rec50 | "Beautiful Destruction" and "noone loved him more by more"

Big Damn Table of River recs, 8/50

Claim: Firefly, River Tam
Title: Beautiful Destruction
Author: Alia/

aliaspiral
Characters: Jayne, Zoë
Prompt: Fandom Cliché
Rating: PG
Length: Short [~1000 words]
Brief summary: It seems like every author of every 'ship in the Firefly fandom has their take on what happened after the blast doors closed near the end of Serenity. It's become almost a cliché in Firefly, but Alia's "Beautiful Destruction" is the best one I've found. Zoë and Jayne, wounded and worried, talk about River, and their voices sound both tired and hopeful. They don't want to believe that she's dead, but they know there's no way one little girl could fend off a ship full of Reavers, and you never forget that there's wounded friends behind them. There's a slight River/Jayne slant, but nothing overly 'shippery, and one of the best River-centric stories out there.

“I saw the tapes,” Zoë volunteered from behind him. “She’s a good fighter. Got good instincts.”

“Don’t know how much good that will do her ‘gainst Reavers.”

“Reavers are something else.”

“So is she.” He pressed his fingers into the bullet wound in his shoulder. “I actually laid hands on her, in the bar fight. It was kinda like holding a live grenade.”

“What, dangerous and stupid?”

“Naw. It was. It was a rush, you know?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just kept talking. He could feel the look she was giving him. “Right before you drop it, when you pull the pin, you feel like you’re in control of it. But you ain’t. You are holding something in your hand that can tear you into bits.”

Link to the story: Beautiful Destruction

Claim: Firefly, River Tam
Title: noone loved him more by more
Author: Drea/

bluerosefairy
Characters: River/Simon
Prompt: Family
Rating: R/NC-17
Length: Short [~1500 words]
Brief summary: Warnings: this story contains almost-explicit sex between siblings. If this bothers you, you're missing a great story. This was one of the first fics that really convinced me of Simon/River. The story flows effortlessly from the present to the past and back again, River's unique point of view obvious throughout. It's almost poetry more than prose, and I can hear River's thoughts as she observes herself and Simon. She's detatched, but so very tied to Simon, and this story is a perfect example of that.

She almost lost Simon. They were all lost, some (MalZoeWash) more than others, but then a bullet had gone through Simon and she couldn’t fix him. She couldn’t fix Simon, but she could save everyone else. Had thrown herself to the lions and emerged victorious. Kaylee’d even made her a laurel crown.

River had tried and tried to stop the endless permuations and infinite equations that all yielded one answer: Simon had almost died without her.

It wasn’t right! Length times height times width shouldn’t equal two to the ninth power. And no matter how much “better” she was supposed to be getting, it never would be. Because they’d taken her apart and put her back together out of order – marriage comes before sex comes before children and why wasn’t Simon her matched pair?

Link to the story: no one loved him more by more