NOTE: I might make this into a full length fic someday, but for now enjoy uwu

Rain poured down from the storm darkened sky to the city of Osiris beneath the thunder clouds that had rolled in around midday and refused to leave, though it was now well past midnight.

Most of the city had gone to sleep. There were bits of it still awake. A few shopping strips lit by neons that had pairs of people milling about them. All of them steered clear of the black alleyways at the end of every block. Even in a city as deep in the Core as Osiris had criminals lurking in the shadows at this hour of the night.

In one of these alleys, beneath an awning, stood a young man, his collar turned up against the rain. He was holding his jacket closed with his thumb and forefinger of one hand and in the other he clutched a large black leather duffle.

Anyone who spent more than a moment looking at him would've known he didn't really belong there. The black jacket he wore had gold filigree buttons, his abnormally soft hands were covered by thick leather gloves, and his dark hair was slicked back from his face.

It had been two years, since Simon Tam had last seen his sister.

Two years, six months, three weeks, and five days to be exact.

He knew how long it had been since he'd last seen her down to the second and he could recite it all from memory if asked.

Even before he'd gotten the strange letters and broken the disturbing coded message within them, he'd been counting the minutes they were apart. River had been his entire life long before she was sent to the special gifted program in the Academy. It would make sense that now that he'd learned of the Academy's ulterior motives, though his parents believed him delusional, he would give everything he had to rescue her.

He ended up doing just that.

Shortly after he decoded the message written in between the lines of River's letters, he'd discovered an underground group, resistant to the Alliance that confirmed what his sister had been writing. They offered to give him everything he would need to save her for a small fortune. After emptying his bank account, he had a little more than their asking price.

Footsteps echoed down the other end of the alley. Simon turned instantly at the sound. He had a gun in the pocket of his jacket. He didn't want to use it. He was very much against taking a life, but if came between the money he needed to save River and whomever was trying to steal from him, it was no contest.

River was all that mattered.

That was how it always had been. And that was how it always would be.

After carefully moving his hand from his collar to his pocket, he watched a pair of silhouettes enter the alley. It wasn't until he could see who they were that he took his hand out of his pocket and allowed himself to relax.

It was a balding middle-aged man and a young woman with bright blue eyes that seemed to shine even in the darkness. They didn't look like they belonged in Capital City. They did look like they belonged in one of the outer worlds. The man was the leader of the underground group Simon had gotten in contact with to help him rescue River and they claimed they weren't Browncoats, but they certainly had the rugged, dirty look all Browncoats Simon had come in contact with seemed to have.

"Do you have the money?" the man asked once they reached him.

Simon held up the duffle. "Ten million credits converted into twenty-five million platinum coins as promised."

The man took the bag from Simon's fingers. As Simon watched, he pulled open the zipper and inspected the contents. The girl pulled out one of the coins and bit the edge of it before tossing it back in with the rest. "It's good," she said.

"Excellent," the man said. "We'll get your sister out and turn her over to you –"

"No," Simon said instantly.

"What?" The man sounded more than a little confused.

"I want to get her," he said, his eyes flicking from the coins to the man's face. "I want to go in and get her myself."

"It'll be very dangerous –"

"I don't care," Simon cut him off. "I want to be the one that gets her out."

The man clenched his jaw. The girl crossed her arms over her chest and raised one eyebrow. Simon held out his hand.

"If that's going to be a problem, you can give me my money back."

"No, no. Shiny," the man said, though his tone told Simon he felt otherwise. "It'll take us a few days to get you what you will need to infiltrate the facility."

It was clear from the way he raised his eyebrow, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at Simon that he thought this would be a deal breaker for him, but Simon nodded once.

He'd waited over two years for this moment alone.

A few more days was going to be nothing.

The Academy was nothing like Simon had envisioned. He'd never even seen the building itself before now. When River had gone to the Academy for the promising program they'd detailed in their brochure, the one she'd wanted to be a part of so badly she'd spent weeks begging their parents to let her go, she'd been taken by a pair of government officials. Now as he walked towards the building from where he'd landed his ship, wearing the uniform of a government inspector, he had to use all of his willpower to keep himself from staring.

