”Is it hard to tell the difference?” River asked softly, kissing her neck lightly again.

”No… but, I gotta admit, sometimes you do remind me of a song, River.” Kaylee admitted softly, somehow feeling she was lost in a world she’d never been to before, maybe the one River lived in so often.

”How?” River asked.

”…The way I feel when you’re with me? I don’t know how to explain it, really. But, it’s not that unlike how I’d feel… when I was listening to a really beautiful song, and it feels like it’s movin’ my soul, because there’s just… such amazing beauty there, plain to see.” She said softly, some amount of shyness weaving its way in between her words. It scared her a little, sayin’ these things out loud. Things she hadn’t really completely realized before she’d said them out into the open like this.

”Then… we’re a good match, because that’s how I feel now too.” River said simply, laying her head on Kaylee’s shoulder.

Kaylee felt her heart swell up with emotions, and she knew then, even more than she had before, that she was surely, truly falling in love again. With someone who loved her right back.

That’d only really happened to her once before.

She just hoped… this time, it’d turn out better.

———-

Sometime later, after having taken baths and eating breakfast together, they both set about moving the bodies of the dead Reavers out away from the ship and into the woods, into a nearby clearing, where she and River planned to dig graves for them all. It was hard, sweaty, generally ugly work, but they’d got it down to a rhythm. She was using the litter that River had made for her back before, when she’d had her ribs hurt after the crash, to carry bodies, while River was just simply picking them up in her arms and carrying them like it was no bother at all.

Kaylee had suggested that they make a second litter, but River had said that it felt like they were her weight to carry… as she’d been the one to kill’m and everything, Kaylee guessed. She’d counted – there were forty-two Reavers in all. She’d been a little stunned to find out there’d been so many, and that River had fought and killed them all, an’ her comin’ out of it with but a little of’a hurt elbow? It was hard to get her mind around it, actually – but then, that was River all over, wasn’t it?