A/N: Hi! I'm memorysdaughter, and this story is a collaboration between myself and hossluver. We hope you enjoy our fic; we had a ton of fun writing and editing it.

There was merit to both arguments. It could be argued that the girl in question - River Olivia Donovan-Jinks - was just like her mother: smart (no, brilliant), interested in everything, able to look at something and reconfigure it in twenty or thirty different ways, never kept out of anything simply by firewalls or locks or closed doors or passwords, fiercely independent, witty, always on the move. Fascinated by technology, video games, science fiction, anything with limitless possibilities.

And she was like her father, though it was more so physically. She had his eyes, his smile, and his somewhat unnerving and completely annoying ability to detect a lie the moment it was spoken. She was kind, thoughtful, loyal to a fault. Beloved by animals. Adoring of her family.

But she didn't believe any of that. How could she? She knew whose daughter she was. She was the Warehouse's daughter.

More and more, Claudia was seeing her daughter less and less. It seemed like every time they were about to have a real conversation - to talk about the things that really mattered - there was a crisis that needed to be solved, there was a ping, or a Regent on fire, or something desperately wrong somewhere.

It seemed like every time they were going to fix things, something else came up.

It was their life and it always had been, but as they approached the worst time of the year – his birthday – Claudia was getting more and more frustrated with the pattern.

She had tried asking Myka, trying to figure out when she had crossed the line between a somewhat absent mother and a downright negligent mother. Instead of parenting, they had turned River over to the Warehouse. Myka hadn't known what to say; it was the truth, and there was nothing they could do to change it.

And the girl was just fine with that. After all, the Warehouse had raised her.

It bothered her, probably too much. He'd been gone for four years, and she still got all flustered at his birthday… Christmas… their anniversary… River's birthday… Thanksgiving… any time the Warehouse's mishmash of a family celebrated together and he wasn't there, it broke her heart again.

Four years. It could have been an eternity. It wasan eternity. When she looked back over all of the things he'd missed, all of the things he was going to keep on missing – it took her breath away.

Luckily, the rest of the B and B's occupants had the routine figured out. A week or so before any major holiday, she threw herself into work. Checking on pings that weren't really pings, bothering the Regents about things they should have fixed months ago, doing endless rounds of inventory, berating everyone for not measuring up to her standards, and then going home and sleeping far too much. She knew it wasn't healthy, but she just couldn't stop herself. He was there in her dreams – there in a way that he just wasn't anymore. She was tired of looking at the boxes of things in their closet, tired of relying on memories for what should have been reality. But in her dreams she could see him, talk to him, hold his hand; he was warm and whole and there. And if that was all she was going to get, she was going to take advantage of it.

River reacted in almost the exact opposite way. The usually-quiet, thoughtful girl went into what Myka referred to as "hyper-drive" close to her father's birthday and her parents' anniversary. She broke things on purpose, listened to her music louder than ever, stayed up all night reading or looking at the photo albums that she was convinced her mother didn't know about, called Switzerland at all hours to chatter to Joshua about anything that got into her head. And though for the majority of the year River was an avoid-confrontation-at-all-costs pacifist, she picked fights with anyone and everyone who got in her way. At the same places in the calendar year when Claudia was giving up the fight, River turned into a manic, fearless, risk-taking fire-starter who couldn't be trusted to keep her hands to herself.

It wasn't natural. It wasn't normal.

But then again, nothing in their lives was.