Work Text:
Green and gold, black and red, yellow and brown, brown, brown, hissing and writhing, twining around each other. River watched, fascinated by their movement, their unhuman grace as they avoided becoming a hopeless tangle again and again. She drew closer, close enough to hear their sleek bodies slide over each other, scale against scale, to breathe in their dry, reptilian scent. Save for that movement, the woman might have been a statue.
The woman's eyes opened, irises swirling shades of green and blue and purple. She focused intently on River and the whites of her eyes blazed brighter and brighter until River was nearly blinded. She closed her own eyes, but it did no good, the light was still there, pressing against her closed lids. She lifted her arms to block it out, but even after the pressure of it was gone, her vision remained dazzled, stars scintillating through the black, fading away until finally only the darkness remained.
When the woman spoke, her voice belonged to Shepherd Book. "Reavers are merely the logical endpoint of a life without God." River opened her eyes. The woman's face, too, belonged to the Shepherd, but her snakey hair continued its sinuous and enthusiastic dance.
River woke abruptly to a room bathed in darkness. She sat up and the thin sheet that covered her slid down to pool at her waist. Shoving it aside, she swung her legs out of her bunk and scooted forward until her bare feet found the floor. The dark of the room pressed against her eyes and skin every bit as heavily as the light had in her dream, but the darkness of her room was oppressive, stultifying where the light in her dream had been warm and inviting. Except for the snakes.
From somewhere far off, River heard laughter, but it wasn't real. It couldn't be real. She was in her room on Serenity and the only true sounds in the darkness were those of the ship herself. That laughter, cruel and mocking, was part of the darkness. She shivered, ran her hands up and down her bare arms in an attempt to get warm. Blindly, she reached for the light switch, but the lights wouldn't come on no matter how hard she worked the toggle. After a time she gave up trying, but when she let her hand drop from the switch, a deep blue glow appeared in the far corner of the her room, mocking her in partnership with the renewed laughter.
Lifting her hands to cover her ears, she whispered, "It isn't real. It isn't real."
She felt a phantom warmth against the soles of her feet and looked down. A trickle of golden light crept under the door, battling the blue dark, beckoning. Part of her understood that the creeping light was impossible, that all of the doors and hatches on Serenity were airtight and thus light-tight as well, but that rational part of her brain wasn't strong enough just then to overcome the snakey lizard brain.
She turned toward the light and felt air move across her skin, as though someone passed behind her. "It isn't real," she repeated. From the periphery of her vision River caught a glimpse of a hand, outlined in blue, reaching toward her. "The darkness lies." She took a step back from the might-be hand and something brushed against her ankle.
With a hastily bit off shriek, she sprang for the door, fumbling at the release until it opened and she spilled out into the corridor. The door slid shut behind her and, even though it always did that, she jumped. A light touch at her calves made her realize that it had been her own skirt all along. A look down confirmed it and she smiled, relieved. But then her gaze drifted back to her door and she shivered. Nothing in the 'verse could make her go back in there, not yet, anyway.
A flash of light at the opposite end of the corridor, brightly there and then gone, caught her attention. River turned toward it – a star's light breaking through the darkness – and she smiled again as her skirt slid against her ankle on that side. She walked slowly toward the glint.
She followed the star's intermittent light through the ship. When it stopped, she stopped. Before her stood the Shepherd, feet wide and arms akimbo, looking out into the black through which they all moved. River breathed in deeply, a sense of calm flowing into her with the canned air. No scent of snakes.
Serenity moved easily through the black, the darkness couldn't hold her. Shepherd Book knew all about the infinite, about the darkness that sought to consume all in its mindless greed. He recognized the light of the stars that defied the black, piercing through at times of their own choosing, regardless of what the black might want.
"It doesn't understand."
He whirled to face her, his right hand dropping to his hip in much the same motion Jayne or Mal used when they were startled by something planetside. The Shepherd spoke her name and almost seamlessly turned the motion of hand-reaching-for-weapon to hand-inviting-entry. He said something else, too, but it wasn't important. River cocked her head, studying him, seeing him in a new light. He understood the darkness so well because he had once been the darkness.
"It doesn't understand," she repeated and he looked at her in puzzlement. "The darkness," she clarified. "It has not understood it."
"Understood what?" His voice was quiet, gentle, as if to speak in a harsher tone might spook her. And River understood that it might as the mocking laughter echoed inside her head, trying to smother her in darkness.
Ignoring the laughing dark, River told him, "The charm dissolves apace." Someone else's words, but they fit the here and now. She sat down in the co-pilot's chair and raised her eyes to look through the canopy at the stars, glittering points of light shining in spite of the black. "And as the morning steals upon the night, melting the darkness, so their rising senses begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle their clearer reason."
She felt the Shepherd's confusion as surely as she'd felt the want of the darkness and the welcome of the light. She smiled, still watching the stars dance. "Doesn't matter. The light shines anyway."