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psalm_onethirtyoneAhem. Firefly fic! This is--a story about Simon and River. But it has selkies. So, you know, I'm not really sure. It did, however, take a year, so I am just quietly grateful that it is finally done.
Warnings for crazy.
unmedicated
---
"Don't touch it!" she screams, taking big steps backwards. Her sweater is pink. Her hair has little braids in it because Inara was taking care of her yesterday, and she lets Inara braid her hair. She doesn't let Simon.
"River, please. It's all right."
"Nothing is all right!"
"It is. I promise."
"You don't listen! How do you know? You know don't because you don't listen. Everything you see is in its singular form. There are no deviations."
"All right. All right." He takes a deep breath and moves closer. "Will you tell me what's wrong?"
"There are scared people. They need a home. They don't have anywhere to go, and we're cruel and angry and we won't help them."
"Who are they?" Soft, soothing. If he uses the right tone of voice--
River puts her hands over her head. "They're in the hold. They want to come out because they're hungry."
"Who are they, River?"
"People we won't help! They see in black-and-white, they're like dogs. They're colour-blind. They came out of the sea and they smell like seals and they're scared and you can smell it, I can smell it, they're little green and grey people who don't have shoes."
It's nonsense again, and half the time the nonsense means something. He hates that. He can't translate. She isn't scared any more, and he'd think she was trying to tell him something, but she isn't consistent, and what she says ought to have a meaning and doesn't. Or shouldn't have a meaning and does.
"What do you want to do?" he asks quietly.
"We should wake them up." Suddenly she drops her hands and laughs; her face brightens. Simon closes his eyes. "They need to transfer their consciousness. Otherwise the baby will die."
Before he can say anything, before he can open his eyes and show her his startled face, River is out of the room and running, her boots banging on the iron walk, her white skirt fluttering, her long hair fluttering. The little braids swing and bounce.
He runs after her. He can't translate, and he can't let her go.
---
When he catches up, she's in the hold, threading through the bales of cargo and talking to people he can't see.
"It's all right. I came to get you."
"What do you see?" he calls to her, and she turns around and shushes him, a finger on her lips, mimicking their mother.
"They're going to come out! We have to do it right." She's laughing, smiling. "We have to play fair. I counted to a hundred first."
"Where should we look?" he says. There's no reason to tell her no, it won't hurt anything. Even if it doesn't mean anything--it's just a game that doesn't exist, but she wants to play, and Simon thinks, as long as she's playing the game, she maybe won't be thinking about all the bad things she has to think about, and she'll calm down, and then he'll have a chance to find out what invisible, imaginary thing he was touching to make her scream. It's worth trying. It's worth pretending. It might work for a little while. "All right. I don't see anyone yet."
"They're afraid of you."
"Why me?"
"You can identify them."
"What?"
"You can come out," she says, half-singing, into the shadows. "I don't know any stories. I don't remember the words. Hello," suddenly going down on her knees and holding out her hands. "My brother says hello, too."
Simon comes to her in a curve, out of direct line with her, until he reaches her side and drops to one knee to look at where her hands are disappearing into the greyer light. As he does, he begins to make out people.
---
A man and a woman. The man is small and pale, with eyes the colour of the sea--and, thinking that, Simon wonders when he last saw the sea to make the comparison; but there's something in the stony blue-grey, something moving behind the eyes like a tide, so basic and certain that there's no other name for it but sea. The man looks like something come from an earth, very simply something come from a part of that earth near water, with his pale skin and his ocean-eyes, and his dark-sand coloured clothing and hair.
The woman is like space.
Her face is vivid and sharp and intergalactic, her movement broad and unending. The composure of her body, the starlight colour of her white-grey dress, the length of her fingers and the length of her hair, all of it is somehow as deep and vast as everything outside Serenity.
It frightens him.
River is saying nothing, but no longer smiling at them, instead serious and still. The woman looks back at her and then, suddenly, says, "Hello," one word like something cutting through nothing, sharp as her face, and nods. Her voice is quiet in volume, dark in tone, untrusting, unsure, unanchored. Like a piece of something flying through in zero-gravity, with no atmosphere to affect it.
