Denouement

Denouement:

The outcome of a sequence of events; the end result.

The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot.

The climax of a chain of events, usually when something is decided or made clear.

The final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

The outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences.

They have won…so many battles.

She could count on one hand the number of defeats:

-The letter

-The journey

-Jiangyin

-Ariel

In the end, they were victories as well. Bitter-sweet, like the chocolate Inara sometimes receives and hands off to the others.

Dust on their shoes and blood on their clothes, the sound of gunfire ringing in their ears.

At dawn the battlefield is clear and empty, white tents in the background rising like a warning.

At midday the sun is high above, white orb suspended in the haze of battle, born aloft by the screams of the living and the silence of the dying dying dead. Dirt kicked into the air by bombs, boots, bullets. Ships above, men below.

The sky and the sea meet and converge, diverge. The sun beats down relentlessly, hot and burning in its fury. The earth swallows the blood shed from misguided wooden toys now embedded with bits of tin and steps back, uncaring and uncompromising.

Red flag, blue flag, white flag, no flag. All are the same, for it has seen empires rise and fall, seas sweep in sweep out, mountains crumbling and bowing beneath the drive of the rain and the whistle of the wind.

At night darkness has cloaked the world, the sun retreating for a few scant hours to allow the stars their chance to shine.

The white tents are gone, swallowed by shadow. The battlefield is indigo poured on navy smoothed onto black. Brown coats and blue coats and whose coats matter? lie still together, the black of the dirt and the blood of the body erasing all boundaries imposed by the restrictions of the human mind, so controlled and orderly, machinelike in its execution of processes bestowed upon it by unknown creators.

Friendships forged in the heat of the day and the sound of battle are tested by the discovery of missing pieces and the subsequent holes in the dynamic of the unit. Who once was the follower is now the leader and the others look on, watching pride and loss and terror and sense-of-self grapple with new responsibility and the fresh bloodstains on the hands, wondering whether their new leader will rally them anew or put a bullet in his own skull.

The stars cast harsh white light unto the plains, and the dust settles back to the ground until the next bullet-boot-bomb sends it careening back up into the face of the sun.

So many battles, so few defeats. Victory is a taste she could grow accustomed to. That they could grow accustomed to.

Commanders, leaders. Ordering troops. Directing movement.

Go here, die there, shoot them not us aren't you listening man? Kill them before they kill us, who cares about the nightmares blood on the hands of a brand-new father? Stop them have a medal you big damn hero you but only if you follow our orders. Are you listening have you got that? Then pick up your gun and go!

O.o.O

They are little more than children in body, but in mind they are older than the world itself.

Child prodigies. Experiments. Rescuers. Truly, the things stories are written about.

The girl with ice in her heart and death in her shadow, blood covering every available inch of skin; lunacy in the words she speaks and Miranda in her mind, all those deaths whispering whispering until they themselves become the screams that haunt her dreams and send her skittering in a dance-kill-dance around the ship.

The boy whose once-white hands are all too ready to become the color he puts back in should a threat to That Girl arise and rear its ugly head. He is stone on the outside and frosted-rose-colored glass on the inside, burned to ash in worry and pain and created anew in words written in code on letters made of terror and scalpels, reborn with the emergence of everything he has from her cocoon of ice and snow and dark.

O.o.O

They have won…so many battles, and she can count the defeats on one hand.

There is dust on their shoes and blood on their clothes, gunfire ringing in their ears.

Oh, these Big Damn Heroes, with their hard-earned bitter-sweet victories of battles that, in the end, mean little more than the ashes on her tongue and his missing letters.

O.o.O

They have won…so many battles. They have lost the war.

It does not take a genius to understand which is worse, counting on their fingers when their heads have been solving problems that take computers years to calculate in seconds since the age where most children are still beginning to grasp the basics of reading and writing.

Hundreds of battles. Four losses, dozens of victories. The taste of winning, warm and wonderful, in their mouths.

Two fights to end the war. Two losses, zero victories. The taste of defeat, black and oily, in their eyes.

Fall-

Two by two, hands of blue.

They are coming, and they bring with them a tidal wave of red-blood-tears and tin soldiers clothed in navy and made of empty promises spoken with dead tongues.

Her world fractures into splinters of blistering white light and gleaming silver torture instruments and the hum hum humming! of hospital machinery.

