River Tam

[After talking to Faith.]

If she passed anyone in her sobbing, blind flight from the cargo bay to the passenger dorm, River doesn't know it. Probably doesn't care.

The door of her bunk is hanging half open.

River herself is huddled in one of the smallest smuggling niches inside the wall by the engine room, wrapped in her brown duster. She wasn't wearing it in Milliways, and it's only draped around her shoulders now, the long tails straggling around her. She's crying helplessly, bitterly, in choking gasps of sobs.

A trick of the cooling conduits that snake through this corner: it's cold.

There's a gurney pushed up against the side wall of the infirmary. The only thing on it right now is sterile bedding, white and crisp.

And, underneath, a huddled form.

River's been here for an hour. Kitty's asleep.

River's not moving, except to breathe.

River is sitting on top of a pile of crates in the cargo bay, staring at nothing. It's not nothing to her, though, to judge by the interest in her eyes.

When Piotr comes in, her head lifts.

River's wearing her brown coat, as she does most days.

In one pocket: a wooden ring. An iron ankh. A black handkerchief.

She slips them between her fingers inside her pocket as she paces through the ship, watching her other hand slide along the bulkhead below a clustered length of wiring.

He's getting worse pretty fast, Sallie warns quietly as she leads the way from Milliways to pantry to kitchen.

River doesn't look surprised.

Just nods a little, and nods again when Sallie tells her to make sure to stop by on her way out and pick up some brownies for the crew, and heads down the hallway to the room that's become Ennis's.

Ennis is awake -- has been for a few hours. Groggy and drugged, but awake. Jack's keeping him company, sitting on the spare cot with his hat on his knees. Except that at the moment, that seems to mean slumping against the wall, snoring faintly every so often.

River doesn't like infirmaries.

But, for some people, she'll make an exception.

Wash is gone. Pretty much every member of the crew has chipped in to help with flying at some point; skill levels vary, of course, but it's not complicated to fly in a straight line through the black, or babysit the autopilot. Every night, Zoe silently takes Naomi and leaves for Milliways, to sleep there instead of in their bunk.

All the same, there's work needs doing. Or, maybe, everyone's got extra reasons to seek out work right now. Keep the hands busy and (maybe) the mind quiet.

Either way, it's been a while since River's guns were last cleaned. Which is why she and Mal are sitting at the kitchen table with rags and brushes and oil, guns in various states of disassembly spread before them both.

[After this.]

River's looking thoughtful. Intently so.

Mal's not on the bridge. Not in the kitchen, either. She keeps looking.

It's been a long, happy day. There are presents in the corner of River's bedroom, and there's extra birthday cake in the kitchen cupboard, and she visited two new homes on two new worlds, today, and everything was all right.

Now, River's curled up in her room, back against her bunk, head tipped back and fingers wrapped around her knees, and she's just smiling at the ceiling.

They meet at Milliways. Simon and River and Kaylee enter, closing the front door behind them; Gabriel and Regan are waiting, and they open the front door in turn to reveal the upstairs den of their Londinium house. It's quick, and efficient, and infinitely easier than traveling days into the Core by ship.

There's a plate of assorted tarts -- tiny and light, because the younger Tams have already had one birthday dinner and most of a large birthday cake, but there's one fruit tart with a candle in it. (Hodgeberry and lemon.) River blows it out, and very carefully upends the candle in a spare bowl before turning her attention to the tart with great delight.

Crowley comes an hour late, pleading late appointments. No one's fooled -- he was giving the Tams family time first, whether or not they thought it necessary -- but except for a tolerantly exasperated look from River, everyone pretends they believe him. "I saved you a tart," River informs him, and points to the plate, which still contains at least a dozen of them.

Presents come afterward. River's parents give her a golden puzzle locket on a long and intricate chain, fashioned to look like the closed bud of a tulip; when the hidden latches are pressed the right way, the petals unfold delicately to reveal empty frames for six pictures. River immediately makes Simon fasten it around her neck. From them, too, comes a pocket-sized black holocube. At a touch it plays soft chiming music, and multihued fractal designs drift across the cube's surface and float three-dimensionally through the air around it. From Crowley come a set of sleek designer pens with more than a dozen colors of ink, the kind of pens that write in space and under water and upside down and look damn stylish the whole time.

("Don't abuse those, now," Crowley tells her sententiously, with the kind of tolerant look that means I know full well you're going to write all over my stuff, but try to keep it off the really expensive bits of furniture.

"Never in life," River tells him, trying for innocence and achieving pure impishness, and she's too cheerful to even notice the verbal slip.)

The evening finishes with games, Chinese checkers and mancala and a complicated board game ruled as much by luck as by strategy. River and Crowley team up against the married couples, and manage to win at least half the games in spite of River's total lack of a poker face -- or perhaps it's that her everpresent grins and laughter serve as well as one, and Crowley's snake-eyed CEO's stare is certainly enough to make up for a great deal.

And it's more than okay. Very much more. It's laughter, and it's the second of River's two overlapping families, and it's a very, very happy birthday.