"Hello," Simon answers. It seems expected of him. River is still silent. "When did you, um, get on?"
"Back there," she says quietly. "When you touched down for resupply."
"Are you planning to get somewhere?"
"Anywhere you stop next."
"Any, um, particular reason?" He rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. Somehow casual conversation with stowaways seems incongruous. A gunfight or a chase would be more in keeping with the usual character of things that happen on this ship.
"We want to go home," she says.
"Ah. Um. Wouldn't it have been better to have signed on?" From the quality of her dress, at least, they can't be without money: penniless miners and frontier settlers wouldn't wear cloth of that colour and texture, and her hair is dressed simply, but nevertheless dressed, with tiny shining stones woven into it. Her hands are not working hands.
"He'd want money."
"Probably," Simon says. "You don't have--?"
"He wouldn't take it." She drops her hand into a pocket beforehand invisible, and shows him a palmful of shells and stones, as shining as the ones in her hair. Then she turns her hand and they're grey, and he realises: worthless. Very much worthless.
"Fair enough," he says.
"We won't be here long. He needn't know." Her eyes are stern and accusing, and at the same time they're not looking at him at all.
River, he notices suddenly, isn't listening. She's turned to the man, and she's making a butterfly with her hands--old child's trick, that she learned from a nurse when she was two. Thumbs hooked, fingers spread. Her face is still sober, but very cautiously the man smiles, as she flutters her fingers and lifts her hands. His smile is a twist, not exactly a whole smile: a twist like a knot of seaweed, or a spiral shell from the sea.
"Good lass," he says.
"Yes, she's my, um, sister," Simon says, trying to keep one eye on her moving hands and the other on the woman's half-angry, half-wary face.
"Superficial physical similarity." River. “Shared genetic material. He stole a chromosome in the womb and birthed like a pea.”
“Shh.”
“Peas grow in cans,” she says loudly. “They reproduce asexually now. There’s no recombination of alleles.”
“I’m sorry. She’s not--“
“She’s a wise woman.” The woman folds her hands away again.
“A what? No, no, that’s a superstition. She went to school. We still learn Mendelian genetics, although we recognise that his methods were crude and the proof of his hypotheses was luck, because he only looked at traits that were coded to--”
“Simon doesn’t understand. May I see your skins?”
The man shies back into the shadows of a tower of crates. His face is grey now and the smile is gone.
“People have been trying to take them for years. You hid on the ship so you could get away. You don’t have a family any more. You just want to go somewhere people won’t find you. Somewhere with lots of water. “
He nods slowly.
---
The woman has gotten to her feet while River was talking. She’s standing away, her star-coloured dress shaking at her ankles. Her thin hands are shaking at her sides. “Come away,” she says fiercely, turning to the man. “Come away from her. Don’t let her take anything.”
“Sticks and stones will break my bones--“
The man shivers. “They’re so young and they die so quick.” Simon can make out an accent now, a rough accent like scar tissue ploughing up from the skin. Uneven. It’s uneven, like the way River talks, like the way the ship changes course and him learning last of all. Sometimes he knows what he wants, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he wishes he could ask Kaylee to leave Serenity and come with him somewhere else, somewhere quiet and steady where they could raise a family without the trouble Mal’s always looking for, without the constant interruptions of things crashing to the floor and thin screams in the middle of the morning--
No. No.
“Turtles and mice,” River says.
“Aye,” the man says softly.
“I just want to touch. Did you know if you lie on the floor and put your ear down you could hear it singing? Her belly sings.”
“Aye.”
“Can I touch?”
He straightens up a little and reaches inside his coat. Simon watches (maybe it’s a dream. Maybe it’s River’s dream. He’d never know the difference, maybe) as he pulls out hand after hand of sleek grey fur and lays it on the floor, as gentle as Simon is with his surgical scissors. River comes forward on her knees to touch it.
