2River terrifies her. Makes the world un-smooth, and as little as dear Kaylee would ever want to be the captain, she can see how a little smooth would be nice. She knows it her own self, knows it like the perfect balance she can keep Serenity in, knows it like the grease slicked against her palms.
Kaylee's easy. She likes things to be straightforward. To make sense. She likes engines and machines of all kinds, because they make sense to her, same if they don't to others. They talk to her, clear and simple, like people never do, and River's a hundred times worse than people, because River never stops feeling.
Kaylee terrifies River, because Kaylee can push so much away. She's smooth and sweet and smiling on the outside, but locked inside her is a terrible sort of hunger and Kaylee may well be an object in space but on the inside she's just more black. River doesn't like that. She craves matter, not the lack thereof.
River can't trust Kaylee. It's not that she doesn't understand that ravening, that need, but Kaylee herself doesn't fully know what she's keeping locked up inside her and a force like that is liable to get loose.
Kaylee can't trust River because River's a cutting instrument, primed to strike, and something like that can only cause hurt, and that's why they'd be completely wrong for each other.
Serenity speaks to them both. Kaylee at all hours when she's in the engine room and the universe is smooth and her hands and the ship are all that she needs for an eternity of peace to consume the space behind her eyes. River when she's dropped her connection to land, any land, and let herself be free. Serenity's not blue sky and River still forgets how to be sometimes, but Serenity keeps her in stasis.
Simon links them together. Loves River like devotion, loves Kaylee like a thirst. He's the ground for River and the sky to Kaylee. Looked down upon by the one, gazed upon with longing by the other.
Kaylee and River are completely wrong for each other. They know that, know that they wouldn't last so much as a minute together, not with Kaylee so scared of/by/for River and not with River so affected by all the lies that bind together into the smoothness that is Kaylee.
But still it is that whenever Kaylee hears those screams at night, because River never stopped screaming, something inside her twinges, and when River feels Serenity smooth under her feet on the good days, she thinks thanks to the mechanic. Still it is that Kaylee could spend all day watching River do the math, talking to her and listening to her crazy and wondering if it'll always be so bad.
Kaylee isn't the blue sky and River can never look up to her. Kaylee isn't a doll and River can never protect her from being shattered. Kaylee isn't a sheath, a condom, something to be used and thrown away, so River knows she shouldn't try. Kaylee is the emptiness of space on the inside and sometimes River looks at her and just remembers twenty rutting needles in her eyes and asking her what she sees.
Kaylee is too crowded and too bare at once and so River should stay away, and River isn't smooth, isn't ever going to be gorramn smooth, and River fucks up the workings of Kaylee's world, fucks them right up to Hell. River's like an itch under Kaylee's skin, something small that complicates it all nevertheless and Kaylee can smile and be her own smooth self and try to be River's friend but something inside her just wants to make River hurt because River is a knife and somewhere inside her Kaylee thinks she might be some kind of blade too.
Being with machines is nice, makes something inside her feel warm because she understands it all, and being with Simon is nice because it's easy with him and Kaylee likes easy but there's something about River that makes Kaylee throw her down onto her bed and smile in a way that feels at once the most wrong and right her face has ever been and sink down, all nails and callouses and teeth, and get a gorramn response.
It's nice, River thinks, because whether Kaylee knows it or not, it's the most honest she ever gets, because strawberries and frills and boys with faces so soft you'd assume them sly at a glance aren't anything to the need Kaylee contains, and sometimes River just wants someone to get lost in, someone to distract her from the horrors of the world. Even if that someone is a horror herself.
River and Kaylee really shouldn't be together. They make it work.
A/N: I don't really get why people talk of River-Speak like the height of illogic. It makes sense to me, and most of the time it seems to make sense to the people around her as well.
~Mademise Morte, February 15, 2013.