Disclaimer: Not mine. They belong to Joss. Which is good, ‘cause I don’t think I’d want to be responsible for Jayne most of the time. Thanks, Joss.

Author's Note: This is a nod to a very brief moment in Objects In Space, brilliant because it was so very brief and unexplored. I thought I'd do some exploration of my own, branching off (pun intended) from Joss's vision of River's perceptions of objects, in space.

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One by one, like leaves from a tree, All my faiths have forsaken me; But the stars above my head Burn in white and delicate red, And beneath my feet the earth Brings the sturdy grass to birth. I who was content to be But a silken-singing tree, But a rustle of delight In the wistful heart of night-- I have lost the leaves that knew Touch of rain and weight of dew. Blinded by a leafy crown I looked neither up nor down-- But the little leaves that die Have left me room to see the sky; Now for the first time I know Stars above and earth below. -- Sara Teasdale--

Leaves by ShinyBug

No one else sees the leaves. Just me. I guess that’s for the best; they’d just be afraid, and they’re already afraid enough as it is. Afraid of Alliance, afraid of the holes that guns make, afraid of the black we sail through. Afraid of me. The leaves would only make it worse, if the others could see them.

But I see them, all the time. They are scattered across my plate at dinner, making it hard for me to eat, even when Simon nudges me disapprovingly with his elbow. They are under my hands when I push my plate away, when I brace my palms on the table as I stand up. There are some lodged in Book’s hair, which would make me laugh except it’s, well, *his* hair. They are drifting down from Kaylee’s honeysuckles on the pillars as I leave the dining room and the eating resumes behind me, in my wake. They crackle and pinch under my bare feet.

Some of the leaves are fragrant with memories I’ve lost or misplaced; one will smell of dancing and toe shoes, of the hardwood of the stage; one will smell of the cold charcoal in the fireplace of the Tam Estate, in the early morning before anyone else was awake. Each leaf is a different shade of the same color--the color of me, and each butter yellow and blood scarlet and watery green is a reflection of parts of me that have separated, tugged from stem, withered and fallen.

When I walk through Serenity’s hallways the leaves brush my toes; my heels crush them to bits. When I touch one I remember, but then I touch another one and the first is forgotten. They are out of order, a pile of debris to be sifted through. My first kiss, a faded autumn red, lies half-pinned beneath the veined hodgeberry purple of the day I left for the Academy. All to bits.

Serenity saves them for me. She lets the leaves collect in the corners of the cargo bay, in the cabinets in the kitchen, stuck in between the holes in the catwalk floor. There’s a great big pile of them in the engine room, and they swirl around her beating heart sometimes when Kaylee’s not looking, caught up in the revolving heat and light. Serenity knows. Serenity remembers.

It’s confusing, with all the memories underfoot, eddying in the wind of the open cargo door, gathering in piles around my ankles, distracting me from the now and the here no matter what Simon puts in his syringes for me. Drugs didn’t make me this way, and drugs won’t fix me. You can’t put dead leaves back on a tree with glue and expect them to take in water.

The others look at me with confusion and ambivalence. I know my words don’t always reach their ears carrying the same meaning they left my mouth with. They don’t know what to make of me. They see a girl with dark hair, loose skirts, big combat boots, and they think this is what I am. But they don’t see my leaves, or what’s left of them, and they don’t see the bare branches of my arms, the naked bark of my skin.

I used to dance, and when I danced I was a willow in the wind; my hair was the long thread-like branches, fluid and trailing across the floor, across my body, across anyone I chose to bend to. It was simple, when I was just a tree. The leaves sheltered me, kept me safe from the rain and the storms, and I knew no more than what my eyes and ears told me. I never had to count between the lightning and the thunder. I was never afraid.

Then the blue hands came, and picked at me, and picked at me, and the blue fingers pulled off my leaves to examine them, and charted the bark of me, and the rings beneath, and dug out my roots and stripped them of goodness---

---and now I’m just deadwood, a girl in a tree.

I think they wanted to know what I would see, without all the leaves in the way. I see everything. I hear everything. I know everything.

I know that Simon resents me as much as he loves me. I know that he despairs. He wants me to get better, so that we can go home, but he knows we can never go home. Serenity is all the home we have left, and I know he rebels against the thought. I know he wants to want Kaylee, and I know that he really can’t. I know he dreams of the hospital, and finds solace in the white walls and cold metal and blue lights of the infirmary the way that I never will. I know he hates Serenity.