“It feels like Mother’s coat.” She laughs. “Mother’s opera coat. Simon’s afraid. He’s always afraid because he thinks I’ll never get better and he’ll have to look after me for the rest of his life. He loves me, but he doesn’t want to take care of me for-ever. He wants to do other things. He always planned to do other things. I have a question.”
“Aye, lass?” The man strokes her hair with one hand, the way their father used to. Affectionately.
“If I put it on can I be you?”
“Nay, it’ll no work. And there’s no sea.”
“Oceans are a trick of the mind. I could make one. You’re supposed to be crazy if you see things, but hallucinations are basic. Most cultures respect them as visions. I could create.”
“You’re not one of us,” the woman says.
“Softly--” The man looks up at her.
“I want to be a Müllerian mimic.” She presses her knuckles to her forehead. “Confer your advantages. River is problematic. I don’t want my identifying markings. Simon--”
“Shh, mei-mei, I’m right here.” Simon is still kneeling; he reaches for her, gathering her up. She feels so tiny in his arms, a cool-skinned construct of nerves and tissues and organs, proportionally smaller than average, with a soft wave of hair that falls over his hands. He makes out one of the braids beside his thumb. “I’m right here.”
“It’s ugly this way. Make me a new species, Simon. Rebuild me. You’re a doctor.”
The bird.
Holding her reminds him of holding the bird.
---
When their father took Simon to the market to buy his first dissection specimen. He remembers his father’s hand on his shoulder, firm and gentle at the same time. Remembers standing in the dusty street looking at all the vendors, and his father saying, “Choose whatever you like. When I was a boy we used dead cats, but they seem to be in low demand these days. I recommend a bird or a monkey. Snakes take too much time.” He remembers staring into the cages--remembers the face of the church they stood in the street before, remembers the shouting vendors of sacrificial animals--here where they were cheapest, because the people who came to this church couldn’t afford anything that wasn’t. Simon chose a dove.
They took it home and his father, in the laboratory, set the cage down on the table. “If you remove it, I’ll euthanise it for you.” It was illegal then to buy animals already dead because they were so often carriers of disease: whenever his father purchased anything for dissection, he brought it home alive and euthanised it in the laboratory. He was teaching Simon so Simon would be ahead at school.
Simon remembers how he reached his hand into the cage and closed his fingers around the dove. He could feel it trying to fly. He felt its wings beating against his hands, because he had grasped it incorrectly. He felt it flapping and thrusting and trying to escape from him. His father came to the rescue, put his hand in beside Simon’s and caught the bird so its wings were pinned to its sides beneath his fingers. He took it from the cage and gave it to Simon.
In his hand it was still, except for its rapid breathing. He could feel the bones of its neck beneath his fingertip. He remembers thinking how easily he could have killed it himself, and how alive it felt. Some part of its future was infinitely dependant on him, and it was entirely separate from him, unconcerned with any of his intentions, on some different plane of being (a thought that was too philosophical for him to express then: what he told River that night was, “It didn’t know what I was going to do. It didn’t care.”). He almost let it go.
Instead he gave it to his father.
The fate of the bird stopped mattering after he realised how fantastic its organs were, beautifully and minutely formed; after he traced the path of the digestive system and earned his father’s approving smile (that night, River said, “I already know how the digestive system goes. He did that with me when I was seven.”).
---
Now he feels his sister’s body against his own, and he can feel her breathing. He can feel the bones in her thin arms, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin on her cheek. She’s like the bird. What he does will mean everything that happens to her, and she thinks, like the bird, in a way he doesn’t understand at all.
His throat tightens.
River thumps her fist against his chest. “Do what you’re supposed to do! Make me better! You’re the doctor!”
“But you hold--you hold together appropriately the way you are.” He has no idea what he’s saying. No idea. “You’re able-bodied; your, your heart, your lungs, your liver, they’re all in perfect working order. You’re physically admirable. There’s no reason to change you. You’re beautiful.”
She trembles against him. Looking over her head, he can see the man and woman watching them, silent and dark-eyed. The man has one hand on the fur skin, as if he doesn’t know whether to draw it to himself or offer it to them. The woman’s mouth is pressed tightly together. Simon wants to shudder himself, draw into the shield of somebody else’s body. He doesn’t even remember how this day began. It must have been sane, back at the beginning. It’s always sane at the beginning. Somehow it always gets worse from there.