It was much larger than he'd thought it would be, though now that he knew what was really going on inside its walls that made sense. The façade of the building was all white marble with blue tinted windows placed equidistance apart from one another. Everything else seemed to be made of glass: the doors, the elevators, and even some of the walls within the building.

Simon's fingers tightened around the baton he was carrying while.

His free hand clenched into a fist.

He wanted to shatter it all.

As he stepped through the front doors, he kept his head down, trying to keep the cameras from getting too good of a look at his face. He knew it was futile. They'd know who he was and why he was there eventually, but he wanted to put that point in time off for as long as he could. Rescuing River depended on it.

Walking with a confidence he didn't entirely feel, he went up to the receptionist's desk in the middle of the foyer and said in a soft voice, "I'm here to see Dr. Philbert Mathias. He should know that I'm coming."

"Yes, of course," the receptionist said with a smile. "I take it you're the inspector?"

Simon didn't return the gesture. "Yes."

"I'll just need to see your papers," she said holding out her hand.

Reaching into the pocket on the inside of his jacket, he handed over the papers he'd been given earlier that morning. The receptionist ran them before handing them back and saying, "Dr. Mathias is currently with a student on the fifth level in room 501. He'll meet you there."

"Who is the student?" Simon asked, putting the papers back in his jacket.

"River Tam."

Simon swallowed hard and nodded once, not trusting himself to speak, before he walked as quickly as he dared without raising suspicion to the nearest elevator. He got on and pressed the button for the fifth floor. As the elevator began to move downwards – the testing facilities were underground – he thought back to how the receptionist had called River a 'student' rather than a 'subject.' He wondered if this was a cover she was supposed to use or if she truly had no idea what was going on beneath her feet.

The elevator stopped and Simon got off. A sign on the wall said rooms 500-525 were to the right while rooms 526-550 were to the left. He took a right and stopped at the room with a little 501 above the door. The label next to it read Dream Testing Facility. He swallowed hard and hesitated with his hand on the knob.

Through this door was his sister whom he hadn't seen in two years, seven months, one week, and three days.

Through this door was his sister.

And the man who was hurting her.

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes briefly, steadying himself before he opened the door. Immediately, he tightened his fingers around his baton again in an attempt to stifle the gasp that threatened to escape his lips as he stepped into the room tinted blue from the lights overhead.

River was in the room just as the receptionist had said she would be. She was strapped to a metal chair that had wires sprawling out of the bottom of it that attached to plugs in the white tiled walls. There was a metal apparatus strapped to her head with electrodes that trailed down from it and were stuck to her cheeks. A wire was attached to the apparatus. It went to a machine pushed up against the wall opposite the chair she was strapped to.

She was gasping and occasionally crying out. The look on her face was one he'd seen when she'd come into his room after a nightmare, when she'd broken her arm after trying to climb the tallest tree in their backyard, and when her pet cat, who had been her best friend, had died a few weeks before she left for the Academy.

River was in pain.

Simon's fingers clenched the doorknob in a white knuckled grip.

"You must be the inspector," a voice said, breaking Simon from his trance.

He blinked and looked up. There was a man standing off to the side of the chair, he now noticed. There were a couple more standing near the machines as well. The one who'd spoken to him was a middle-aged man whom he could only assume was Dr. Mathias.

This was the man who had been torturing his sister for the past two years.

Simon straightened and pushed back his shoulders. He closed the door behind him and held the baton in his hand like it belonged there. He wiped whatever emotion might've been showing from his face and didn't smile when the doctor spoke.

"Yes, I am," he replied. "I'm here to inspect the work you are doing on this subject. Please continue. I will ask questions if I have any."

The doctor didn't look pleased, but he didn't make any argument. He turned back to the other two men – he now recognized them as medical employees – in the room and said, "Continue the procedure."

