One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts

Disclaimer: Between you, me, and the fence post, the idea of my owning intellectual property rights for anything even remotely Firefly related is somewhere left of ludicrous.

A/N: This is my first go, so be nice, but critical.

I just started some grad work in the UK, and am trying to get used to their quotation system, so an inverted comma denotes speech, two is for speech within a quotation.

River's literary allusions should be pretty obvious, especially to Firefly fans, who, as we all know, are smarter than the average bear. But, for those who are curious, I think I have used J R R Tolkien, J K Rowling, T S Eliot, Shakespeare, and Homer for now. I'm sure there will be more in later chapters, assuming that there are later chapters. The fic and chapter titles are from Tennyson's 'Ulysses'

Chapter One: Made Weak By Time and Fate

***

I should not have lived. Should never have lived.

How? How could I be alive when so many have died? So many have been killed. Murdered.

Survival in the face of such pain, such death. It is absurd, inexcusable, almost obscene.

What right had I to live? Why should my skin still hold my body in, when blood and guts and gore adorn the floor, the last remains of men and women whose skin failed them in the end. Where once their were comrades in arms, now there are only the dismembered arms of comrades, strewn about the deck. Comrades in arms. Babes in arms, more like. And now they are all gone. But I am still here. I should not have lived.

An eyeball stares up at me, accusingly, from the remains of a shattered skull. 'How can you live?' it asks. 'Yes,' I say, 'but how can I die?' I look around at shards of broken glass, jagged ends of metal spikes, the debris of a ship in ruin. A myriad of ways to end my life present themselves to me, eagerly, seductively. They tease me with promises of peace. In an instant, I could take my rightful place among the dead. But I fear that the dead would not accept me. It w