The man suddenly moves. It catches Simon’s eye, the shifting of shadows, the disturbance where there was absolutely stillness. The man comes to them, and slowly drapes the skin around River’s shoulders.
“There, lass. You can’t be us.”
Then he kneels down and rests his dark head on River’s shoulder. His aspect is animal; Simon wants to look away. He can see the bird in this man as surely as he feels it in River. Both of them are wild.
“This is crazy.” The woman looks down at them all. “We shouldn’t be talking to them, you put your skin on her--what are you doing? You’ve gone crazy. You’re going to get us hurt or stolen. We’ll never get home. Just stop it.”
“She’s Wise.”
“I don’t care! I want us to get home!”
“You’ll get home.” River’s voice is muffled and somehow clear. “It’s singing in your belly. It wants to spill out into the light. Wash the blood off and it’ll be fine. It’s a lake, not the sea, but it’ll open for you. Go home.”
“Where?” shakily. The woman’s hands are still now against her sides. “Where will we go?”
“Your stop is next.”
“Shh,” Simon says, stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. “I’m sorry for this trouble. My wife and I, we’re just trying to find a home. And these bodies--they’re dying so quickly. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “I underst--it’s fine. We won’t--we aren’t going to alert the captain. Get where you’re going safely. --River. Come on, please come with me. We’re going to go back to your room now. All right?”
“You’re going to put a needle into my bloodstream and make me stop existing.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“Promise?” Her eyes are fixed on him. Her face wrinkles like an old woman’s when she cries.
“I promise. I’m going to take care of you.”
Slowly Simon gets to his feet, lifting her up in his arms. The skin slips off her shoulders and back to the floor, and the man pulls it to his body. His hands hold it awkwardly, as if he weren’t used to having so many fingers.
“We’re going to go back now,” Simon tells him. River’s arms are tight around his neck. “Good luck.”
“Aye. Luck to thee,” says the man, in his scar tissue voice.
---
He puts River down carefully on her bed; she lies back and he strokes her hair. Back here, in the clean room with its small beds and the furniture that disappears into the wall with a push, it’s unbelievable to think of the two people back in the hold. He’s already beginning to think it was just--no, but it’s not a dream, it certainly can’t be that. It was too tangible. Maybe he is going crazy, it’s starting to look like a possibility.
“Selkies,” River says, wiping away tears.
“What?”
“They’re extinct. We don’t believe in them.”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“I wish--” She breaks off and lifts her hands into the air. Then she tucks her thumbs together and makes the butterfly of her fingers. “Can I give birth to a seal?”
“What? No, of course not, that’s--”
“Stowaways. Castaways. Float, swim, wander, sail. We’re on a boat. They’ll find the sea. They have to. It’s by definition.”
Simon gets on the bed beside her and she curls up against him, wrapping one arm around his waist in a way he has the disconcerting feeling is possessive.
“When are we going home?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Catalyst. Thank you for stopping.”
“Stopping what?”
“Touching.”
“River, what was I touching?”
“It hurt.”
“River--”
She tips her chin up and whispers in his ear, “You can let go of the bird and it won’t fly away. It doesn’t want to. You’re not Mr. Tam. You aren’t going to fill its body with poison. Won’t kill me so you can cut me open and write words on my life. No little labels on my arteries. Bird won’t fly.”
She knows. (Of course she knows.) Simon reaches for her hand, feels her fingers curl around his. She’s wise and broken and beautiful and old. He squeezes her fingers. “I love you.”
“You can make me sleep now if you want to.”
“I’m not going to.”
A long silence. Simon almost dozes off, and then River says, abruptly and guiltily,--
“I’m sorry I called you a pea.”
He squeezes her hand again, and this time she squeezes back.
---
Down in the hold, the woman sits on her heels. She spreads the skirt of her star-coloured dress around her smoothly and looks up at the man. “She said it’ll live.”
