simon_doctor | (no subject)

(no subject)

[Editor's note: Nightmare co-written with

phoenixchilde, who is love.]

The dream starts in the hospital on Osiris. He's moving down a hallway, looking for something. It's here somewhere, he knows it's here somewhere.

"Dr Tam?" It's one of the head doctors from his residency, looking harried and busy. "Where's your sister?"

He knew this a moment ago, but he's forgotten, almost as the question was asked. "...I'll find her," he promises, and starts briskly down the hall.

But they've completely changed the layout of the hospital, under orders from ... somebody. It happened yesterday afternoon. It's irritating that nobody bothered to tell him; this is the kind of thing he needs to know, to do his job. He tried to retrace his steps several times, but the doors keep opening on rooms he doesn't recognize.

Through the window of one door he sees a room with a dozen or more datareaders scattered over the floor, as though someone's knocked over a pile of them. One of them must have what he's looking for.

When he opens the door, though, he finds himself walking into Serenity's engine room. Which is cold, and dark. The engine casing's closed, and Jubal Early is sitting on top of it.

Early pats the engine casing next to him. Something electrical snaps as his hand touches the casing, and there's a spark. "About time you got here, Dr Tam."

Simon backs away a step. "Have you seen River?" he asks.

Early looks about the room. "Seen her? No. I hear her well, though. Girl makes an awful racket for one trained so well."

"I'm sorry about that," Simon apologizes. "We've been working on it."

"Excuses," Early muses. "We're forever giving them away freely, and yet they're so rarely accepted. Does that seem right to you?"

Simon looks at the engine casing, and that's when he realizes that

(if you cross me)

Kaylee's tied up inside it.

He stares at it, and then up at Early. "Do you really think that's necessary?"

"Of course." Early sounds surprised he would ask. "Girl needs to be educated. Trained. Seems you got a habit of falling behind on those things."

"Roland's gone," says Simon. He glances back over his shoulder as he says it. We're very much alone out here.

"Don't tell me you've bought into their mystic claptrap, Dr Tam." He looks back at Early, who

(melted away)

isn't Early anymore. Short, balding, neat white beard, neat white lab coat -- "That kind of training is the last thing she needs," Dr Lin says, exasperated.

He's starting to get a little annoyed himself. "Look, this isn't really the best time ..."

Footsteps, and River's voice in the distance, very faintly. He can't make out what she's saying, but it's rhythmic, like a skipping-rope rhyme.

"You'd better go bring her back here," Dr Lin tells him. "And don't forget the files."

Simon turns to follow the sound of River's voice. He hesitates uneasily at the doorway, and turns back to say, "We had a deal."

"That's right, Dr Tam," says Early. "Let's not forget that."

He heads out into the corridor, and River's chanting voice starts to come through more clearly: "One two three, Daddy and me, went to the fields and went to the sea..."

The kitchen's dark and silent. One of Mal's guns is disassembled on the table, each part neatly tagged.

River's voice trails through the room like a ribbon. "Four five six, old biddy's chicks, sent to the market and sold for bricks... bricks for the house and graf for the men, Mamma's in the kitchen, eight nine ten..."

Nobody's sitting on any of the couches, even though there's a warm and inviting fire in the fireplace. He hurries past them; River's chanting is coming from just up ahead, in a rhythm like a bouncing ball.

"River rise up, fields go down, poor little Johnny-soh tripped and drowned."

And on the last beat, all of the power goes out except for the emergency lights, glowing red against the walls.

And then they go out, and there's just blackness.

And then stars.

Brighter than anything he's ever seen. And they're moving, slowly spinning in a grand wheel around him. Only of course they're not moving; he's the one that's spinning.

The ship's right behind him, though, all he has to do is reach back and grab the open hatch -- but when he tries, it's too slippery. He loses his grip. Because his palms are sweating, and his bare fingers scrabble uselessly against the hatch as it starts to close -- he should be wearing gloves for surgery, why isn't he wearing gloves? --

And he can't see or hear it, but he knows that if he could get the hatch open, it would open on an operating auditorium, with LinEarlyLin poised to operate.