Flakes of ash drift down from the ceiling above; the building is awash with the tremors of an army bearing down upon them, and she takes a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowstorm composed in a shaft of sunlight, animated by the whispers of the world.

Where she is going, there is none.

No whispers.

No sunlight.

No snow.

No beauty.

Beauty is pain. The laugh that leaves her mouth is bitter and harsh, ('old beyond her years she is' whisper the guests, who refuse to see with their eyes and hear with their ears; shows what they know).

There is no beauty in blood, no redemption. Blood symbolizes only death, or injury; weakness will not be tolerated and she adjusts her grip on twin blades of ice while men-who-think-they-are-gods look on with golden eyes and slavering jaws, lusting after the power and wealth she can bring them oh, how their enemies will tremble before her.

He will not leave her.

She screams and begs and cries and pleads. This does not work, and she resorts to threats and blackmail; anything, anything, to get him out of this forsaken building made with the sweat and blood and tears of men who have long since become skeletons in the ground, their bones eroding to fine white powder and mixing with the soil. Mother Nature always wins in the end.

When all else fails she escalates to violence, and her fingers shred his shirt into tatters and leave him bleeding from dozens of scratches littered on his arms and shoulders and chest (although she avoids the face, lest she cause permanent damage, injuries that cannot be soothed away with a bandage and a smile and an all better now from Doctors Who Are Good with no needles).

He does not leave: not her, not his mei mei; he will never leave her again. Stupid simple aggravating Simon. He is too late, far far too late, but he refuses to see with his eyes and instead sees with his heart.

She loves him far too much to kill him but god cannot make him a stone (although apparently he can freeze a river in its tracks with a single well-placed needle in her head) and she will not be able to teach him, expending too much energy simply on collecting the pieces that one of them has to keep track of so Humpty Dumpty can be slapped back together again.

Violence gives way to dragging and pushing and shoving, and though he is strong she is much much stronger (never has she been so glad of their Such Good Work) and ground is rapidly lost beneath their feet, the ice-white floors traveling by in a blur of lines and cracks and deadness.

Fast she is, but not fast enough, and the dead descend in rows upon rows, breath in billows smelling of dying roses and rotting corpses, led by that nursery rhyme nusery rhyme caught in her head and WON'T GET OUT.

The animal claws at its cage but she cannot set it free and unleash the storm they have created upon them, to rain destruction and fire onto their miserable lives and leave them to rot in this hellhole.

Simon is close at hand and the risk of friendly fire is too high; she is vicious and deadly and he will be swept up in her rage and laid in eternal red-soaked slumber back upon the ground she was so intent on carrying him over.

He does not leave, and though they sowed the wind he reaped the whirlwind, and she can only watch in blue-tinted horror as they wrap their hands around him and sink in their metal-tipped claws; never will they let go and all martyrs die in the end for the cause.

The thrill of victory is but an echo in her mouth, and defeat comes in like the tide, choking her on ink-drenched lies printed on paper and stained on the field of battle.

She is shattered, and in her remains they plant their flag and construct around her, leaving the pieces to erode and collect dust in the hollow halls of their shiny new monument.

Apart-

He fights. With everything left in him, he fights. His muscles burn and his lungs scream for breath, but still he fights on.

It is not enough, not nearly enough, and an ocean of navy-clad officials drag him bruised and bleeding to the floor where he screams until it feels like his vocal chords have shredded themselves in his mouth.

This, he thinks, is how Mal felt at Serenity Valley.

Desperate. Panicked. Terrified. Uncaring whether he lived or died, bled or breathed.

His skin is slick with sweat as he struggles against iron arms holding him down, pressing one cheek hard into cold marble floors.

This, he thinks, is how a butterfly feels when pinned to corkboard.

There is a thicket of legs, a jungle of arms, a mass of white-red-blue-blossoming-into-purple faces in his way, narrowing his line of vision to little more than a dot.

He never noticed what an ugly color white is.

Unfeeling. Cold. Impersonal.

A list of adjectives and synonyms sprout into his mind, spurred on by the waves of adrenaline coursing through him.

River vanishes around the corner, escorted by a whole goddamn regiment of soldiers. Executioners. Death has her by the elbows in the form of two blank-faced blue-handed men, and his mind rings with the cadence of a nursery rhyme.

Someone grabs him by the hair and lifts his head off the floor only to slam his face into unyielding stone.

His world dissolves into stars and explosions and a blackness thicker than the dead of space.