To Simon's horror, the one closest to River took a metal rod and shoved it through a small plastic holder that was connected to the apparatus on her head. She let out a shriek of pain as it pierced her skin.

"She's dreaming," the man said, taking a couple steps away from her.

"Nightmare?" the other asked.

The first one nodded. "Off the charts. Scary monsters."

It sickened Simon how the man smiled as he said this and River gasped for air.

"Let's amp it up. Delcium, eight-drop," Mathias said, making a note on the clipboard he was carrying before he turned back to Simon and added, "See, most of our best work is done when they're asleep. We can monitor and direct their subconscious, implant suggestions…"

The chair River was on began to lower into the floor. She convulsed and Simon's eyes widened. He clenched his baton more tightly to prevent himself from showing any more emotion than he already had. He couldn't give himself away. Not yet.

"It's a little startling to see at first, but the results are spectacular," the doctor added quickly, seeing Simon's expression. "Especially in this case. River Tam is our star pupil."

Simon's eyes didn't leave his sister's face once. "I've heard that."

"She'll be ideal for defense deployment," Mathias went on. "Even with the side-effects."

This caught Simon's attention instantly. His eyes flicked from his sister to the doctor. "Tell me about them."

"Well, obviously, she's unstable," the doctor told him, glancing back at her as he spoke. He gestured to one of the nearby machines and walked towards it. Simon didn't follow. He moved closer to River as the doctor continued speaking, "The neural stripping does tend to fragment their own reality matrix. It manifests as borderline schizoph – "

"What use do we have for a psychic if she's insane?" Simon asked, his eyes turning back to her, cutting the doctor off, unable to hear anymore.

They'd taken his sister, his sweet, kind, beautiful little sister and damaged her beyond repair. He could see how thin she was from lack of nutrition, the muscles in her arms that hadn't been there before. Her body was too unbalanced to have grown this way undirected. What had they done to her? And why? He still didn't understand the purpose of this.

And then the doctor said it for him.

"She's not just a psychic. Given the right trigger, this girl is a living weapon."

So that was what they were doing. They were building an army of unstable children. The thought made Simon more sick to his stomach than he already was.

The doctor, completely oblivious to his discomfort however, continued, "She has her lucid periods. We're hoping to improve upon the…" Mathias paused. "I'm sorry, sir, I have to ask: is there a reason for this inspection?"

River whimpered and twitched in the chair. Simon twitched slightly as well at her pain, but when the doctor spoke, he had hold back a smirk.

"Am I making you nervous?" he asked instead, his eyes moving from his sister to the doctor for the second time since he'd entered the room. He still betrayed nothing, showing no signs of emotion at all whatsoever.

"Key members of parliament have personally observed this subject," Mathias boasted. "I was told that the Alliance's support for the project was unanimous. The demonstration of her powers –"

"How is she physically?" Simon asked, his gaze returning once more to his sister.

Mathias let out a sigh and walked around Simon again to a machine showing a 3D image of River's brain. "Like nothing we've seen. All our subjects are conditioned for combat, but River…she's a creature of extraordinary grace."

"Yes," Simon said softly. He'd heard enough. "She always did love to dance."

He dropped to one knee and slammed the butt of the baton to the ground and the eagle at the top of it exploded, sending shockwave of energy through the room at about neck level. It less than a second, Mathias and the two medical employees dropped to the floor unconscious. Simon knew they wouldn't remain that way and wasted no time going over to his sister.

"River," he said, his voice breaking on the word. There was desperation in his tone and he didn't bother hiding it. "It's Simon. Please. It's Simon. It's your brother."

He pulled the apparatus off her head, taking the metal rod out first, wincing as he did so. He stroked her face, willing her open her eyes, praying she would wake up. His hands were shaking as he rubbed his thumb across the wound now bleeding from her forehead. He felt a lump rise in his throat. How many times had this been done to her? And how much worse had it been?

