-Firefly-

The disconnect between intent and speech puzzled her. It was a perplexing problem, one she took out often to run through her hands so she could study it from every angle, one that frustrated and angered her and wearied and worried Simon. He heard the words she spoke, but the problem was that very rarely were the uttered words what she meant to say. They were birthed in one shard of glass-that-was-her, but in translating them from splinter to shard to slice, they became garbled and unclear.

It frightened her, the precariousness of the situation. She had escaped those who rummaged and rearranged the contents of her head and soul by writing to her brother, hiding codes in stories that had never been and jokes that weren't funny and anecdotes that never happened. It had been a desperate ploy, one founded on faith in her brother and his love for her, his brilliance for solving puzzles, his reckless determination, but the ploy should have been over and done with once he followed her clues and rescued her. It should have faded into the past instead of lingering on into the present, and yet linger it did. Everything she said came out wrong, the truth and meaning hidden in codes that Simon tried so hard to decipher.

She was trapped. Simon had taken her out of The Academy, but she was still locked away, imprisoned in a cell they had crafted for her inside her own head. She reached for him through the bars, but he felt only butterfly touches, saw only slight glimmers, heard only echoes of her screams.

But how could she blame him for not understanding when so often she didn't understand what he said? Sometimes she looked at him, and she saw his lips moving, and she tried so very hard to focus on what he was saying, but he was too far away, his words too muffled and foreign, his touch too vivid for her to concentrate on whatever message he was trying to pass on.

And it was hard, almost impossibly so, to figure out which things were spoken aloud and which were whispered into her mind alone, especially when the two were so different. Sometimes, she wasn't even sure she had matched the right voices with the right name. Was Kaylee thinking about the time she'd spent in a monastery? Was the captain the one who reminisced about a planet where the sky was veiled? Did Inara remember a battle where only a sergeant and loyalty had gotten her through alive?

It was a jigsaw puzzle, one with no pictures or frame of reference, constantly jumbled and mixed up and horribly confused in her mind so that the only one she knew for sure, without thinking or looking or wondering, was Simon; she could pinpoint his thoughts and voice and recognize them instantly as her-Simon, a calming ability she could use with none of the other souls bound together in this cocoon of Serenity.

She drifted, apart from them, sometimes mingling and intersecting with their world, other times only passing through ethereally. Simon kept her grounded, an anchor that always brought her back, chaotic and scared and shaking, but inevitably, she'd drift off again, and her cries for help, her whimpers of loneliness, her screams of fear…they went unnoticed, hidden in a mountain of gibberish and jargon and nonsense that spilled from her lips like blood.

There was too much noise, mayhem all about her, and individual syllables got lost in the clamor. But there was something worse than that, something that made the assaulting hubbub seem a refuge.

Silence.

Complete and utter silence.

It pressed on her from all sides, hungry to consume the sounds that emanated from her—the beat of her heart, the inflation of her lungs, the roar of the blood moving through her veins…the whisper of her brother's pulse, tucked away in her mind for safekeeping.

Terrible, horrible silence. The silence of nothing. The silence of death. The silence of…peace?

She broke the silence by starting up from her bed with a shriek that rent the pseudo-night and cast sparkles into the darkness. The silence was too oppressive and the thrum of Serenity's own heartbeat wasn't enough, so she wept aloud and screamed again and sobbed violently, anything to prove to the voices and the darkness and the silence that she would not lie down, that she would fight and struggle, that she would make noise no matter how the seeming deafness afflicting her tried to smother everything that was her.

The sounds she made faded so quickly, a too-thin veneer of defiance spread too far over her wide expanse of terror. They protested the silence, claimed boldness, challenged the encroaching enemy, but in reality—a shifting, nebulous realm she only vaguely touched anymore—in reality, she was so tired of fighting, so exhausted and drained from screaming in the cells where no one could hear her, so horribly, terribly afraid of what years more of an existence like this one would mean. One day, maybe today, maybe years from now—either way, it hardly mattered since time slipped her by like the abstract concept it was—she would surrender to the silence, succumb to the deafness of the 'verse, shrink away into nothing.

