauder. The aqua tint of the visual-comm couldn't disguise the blood coating his crooked teeth and fingers. "I been trying to get Takayama and his boys to quit from calling them grunts at Allied Enforcement, but -
"Don't got to tell me twice, Monty," Mal responded, dabbing his bleeding mouth with the sleeve of a torn brown shirt. "Who'd have thought Fanty and Mingo would turn colors on us?"
"They supported Unification, the jackals," Monty said in a tone indicating the twins' political sympathies explained all.
The captain's gamble succeeded, but not without some losses. Jayne's lip compromised their cover and they lost a small fraction of money they couldn't afford to lose. The supplies sitting in the cargo bay were half of what Zoe and Mal traded. River sensed Inara's qualms like a pang of hunger.
"Serenity'll fly good for awhile," Mal half-lied. Inara silently left the bridge, presumably for her shuttle or to join the others at the common area.
"We should leave," River said. "Leave this place, join your old compatriots. Other planets are giving birth, some reviving themselves. Safer there, Mal."
"Little one, I know you ain't vain." With careful gentleness, Mal repositioned the straps of her sundress over her shoulders, looking away with the courtesy of a gentleman - or older brother - when the fabric stretched over the soft swell of her breasts. "But you got to be more meticulous with the way you put on your clothes."
***
The people couldn't help but lie down. Trees stretched their arms, helpless they bowed. Oceans, seas, rivers and lakes boiled, froze and then evaporated into air lighter than hydrogen, lighter than aitherium.
No sound. No one was home.
"That there's Shadow." God turned Mal to stone. "The history books said it was a 'crossfire' that burned her, that the Independents were infiltrated by a spy that fed them wrong intel. Victors were partly right, little albatross. That spy flipped colors. That moon was a Browncoat stronghold, strategic one, too, out here. Alliance rendered it uninhabitable. No one lives there now. No one can."
Serenity slouched by in a death march presided by one for millions no longer in attendance.
"Home is here." Sorrow tightend his voice. Long-festering anger weighed it down. "Right here."
River put Serenity on auto-pilot when Shadow became a ghost in the grid. She came around to Mal to put her chin on the top of his head. Her hands were small on his wide shoulders. "Come home soon."
"The captain is alone," River announced to Jayne when they met at the foot of the stairs connecting the bridge to the corridor.
Jayne made to continue, but she stopped him with a palm to his solar plexus. "Gorram it, girl," he said, pushing it away, "I got no time for your moon-brained notions, I got to talk to Mal."
She let him pass. "It's your funeral."
The sentence disturbed him, a hard pebble breaking the still surface of a pond.
"Wait, what? Bù kê néng! Come back here, I ain't got a hunger for another lashin' if that's what you're prophesyin'."
***
Simon rolled on top of her, deepening the kiss, telling her shh, shh, are you sure? when her hands moved below his waist, clenched his buttocks, adjusted his hips so he rested in the cradle between her legs. He gasped when her fingers grasped his half-hard cock. He tasted of sleep.
Nothing happened.
"You have to, um."
She examined it with her fingertips: tickling the lengthening shaft, circling and grasping round and round, up and down, up to its head and down to cup his balls. Odd.
"Odd? I suppose they are, yes -"
"No. Odd. No one is awake. Someone's always awake."
"We're awake."
Simon's shyness with girls extended to her as well. He handled her delicately, tentatively, as though she was on the verge of changing her mind - or worse, about to break. But River was rarely moved to change her mind. To love, to need, to cross from one point in the black to the other - it's as sure as gunfire, as final as an executioner's swing, as firm as love.
It's her turn to gasp when she felt Simon's fingers part her lips, touching the deliciously uncomfortable pressure between her legs. She leaked into his hand, dripped hard when his thumb found her swollen clit, and saw stars bloom behind her eyelids when he scooped up her juices and scissored his way inside her. Her thighs went numb.
"This is so bad," Simon whispered harshly, rubbing his erection in the cleft of her naked buttocks. He's behind her, calling her home.
***
"No," River turned her head to kiss him hard. "No. It's good." She fought with his blankets, pushing him on his back so she could straddle him. He didn't resist. The thick silhouette of his penis was harsh in the spare light. It jumped at River's touch. "My turn."
Simon held her steady as she lowered herself on him so he could fly. The sting flared and then it was gone. The human body was an amazing instrument.
"But it can only take you so far," Inara said. Her mind was red lacquer, dreaming of immortality and beauty. Although she's sure to miss the Companion, River felt little sympathy for her. Not everyone had two worlds to call home. "Do you understand, River?"
River kept her eyes shut as the woman ran a brush through her long, dark hair, its small teeth scratching her scalp. It made her want to curl in the woman's lap and fall asleep. A long time ago, her own mother made brushing River's hair a ritual. "Yes."
"This is why you must take care of yourself. Kaylee, too," Inara continued. This was the distance love would take her, a woman who travels to sate the passions of strangers, visiting her intentions on the ship's most junior crew member. "Mal, too. Everyone. Simon will work himself to the grave, he frets over you all so much, for all his coldness. Well, perhaps not Jayne so much."
The video-recorder gave a tiny whine as Kaylee toyed around with it, capturing these moments as if they were their last. She held up the machine, her hazel eyes steady on the view finder. River held her hands out for it so the mechanic could take her turn under the brush.
"Kê ài," Kaylee said admiringly when she plopped on the bed next to River, stroking the glossy locks Inara took so much time untangling. "Don't you look pretty."
River smiled.
"Don't worry, everyone will endure," she told Inara assuringly. And almost like an afterthought, she added, "Simon's strong. Brave. I know. I've been watching him all my life.”