Nested Like Dolls (Under Your Skin Recitative)
Remix Author: Nifra Idril
Original Story: A New World by Kurukami
Summary: All pregnant people are two people.
Rating: G
Fandom: Firefly
Spoilers: Heart of Gold
River has heard people say that pregnant women are beautiful, but this one is sweaty, angry and red. Her stomach is turgid and strange, and there is a person inside her. All pregnant people are two people, and Simon’s hand is between their legs. Under her skirts, but River can see his hand there, white and calm against the wet dark pulsing woman, and Inara has put wet clothes on their forehead. The wet clothes aren’t helping.
Labor is hard work, to press one person from another. Uterus, cervix, canal; compress, compress, dilate, compress – water and millimeters and Simon’s hand, smooth muscles, collapsible head. River’s head collapses every day.
A uterus is as big as a fist; River remembers pictures and underlined words and Simon’s textbooks and she remembers her mother but she doesn’t remember being her mother. Women become their mothers, but River isn’t a woman and she isn’t her mother, though she was once but she doesn’t remember being those two people. She remembers being River That Was and now she’s River That Is and sometimes she’s River That Isn’t.
Pregnant people swear a lot.
The Person Inside – nested in like a doll inside a doll – is crying, too. Nobody but River can hear him, because the Person Outside is too loud, with her grunting and her screaming, but River can hear because River has big ears, and she learned how to listen when she was in a dark place. Colder than a womb, but it pressed down on all sides of River just the same until Simon’s hands pulled her out and made her breathe again.
River was River before she was born the second time, and maybe the first time, too – different Rivers than this River, but you’ll never see the same River twice. The person on the outside is a whore, spreads her legs at a forty five degree angle on these sheets and in and out and in and out go the men and then they leave their money, cold coins on the hot bed, and then they walk out and come in again. Flesh to tired flesh, again and again.
Simon bends busily to the task of taking another person out of the woman who lets men inside her for a living. River wants to ask him Who do you think is in there? There are too many voices in the room, though.
Simon: “Shh, you’re close now.” Inara: “You’re doing so well, honey, keep going.” The person on the outside doesn’t say actual words; she’s too busy contracting and contracting, and pointing her belly toward the ceiling and clenching her teeth like a trap snapping shut.
River stares because this is her first labor, even though she’s been born more than most people.
The Person Inside asks: “What have I done wrong?”
River looks to Simon, but Simon’s ears aren’t as big as hers, and he still can’t hear even though the Person Inside is yelling as he comes closer and closer to Simon’s hands, and River doesn’t know what to say because she hasn’t known the Person Inside very long.
It’s rude to criticize someone when you first meet.
The Person Outside says the pain is a judgment on her sins, and Inara hushes her but Inara has all the same sins as her, just better clothes. Inara says that everything will be alright, and the Person Outside believes her.
Birth can be traumatic. River remembers it herself (cold naked Simon’s hands bright light Mei Mei, shh, you’re safe now), so she repeats what Inara said to the Person Inside, and then the Person Inside is outside, too, popping out into the light and the cold and the dirty sheets and Simon’s hands.
River wonders if that makes him her brother, too.
Being Outside makes the Person who was Inside a baby now, and not a person anymore. It must be very confusing for him.
“Ain’t he beautiful?” asks the woman in the bed when Simon hands her the baby.
He’s covered in blood and white lining from the home he just left and when River touches his head it’s very soft. Inara says he’s lovely, and Simon just gasps like he pushed the baby out all by himself.
“What do you think, River?” Inara asks, smiling.
River shrugs and says, “He’s smaller than he sounds.”
Then they all coo over the new baby, and River watches them waving their fingers in his round little face and she holds out her fist. That’s big enough to live in, she thinks, curling her fingers tight and tight and tighter until her palm is wet and dark and beating with her tight, controlled pulse. A womb is a hand that holds you and then pushes you away to live on your own.
Simon’s a very good mother. River wonders when she’ll be ready for him to contract into one person, instead of holding River inside.
end
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