Title: The Puppet

Author: Bianca Valdez

Pairings: None

Characters: River Tam, Simon Tam

Rating: T

Spoilers: You would be well served to have seen 'Serenity', though chronologically this is set before/during the first scene of such.

Disclaimer: Rights go to Joss Whedon

A/N: I had a hankering to write something from River's point of view, and this is what happened. It's rather introspective I suppose, and not a heavy in the plot department, so I guess it could be classified as a drabble. Well, enjoy! And, if you're feeling particularly generous, drop me a review.

She sits on a throne of nightmares, needles piercing the dreams that dance about her consciousness, spinning and leaping and swaying to the music that makes no sound.

She used to dance. Her heels would kiss the ground a quick goodbye and her toes would press into the earth and she'd turn in circle after circle like the undulating mist.

Dreams are monsters that claw at her sanity, but she prefers them to the waking.

Or maybe she doesn't. It's hard to tell.

She's singing, higher and higher, the notes soaring, flying like she wishes she could. It's a dream, which means she has control, so she spreads her wings and jumps and means to fly, but instead she falls.

She thinks she has control but she doesn't. Not really. The dancer is a puppet on strings, hangman's ropes lifting her wrists above her head and sending her spiraling once again.

Dance, they say, and she does. She dances. She sings. She is beautiful, and she is in pain.

The puppeteer pulls too hard and her eyes fly open. The singing turns to screaming, and when she tries to silence herself she finds she cannot. She is filled with fear like an icy wave, sweeping through her and making her feel all tingly, like when she sits in the bathwater too long and her skin turns to prunes.

There was a boy in those memories, and he'd point out the wrinkles and try to explain. She'd always known what they were though; she knew the answer, like always, and she'd told him. He'd gaped at her like a fish (the mouth opens and closes, slack-jawed with shock, but not electricity because that is counterproductive and makes your hair all funny, and fish don't have hair. Although technically it is electrical because of the impulses in your brain and the pulsing of your heart that stutters from surprise) and she'd laughed and laughed. Then he'd splashed her and they'd made a mess of everything, puddles on the floor, reflecting the tiny, man-made suns in the chandelier above.

She doesn't remember his name. She wouldn't remember hers, either, except the hands of blue keep reminding her.

In the beginning she counted. Now numbers can't keep their order, soldiers falling out of line, words flying off the page. She does not know how long it's been, and it doesn't really matter. Days, months, years, eternity could have passed for all she knows, and she cannot summon up the will to care.

Time won't stop the nightmares. At first she thought they would, but she was wrong. She'd never been wrong before.

Not true. Recalculate; remember. She'd been wrong. She'd thought the bathwater boy would come for her; she'd sent him a letter. Thought he was smart enough to read her code, thought they were close enough to speak each other's language.

He's not here. He's not coming, and she should've known. He can't open minds like flowers in bloom and sample the thoughts within.

She can. She's a puppet and she can do it on command.

Sometimes, though, she does it when the strings are slackened, as the hands of blue proudly present themselves like items in a shop window to the men (and women) in the suits of gray and the eyes of steel and the minds free of conscience and filled to the brim with absolute surety and secrets that must be kept at all costs.

She knows the secrets. It makes her smile a bit, because that's something they haven't stolen from her. They can't, because, for once, she's the one who stole it from them.

Miranda.

Miranda is their princess of death, spinning on her own invisible axis, caught on her own eternal string. She whispers her terrible truths in the heads of the gray suits and she is heard by the girl with the mind like broken glass, edges rubbing up against edges with bits of knowledge caught in the cracks like sand between your toes.

The hands of blue don't know she has it. If she's very smart (she always has been) they'll never find out.

She's their toy until eternity comes, but she can toy with them too. The day she found that out was the day she realized that maybe she can survive.

Those are her options. That is her ultimatum. The hands of blue think they hold all of her strings, but if she decides to die there is nothing for them to do. They'll watch her fall down the drain and she'll be laughing the whole way.

She'll be crying at the same time, though, because this isn't how it was supposed to go, and she misses home.

No. She doesn't miss home. She can't remember home. That memory splintered a long time ago. She can probably glue it back together, if only they'd stop yanking her around like this.

She does remember the boy. It's him that she misses, really, not the silhouettes that could be her parents, the paper dolls of a man and a woman whose job it was to teach her, but they mustn't have taught her anything. What is there to teach to a girl who knows all of the answers? What can you do when you thirst for knowledge but there's nothing left for you to learn?

It's why she came here. She wishes she hadn't.

She screams. The song grates at her throat like gravel caught in the soles of her feet (pebbles in her soul, too) and her eyelids peel back but she still cannot see. Her vision is obscured by a haze of clouds that turns to rain on her face, blurry figures of the blue hands reaching towards her with a needle to pierce another hole and lace it with another thread, a thread to make her dance even more.

She'll dance until she can't dance anymore, and then they'll make her keep dancing anyway.

Her eyes squeeze shut once again as they twist the needle, and she is falling once again. Her skirt fans out around her like the petals of a rose, rain on her face turning to dew on the blossom, rolling off to drop down into oblivion below her.

