Disclaimer: Joss Whedon is my god; I merely worship at the temple of his greatness with my humble offerings.
Warnings: Potential head trip.
"If appearances are deceitful, then they do not deserve any confidence when they assert what appears to them to be true." --Diogenes La?tius, "Pyrrho"
I was born in space.
It is not a fact widely known, nor is it one I would express much pride in knowing the truth of. After all, when the Alliance has done so much to terra-form countless moons and planets for our occupation, it behoves us to bear out our gratitude and find our homes beneath their rule, does it not? Not so. If you were poor, at best you could expect a place out on the newly defined Rim, where it was best if you could till the land or tend the herds. My father had no such skills, for he, too, had been born in space and clung to that most present source of unstable stability.
As a child, I thought as a child and spoke as a child. Often, I did not understand such things as "restricted access". The ship on which I was born and called my home was my playground; why, then, should any place be closed to me? How foolish are the thoughts of children, and how arrogant.
Accidents may come in many forms. Some are small, easily overlooked. Some are on a far grander scale and lead one into similar accidents of magnificent devastation. In youthful ignorance, I was often swept up in the smaller accidents, heedless and unknowing of how such accidents might collect upon each other to create a higher level of destructive chaos. A misplaced toy amid the components of the ship's engine catching within the wires, constant movement working in consistent effort to strip protective casings from the wires until steel touched to copper and sparked most reactively.
I knew none of this. As young as I was, all I was given to understand was that something had gone horribly wrong and my home was about to destroy itself. My father, his small crew and I could barely squeeze aboard our single emergency shuttle. As we were propelled out into the Black, I could not help but press my face against the viewport for a last look at my home.
Have you ever seen a spaceship explode? I understand that there are many films from Earth-That-Was which present images of exploding spaceships much as such a ship would explode while planet-bound amid a stable atmosphere. Such images are quite unlike the true experience of seeing, with your own eyes, as a ship you once called home explodes in space.
First, there is a great feeling of pressure. Real or imagined, I do not know. Cracks and fissures cover the surface of the ship, breaking it into pieces. Brief, all too brief flares of fire highlight these crumbling segments of metal as what oxygen as was aboard is quickly consumed and the flames are smothered by the crushing Black. Then the shockwave comes, an expanding sphere of pressure releasing out to press apart the pieces of the ship and anything still within range, then collapsing back in on itself as the pressure dissipates, leaving only floating shrapnel and twisted, broken metal behind as a testimony to what once was.
Had this been the end of it, perhaps in time the image would have faded from my mind as years so often fade the memories of childhood. Alas that this was not to be. As we hung suspended in the darkness, each left to our own thoughts before we would begin our trek towards the nearest inhabited moon, the wreckage of our vessel was discovered. In my naivety, I pointed out the approaching ship to my father. His response when he beheld the strange and hulking ship with many spikes and stains of red across the hull will haunt me for the rest of my life.
"Reavers."
I had not seen my father afraid until that moment, nor any of the crew. Fear was something beyond the realm of concern for such strong men. Or so I thought. Silence descended, a horrifying, pressing silence that arrested all attention upon that single ship. None of us dared speak a word, not even I. My father held me up against his chest, and I could feel the chill of the knife he carried press against my shirt. As young as I was, I had no understanding that my father would have killed me then before we could be taken alive had we been discovered. The press of the knife held me still against him, eyes locked upon the ship as it floated slowly, so very slowly past the wreckage.
It seemed in my young mind a lifetime passed before the Reaver ship was gone, leaving behind a broken wreck of a former home, a silent and shaken crew in a barely working shuttle, and a little boy whose world and meagre understanding of universal truth had crumbled with the ship. The Black was not an all-encompassing playground any longer. It was a dark, cold, fearful thing that reached with icy hands to claim those foolish enough to think that they could dominate it.
Lessons learned in fear remain long with the young. To this day, though I make my home and business high above planetary atmosphere, enclosed safely in my space-faring station, the Black is still my enemy. Its calm appearance belies the horrors and destruction of its denizens. Such is the nature of fear, of seeing the truth of danger in what was once perceived as safe. There is no such thing as "safe" beyond what you are strong enough to create for yourself.
Irrational? Perhaps. We are all children of our fears, moulded and shaped at will by that which threatened us. I have lived my life by this well-learned truth, and here I am. A master of my fate defined by my fears and so determined to rule them before allowing them to rule me.
I wonder... Do your fears define you as well?