Title: The Shang Yuan Don't Sing Lullabies

Author: Jazzfic

E-mail: andrews_j2002@yahoo.com.au

Rating: G

Summary: Why River fears the night, and why she wants to change.

Spoilers: None

Pairing: Mal/River

A/N: Thanks to madjm for the beta.

Nighttime is for solitude, when everything is still and at rest and talk and action turn into sleep, but for River these are falsehoods, every last one. At night she is unerringly awake, and justly so; at night she has to be stronger than the rest, for it is at night when she is most alone.

You see, the crazy never dream. They have no desires to run to. Their lot is to lie prone and unmoving, staring into some imaginary world, but they won't go there. They can't. Dreams are a door into normality, a place where there are no shadows waiting to pounce, no restraints, no rules.

So River doesn't sleep. She waits and she knows this is not a game--if it was a game there would be the door, and in her palm the key.

Tonight she wanders with little purpose, and would for hours continue unstopped except that some luck leads her bare feet to the cockpit, where the ship is on autopilot and following only the stars; it is the sight of this that greets River, hovering like a ghost at the threshold, and there she smiles. If she and Serenity can chase the stars together, River thinks, for a while she can pretend she isn't alone, and maybe the night will pass more swiftly.

She takes a step in, and that's when she sees him.

"I know you're there." He turns slightly, his profile visible only by the lights of the controls. "Would know those teeny footsteps anywhere..."

Much of her life might have been a torment of lies, but Malcolm Reynolds is not one of them. The Captain is a rock, a weight in the close world she inhabits, and River understands this, perhaps even to the point where understanding stops and things just are. It has been this way from the beginning--ever since she escaped that frozen hibernation and took her place on Serenity with Simon, she has seen him