River Tam

River wakes early, some days. Not every day, but today's one of them.

Mornings are quiet on Serenity. Even though the chronology is all based on ship clocks, with no true pre-dawn hush, there's the silence of a ship whose crew is all still asleep in bunks and shuttles, behind closed doors. The engine turns; the life support runs; River's footsteps whisper against metal and rugs and tiles. That's all.

Serenity's on autopilot. The course is plotted in, and she knows how to fly herself, out here in the black.

So River's sitting in the copilot's seat, arms wrapped around her knees, ignoring the controls in favor of staring out at the stars.

All those tiny pinpricks of fierce light, impossibly white in the velvet darkness.

The kitchen: ruled by a plump and autocratic cook with a horde of scurrying servants.

The hallways: lit by gas and sunlight, wallpapered, lined with classrooms. (River's shoulders are tight and hunched every time she looks in one of these rooms. She looks in every one anyway. Every room; every corner.)

The cellar: damp, dim, full of shelves and barrels and glass jars. Pickles, blanched vegetables, potatoes and parsnips and onions. Coal and wood for fires.

The attic: dusty, dim as the cellar, and full of papers and stored paintings rather than root vegetables. A few servants' bedrooms, tiny and spare, with the kind of desperate cleanliness that's meant to make up for a lack of actual possessions.

Hardly anyone notices one more servant girl, especially one who keeps well out of the way of other servants. A few people -- a portly teacher with a bluff avuncular face, the cook, an imperious young teenager -- give her orders, barked or distractedly mumbled. River nods, tries not to flinch and not to glower, and scurries on with the proper cowed air. She ignores the orders once she's out of sight, of course.

Mostly, she keeps to the shadows. The corners, the back stairways, the closets; even fewer people look there.

She listens for whispers said and unsaid, for secrets and plans and screams. She looks at the walls: the cracks, the spaces, measuring dimensions with her eyes while her fingers tick and twist through mental calculations at her side.

(Whatever else may be said of the Academy, River learned there. Learned well.)

River watches, and River listens, and what River finds is: everything matches. Everything adds up.

There's a discreet back stairwell for servants' usage, but no hidden passages. There are trapdoors -- for laundry. There are rooms the students aren't allowed in -- for the faculty, or the servants.

But there's nothing sinister, in the building or lurking in anyone's thoughts. Nothing but the usual, petty human venalities.

It's an Edwardian girls' school.

River's in her room, curled up on the floor between bed and wall. There's a piece of paper in front of her; she's been scribbling something. She's not right now, though.

Right now her hands are curled between thighs and chest and her eyes are closed and damp, and her face is tight with misery.

It's that meme!

Comment with your character's name (past or present) and the name of one of mine, and I will tell you:

1) how my character's opinion of the named character has changed over time, or
2) why my character does or does not get along/like/other with the named pup.

Mine, for reference, are:

River Tam (river_meimei)
Lan Mandragoran (taishar_malkier)
Piotr Rasputin aka Colossus (steel_artisan)
Regan Tam (regan_tam)

And past or mostly inactive:

Will Stanton (sign_seeker)
Alain Johns (honest_johns)
Edmund Pevensie (iustus_rex)
A-ko the shadow girl (a_ko_chan)

Simon's upset.

River -- if she is -- isn't in the same way. It's hard to tell.

What she is is sitting on the floor near the fireplace, between couch and end table. She has a gold bracelet, spangled with bells, lying on the table in front of her. Every so often she touches it, and a soft lilting melody chimes out.

The forest is chilly in winter, like every other non-Caribbean corner of Milliways's outdoors in February. But the trees are a windbreak of sorts, and more importantly, it's outside.

You can walk here for hours, without ever seeing the main building, if you choose your paths carefully.

River doesn't intend to be out for hours, presumably; she's not dressed for that. But she has boots on, and leggings under her dress, and a thick sweater she stole from Simon years ago under her coat. It's enough to make tramping along the forest paths a reasonable proposition.

There are birds singing.

River's in the hallway between her room and Simon (and Kaylee)'s, stretched out on her stomach. She's examining a physics magazine: from Milliways, apparently, to judge by the glossy pages and the fact that the crew hasn't seen a mail drop or market in a little while; usually, if River gets a magazine or book there, she devours it the same day.

Her only concession to being in the way of traffic is that she's settled up against her own wall, instead of lying right in the middle of the floor.

It's been days since Kaylee was home. More than days.

She's looked, but Kaylee's good at hiding. Sometimes. Sometimes everyone is.

(When you're hurt so bad you just want to find a cave to hole up in, you can usually look hard enough to find one.)

And the few times River's found her, it's been...

Sometimes you want to be alone.

Sometimes you don't want even people you love to be near you.

(There have been days River's sat silently outside a door, waiting. Waiting until she had to go, hours later, and nothing had changed enough.)

And then it's later, and the world's too crowded or you've found another friend and the fragile peace there, or you've found another hole to hide in.

But, now: a door, down one of Milliways' shifting corridors. (Locked.) River tries the knob, stares at it for a moment, and then lifts her hand to knock.

There are three places River spends most of her time nowadays: Serenity, the lake and forest of Milliways, and her father's hospital room.

Only one of them is free of grief and guilt and strain. Free except for what she might bring, of course. It's that one she's in now: curled on a rock set a few feet into the lake, damp bare feet tucked under her skirt. Her boots wait on the shore, haphazard and abandoned.

Gabriel Tam's hospital room is as spacious and comfortable as hospital rooms can get, as befits a senator. And -- as befits a senator badly wounded by an assassination attempt -- windowless and very, very well-guarded.

His bodyguards are feeling more than a little like failures, and accordingly more than a little paranoid.

The family can come and go freely, of course; River checked. (Not aloud. She knows the map of these corridors now. Knows where the eyes are, and where the walls change angles, and how many guards will follow her at a discreet protective distance if she leaves.) Simon's at Milliways, or back on Serenity.

Her father's asleep. So is Regan, having ignored the spare bed to curl up in an armchair next to her husband's bed. The resemblance between mother and daughter is rarely so strong.

River was asleep too, earlier. The floor under the corner table; Simon tried to make her take the bed, but River refused, more and more strenuously until he gave in and soothed her and tucked a blanket over her instead.

She's awake now.