river_meimei | (no subject)

River is dancing.

(Simon tucked her in, smoothed the covers under her chin and brushed back her hair. Half an hour earlier were her night's injections. Sleep well, mèimei, he said, though they both knew the odds of that, and she smiled for him.)

River is dancing, en pointe. Solo, adagio. The room is small; they installed walls onstage when she wasn't paying attention. They crowd her.

She can't show it. The audience is behind those walls. She can't see them, but they're watching. She can't mess up: it's important. This is her mission; this is her purpose. She is a dancer.

Allegro, now: faster, turning, the fluttering steps of battement, brise, pique and cabriole. It's hard work -- it takes strength and precision and

(physical conditioning -- she's an exemplary subject)

grace -- but she can do it.

Her shoes thud against the floor. This is utterly familiar: the solid smack of toe shoes on hardwood, the squeak of floor, the rustle of tulle and smell of sweat and the burn of tired muscles.

Even when the walls close tighter, when she has barely room to move, she can do it, she can do it, because she learned this dance when she was fourteen and she is a dancer and everyone is watching. Everyone. The walls are sharp and the floor is slick with blood no one else can see, but (change to pas de bouree, small steps inside the prison bars) she is a dancer.

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There is a cough, and then silence. Nothing more.

Not the sound of cloth against a seat, not the quick snap of a match. But there he is, watching, waiting. A hat, a cigarette, a hand in a pocket. Nothing more.

There could be a smile, but there couldn't be a smile. Only the newly worn wrinkles of a secret something, whispered on the night wind. Nothing more.

Night wind.

The walls are gone. The floor fades at the corners into brown dry grass. River hesitates; slows in her pirouette -- steps down to wait, balanced high and steady on the blocky toes of her pointe shoes.

(This, too, is part of the choreography.)

Silent, masked faces watch her. Men in suits with cool false faces laid over smirks, and one weathered cowboy.

The wind lifts her hair.

There's no crunch under his feet, but the grass bends anyway. The cloud of smoke around his face flies away, and a fingers comes up to tip his hat. There's a sound, a grunt, a hello, a something, and he holds out his hand, awkward, unsure.

River lifts a hand -- fingers fluttering, wrist bent like a bird's wing. Her mouth falls open, and

(all is silent in the halls of the)

closes.

"You came," she says, though she doesn't say it.

The smile's there, now, and Ennis squints his eyes against the sun (where'd it come from?).

"Wasn't gone," he says, though it's the truth and not.

River didn't move, but she's barefoot now. Maybe she always was. (Maybe that's why there's blood on her feet.)

"I was." Softly.

Her eyes drop in sudden confusion. "It follows," she says, hesitant and half a question. "I am not a wave."

Ennis nods, or maybe he don't, it's hard to tell sometimes, when the wind's from the west.

"Still here," River whispers, tipping her head back enough to meet Ennis's eyes.

The west wind lifts her hair and the trailing smoke of Ennis's cigarette, as they stand together on the rocky mountain pass.

Forever and ever, Amen.

There's a sideways sort of smile and those lines around his eyes look a bit more noticeable as he reaches out a hand and taps her jaw.

"Ain't goin' nowhere."

Ennis. River. Jack. Sallie. Kaylee. Junior. Milliways. And so it goes.

Somewhere, a violin is playing a perfect birdsong.

River's eyes drop to his wrist.

"You're not here," she says, very low.

"I'm not."

"The congruence is a factual impossibility."

"Is it?"

And maybe Ennis don't say much, or maybe he don't ask too many questions, but this is one he ain't too sure about.

"Yes," River says, hands buried in her tutu.

Except she doesn't say it. Her mouth doesn't open; it doesn't count.

"I don't know," is what she does whisper aloud, the way that counts, into the east wind. There's a scent of sugar on the air, heavy and thick, like a fairground.

"You saw me," she says, and lifts her eyes to Ennis's.

He shrugs, and there's another puff of smoke.

"It's you."

And that makes her smile, small and a little shy; the kind of smile that softens her whole face, and makes her look suddenly younger.

Maybe there aren't the wrinkles that were there last she saw him, but the side of Ennis' mouth is crooked in that all too familiar way as he moves in a little closer.

There are questions, but they're not really his to ask, and the answers aren't his to have.

He's young, and he's old, and he's neither; he's dead, and he's here, and in dreams only the last part matters.

The violin is louder now, if still unseen. A soft waltz underlies the chirping birdsong, both from the same instrument.

"Time to go." River takes half a careful step towards Ennis as she speaks, and her head turns and lifts into the wind. "Listen. The rocks are going to fall."

Ennis shakes his head, or maybe he nods. Either way he smiles, and he reaches out a hand for her. But when he gets there, it's soft, it's there and it's not.

River clasps his hand in both of hers, even though it's not entirely there, and they float

(phase)

down through the path, down through rock beds and wire-tangled conduits and glittering ballrooms and bloodbaths.

"I miss you," she whispers as they drift down into a hazy apple-blossom spring, and somewhere along the line they changed without noticing into a waltz hold.

Ennis' hand goes to her waist, and he's moving like he never did in real life, but then, it's never been his dream, has it?

He'd say I miss you, but it's both true and not, and there's no room for that here.

The blossoms are falling like snow, like autumn leaves; it's spring, and on the trees they're just beginning to bud.

River closes her eyes (but she still sees just the same), and lets him twirl her inches above the ground.

His hand moves to her back, and there's laughter as he dips her, swaying in time with the music that nobody hears, and his hands aren't rough, not here, not now.

River's not laughing -- but she is, all the same, laughing without ever opening her mouth, the same way in dreams you can hear yourself talk without ever saying a word. She's laughing, and Ennis's laughter is rare and soft but it isn't rusty here, any more than his hands are weathered clumsy.

There's water under their feet, and warm improbable apple-trees in bud and bloom, and if River opened her eyes (and she can see, but she hasn't, so it's okay) she could see the branches mistily through Ennis and through herself. It's because they're more real than the trees; it's because everything here, now, this, is realer than anything awake could ever be.

She lets herself be spun and dipped, moving lightly with the dance and the laughter, with apple blossoms caught in her hair.

Everything is here, and everything is now; for this is all Ennis can remember, and all he can do. And he smiles as he floats, or nearly does, anyway, and something this good can only last forever.

And it does.

(omnia mutantur)

They spin on and on, timeless and floating in the sunlight,

(et nihil interit)

until they don't.

(Everybody leaves. And everything ends.)

And River dreams of swimming alone in a bioluminescent sea, and River dreams of knives and screams, and River dreams of running in hopeless helpless panic from the blue-handed men surrounding her, stalking her, to take her to the Negative Zone and slice into her brain until everything that makes her is gone.

And, in the end, River wakes.