4 January 2003
Fandom: Firefly
Spoilers: Oh so vaguely for "Serenity"

Notes:
Shout-out to Basingstoke for her Smallville story, "Five Things That Aren't True," which provided inspiration for Kita's "things that never happened" challenge and for this story.

Title courtesy of Jann Arden.

A 'dan' is a Chinese opera singer who plays women's roles.  All performers in traditional Chinese opera are men.

Disclaimer: Of Joss, and (alas) Fox.




1.  Interlunation

It isn't a mistake, because he doesn't make them.  It's a deliberate, quiet act.  Her heart eases quietly and he pulls the sheet over her face and notes the time.  The date.

He puts on his coat and goes home.

Outside, they're hanging lanterns for the New Year Festival.  Carefully lunar, calculated based on a moon that no one's seen in generations.  He buys sesame balls from a woman with a mulitated hand and tells her that if she comes to the hospital after New Year he'll mend it for her.

At home, there are waves from both his parents, and a half-dozen from River.  He'll go home to see her and she won't stop talking until he leaves.  She knows his textbooks better than he does, and she'll quiz him on them for ten or fifteen minutes before she warps the facts into an elaborate game.  Pretty, precocious girl who twists him tighter than any lover he's had.

The last wave from River says, "You have three days to make it up to her."

He curls up with a text and sliced fruit and watches the moon rise.  Layers of interconnection and brain chemistry.

The box chimes softly.

"Hello, mei mei."

"Simon."

"River."

"You were stupid to do it now.  You could have waited until next week, you'd still have had the experience, and you'd have a whole year to appease her.  Now you have three days."

"In three days I'll be home.  You'd better have a good present for me."

"Nobody comes into this house bearing ghosts.  It's a new rule."  She signs off without saying goodbye.

Simon remembers the cool of the hospital and of the woman's skin.  How gently her heart failed.  Nothing fluttered in that last moment; she washed out clean as water and was gone.  She had no family and no great fortune.  Like the real, precious body into which he sank his hands in his last classroom year, she was the perfect education.  All the mysteries of the human body in her very real flesh.

The candles in the corner cast light on the delicate holograms of his ancestors.

When he wakes just before morning, the candles are out and the projectors are smashed.

Simon takes pomegranates to the hospital's shrine.  While he's making his rounds, birds eat them.  Black feathers all over the ground.

There are firecrackers in the street, and lights in the sky, and he isn't even surprised when the woman sweeps into his flat, settles in the corner, and starts cursing him.

---

2.  Rim

The casket hisses liquid nitrogen and the smell of pure narcotics.  Edges of his skin flash-freeze and turn black when he reaches out too soon.  Hard not to scream.  He drives the other fist into his mouth to stay quiet.  It hurts, but unevenly, and he can almost, almost forget in the face of the warming box.

Cold carbon and ice crystals waft through Serenity's hold.  The ship's chill crawls under his skin as he strips.  

His things are still in his room.  His cast-off clothes are hidden.

He lays a blanket across the casket's edge and climbs across that protected stretch, kicking the blanket down behind him.

Inside, River is just barely conscious, curled fetal and slickly naked, watching him through one dilated eye.

"Shhh, mei mei."

Wraps himself around her.  The back of her neck presses his lips.

The lid closes over them both.

---

3.  Holliday

"Are you sober?"

"Not for years."  He can stand, though.  He's performed surgery while drunker than this.  Carved abcessed teeth from barely-frozen gums.  Patched truncated limbs.  Mined bullets from soft abdominal tissue.

"It's time."

"My hands are steady."

He follows Mal to the door, stops for his hat and coat.  Polishes his watch once on his vest before he steps outside.

Kaylee darts back into the blacksmith's shop as soon as she sees him.  Peers out the crack in the door, back-lit by the forge.

Inara turns deliberately away from both of them and walks back inside the saloon.

On the other side of Simon, Jayne falls into step.  So excited he'll hyperventillate in a moment and be no good to anyone.  Malcolm claims Jayne's a good man in a fight.  Simon's never seen it.

The rush of horses surprises him for a moment.  Stock plunging down the street, away from the peeled-rail gate.  Simon, Mal, and Jayne step through, and the gate swings shut behind them.

Across the street, he sees Book bent painfully over his Bible.  Simon thinks he might be giving Last Rites.

Across the Corral, Zoe and Wash stare at them, hard and blank.  Her fingers twitch toward her gun.  Wash is sunburned across his nose.

Zoe says, "High noon."

Mal says, "Draw."

---

4.  dan

He spent the first three years of his training guiding his body into poses that it should not have achieved while all his bones were intact.  He can bend double and leap, use a sword, backflip, simulate the great battles of the Classical Age.

None of this is useful.  

More significant are the careful, delicate movements of his hands when he sings.  He knows the lyrics to a dozen operas by heart.  He moves more gracefully than any woman he's ever met.  He can glide as well as the greatest lady who ever moved on bound feet.

He's good with make-up.  The stylized lines of his assumed face help, the exaggerated eyes and delicate mouth.

The jewellery he's collected over the course of his career is spectacular.  He likes the jade and silver tiered necklace particularly.

He warms up for hours.  He stretches.  If he reaches back through the torn, opium-warped portions of his memory, he can remember doing this with River when they were both tiny children.  She taught him most of what he knows about being a woman.  The gestures.  The directions in which only women can bend.

She pounded on the gates of the opera-school for days after he went in and didn't come out.

In the car, on the way to the theatre, Simon thinks he sees her.  Wild brown hair and a dancer's posture, perched on the railing of the Bridge of Sorrows.  She throws eggs at his car and never focusses on Simon's made-up face in the window.

He's heard that the New Society will benefit people like her.  The poor are the People, now.  And the mad do seem to be in control.

The theatre is filled with students.  They'll denounce him tomorrow, probably, or the next day.  He is Reactionary.  Counter-Revolutionary.  He represents the decadent artistic tastes of the Bourgeoisie.

He wonders if River will be there for his interrogation.  Whether she'll crouch by his head while he weeps or break his feet with a cane.

The theatre is undarkened, because darkness elevates performers above the audience.  He sings.

At the back of the theatre, he sees River creep in.  She stands in the doorway's sunlight, mirroring his every gesture.




jane
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