“Good.” He rests his hand on her belly. “That’s good.”
Warnings for crazy.
"Don't touch it!" she screams, taking big steps backwards. Her sweater is pink. Her hair has little braids in it because Inara was taking care of her yesterday, and she lets Inara braid her hair. She doesn't let Simon.
"River, please. It's all right."
"Nothing is all right!"
"It is. I promise."
"You don't listen! How do you know? You know don't because you don't listen. Everything you see is in its singular form. There are no deviations."
"All right. All right." He takes a deep breath and moves closer. "Will you tell me what's wrong?"
"There are scared people. They need a home. They don't have anywhere to go, and we're cruel and angry and we won't help them."
"Who are they?" Soft, soothing. If he uses the right tone of voice--
River puts her hands over her head. "They're in the hold. They want to come out because they're hungry."
"Who are they, River?"
"People we won't help! They see in black-and-white, they're like dogs. They're colour-blind. They came out of the sea and they smell like seals and they're scared and you can smell it, I can smell it, they're little green and grey people who don't have shoes."
It's nonsense again, and half the time the nonsense means something. He hates that. He can't translate. She isn't scared any more, and he'd think she was trying to tell him something, but she isn't consistent, and what she says ought to have a meaning and doesn't. Or shouldn't have a meaning and does.
"What do you want to do?" he asks quietly.
"We should wake them up." Suddenly she drops her hands and laughs; her face brightens. Simon closes his eyes. "They need to transfer their consciousness. Otherwise the baby will die."
Before he can say anything, before he can open his eyes and show her his startled face, River is out of the room and running, her boots banging on the iron walk, her white skirt fluttering, her long hair fluttering. The little braids swing and bounce.
He runs after her. He can't translate, and he can't let her go.
When he catches up, she's in the hold, threading through the bales of cargo and talking to people he can't see.
"It's all right. I came to get you."
"What do you see?" he calls to her, and she turns around and shushes him, a finger on her lips, mimicking their mother.
"They're going to come out! We have to do it right." She's laughing, smiling. "We have to play fair. I counted to a hundred first."
"Where should we look?" he says. There's no reason to tell her no, it won't hurt anything. Even if it doesn't mean anything--it's just a game that doesn't exist, but she wants to play, and Simon thinks, as long as she's playing the game, she maybe won't be thinking about all the bad things she has to think about, and she'll calm down, and then he'll have a chance to find out what invisible, imaginary thing he was touching to make her scream. It's worth trying. It's worth pretending. It might work for a little while. "All right. I don't see anyone yet."
"They're afraid of you."
"Why me?"
"You can identify them."
"What?"
"You can come out," she says, half-singing, into the shadows. "I don't know any stories. I don't remember the words. Hello," suddenly going down on her knees and holding out her hands. "My brother says hello, too."
Simon comes to her in a curve, out of direct line with her, until he reaches her side and drops to one knee to look at where her hands are disappearing into the greyer light. As he does, he begins to make out people.
A man and a woman. The man is small and pale, with eyes the colour of the sea--and, thinking that, Simon wonders when he last saw the sea to make the comparison; but there's something in the stony blue-grey, something moving behind the eyes like a tide, so basic and certain that there's no other name for it but sea. The man looks like something come from an earth, very simply something come from a part of that earth near water, with his pale skin and his ocean-eyes, and his dark-sand coloured clothing and hair.
The woman is like space.
Her face is vivid and sharp and intergalactic, her movement broad and unending. The composure of her body, the starlight colour of her white-grey dress, the length of her fingers and the length of her hair, all of it is somehow as deep and vast as everything outside Serenity.
It frightens him.
River is saying nothing, but no longer smiling at them, instead serious and still. The woman looks back at her and then, suddenly, says, "Hello," one word like something cutting through nothing, sharp as her face, and nods. Her voice is quiet in volume, dark in tone, untrusting, unsure, unanchored. Like a piece of something flying through in zero-gravity, with no atmosphere to affect it.
"Hello," Simon answers. It seems expected of him. River is still silent. "When did you, um, get on?"