But not this moment. Because Simon's heartbeat grew louder, and his noise joined with hers to fight off the silence for an unspecific amount of time, his lungs filling and emptying of air, his blood pulsing through his veins with a steady beat she might wish to dance to later, his voice daring to brave the silence, entering it and shooing away the vast nothingness threatening to engulf her, his sleeves brushing and rustling against her as he wrapped her in his strong, strengthening embrace.

"Nothing," she babbled, trying to explain why she was screaming, why she had pulled him from the sleep that the shadows threatening to obscure his eyes whispered he needed. "Nothing, only silence—it stops everything it touches, makes you forget to breathe, forget…and she forgets so easily, how can she scare it away?"

"Shh, mei-mei, it's all right. I'm here. It's me, Simon. I'm here, River."

She hated the uncertainty in his eyes while he waited for her to drag herself away from the cloying grip of her nightmares, hated the tiny spiders skittering through his clean and quiet thoughts, the ones that wondered if she recognized him, wondered if she'd meet his eyes and know him, the ones that left behind little cobwebs of hurt and fear and stinging pain that his beloved sister, his-River, could look right through him as if he didn't exist, as if she'd never seen him before, as if all the years where she had been fixed in the forefront of his mind didn't matter, had never even happened.

She hated that uncertainty even more because as much as she might rage and shout that she would never forget him, that she had kept fast, secret hold of him during all those days when secrets were burned into her and wounds were dug into her and scars were gouged out of her—as much as she denied that she would never look through him, she knew that the denial was as thin and wasted as her defiance of the silence. Knew that in a locked box hidden beneath happier, larger boxes, Simon kept the memories of the times she had looked through him, walked past him, fought him, screamed at him without name, associated him with her tormentors.

"Simon," she said, and was pleased when that came out ungarbled, clear and concise. She recognized him. She knew him. She loved him.

Relief turned gray eyes to blue, a shade of blue that did not frighten her but rather calmed her. Content that they were Simon and River—not doctor and patient, not stranger and lunatic—he settled himself on the edge of her bed, his long fingers pushing back the hair falling before her own eyes.

"Too quiet," she whimpered, tangling both of her hands around one of his, the one straightening the blankets around her. He hadn't turned the light on when he'd sleepily rushed to her aid, and only the little light he always left on for her illuminated them, but it was enough, more than enough. She had lived without light for…for a long time. Now, even the tiniest drop of luminosity could sustain her, a rich delicacy she knew better than to take for granted. "It's too quiet, always trying to swallow me up. Don't let it take me, Simon, don't let it eat me. It's like the Black, all-encompassing and too vast for any mind to comprehend. You slide through it and don't realize it can destroy you. But there aren't any stars. It's just…nothing."

He trickled cool fingers across her brow, comforting and checking all at once, multi-tasking as he was prone to do despite his propensity for single-minded fixation. "I thought you loved the Black, River. I thought it helped you."

She was trying so hard to speak clearly that it frustrated her he couldn't see what she was saying. A huff of breath escaped her and she rolled her eyes. "The Black has stars. The silence doesn't."

"Ahh." Simon looked away, a quick flick of his eyes, before he was looking back at her and offering a wan smile. "I'm sorry, River. I'm trying to understand."

And suddenly it occurred to her that she wasn't being clear, that her words had been disconnected from her intent again, that he was once more left behind, struggling valiantly to read the message hidden in the multitude of useless words. She had to try harder, had to work at this, had to decipher why she couldn't reliably convey all that she wanted so badly to tell him.

"Don't understand," she pleaded with him, half-rising and bringing her hands to the collar of his soft sweater. "Please, Simon, don't! They'll cut you open and hurt you and change you and you won't be my-Simon anymore. You'll be broken, and only one of us can be broken. How can the whole be strong enough if both halves are flawed? I don't want you to understand!"

"Hey." His fingers moved to her chin, steadying her, grounding her, the lodestar that kept her vaguely pointed in the right direction. "Don't say that, River. You're not flawed. They may have hurt you, but you are beautiful and brilliant and much, much too good for them."

The slight tug at her lips surprised her because smiles were almost as rare as light to shatter the darkness, but this smile birthed light, gleaming illumination filtering through the abandoned rows inside his head, opening up boxes to call up happy memories of days when his mei-mei had followed him everywhere and grabbed his hand to pull him into a fun dance while their parents laughed at them or when they spoke together for hours about anything and everything, the secrets of the universe—all of them good and fun and wonderful, not dark and twisted and wrong—laid out before them, anything they wanted theirs for the taking.

