Work Text:
Words run before her eyes. Poetry, prose, grocery lists, love letters. She doesn't know where some of it comes from; doesn't remember who it belongs to. The characters merge, disband, melt into each other. They turn cursive, like Simon's beautiful handwriting, then blocky like textbook script, then awkward and shaken, as if flowing from her own pen, from her fingers, from the things inside her head.
Biáng, fifty-seven strokes. She traces them one by one. Erases them, behind her eyes, lovingly carves them out again. They used to be blue but now they're red, like someone's insides. She's never heard the word used, biáng, not once; not in a real, spontaneous sentence. It must live in the wild, somewhere. It must have meaning and purpose.
She's never going to find out.
*
Kaylee asks her to translate something. A tech manual, something she picked up at their latest stop. "Simon is too busy," she says. River knows it to mean that Simon's done something stupid again; probably being overprotective of her. River doesn't need all this protection from him, not now. Simon always had a problem switching gears.
"Here," She says, pointing at the page. The words are simple, most of them she learned before she started school. Kaylee smiles her bright smile – River likes being around it, likes trying it on – and says, "Thank you."
Simon's always scoffed at people who couldn't read Mandarin properly. Who could only swear, and maybe write their names or the names of their children. Backwards, ignorant hicks who'd probably never gotten so much as a high school education. He couldn't even imagine living that way, before he went off to med school on Shinzhen, with its big city politics and its social policies that led to much more poverty than anyone was willing to admit.
But Shinzhen didn't change his mind. He wasn't the changing kind, then. And then one day he decided to come find her, and ever since then change has been like a constant downpour, drenching poor Simon to the bone.
*
Sitting on Inara's large, comfortable bed, with the sheets that feel soft like clouds, River waits for Inara to finish her prayer. The room smells familiar; the way home used to smell when she was River, the girl, and not this thing, which is only shaped like a girl, that she is now.
She's having one of her bad days.
They come like tidal waves. Predictable, yet unstoppable. She's stopped telling Simon when she can feel it coming; he can't do anything and the worry in his eyes makes her skin itch.
It isn't rage, exactly, or anger. She feels nothing at the moment. But people treat each other like vessels; they pour themselves, their emotions, into each other until something topples over and it all ends up on the floor. Or better yet, floating in space, in the darkness; motionless and frozen, finally at peace. She is not a very good vessel anymore. She tips over frequently.
Inara uses another stick of incense; the smell grows stronger, and River burrows into the covers and closes her eyes. Níng – five strokes. One, tiny like a bug; two, confident and precise, at just the right angle; three, long and leisurely but still controlled – vertical strokes will trip you up if you let them. Four is easier; it's unconnected, free of responsibility. Five, like a stretch of release all the way down.
宁静 Níngjìng. Serenity.
River opens her eyes and takes a deep breath.