"Back there," she says quietly. "When you touched down for resupply."
"Are you planning to get somewhere?"
"Anywhere you stop next."
"Any, um, particular reason?" He rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. Somehow casual conversation with stowaways seems incongruous. A gunfight or a chase would be more in keeping with the usual character of things that happen on this ship.
"We want to go home," she says.
"Ah. Um. Wouldn't it have been better to have signed on?" From the quality of her dress, at least, they can't be without money: penniless miners and frontier settlers wouldn't wear cloth of that colour and texture, and her hair is dressed simply, but nevertheless dressed, with tiny shining stones woven into it. Her hands are not working hands.
"He'd want money."
"Probably," Simon says. "You don't have--?"
"He wouldn't take it." She drops her hand into a pocket beforehand invisible, and shows him a palmful of shells and stones, as shining as the ones in her hair. Then she turns her hand and they're grey, and he realises: worthless. Very much worthless.
"Fair enough," he says.
"We won't be here long. He needn't know." Her eyes are stern and accusing, and at the same time they're not looking at him at all.
River, he notices suddenly, isn't listening. She's turned to the man, and she's making a butterfly with her hands--old child's trick, that she learned from a nurse when she was two. Thumbs hooked, fingers spread. Her face is still sober, but very cautiously the man smiles, as she flutters her fingers and lifts her hands. His smile is a twist, not exactly a whole smile: a twist like a knot of seaweed, or a spiral shell from the sea.
"Good lass," he says.
"Yes, she's my, um, sister," Simon says, trying to keep one eye on her moving hands and the other on the woman's half-angry, half-wary face.
"Superficial physical similarity." River. “Shared genetic material. He stole a chromosome in the womb and birthed like a pea.”
“Shh.”
“Peas grow in cans,” she says loudly. “They reproduce asexually now. There’s no recombination of alleles.”
“I’m sorry. She’s not--“
“She’s a wise woman.” The woman folds her hands away again.
“A what? No, no, that’s a superstition. She went to school. We still learn Mendelian genetics, although we recognise that his methods were crude and the proof of his hypotheses was luck, because he only looked at traits that were coded to--”
“Simon doesn’t understand. May I see your skins?”
The man shies back into the shadows of a tower of crates. His face is grey now and the smile is gone.
“People have been trying to take them for years. You hid on the ship so you could get away. You don’t have a family any more. You just want to go somewhere people won’t find you. Somewhere with lots of water. “
He nods slowly.
The woman has gotten to her feet while River was talking. She’s standing away, her star-coloured dress shaking at her ankles. Her thin hands are shaking at her sides. “Come away,” she says fiercely, turning to the man. “Come away from her. Don’t let her take anything.”
“Sticks and stones will break my bones--“
The man shivers. “They’re so young and they die so quick.” Simon can make out an accent now, a rough accent like scar tissue ploughing up from the skin. Uneven. It’s uneven, like the way River talks, like the way the ship changes course and him learning last of all. Sometimes he knows what he wants, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he wishes he could ask Kaylee to leave Serenity and come with him somewhere else, somewhere quiet and steady where they could raise a family without the trouble Mal’s always looking for, without the constant interruptions of things crashing to the floor and thin screams in the middle of the morning--
No. No.
“Turtles and mice,” River says.
“Aye,” the man says softly.
“I just want to touch. Did you know if you lie on the floor and put your ear down you could hear it singing? Her belly sings.”
“Aye.”
“Can I touch?”
He straightens up a little and reaches inside his coat. Simon watches (maybe it’s a dream. Maybe it’s River’s dream. He’d never know the difference, maybe) as he pulls out hand after hand of sleek grey fur and lays it on the floor, as gentle as Simon is with his surgical scissors. River comes forward on her knees to touch it.
“It feels like Mother’s coat.” She laughs. “Mother’s opera coat. Simon’s afraid. He’s always afraid because he thinks I’ll never get better and he’ll have to look after me for the rest of his life. He loves me, but he doesn’t want to take care of me for-ever. He wants to do other things. He always planned to do other things. I have a question.”