It's lonely in the void. She reaches out for company but is met with stony logic, empty of emotion and filled instead with scientific formulas and numbers and variables, things that used to mean things but are now contained inside of a splinter that she pushed to the side.

She's afraid of it. She doesn't want to be like them.

The bathwater boy was like them, though, mouth full of medical terms that her parents couldn't understand, that she could more than understand. He was brilliant, dulled only by her shadow.

She shivers as she thinks that he could become a hand of blue. Not her bathwater boy. She'll protect her bathwater boy, even if he exists purely in the spirals of her fragmented imagination.

Another needle, piercing another hole into her sanity, and another piece snaps. Their voices are a blurred as she spins, her ears filled instead with the grinding sound of glass rubbing against glass. A shard catches the front of her skull and she screams, the void slammed away by the sudden, vivid image of a classroom.

The teacher spins a tale of lies, but only because she is unknowingly their puppet as well. "River?" she says, and the dreamer stops twitching, looking up with eyes that see too sharply, too brightly.

"We meddle," she says, and then the teacher stabs her with a needle, a thread attached to string her up.

She sings again, muffled and sad and choking on the rain that has found its war inside of her throat. She swallows violently, the song interrupted by the clearing of the puddles so that the can continue with ease. The terrible music fills her ears, cacophonous and layered with the scraping of the glass, the clattering of the needle, the thrum of the string as they twist above her, spinning her and spinning her until she collapses, holding her up and spinning her still against her will.

She lashes out, trying to dislodge the needles, and in doing so breaks past the cacophony. The hands of blue are flustered, the nervous wind lifting their coattails and making their hair stand on end.

But its not just the hands of blue, not this time. She thinks for a moment that it is one of the gray suits, but there is something familiar about him and his private words are tangled in shock and fear beneath a stony mask of indifference.

She reaches out to him but is pulled back by the tug of a thread. She sings for them. She doesn't want to, but she does.

The gray suit spikes in fear, thoughts rising and heart beating faster with the rapid impulses of electric readiness, compensating for the adrenaline that pumps through his veins like a river through a dam (a river through a dam, a River and a Tam…), and the air fills with pulsing energy.

Everything is very quiet and very loud all at once, like thunder. The room is a storm and she is the epicenter. She tries to stop singing and finds she can only dim the volume.

Hands are on her cheeks, gentle and soft, and whispers float the needle from its hole. She is cut loose from her strings and she wants to dance away, but she cannot seem to move. She is slackened, the toy with no one to play with it, as the familiar form smiles at her sadly and whispers her name.

"River. River, it's me! It's Simon. It's your brother."

Simon. Simon. Simon.

Simon is the bathwater boy. He came, he came for her, he will save her, but it's too late. There's no saving. Miranda tickles the back of her mind giggling softly because she knows that her keeper is ruined, puppet cut loose and unable to dance anymore. But strings can be picked up again, and they can make her spin.

She doesn't want to spin. Not anymore. Simon could get hurt.

His presence is gone from her and she feels a droplet of rain that he is gone. She reaches out to hold onto him and finds that he is still close. Close, but not close enough.

She ghosts up from the throne of needles and thread, shaky feet dancing on the ground of their own will for the first time in…she can't remember, but its been eternity. Her strings drag behind her, ghosts and reminders and nightmares that she doesn't want, never wanted, why did this happen to her, couldn't she just have been born stupid?

She blinks her eyes and the void shrinks into a cold room filled with needles that are syringes and hands that are sleeping. She steps over one, wanting to take his needle and stab him with it, see how it feels now, but she is afraid and Simon is here and he cannot know that she is a monster. No, not a monster. A doll. No. A puppet. No.

She glances at a scalpel, glinting on a table.

A weapon.

She pads across the room that used to be a void but isn't anymore, holding close the fragments of her mind that she needs to get Simon free. He shouldn't have come, because she is past saving and now he is in danger too. The hands of blue can get to him and if they get to him than she won't let them pull her strings anymore. She'll rip them from their hands and she be what they made her to be, a gleaming arrow ripping through their flesh and setting free the river of crimson that pools across the tile.

She can set free the river, because she is the river.

But not in front of Simon. Simon can't know.

He checks the door, peering through, stripping free of the jacket that is not him, and she is glad because now he smells like the bathwater boy. She stands behind him and he turns, surprised, as she speaks for the first time in eternity.

"Simon."

She has been singing for so long that the word seems flat in her mouth, but she revels at its taste because it is something that she has not been commanded to do. He looks at her with wide eyes and takes her hand.

Then they run. Not flying, not yet. They run through the hive of the hands of blue, run to a shaft of wind and light and up into a ship of freedom, or so she thinks. But she is wrong, because Simon presses a shaky kiss to the top of her head and lays her down for a nap in a bed of ice.

For the first time since before she can remember, she doesn't dream.

Before she rests her eyelids closed like butterflies with shut wings, she does remember what is to come.

"Simon," she mutters, his dark eyes watching her. "Soon we're going to fly."

He nods, placing a gentle hand alongside her cheek and holding back tears. "Of course," he says. "River, I'll be here when you wake up."

She smiles. "Take me to serenity."

Lightning bugs dance in a sky of stars, and she dances with them. She spreads her wings in the calm and at last she can fly.