River continued twitching and gasping in the chair, not moving. Though it pained him, Simon moved away from River to the door he'd come in. He looked down the hall through the small rectangular window set into it. He had to know where they were at. He turned around and began pulling off his jacket, prepared to wrap River in it and carry her to safety, but saw her standing in front of him.

"Simon," she said her name calmly, no trace of her previous trauma evident in her expression at all. Not to anyone who wasn't looking closely. And Simon was. He could see the dark, bruise-like circles beneath her eyes, the dead look in them that revealed she'd seen more than he could possibly imagine. Her eyes slipped over him to the door and she muttered, "They know you've come."

Not wanting to waste any time, he pushed open the door and led River out of the blue tinted room to the hallway.

"We can't make it to the surface from the inside," he told her softly, but before he could finish speaking, she'd pulled out of his grip and scaled the wall. She braced herself against the cavernous ceiling with her legs and held onto the sprinkler for support. Despite everything he'd just seen and knowing it was due to that she was able to do this, Simon was impressed.

A pair of doctors passed by him, going directly beneath her.

Neither of them noticed anything was amiss.

A moment later River dropped back down to the floor.

For a moment, she unmoving stood in the center of the empty hallway, her head cocked to one side. Then she turned to Simon and said, "Two rights and one left. The halls are empty. The ventilation shaft will be in the middle of the last hall."

Then she started running down the hall. Simon blinked and watched her, dazed, before he finally forced himself to follow her. How did she know these things? But then he remembered what he'd been told by both the underground group, the doctor, and the words that he himself had spoken back in the blue tinted room.

She was a psychic. She could read minds. She knew things other people didn't.

Just as River said, the ventilation shaft was at the end of the last hall and the ones they ran down before it were completely empty. Simon opened the window leading to the shaft and the instant that they were both standing on the small sill just outside it, he wedged it shut with his baton, which turned out to be a good idea as that was when the Academy's security finally caught up with them.

The pair of guards fired at the window, but the laser bullets bounced right off the glass.

If he hadn't been so worried about getting River to safety, Simon might've smirked.

The guards should've known the glass was laser-proof.

As they began trying to break the window by hitting it repeatedly with the butts of their guns, Simon pressed a button on a small remote control he had in his pocket. It would activate his ship and bring it directly to them.

The glass cracked. Laser cages began moving up, section by section from the bottom of the shaft, steadily getting closer and closer to the small shelf they were standing on.

Simon swallowed hard, praying the ship arrived soon.

The spiderweb in the glass grew. The lasers were only a few feet beneath them.

Then suddenly the sky above them darkened. He looked up and watched as a lift lowered from the belly of the ship down to where he and River were standing. The minute the lift was within reach, River got on and he followed.

He kept his eyes on his sister as the lift pulled them up into the ship, ready to reach for her if she became unbalanced and looked like she were going to fall off the lift, but she didn't. She was steadier than Simon could ever remember having been.

The ship's belly closed as it pulled them into its small hull. It was only slightly larger than a shuttle that might be attached to a larger one. Simon immediately went over to the ship's control's, taking off the autopilot function and steering it away from the Academy, using as much fuel as he dared to get them as far away from that place as fast as possible.

River was sitting near the lift, pressed up against the wall, her legs pulled up against her chest, her hands on top of her knees. She was staring at nothing, but her eyes were wide and Simon suspected she was seeing more than she let on.

Again he felt hatred for Dr. Mathias and the others who had stood there and watched as she twitched and whimpered and screamed, and –

A lump formed in his throat.

And for two years, he'd let them do it.

Turning his attention back to the task at hand, Simon reminded himself that they weren't safe yet and focused on getting them out of the Osiris atmosphere and on their way to Persephone where they would use what little money he had left to buy their way onto a trade ship and go as far away from the Core as possible.

It was only when they were far enough away from Capital City that the world was little more than a speck in the distance that Simon slumped in his seat and closed his eyes, letting out a breath of relief.

Finally. Finally.

They were safe. River was safe. She was away from that horrible place.

Or, at least, for now.