I know that Shepherd Book is no Shepherd at all. I know he believes what he says about his Symbol that he carries around with him, and he doesn’t lie, but a man can tell untruths by saying nothing at all. I know who he talks to when he prays, and I know who he reports to, and they aren’t the same manner of Authority at all.

I know that Zoe will never have children. She doesn’t know it yet, but she will. And I know that Wash entertains thoughts of leaving her first, because he thinks she might beat him to it. I know that neither of them has ever been happier than they are when they are together, and I know that in the end that won’t be enough to hold their marriage together. Spiderwebs are transcendently beautiful, and infinitely fragile.

I know that Inara cries in her shuttle at night, her face red and her hair messed, letting go of all the restraint she lives with every day. I know she wants to reach out and grasp with her two hands what is so close in front of her, and I know that she will not. She will leave first, and she has already left in her mind. I know that Inara is more afraid than any other person on this ship, even more afraid than me.

I know that Kaylee doodled Simon’s name on the wall of her bunk, and then covered it up with a postcard of Persephone’s city skyline at sunset. I know that Kaylee dreams of being loved by someone she doesn’t have to prompt for compliments, and I know that she has already begun to despair of my brother. Her confidence is slipping. Serenity has become her closest confidante and bedfellow, but Serenity will not hold her in the night. I know she has tried to scrub him from her wall.

I know that Jayne turned us in on Ariel. I know he still thinks about the reward money he could have had for us. I know he watches me differently now, and he thinks about my brain. He thinks about the scalpel scar hidden by my hair, and he tries to sound out the word amygdala in his mind. I know that the mudder on Canton who took the bullet meant for Jayne features prominently in Jayne’s nightmares, and sometimes the mudder wears my face. I know that Jayne, very deep down below speech or thought, desires redemption, in whatever form it may take.

I know that Malcolm Reynolds will never love anyone more than he loves Serenity, and he and I have that in common. I know that he touches her walls, her grates, the lights of her consoles with lover’s fingers, the way I do. I know he visits her in the engine room when everyone else is asleep, and he stands with his hands in his pockets so he won’t reach out to her beating heart, tangle his hands in the molten glow of her revolving pulse. Serenity loves him back without condition. She keeps him safe, the way she keeps me. I know that Mal is more kin to me in that way than Simon ever will be.

I know all these things. I see them and hear them, because not all the leaves scattered across the floor are mine. Some of the leaves wear Inara’s pale gold, Jayne’s muddy blue, the Shepherd’s slate gray, Mal’s blood red. They get mixed up with mine, and I get confused.

I remember tumbling a red-headed whore in Minerva settlement, and accidentally calling her by Kaylee’s name, then not being able to look Kaylee in the eye for a week after, or even jerk off without feeling ashamed.

I remember performing open heart surgery on a four year old boy from New Taiwan who could only say “Sank you” in English, only to be unable to save him days later when he succumbed to a post-op infection I might have prevented, had I not been preoccupied with thoughts of breaking my sister out of the Academy.

I remember the first time I killed a man with my hands, during the battle on Xin Yue, the way his warm blood ran over my hands and my knife, looking at his astonished face and finding him to be barely eighteen, the way I vomited and shook after, hiding it from Mal.

I remember getting shot over a new catalyzer, betrayed when I thought things couldn’t have gotten worse, my blood sliding and dripping down Serenity’s floor grate, letting her bear me up with her adamantine steel structure, feeling the sadness in her silent, still heart as I struggled with blood-slippery hands to perform another kind of open heart surgery.

All these things I know. Having no leaves, I am open to the elements, the passions and lies of others, the things unsaid. I wish I could tell the Blue Hands that they failed, that they can stop looking for me, because it doesn’t matter what I know, or what I see, or feel, or hear. I can’t speak these things in any language that human ears understand. I open my mouth, leaves come out. The others frown, shake their heads, walk away warily, as though hearing a message in a dream that they might almost comprehend, but like a dream it’s gone before they can grasp it. Leaves in a high wind.

I’m just deadwood, trying to put roots down again, trying to be seen in a forest.

