It had taken three months for Jayne to apologise.

He did it with his hands. They cradled the small present and he shoved it at her while they passed each other in the halls like ghosts. He still believed it was Christmas and she hid in her bunk before she opened it.

He had given her hands.

It was entrancing.

How, she wondered, could one pair of hands contain so many things. There were things where she could sculpt, write, draw, paint.

She would imagine the art pouring out of her hands spread in pretty little invisible webs woven between her fingertips.

The images, shapes, the colours she coaxed out of her media were mind-boggling. Day after day, she would pull faces from the clay, bring the dead back to life in black and white, nothing but acrid ink glistening on the page, smeared by the hurried motions of her hands across the pages.

She moved on to further, frantic scribbles, smudged in their own time as well.

Her hands had a life of their own. Give them a pen and paper or a paint brush and they were strangers dancing away from her. Arms jerked to and fro, ages fluttered in distress, suddenly filled and dismissed for the next.

Her hands were to paper what Jayne was to girls from the places they visited. Littered around her bunk lay hundreds of one night stands, ravished and wistfully pining for the waning glory of their lost virtue, victims with sordid pasts, once white and pristine, now smudged, bruised by fleeting moments of her fervant desire.

Her hands, they could be like Mal Reynolds, could easily play a rustic romantic, play fast and loose. That is, if sketchpads were lost souls pining after a leader who starred in harrowing tales of intrigues and escapes, if they did not believe in the word surrender.

Each day the infatuation grew, for in every one River poured forth, it bore something new, something more riveting than before. Where her hands were to paper irresistable and heartbreaking, they were also Kaylee for they nurtured and mothered her art into a state of simp