River's there, but not on the operating table. She's in a chair, with restraints at ankle and wrist and neck.

Kaylee's on the table.

And he doesn't have a surgical mask, either -- no gloves and no surgical mask, that's why he can't breathe --

River's crying, and there are words in it: "-- don't trust him, don't listen, he's not a doctor, Simon --!"

And Simon wakes, gasping for breath.

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"Mm?"

Kaylee shifts a little. Mumbled thickly: "Simon?"

He has to make a conscious effort to relax his hands, clenched into the pillow, and to slow his breathing down from a frantic gasp.

"Shh ... it's okay, ai ren."

A little clearer: "What is it?"

She rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "What time is it?"

He squints at the luminous display of the small clock near the bed. "...little past two. Go back to sleep, Kaylee."

This sounds like an excellent idea.

She burrows closer against him, closing her eyes again...

...only something's not right.

"Simon? Were you dreaming?"

His heart's beating awfully fast for the middle of the night.

It really is.

"...yeah."

"Turnin' on the lights. Close your eyes."

She reaches behind her, hand moving along the wall to find the button that turns on the Christmas lights.

The room is suddenly there around them, bathed in an even, gentle glow. There are the shelves, with their messy piles of books and trade journals; there are Kaylee's boots on the floor; there are all the things on the walls. Familiar territory.

Familiar territory that isn't going to suddenly turn into something else.

Simon sits up, reluctantly abandoning the hope of getting Kaylee, at least, to go back to sleep.

So does Kaylee, hands in her lap.

Quiet: "You want to talk about it?"

This isn't the only one he's had lately, she knows.

He's silent for a little too long before drawing breath and speaking. "I don't know."

Parts of the dream are already fading out of his memory. Other parts are very much not.

That's probably a no, then. At least for now.

She gently rubs his back. "We could always read for a little bit. Would that be okay?"

"...I'd like that."

A pause.

"Not the Shakespeare, though."

Not the Dream.

"Couldn't read it straight right now anyhow. I know just the thing..."

She slides out of bed and retrieves her old storybook. Before she climbs back in, book in hand, she tosses the throw pillows onto the bed to make a backrest against the wall.

"Come on and sit back here." She pats the place next to her. "Been meanin' to read this to you for a while anyhow. Figure now's as good a time as any."

He edges across the bed to sit where she indicates, leaning back against the pillows.

"What is it?"

"Might explain a thing or two." A smile that's just a little bit shy. "Unless you didn't want to know why Gwion was your name in letters home -- in which case we'll read somethin' else out of here."

"...Oh."

He's smiling.

"No, go ahead."

So she does, reading aloud. This is easier than Shakespeare, even if the names are a bit harder to pronounce. But Kaylee's heard them all many times before.

She reads the background, and reaches the pertinent part of the action. "And one day, towards the end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations, it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach. And by reason of their great heat he put his finger to his mouth, and the instant he put those marvel-working drops into his mouth, he foresaw everything that was to come, and perceived that his chief care must be to guard against the wiles of Caridwen, for vast was her skill. And in very great fear he fled towards his own land."

She reads the part where Gwion Bach must change in order to escape Caridwen, and how he doesn't, and how he is cast upon the sea and washes up on a weir and is taken into the care of the king and renamed Taliesin. And then come the verses that Taliesin sings, and something that constitutes a happy ending, or something close enough to it:

"Thenceforward Elphin increased in riches more and more day after day, and in love and favour with the king, and there abode Taliesin until he was thirteen years old." Kaylee looks up at Simon. "Goes on a fair ways from there. Lots more verse-makin'."

"Mm. Do you want to stop there, or keep going?"

"Up to you." Kaylee's voice is light enough, but her face shows her concern.

He leans back against the pillows, and runs a finger idly along the fringe of one of them.

