Radioactive
River's radioactive. Contagious, catching, deadly.
Infection introduced to her system by white hands, coming in and taking over, feeding off of her until she was nothing left but an empty shell, filled with the radiation.
She grabs wrists, slides fingers against walls, leaving behind traces of blue everywhere she goes. Touching, spreading, infecting. Everyone is fair game, no one safe but the ones already infected.
Simon takes her, tries to burn the dust and the spores and the radiation out of her with recycled air and freezing temperatures. Cold, empty boxes and black space.
But it sleeps, dormant; like her is her, hiding deep down in her soul and her brain, waiting and plotting and dreaming.
When she wakes, all screams and questions and pain of skin returning to life, it breathes in life again and rises like the phoenix from the ashes.
Simon holds her, protecting and guarding, an older brother to the core. When he pulls away it clings to him, turning black and white to blue, and she can see the blue handprints emblazoned on his shirt, his face.
No matter what can't lose it, she has tried long enough and hard enough to know that no amount of water or soap can ever rid the skin of it. (Burn the clothes and peel back the skin, but it twines with the blood and the bone and burns white-hot and you can't lose it, can't ever lose it).
Infection spreads through the ship, blue sliding over silver metal, rusty gears. Trailing from her hands and her feet, strands of hair painting the couch and her bed and the floor with that ever-present blue. (She hates that color, hates hates hates).
The gears spread it to the mechanic, blue covering hands quick and sure. She won't see it (her baby wouldn't ever do something to hurt her), and sure hands spread it to the captain and the pilot and the first mate. (Hugs are the playground for germs and bacteria and radiation, and River flinches from all forms of human contact).
The pilot spreads it to his dinosaurs, the buttons, the helm. Firm pats on the shoulder and barging into shuttles and it's passed on, blue covering everything everyone until there is no other color left.
No more rainbows, no more pictures when every pencil bleeds blue onto blue and there is no order, no lines, and everything dissolves into blue chaos.
Hands grabbing and reaching and there is a knife that once was silver flying through the blue air into the blue man and slicing him open. Screams and shouting and for a second she sees another color for the first time in four years. But then it goes and she's left with the memory, the memory of something that is not blue but that she can't name, not anymore. And then the blue slides through her brain and swallows the mystery color and she is left with blue only blue.
Blue infection, blue radiation, clogging the filters and the lungs and the mind until people choke on it, blue sliding from under fingernails and out of eyes and noses and they crumple to the ground, infection moving onwards ever onwards until it reaches its target.
Simon comes covered in blue and she cries, because she knows once long ago he was not blue but something else, and she has stained him with their infection until there is nothing but blue any longer. She has erased him and redrawn him, destroyed him and then remade him, and he hasn't given consent or permission.
He gives her medicine, blue pills in a blue bottle, and she takes it and swallows, because that is what she must do, although it doesn't help and the infection just spits it back out; she is a plague, contagious and radioactive and nothing can stop her, no power in the 'verse.
But the medicine gives voice to the chaos, lets it whisper blue murmurs to taint the air and the people and leave them choking on their own (blue) blood. Tells of its origins beyond River, little catalyst who spreads infection wherever she steps.
"Two by two, hands of blue. Two by two, hands of blue."