My first Firefly fic that I've posted in all of ever. Be gentle. Content warnings for referenced abuse, unspecified type, and brain tampering, and some messed up parents if you can understand my attempt at Riverspeak.
Once there was a king and a queen. The king raised two children up from dirt. A little prince to wear his shoes once his feet were big enough and a princess whose feet were too big. Her feet were too big and her eyes and her ears and her head, analysing, memorising, capturing.
The king decided that he wanted her too-big parts broken and made small so he sent her to the Huntsmen with blue hands. The queen watched and drank from a stream of flowers and fruit and let herself be blind.
The little dirt prince was made of coal by then, glossy and impressive, and he was too noble to ignore the little dirt girl's fear scratched into the stone, so he followed her tracks and got her out, but then she was just dirt, shapeless, formless. She had been stepped on so many times that no one could see the bootprints.
The coal prince saved her and kept saving her, rebuilt her speck by speck, thankful that they hadn't broken her atoms, too, because his specialty was bodies.
They ran away on the back of a bug, and he became diamonds, and his feet grew. The king's shoes wouldn't have fit him anyways. He found a new queen, queen of fossils and strawberries and bugs, and they were happy.
Everyone else on the bug's back was happy, too, even when they were scared. The warrior and the bug's brain made their own princess, and when the dirt sat atop the bug's spinal column, she made the warrior swear that she'd never turn into dirt.
But still, the girl hid treasures under her bed, greedy as a dragon. The blue hands made her into this, she knows that, but she can't help but be scared sometimes when the bug stops singing and sleeps. She hides apples, eight, each with eight seeds. Sixty four trees, each bearing up to four hundred apples. Enough to last the harshest of winters, enough to wait the Huntsmen out.
You can't eat if you don't come out of your room.
I don't want you in my brain.
Then starve.
Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shutupshutupshutupshutup
Eight apples, sixty four seeds, three thousand apples, safe, safe, safe. Keep them clean and gleaming, never eat them. Safe, safe, safe.
The girl is sitting on the floor with apples in her lap and she is counting and the ship is waking up to sing again which means the strawberry queen is awake which means Captain Papa and the dirt dragon's doppel will be awake soon so the apples have to hide again but she isn't finished, isn't finished.
...
"Mei-mei?" Simon knocks on the door to River's room, carefully pushing it up and climbing in.
She looks feral, wide eyed and sleepless, trembling hands spinning shining pink-skinned apples as she counts, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, forty, forty-eight, fifty-six, sixty-four..."
"Mei-mei, have you been up all night?"
"She isn't finished."
Simon drops softly to his knees next to her, sees the dust rings under her bed where the apples sat, waiting. "Oh, River..."
"She isn't pitiable, she doesn't want it." River kicks away, apples cradled to her chest like children. "Let her finish counting and everything will line up."
Simon raises his hands, placating, and sits with his legs crossed like a first grader. "Can I help?"
"She is a dragon and this is her horde. Do not disturb: she spits fire." River doesn't look up from her apples, palming them carefully, counting: apples, trees, apples, trees, apples, trees, apples.
"Do you want me to go?" he asks, reaching for her. Establish contact, soothing tone of voice, providing decision-making opportunities - standard procedure for patients having a breakdown.
He thinks this is a breakdown.
"Already broken. Not breaking anymore. She just needs them here, need her horde. Dragons sleep on their gold and jewels and make armour. Soft underbellies, weak. She's not breaking, she's making better."
Simon nods, squeezes her knee, kisses her hair. River is thankful for the gesture, but she doesn't stop counting, starts over. He distracted her by making her explain.
...
She comes out to breakfast when everyone else is awake and sees them watching her like they're not. She takes a bite of protein mash cut with cheap by-the-pound rice and adds pepper, lots of pepper.
"Good mornin', mei-mei," Kaylee - her name is Kaylee, and she is not a queen - says, bright tone poorly concealing her worry.
Captain doesn't even bother hiding it, looking at her like an owl looks at its hatchlings when they won't eat, but she is, she's eating.
"You look a little tired," she continues. "You wanna take a nap in the engine room?"
"Yes." Another bite. Stirring in pepper, needs two shakes more. Hungry, hungry. Can't eat the apples. Apples are for saving. Must get protein, too, trade for it on the next planet, hide it away. "Thank you."
Breakfast passes mostly silently, Jayne-not-Jane cracking only one joke about Zoe feeding her princess at the table, Captain only whapping him once with a wooden spoon.
Everyone laughs, Jayne-not-Jane sarcastically. He steals a bite of food off Kaylee's plate.
She moves her cracked plate to her lap and keeps it there for the rest of the meal.
...
Dressed in her biggest, fluffiest sweater - a Momma Cobb creation - and a pair of thick socks and Simon's stolen pyjama pants, River curls up in Kaylee's hammock, watching her work, listening to the bug sing.
Kaylee lets out a contented little hum and rocks back on her heels, swinging to look at her. "Simon told us. That you're hiding food?"
River frowns into her knees.
"Ain't nobody mad or nothin', mei-mei," Kaylee rushed to reassure, waving her hands. "I just thought you oughta know..." She pulls up a panel by the motor, smiles over her shoulder. "I been keepin' things here for years. Used ta skim li'l flakes of protein off the bars, pack 'em together into little cakes."
River grins, scrambles down and looks. Canned fruit and veggies and fish and soup, jewel-bright candies in cellophane wrappers, old protein cakes gone shiny-green with harmless oxidization, bags of rice. Kaylee's got a good horde.
"Mal does it, too, and Zoe. Ain't hardly nobody aboard doesn't do it. We just got scared 'cos Simon started talkin' bout the implications."
"Broken brains count as abuse," River said mildly, counting protein cakes. Forty. Good number.
"Yep." Kaylee gave her a one-armed squeeze, not interrupting her counting. "Once you're done, mei-mei, take that nap for me, ni hui?"
River nods. She ends up falling asleep curled atop the panel like a puppy.
...
They land on an edge-Core planet a few weeks later. Simon takes Kaylee out to a fancy restaurant; she gets to wear her frippery and Simon cuts anyone who thinks anything nasty with diamond eyes.
When she comes back, she stops off in River's room and gives her two heaping handfuls of starlight mints for her horde.
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