“Aye, lass?” The man strokes her hair with one hand, the way their father used to. Affectionately.
“If I put it on can I be you?”
“Nay, it’ll no work. And there’s no sea.”
“Oceans are a trick of the mind. I could make one. You’re supposed to be crazy if you see things, but hallucinations are basic. Most cultures respect them as visions. I could create.”
“You’re not one of us,” the woman says.
“Softly--” The man looks up at her.
“I want to be a Müllerian mimic.” She presses her knuckles to her forehead. “Confer your advantages. River is problematic. I don’t want my identifying markings. Simon--”
“Shh, mei-mei, I’m right here.” Simon is still kneeling; he reaches for her, gathering her up. She feels so tiny in his arms, a cool-skinned construct of nerves and tissues and organs, proportionally smaller than average, with a soft wave of hair that falls over his hands. He makes out one of the braids beside his thumb. “I’m right here.”
“It’s ugly this way. Make me a new species, Simon. Rebuild me. You’re a doctor.”
The bird.
Holding her reminds him of holding the bird.
When their father took Simon to the market to buy his first dissection specimen. He remembers his father’s hand on his shoulder, firm and gentle at the same time. Remembers standing in the dusty street looking at all the vendors, and his father saying, “Choose whatever you like. When I was a boy we used dead cats, but they seem to be in low demand these days. I recommend a bird or a monkey. Snakes take too much time.” He remembers staring into the cages--remembers the face of the church they stood in the street before, remembers the shouting vendors of sacrificial animals--here where they were cheapest, because the people who came to this church couldn’t afford anything that wasn’t. Simon chose a dove.
They took it home and his father, in the laboratory, set the cage down on the table. “If you remove it, I’ll euthanise it for you.” It was illegal then to buy animals already dead because they were so often carriers of disease: whenever his father purchased anything for dissection, he brought it home alive and euthanised it in the laboratory. He was teaching Simon so Simon would be ahead at school.
Simon remembers how he reached his hand into the cage and closed his fingers around the dove. He could feel it trying to fly. He felt its wings beating against his hands, because he had grasped it incorrectly. He felt it flapping and thrusting and trying to escape from him. His father came to the rescue, put his hand in beside Simon’s and caught the bird so its wings were pinned to its sides beneath his fingers. He took it from the cage and gave it to Simon.
In his hand it was still, except for its rapid breathing. He could feel the bones of its neck beneath his fingertip. He remembers thinking how easily he could have killed it himself, and how alive it felt. Some part of its future was infinitely dependant on him, and it was entirely separate from him, unconcerned with any of his intentions, on some different plane of being (a thought that was too philosophical for him to express then: what he told River that night was, “It didn’t know what I was going to do. It didn’t care.”). He almost let it go.
Instead he gave it to his father.
The fate of the bird stopped mattering after he realised how fantastic its organs were, beautifully and minutely formed; after he traced the path of the digestive system and earned his father’s approving smile (that night, River said, “I already know how the digestive system goes. He did that with me when I was seven.”).
Now he feels his sister’s body against his own, and he can feel her breathing. He can feel the bones in her thin arms, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin on her cheek. She’s like the bird. What he does will mean everything that happens to her, and she thinks, like the bird, in a way he doesn’t understand at all.
His throat tightens.
River thumps her fist against his chest. “Do what you’re supposed to do! Make me better! You’re the doctor!”
“But you hold--you hold together appropriately the way you are.” He has no idea what he’s saying. No idea. “You’re able-bodied; your, your heart, your lungs, your liver, they’re all in perfect working order. You’re physically admirable. There’s no reason to change you. You’re beautiful.”
She trembles against him. Looking over her head, he can see the man and woman watching them, silent and dark-eyed. The man has one hand on the fur skin, as if he doesn’t know whether to draw it to himself or offer it to them. The woman’s mouth is pressed tightly together. Simon wants to shudder himself, draw into the shield of somebody else’s body. He doesn’t even remember how this day began. It must have been sane, back at the beginning. It’s always sane at the beginning. Somehow it always gets worse from there.
