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Disclaimer: The characters of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel are not mine and belong to Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Mutant Enemy. They are used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Feedback is incredibly welcome.
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Angel (series spoilers) and Firefly (series spoilers) crossover AU. Fred/River, PG-13. For Ari.
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Astronomy is not something Fred had much time to consider, although nebulae and supernovae, the slow-stoked birth of stars, are bedtime stories she used to tell Feigenbaum. Living in a cave does not leave you much time for looking up. And up takes time to master. She spent her years waiting for up, if not skyward and starward, waiting for rescue by a shining rider. Light and dark, star and space and their boundaries: of course she spent her time in company of a vampire, of course she moved from sewers to sunlit office.
Here and now, there are so many skies. Fred has traveled enough dimensions, seen enough doors; this is not the last, perhaps, but it is a resting place in a place that moves. Serenity. She likes the name. She is not unaware of irony.
Freed from atmospheric haze, the stars have unwavering stares, white-red-blue eyes.
Resolutely, Fred continues writing upon the wall with a marker. This future's electronics do not trouble her, but equations made tangible mean that she, too, is tangible; that she is not a smokedrift ghost in an airless space. And River stands beside her, adding her own bounding inequalities, or correcting a subscript, or accepting a more elegant proof. They are modeling the reconfiguration of worlds, the dust and dusky skies in a solar system River has always accepted and Fred has, from the beginning, found inexplicable.
Fred's hand covers River's for a moment. River startles with the quick, nervous movements Fred recognizes in herself, from seven years of no escape. "Blue," River says. It's more than a whisper, less than a cry.
They both have stories to tell, hell and princesses and up and blue hands and horses and all. In the meantime, they have worlds in the words of astronomy.
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