A/N: Undoubtedly my favorite scene in the entire series is the one where River gets up on that stage and dances. I love the smile on her face and the way she just stops caring about everything for a little while. I love the smile on Simon's face when he sees her so happy, too. I had to write a little something. This works much better if you have the music from that scene in your mind, so I recommend finding it if you can.

If you recognize it, I don't own it.

For Now, She Will Dance

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music." - George Carlin

Simon worried about her. All the time, he worried. He was especially worried here, when the Captain Reynolds insisted that they take a walk around another out-of-the-way planet. Simon would always be a civilized man, accustomed to the luxury of the inner planets and not readily adaptable to a less accommodating way of life. River, though, River didn't particularly care. She felt like she was drifting, drifting, floating away with only her brother's (well-intentioned but occasionally stifling, sometimes he was smothering her and didn't see that she couldn't breathe) concern to tie her to the here-and-now.

River drifted toward music. She liked music. She recalled music when she was young (when she was a child, innocent, before the Academy and before they had stolen her innocence away, away, where she would never find it again) and she liked music. Music was like freedom. Music was like the blueness of the sky, something that was never in the Academy, not even in the Things They Made Her See.

River drifted past people. They were sort of there and sort of not. No, that was wrong; River knew they were there. They were real people, not holograms, people as solid as herself and Simon were (they were the only solid people sometimes and the rest were like ghosts, like spirits, vapors in the world that would vanish as soon as she couldn't see them anymore and so she looked away quickly, because it was best to get it over with). She knew, intellectually, that they were real, but River wasn't ever sure anymore if she could believe her senses. She turned her eyes up and watched the dancers, wondering at the grace of their movements and the jolly music they danced to. She was awestruck by the (oh, she knew this, didn't she? She should have known it, was it in the Things They Made Her See or was it something else, another ghost, or maybe) unfamiliar dancing. As she stepped forward again, someone jostled her, and a voice cried out from the stage.

"Come on, get up here, girl!"

Something snapped into place inside her and, suddenly, it all made sense.

River watched the dancers with a new eye. Information sleeted past her highly developed brain. She learned the pattern of the movements. She saw the flow of the dance, heard the clacking rhythm of boot heels on wood keeping time with the rollicking step-wise melody of the carved wooden flutes and fiddles. Everything filed neatly into her mind and River found that her feet were solidly on the ground, itching to move.

So she let them.

She threw herself into the dance with a grin, spinning and kicking with graceful abandon, losing herself to the tumbling triads. She clacked her way across the dance floor on her own, or twirled in the arms of a partner. She danced the unfamiliar steps as if she'd known it all her life, feeling a real smile stretch across her face. As the arpeggios soared up and down the scales, River danced across the stage, flicking her hair away from her face and snatched at her skirt to keep it from getting in her way. She saw colors and movements with her eyes and heard the play of the music with her ears. She smelled with her nose and tasted with her tongue and felt, felt, felt for the first time in so very long. The world was right again! The world was hers, all hers, and she danced across it, danced over the top of it, so lightly that she might as well have flown. Everyone else had to run through it, but not her. Not anymore.

River knew that this would not, could not, last forever. She was too much under the thrall of the Academy, still, and the fog which had ensnared her would be back soon. For now, though, she would pretend that it wouldn't. For now, she would smile and laugh. She would kick her feet and swirl her skirt. She would hear the music and feel the sunlight on her face and see the blueness of the sky.

For now, she would dance.

"She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing 'yes' in the sky." - Monique Duval