Softly: "He never did get back home, did he."

Kaylee closes the book, marking her place with her finger.

"No." Almost apologetic. "Made a new place, though. And everybody knew what a jīngcăi poet he was. And...he was happy."

Kaylee likes to think so, anyway.

"A new home. A new identity..."

He's not quite looking at her.

"I was back home, in my dream. Back at the hospital. And it ... it kept changing. I couldn't find my way around."

"Wasn't your fault, though. It was the place. Not you." She takes his hand.

Trying to logic your way around dreams is often pointless, though, and she knows it.

"And then I was here, and ..."

He isn't sure he wants to tell this part.

But he's gotten started already.

"Then what?"

It's not a pressing inquiry.

Somewhere just barely within the conscious level, he decides that he is not going to mention Early.

"I was looking for River. And I could hear her, just ahead of me, but ..."

His fingers comb through the pillow's fringe, restlessly, almost of their own volition.

"And all the lights went out, and then I was ... outside. Outside the ship. And I couldn't get back in."

Her hand tightens on his.

She's known for a while that pressure suits -- and really being out in the black -- don't make Simon particularly happy.

"And you and River were inside, and I -- I knew you were in trouble, and I couldn't get to you. And --"

He lets out a tiny dry laugh. "This is ridiculous -- I remember thinking, I don't have gloves on, or a surgical mask, that's why I can't breathe."

"...maybe not that ridiculous."

Illogical, sure, on the literal level. But not ridiculous.

He doesn't contradict her, not out loud.

But it is ridiculous. As though latex gloves and a paper mask could protect a human body from the effects of exposure to vacuum.

As though the badges of a profession, a calling, an identity, could ever be sufficient protection from the nothingness outside.

"...it's over now, anyhow. And you woke up."

It's important, she feels, to point this out. Can't quite put her finger on why.

Brief silence.

"I'm worried about you."

He looks up at her, for the first time since he began to talk about the dream. And smiles, a little.

"I wish you wouldn't. Worry, I mean."

For a brief moment it looks like she doesn't know how to respond. Then there's a flash of a smile, and it lingers.

"No power in the 'verse can stop me." Pause. "When there's cause, anyhow. Which...there is."

His smile twitches a little, and fades. There wasn't much of one there to begin with, anyway.

But his eyes stay on hers.

"What makes you worry?"

"Hasn't exactly been an easy last week and a half or so for you. And...that wasn't the first nightmare you've had, either." Quiet. Frank.

Again that tiny dry laugh. "It's funny. River's been sleeping pretty quietly."

"How's that funny?"

Kaylee thinks she knows.

"Just ... over the past year, she's been the one having nightmares."

It isn't really that funny.

"Not like you're not allowed to have them, when you got reason to." Quietly.

"It's not a question of reason. They're just nightmares. The brain dealing with stress by, by telling itself stories."

(We had a deal.)

Simon rubs at his forehead.

"I'm all right."

Not all stories help make nightmares go away. Some stories are nightmares.

The Prince of Stories, is Dream of the Endless; and Kaylee is one of his.

She slides the placemarking finger out of her book.

Right now there's not anything she can say or do that can help. That can fix it.

But she's here, and she's still holding his hand.

That's not nothing.

Simon glances at the clock. "...D'you want to go back to sleep?"

"Only if you do."

She's tired, sure, and she'll be sorry in the morning. But there are things more important than lost sleep.

"We both should."

Kaylee lets go of Simon's hand, scoots forward, and starts moving the throw pillows to the floor. Her book goes on top of them.

Then she reaches back, and turns off the lights.

It's easy to settle down again. It's also easy to not say anything.

Silent acquiescence. Easier than protesting that's not what I asked. Let him save face if that's what he wants.

He's too tired to lie awake for long.

Not too tired to notice Kaylee's silence, but at a loss to do anything about it.

If he dreams again over the course of the night, he doesn't remember it on waking.

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