Work Text:
Air shuddered, molecules rushing over each other and piling up in unsettled congregations in an effort to avoid the serrated edge of its tongue. It tasted what air did not flee fast enough, shivered in delight, and pulsed encouragement towards its current bearer - tendrils of violence and despair, hatred and joy, winding upwards through the fingers that gripped its body. It had almost limitless influence with this one, but the creature had little impulse control and no strategic or tactical abilities to speak of, and had therefore exhausted all usefulness. It was time for a new bearer.
There were possibilities here. Plenty to choose from, this one driven by anger and poverty and regret, that one by destructive, possessive love, another one by jealousy and greed. Here a complex man, needs unknown even to himself, easy to influence, difficult to control. Here a simple man, simple needs, simple emotions - easy to control, easy to influence, difficult to inspire. Here a woman of depth, another of cheer, yet another of iron control - no good, those three. But beyond... yes.
There was one... It could taste it, tantalising hints of anger, tension, and an overriding focus bubbling beneath a miasma of hard-won serenity. Intent muscles and coiled eyes, an effortfully warm smile facing the world. Male, it tasted, male and unafraid... no. Not unafraid. Simply unheeding of the fear. Much better, he wouldn't be careless or overconfident or indecisive. He wouldn't be subtle or blunt, but an effective mixture... He'd be smart. This man, this one, this way. Its tongue flickered softly, tasting the air again. It would be a fight, but it would be worth it.
Perfect.
--++--++--++--++--
She flowed like her name, spreading wide and slow across the landing plain away from Serenity with the echoes of the Shepherd's consternation borne on the currents behind her. He wasn't sure how it had happened that he'd lost his lamb yet again, but he didn't know the shape of Serenity nearly so well as she. Even Cap'n Mal didn't know all the cracks and crevices his ship contained, and he was the one loved her best, anyone with eyes could see that plain as the black.
She didn't need to send out seeking and questing as she moved toward the town; her mind flooded out to fill the space without any prompting. It was only Simon's latest efforts that kept it from spreading so thin she was soaked into all the thirsty earth. So stretched she was scattered into a billion billions of molecules, too tenuously connected to be termed whole. Impossible to pull together again without the skin of Serenity around her and vacuum about them to contain all the pieces.
But she wouldn't be lost this time, maybe she wouldn't be so lost ever again now that the core of her was so well anchored against the flags pinpointing all that was hers. The stars above and around and below, the dirt under her feet, air across her face, water in the stream across the far side of town, and the music drawing her on: all defined now and ever after in relation to the fixed points of her own personal 'verse. Her brother and her friend and her guide, her captain and her guard dog and her pilot's two halves: her ship and all her people.
Spread out now, they were, and awfully mobile for fixed points, but compared to the wilds of her past, all were strong and steady and bright, took the weight with barely a notice. Mal and Jayne and Zoe were out bargaining crime, trading this for that and that for the other, twisting and turning and coming out on top despite all the 'verse could throw at them. Inara and Simon wandered in the town and were busy drinking in Kaylee, her sunny sweet bubbles coating them both with a slick of the shiny happy they craved but couldn't produce for themselves, not while they listened so hard for something just out of reach. Maybe someday she'd tell them so, if they could stop listening long enough to hear.
In the narrow streets of the town she rushed and rumbled, bouncing between cobblestones and walls and the occasional underside of a balcony, sweeping along dust and bearing pebbles to the ground as she passed. She caught bemused looks, mutters, grunts and outright stares, tossed them back at their senders with a smile sharp as a knife or a grin light as a whisper, whichever suited their faces better. She sidestepped out into the market, her feet floating through the lines of the music drawing her onwards. There was a wealth of goods displayed, clashing cries being sold, hawkers and buskers and not-so-honest hands.
