Title: Imperfect Reflection Characters: River, Simon Pairing: None Rating: M Words: 516

In homage to “Sixty Lights” by the brilliant Gail Jones

A voice in the dark: “River?” It was an antiseptic whisper. She wanted it, this dry, clean, gentleness, this surcease from the purulence of her own self. This simplicity. This hospital cornering of herself into the folds of some – any – sort of sleep. Her feet were cold inside her skin. The blood on them was congealing and itching like ants. The air inside Serenity was completely still. Even the re-cyc system didn’t stir it. Outside the ship, the stars hummed and buzzed and struck like insects at the frail protection offered by sheet metal and rivets. River had dreamed that a moth landed on her face and dropped its load of shimmer before flapping away into the dark corners of her room like a white hand, and she had awakened bolt upright with her eyes open. Again the voice: “River? What’s wrong?” Here is what she had seen earlier: herself, as she truly was. Mirrors lied. Mirrors worked by reflecting light. They only showed what the light told them too, never what was really there. The moth had left her cheek smeared with shine that didn’t show up in the dim light offered by the single fizzing bulb in her room. The glass of the mirror was slow and hard and cold and when she looked into it, she was trapped under an ice sheet. All of Serenity was held captive by the shining surface, and all around her moth dust made her eyes sting. She was wearing one of Simon’s old shirts, a creased blue one he had worn to Alys Camberson’s seventeenth birthday, and again last Thursday. River had taken it for herself and he hadn’t protested. He had given her more needles instead, and she had slept in it. She was unsatisfied by the mirror. What strange alarum of fate had assigned this mirror to her face? What odd twist of Newtonian physics meant that it was forever stranded in an anachronistic lie? The present was never displayed properly, only imperfectly reflected. It even reflected her fist as she calmly shattered it into cracks and shards that stuck in her fingers and feet. She saw only elements, dark in the dim light: the cavernous corners of her room, the seaweed of her hair, the pale sculpted curves of the sheets she had abandoned. The mirror continued its business, bits of sliced River Tam still glanced from its surfaces, compressed, contained, assembled like it was a lens, or a spider’s eye. There was a community of Rivers present with her, a crowd of her face and her blood on the floor reflected the light as well. When she turned away, she was conscious of her face turning away a hundred times.

Simon turned over in his bed, his humped form moving slowly like he was underwater. “River? Are you hurt?” His tone pricked at her like glass shards and she would always remember the way he said her name, loving, distracted, accusatory, lost. She felt stranded outside his room. “I’m fine. I just came to tell you about my mirror, and that I can’t sleep,” she said quietly, evenly, wishing she could just walk away.