The lack of sunrise or sunset should make day and night indistinguishable on board a ship travelling through space, but somehow it was apparent when night fell on Serenity. Once, on a small moon, they had been in a snowfall. Thick, heavy fat flakes of white drifted lazily down from the sky to land with a noiseless sound that defied a description. That sound of the lack of sound was present in the hold at night. In the hallways and common room, on the bridge and in the infirmary. It could be deafening, drowning and disquieting. But mostly, it made for a good time to think without feeling that you had to hide away in your bunk. To think and to try and understand the slow decay of the crew's erratic orbits. Serenity, the sun around which they all rotated, the home in which they all lived, and a mini-verse unto herself had somehow lost the tug she once had on them all. Inara and Mal spent more and more time dissapearing on to any planet they happened to be nearby. Land madness, surely. It was hard to pinpoint why. Often they could be seen standing stock still together, looking off in opposite directions instead of each other, their fingers intertwined. silent, like serenity at night.

River kept mostly to the bridge, laconicly discussing the next reaver hunt. The ability to focus the wild stripped part of her mind soley on the locating and destruction of the canibalistic humanoid interstellar dwellars made her almost normal. But better than that, she reckoned, better because I am better. I can talk not nonsense, I can work, I can do for others, I have a place. I have a value and a calling. She gripped her favourite weapon, a long cruel and thick dagger she took off a particularly vicious reaver pack leader. It's handle was surely covered with the tanned hide of babies, repulsively soft and queasily good feeling to her hand. She wondered if that baby's parents had lived long enought to see it's demise. She hoped not. But she never re-covered it with cow's hide. It seemed dishonest somehow, l