Broken-River faded into the background, and for this little pocket of un-time, his-River firmed and solidified and moved forward to take the spotlight created by his flicker of joy.

"Ge-ge," she said fondly, and basked in his spreading, unfurling light.

He stayed with her until she felt sleep tug at her, bidding her to come and play with it, promising the nightmares had gone for this night, bullied away by Simon's stalwart presence.

A kiss was pressed to her temple, the blankets smoothed over her shoulders, and then, as if it were as easy as breathing, he whispered, "I love you, mei-mei."

Startled, pleased, she hushed sleep's impatient murmurs and turned back to her brother. "Simon, you're loud."

His eyes widened, and though he clearly tried to hide it, a grin played along the edges of his mouth. "Really?"

"You chase the quiet away. It wants everything to be silent, wants to hush blood and air and movement, but you make it okay to breathe and live and smile. She can rest now."

For an instant, she thought the wrong words must have slipped from her lips yet again, but then he blinked away a shimmer and smiled so softly, so gently, so tenderly and pulled her into a quick hug. And then, for once, it looked as if he were the one who could not find the right words to say, so he just smiled and murmured, "Rest well, River," and held her hand until she laughed and gave in to sleep's blatant invitation.

It encouraged her that she had managed to say what she meant, to convey what she intended, to pass along the messages she had composed in her mind. With such success still prevalent in the scattered remnants of her, it seemed a good idea to tell him, now, the words she had been wanting to say to him since well before he had come to rescue her, the words that had gotten stuck in her throat when he'd hugged her farewell as she left for The Academy, the words she hadn't written in the letters because she'd wanted their absence to draw his attention, the words that had come out as something altogether different when he'd stepped into immolation for her.

The measurements used to divide increments of time always slithered away from her, always just out of reach when she grabbed for them, taunting her with their elusiveness, but she thought it was not much later, not much after the night when Simon watched the others leave Serenity with a wistful look on his face that had emerged again for a moment when they heard laughing and music and singing outside in a fire-lit village before the bittersweet expression metamorphosed into a quiet smile and a laugh—and it pained her that laughing had become so unfamiliar to him lately—when she'd taken his hand and made him dance in the cargo bay, just like she'd done in the memory he'd taken out to examine by light of her smile during the night.

The captain returned from the haze of smoke and fire and flowers and fake rain with a thief for a wife, nobility rising within him as if awakening from a restless slumber in response to her quiet deception and soft-spoken manipulation. The snake's presence was like an itch in River's mind, a thorn no one else could see, a disease that would not, she determined, poison Simon. The captain could defend himself and Wash had Zoë and the Shepherd had faith and Jayne was not a tempting enough target, but Simon was too trusting, too naïve, too distractible, and far too large a target now because of River.

For someone little affected by time, it was ironic that she should be inconvenienced by bad timing, but she was. She had been so close to finally getting out the much-delayed words, to actually getting to soothe some of the wounds she'd unknowingly inflicted on Simon, but now she had to protect him from the serpent in their midst too. It was hard, sometimes, being a sister, but she supposed it was worth it, over all.

Pillows seemed the quickest solution to that problem. If the false wife couldn't sleep, she couldn't stay, and it was hard to sleep without pillows—River knew from experience, remembered insurmountable problems with mattresses and pillows at The Academy. But the Shepherd was persistent, and every time she took away a pillow, he found a new one, until finally she had to reach out for Simon's sleeve and lead him forward to explain the problem.

Two birds with one stone. She couldn't remember where the saying had originated, maybe on Earth-that-was, but it seemed to apply here. Speak the words she longed to say right and get rid of the pesky thief problem, all in one forcedly casual conversation. It was a solid plan; she didn't know what went wrong.

A flawed marriage, one that couldn't exist, for reasons too numerous to mention—a warning that all was not right—a declaration that she loved him. She even managed to denounce the serpent to her falsely downcast face.

But it didn't work.