The man suddenly moves. It catches Simon’s eye, the shifting of shadows, the disturbance where there was absolutely stillness. The man comes to them, and slowly drapes the skin around River’s shoulders.
“There, lass. You can’t be us.”
Then he kneels down and rests his dark head on River’s shoulder. His aspect is animal; Simon wants to look away. He can see the bird in this man as surely as he feels it in River. Both of them are wild.
“This is crazy.” The woman looks down at them all. “We shouldn’t be talking to them, you put your skin on her--what are you doing? You’ve gone crazy. You’re going to get us hurt or stolen. We’ll never get home. Just stop it.”
“She’s Wise.”
“I don’t care! I want us to get home!”
“You’ll get home.” River’s voice is muffled and somehow clear. “It’s singing in your belly. It wants to spill out into the light. Wash the blood off and it’ll be fine. It’s a lake, not the sea, but it’ll open for you. Go home.”
“Where?” shakily. The woman’s hands are still now against her sides. “Where will we go?”
“Your stop is next.”
“Shh,” Simon says, stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. “I’m sorry for this trouble. My wife and I, we’re just trying to find a home. And these bodies--they’re dying so quickly. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “I underst--it’s fine. We won’t--we aren’t going to alert the captain. Get where you’re going safely. --River. Come on, please come with me. We’re going to go back to your room now. All right?”
“You’re going to put a needle into my bloodstream and make me stop existing.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“Promise?” Her eyes are fixed on him. Her face wrinkles like an old woman’s when she cries.
“I promise. I’m going to take care of you.”
Slowly Simon gets to his feet, lifting her up in his arms. The skin slips off her shoulders and back to the floor, and the man pulls it to his body. His hands hold it awkwardly, as if he weren’t used to having so many fingers.
“We’re going to go back now,” Simon tells him. River’s arms are tight around his neck. “Good luck.”
“Aye. Luck to thee,” says the man, in his scar tissue voice.
He puts River down carefully on her bed; she lies back and he strokes her hair. Back here, in the clean room with its small beds and the furniture that disappears into the wall with a push, it’s unbelievable to think of the two people back in the hold. He’s already beginning to think it was just--no, but it’s not a dream, it certainly can’t be that. It was too tangible. Maybe he is going crazy, it’s starting to look like a possibility.
“Selkies,” River says, wiping away tears.
“What?”
“They’re extinct. We don’t believe in them.”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“I wish--” She breaks off and lifts her hands into the air. Then she tucks her thumbs together and makes the butterfly of her fingers. “Can I give birth to a seal?”
“What? No, of course not, that’s--”
“Stowaways. Castaways. Float, swim, wander, sail. We’re on a boat. They’ll find the sea. They have to. It’s by definition.”
Simon gets on the bed beside her and she curls up against him, wrapping one arm around his waist in a way he has the disconcerting feeling is possessive.
“When are we going home?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Catalyst. Thank you for stopping.”
“Stopping what?”
“Touching.”
“River, what was I touching?”
“It hurt.”
“River--”
She tips her chin up and whispers in his ear, “You can let go of the bird and it won’t fly away. It doesn’t want to. You’re not Mr. Tam. You aren’t going to fill its body with poison. Won’t kill me so you can cut me open and write words on my life. No little labels on my arteries. Bird won’t fly.”
She knows. (Of course she knows.) Simon reaches for her hand, feels her fingers curl around his. She’s wise and broken and beautiful and old. He squeezes her fingers. “I love you.”
“You can make me sleep now if you want to.”
“I’m not going to.”
A long silence. Simon almost dozes off, and then River says, abruptly and guiltily,--
“I’m sorry I called you a pea.”
He squeezes her hand again, and this time she squeezes back.
Down in the hold, the woman sits on her heels. She spreads the skirt of her star-coloured dress around her smoothly and looks up at the man. “She said it’ll live.”
“Good.” He rests his hand on her belly. “That’s good.”
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Date: 2009-01-06 07:19 pm (UTC)Thank youuuu!