Serenity understands. She doesn’t judge. She knows I was a girl once, until a blue-handed Apollo chased me into a willow tree, but Serenity will take me any way I come; broken or mended, leafy or bare, girl or tree. Her plated hull is the canopy and crown that keeps me dry and warm, her beating heart sustains me in absence of a mother’s misplaced love. She collects my leaves for me, keeping them for later, in case I might want them back someday.

I hear distant laughter from the dining room, Jayne’s booming voice, Inara’s bell-like one, as I walk through the cargo bay in the warm light that reminds me of autumn on the Tam Estate. The trees around me are turning with the season, a forest of riotous reds and golds, and the stream that winds through the trees is beginning to rush cold. The breeze that stirs my hair is scented with late apples, ripening after a windfall on the ground at my feet. I wander through the trees, picking up the good leaves, smiling at what they mean, gathering them in a pile of self in my arms.

I wonder if I should go back to the house. The days are getting shorter now, after all, and I have all the leaves I can carry. I turn and see the captain standing in the stream, watching me with hands in his pockets, and I laugh.

“You’re getting your feet wet,” I point out, and he looks down in confusion. I think he looks rather silly, but I don’t tell him so.

“Everyone’s turnin’ in for the night, River. You should think about doing the same,” he says to me, slowly, as though I might not understand.

“I’m almost done here,” I tell him, hefting my armfulls of leaves a little higher, tsking when a few slip from my grasp to flutter off in the breeze.

Mal steps forward out of the stream at me, just two steps, always wary. His boots are wet. He leans toward me a bit, peering at my arms. “Whatcha got there, River?” He sounds indulgent, but at least he’s talking to me.

“Just leaves,” I say. “Leaves of all colors.”

“Cai guai,” he replies in disbelief, but his voice is kind.

I remember that he can’t see the leaves, and then I realize that if he can’t see the leaves then he can’t see the stream either, or the trees, or smell the apples. That makes me sad, because out of all the others sailing through the black with me I thought maybe he’d see them, and that would be okay.

My arms sink down, the leaves suddenly too heavy to hold. They fall in a whoosh around my feet and dissolve into Serenity’s grate, and when I look up the trees are gone, and the apples, and the captain’s boots are no longer wet. My throat aches as I stare at his boots, at the dry scuffed leather that looks as though it hasn’t seen water since before the cow died.

“Hey,” Mal says, putting out a hand to me for a moment before dropping it.

“Mei guanxi,” I mumble through the tears in my throat. “It’s just...those were the good ones.”

“Well now.”

I look up and watch him struggle with comprehension, which only makes me sadder, because I can’t think to explain it any other way. His mouth seems to be working around words that his forehead is wrinkling to find.

“I guess there’s always tomorrow. To collect more, you know, leaves.” Mal looks pleased with himself, to have gotten that much out. *I wish I could understand her--poor kid just wants to be heard.*

His thought brushes against me and I smile absurdly, feeling that all may not be lost. I look down, distracted by a flash of color, and see one stray leaf resting on my big toe. I pick it up, hold it between my thumb and forefinger, examine its veins. It is a fiery autumn gold, the color of Serenity’s wake at full burn.

“Sorry, I think this one’s yours,” I admit sheepishly, holding it out at him. When he doesn’t move I take his hand and place the leaf in it. He stares at his hand for a moment, then looks up at me.

“Mine? My leaf?” he inquires hesitantly.

I nod. “I’ll tell you what. You buy this ship, treat her proper, she’ll be with you for the rest of your life.”

Mal doesn’t need to say anything. His surprise is strong enough to bop me in the brain. So I bop him one back, tapping him on the forehead. “Son, you hear a word I’ve been sayin’?”

He blinks. One corner of his mouth lifts up. A faraway glint in his eyes reflects the shape of a mid-bulk transport ship, grounded in a desert lot, waiting for someone to see her potential beneath all those confusing layers of dust and space grime. Waiting for someone to get her heart beating again.

“Zao an, Captain,” I say, smothering a smile and a yawn as I move past him toward the passenger dorms.

“Wan an, River. It’s night, not morning.” Behind me, he sounds very distracted.

“As you say, Captain.” I glance behind me as I step into the corridor. Mal is standing alone in the cargo bay. There are no leaves, no trees, no stream. He is staring at his hand, which is empty.

“Huh,” he says.

Serenity’s darkened corridor swallows me up like an embrace. I trail my fingers along her walls as I walk, blessed silence in my head, no leaves under my feet.

~End~ ----------------------------------------

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