It had taken three months for Jayne to apologise.

He did it with his hands. They cradled the small present and he shoved it at her while they passed each other in the halls like ghosts. He still believed it was Christmas and she hid in her bunk before she opened it.

He had given her hands.

It was entrancing.

How, she wondered, could one pair of hands contain so many things. There were things where she could sculpt, write, draw, paint.

She would imagine the art pouring out of her hands spread in pretty little invisible webs woven between her fingertips.

The images, shapes, the colours she coaxed out of her media were mind-boggling. Day after day, she would pull faces from the clay, bring the dead back to life in black and white, nothing but acrid ink glistening on the page, smeared by the hurried motions of her hands across the pages.

She moved on to further, frantic scribbles, smudged in their own time as well.

Her hands had a life of their own. Give them a pen and paper or a paint brush and they were strangers dancing away from her. Arms jerked to and fro, ages fluttered in distress, suddenly filled and dismissed for the next.

Her hands were to paper what Jayne was to girls from the places they visited. Littered around her bunk lay hundreds of one night stands, ravished and wistfully pining for the waning glory of their lost virtue, victims with sordid pasts, once white and pristine, now smudged, bruised by fleeting moments of her fervant desire.

Her hands, they could be like Mal Reynolds, could easily play a rustic romantic, play fast and loose. That is, if sketchpads were lost souls pining after a leader who starred in harrowing tales of intrigues and escapes, if they did not believe in the word surrender.

Each day the infatuation grew, for in every one River poured forth, it bore something new, something more riveting than before. Where her hands were to paper irresistable and heartbreaking, they were also Kaylee for they nurtured and mothered her art into a state of simple beauty. Slow, careful, gentle, deliberate.

She would mold a sepia hunk of clay, when her hands were Inara, into something exquisite. The similiarties were obvious: the clay would swoon at the lightest brush of her fingertips, curving, coiling, whispering it from nothing into a kind of becoming.

When her hands were Simon, she felt her fingers grazing the wet surface of the clay, altering her very uinverse and sometimes they would only sit there on the slippery surface, her mind rushing to explain, worshipping in silence. When her hands were Simon, they were awkward but sweet, and slightly reluctant.

But River didn't care.

She had never quite experienced anything like this before, and all that she could imagine would compare was perhaps crawling into a cocoon with a catapillar and watching the wings paint themselves slowly across its back until they seperated into the wafer-thin things the butterfly used to take flight.

It was like picking out each of the individual tiny feathers sprouting delicately one by one, and seeing the sun as it spilled through the first crack in the shell and brought the colours to life.

When she painted, her hands became Book, strong and steady strokes covering the canvas with a matting of geso, building parables and guiding her vision with subtle sermons in shades of oil and water, a benediction.

When her hands became Zoe and Wash, the walls were suddenly populated by brilliance, murals climbing up to the ceiling like ivy or snakes, or really, both. Growing and dangerous, experiencing the emotions that go with sex and love and worry and laughter or the moment that it is invariably chaperoned by.

And then, when she was done the pages littered around the small space like dead leaves, her arms speckled with red and green and yellow. Her room was filled with clumsy kisses and bursts of anger. Of Life captured in small slices. The aftermath of a silent courtship. Her art was both inside of her still but also recklessly shared with the world.

She paused, and inhaled, unsure of what to do next.

Her hands had become Serenity.