She paused mid-skip, cocked her head and listened. There was a hunter here, sharp and toothy, cunning and hidden and oh-so-very-hungry... well, so long as it didn't hunt anything of hers, what matter? Sibilants blurred softly in the distance, pulling back and away, turning from the place where her shipmates haggled for cargo. So that was all right, then; Kaylee and Inara and Simon would have nothing to offer a thing such as that. She twirled, darted back to study light patterns refracting through a crystal sign, noting the loops and whorls as it made its way to earth, a blithe dance. An endless moment later she moved on, drawn towards the flight of music and stomp of feet, merry merry entirely contrary. That wasn't right, she knew, the words had tumbled and come out different, but it fit anyway. It would do.
A mile behind her, news transmitted upon a string stretched taut between tin cans, she heard her shepherd leave her ship in search of her. Well, he needed to get out, too; too much Serenity, like too much serenity, wasn't good for any man, even a shepherd. She hopped through a flock of geese on the edge of the market, honked greetings to them as they stretched out their necks and flapped their wings in consternation. It was a good day, sky satisfactorily warm, sun purring blue on her shoulders, tall green trees and brown fields visible beyond the dust of the town.
She raced across the field toward the stand, band and dancers visible now and her feet flying to join them. She'd always loved the way music hung in the air long enough for feet and hands to match the beats, for bodies to sway and skirts to twirl. She circled the dancers, studied the notes flickering bright, the pattern of the toes, and flew into the furious sawing of fiddles.
The dance was potentiality and timelessness, all things and none all at once. It lasted forever; it lasted a moment; it wound through time and space on the back of a tuneful air. She drifted on its currents, dodged dancers both visible and not, head back and knees stepping high. Twirled and twisted and leapt, ducked and slid and dived, here above the music, there below it, here counter and there beyond. Swirled and whirled and curled and furled, until...
She snapped to attention, poised on the edge of a point. Head tilted, back taut, foot pointed, she listened with every muscle, straining and stretching to catch a sound she'd already missed... there. A gasp, a quiet, unfamiliar sound, but the timbre - that she knew, knew as well as she knew her own name, which is to say she recognised its shape and knew its echoes, and it had never uttered a sound like that in her ranging before. She leapt over the bandstand rail, ducked under the arm raised to catch her, and ran across the field, hearing the edges of a triumphant caw as she flew. The hunter had dared... well, she would show it. MINE. That was all she needed, all she knew, and the cold bone glee of the hunter would soon learn how fast a river could dull a blade's edge. Nothing touched what was hers and did not learn.
It was easy to find the source, would have been even without the red line of challenge stretching between her and her shepherd. Even without the sounds of the fight, ringing clear through the landscape for any with a mind to hear, washed in blood and grit and viscera, opposed by steel and faith and stone-honing will. She flowed around obstacles, wore down those who would block her way, a hundred millenia of patient scraping in a nanosecond of elapsed space. In less time than it took the body to hit the ground she was leaping the final jeering circle around her shepherd and his attacker, standing on the soaked ground opposite him and studying her opponent. The knife hung from Book's hand, bloody teeth ranged along its guard and tendrils beginning to snake into the matching wounds on his hand. The blade extended out the far side of the hilt, backwards, dripping red onto the corpse of the man it'd last hunted and ridden. It was a master hunter, this thing; patient and wary and decisive; but like all great predators, overly certain... yes. There. That's where its sustenance entered. She darted in, grasped the tip of its blade, and pinched. Hard.
--++--++--++--++--
Fingers pincered around the very tip of its tongue, paralysis spreading from the nerves pressed there. Its blade hung oddly as it was lifted up and out, its tendrils slivering out of its new bearer as the girl pulled. She moved one leg up into a crane posture, held the knife out in front of her face, and studied it with cocked head.
It had never met a predator in its own class. Something that might be dread slid coldly down its tongue, and it began to suspect that, maybe, it still hadn't. The voice, curious and bright, rumbled down its tongue and reverberated through its spines.
"Well, hello there, little... snack."