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Night watch wasn't normally something that needed to be done, on Serenity. The auto-pilot was effective enough, and there were alarms a plenty to wake River and the captain, if necessary.
Still, River often found it calming, peaceful even, to spend the dimmed hours of the night-cycle curled up in the pilot's seat on the bridge. Sometimes she slept. Usually she watched the stars as they coasted past, distant and fascinating and requiring nothing of her.
It was one such night that she found herself comparing Serenity to a solar system.
Mal was the star they orbited, of course; maybe not big and bright and visible to all - and so, she told herself, really not in the blue-yellow range, because those were generally all of the things Mal wasn't - but just big enough and bright enough to keep his planets in-system. (After some thought, she decided that Mal was a red dwarf.)
Kaylee was right in the habitable zone of the system, warm and lush and earthy, a good place for life to get a foothold (and River didn't know anyone with more simple passion for life than Kaylee). She wasn't the biggest planet, but she wasn't the smallest, and they wouldn't work half so well without her. Her satellites were the fiddly bits of Serenity - River only spent an hour or so prodding at the inherent contradiction of that before shrugging and deciding that the ship was, in its entirety, a contradiction itself, so what matter some internal contradiction?
Inara, too, was in the habitable zone, though maybe a bit further out. She was warm, but gently distant; lush, but controlled; earthy, in a way that said she'd seen it all; she cared with an equanimity and distance that drove Mal crazy and River often found comforting, which sometimes confused her because Regan had been similar but so very different. River couldn't decide if Inara had a satellite, but if she did, probably it was her sense of duty.
Simon, she decided, was a gas planet. Partially because it amused her, but mostly because one sometimes had to look beneath all his layers - all his ridiculous layers; River knew how many had formed and saw how some were even necessary, but she's his sister and a sibling can judge with incisiveness that is almost painful, even - especially - when she loves him so - to see his sturdy, steady core. His satellites were his guilt and his medicine, one necessary, the other not.
Jayne was a gas giant. Mostly because it amused her, but also because one had to dig even deeper, under more layers - layers most didn't even know existed, still less thought to look under, but River saw without meaning to - to see his steadiness and heart of gold. (Or maybe it was silver, tarnished and dinged about, but worthy nonetheless.) His satellites were his weapons and distrust and filthiness, things he wore with ease, that were part of him, but in no way were the whole.
Zoe and Wash had been a binary planet system with a slightly variable orbit, tucked in the habitable zone between Kaylee and Inara. They fit and locked together when logic and sense said they couldn't be more different - she hadn't been blind to the looks planet-folk sometimes gave them, the ones that said "How did you two even meet?", and the answer was always, always that life in the black is not like life with one's feet on the ground - and it appealed to River's sense of the ridiculous. Their satellites were love and duty and humor, together in a dance that couldn't be predicted.
Now, though, Wash was gone, smashed to smithereens too small to be put back together by a rogue comet no one had seen, and Zoe was cold and dark, knocked out of the habitable zone by the shock, her orbit erratic without Wash's presence, her satellites duty and clung-to love and pieces of Wash she wanted and yet hurt to see. River hurt to see it, so she tried not to, but it was there and visible all the time.
Book was - had been - a mystery, an outlying planet of which little was known and still less was seen, tending them singly and together as a shepherd, secretive and distant and yet wholly a part of them, an integral piece without which they were less. His satellites had been his secrets, vastly innumerable and as much a part of him as his hair, and all of it was scattered on the solar winds, now, as lost as he was.
River's comparison almost fell down when she tried to classify herself; she wasn't a planet, as she was neither big enough nor held together enough for that definition.
Once, she might have called herself an asteroid belt, scattered far and wide and connected to the rest of the system by gravity and Simon, but Miranda had knocked her loose, closer, more whole than that even as Book and Wash had been destroyed.
She wasn't anyone's satellite, though maybe once she had been Simon's, before the Academy had shattered her; she was far too independent for that, now.
She wasn't a star, because Serenity wasn't big enough for two stars, and anyway if she was too small to be a planet then she was too small to be any sort of star except maybe one on its last gasps of life, and she didn't feel like she was nearly dead, so it was entirely unfitting.
Finally, as she flicked through the computers files on solar systems, searching for something that felt right, she realised that the only thing that fit was a comet. Comets have regular orbits through a system, but at such intervals that they can feel completely random and without cause. Comets are a part of, yet separate from, a system, all at once. They're small, but noticeable; dangerous, but pretty; everyone sees them but who really notices?
Yes, River decided, sitting back in the pilot's seat, and tucking her feet up off the chilled metal as the night-cycle faded towards the day, that fit.
Strange and broken as they all were, they fit.