The captain couldn't see past the lowered eyelashes, the Shepherd couldn't see past his fixation on comfort and care, and Simon…Simon missed the code so clearly spelled out amidst the stories that had never been and the jokes that weren't funny and the anecdotes that had never happened. He missed it, didn't realize what she had told him, didn't hear her promise to take care of him as adeptly and determinedly as he took care of her, didn't understand why she had combined her declaration with her warning that all was not right, that the situation was nothing more than a deception and a mask as simple as a pillow under a shirt.

He missed it…but he told her he loved her back.

"Mei-mei, of course I love you too," he said, effortlessly, easily, almost without thought, as natural as breathing. She had always—she thought always, but maybe not, maybe there were missing moments, missing memories, missing motives—looked up to Simon, always admired him, but in that instant she envied him. Envied him his ease and his skill and his dreamless sleep, and though she didn't wish her fate on him—never, never, please God, never—she did wonder if she had once known that same smoothness and lucidity and certainty. She wondered if she would ever know it again, if Simon would be able to give it to her, slide it back under her skin with the liquids that cooled and calmed and caressed her.

That night, for the first time, she only pretended to have nightmares, screamed not because she had startled out of sleep, but because she wanted Simon in the room with her, wanted him safe next to her. She had hidden away his half of their memento far away to keep it safe, but this time only proximity to her could protect her brother from the temptress waiting to ensnare him should she ever see him and focus on him and recognize in him a mark worth bringing in and turning over for filthy lucre.

Eventually, lulled by her complacency, stayed by her hand so tightly gripping his, he fell asleep leaned up against her bed. She ran her fingers softly through his hair and winced when she realized that his sleep was not as dreamless as all that, not free of fear and pain and grief, and she hummed a tiny tune and traced trembling fingers over his brow and soothed away the nightmares from him.

For a moment, empowered and emboldened by her ability to drive back darkness and protect her brother, River—yes, once again, for this instant, fully River—thought that her own nightmares could be banished, her terrors driven back, her sleep reclaimed. For a moment, she thought she and Simon could actually resurrect his -River from the dead and stitch all of the gleaming shards-of-her back together to make something whole and full and real.

It was an invigorating feeling, a breathless thought, a powerful concept, and though it eventually drifted away into the fog that moved to wrap her in liquid arms and sweep her down the road of incoherency, she thought that maybe a tiny trace of it lingered in the air, settled like a fine dust over the broken shards, coated her skin, ready to be resurrected again when Simon returned after a long absence that had panicked her with the possibility that he might never return, that this had all been a trick designed by her tormentors. She was so afraid of that possibility, so distracted by the niggling terror that Simon wasn't really there at all, that symbols and snow-covered roofs and Shepherds took on more importance than they perhaps really possessed.

But Simon came back, and he smiled at her, and she couldn't help but blink at him in astonishment.

He had been turned inside out.

His blood was on the outside, his skin turned inward, the structure of his form made unstable, inverted, turned backward. It disgusted and thrilled her at the same time, and she didn't know why, didn't know how the condition had struck, didn't know what she could do to help him.

"Simon!" she blurted, half-raising a hand to him, caught between a desire to touch him and the instinctual urge to recoil from the blood so exposed. It made her strangely sad to see him like this, to know that even turned inside out, he still smiled and shone and glistened with that inner light, edged with lightning. It seemed to her that she had been turned inside out too, hands reaching inside her, grasping hold of her center and pulling it outward until she had been inverted too, his-River now curled up and whimpering, frozen in stasis, on the inside, while on the outside, the corpses and nightmares and terrors and secrets were revealed for all who looked at her to see.

"Did you miss me, River?" he asked her, as if he did not realize that now they matched in more ways than one.

"Not my fault," she told him succinctly, finally chancing a touch, ghosting her fingers over the paths along his cheek and lip and temple where the skin had parted to reveal what lay within.

He let out a tiny chuckle. "No, River, not your fault. This was all Jayne's fault—the whole town thought he was a hero, and one of his…former business partners…took umbrage at that opinion."

"People make their own heroes," she whispered, while inwardly, she grinned in triumph and snicked into place the cloying voices whispering of regret and doubt and confusion and Why'd he go and jump in front of me? with the one called Jayne. Every day, she grew closer to being able to tell without doubt which voiceless voices went to which breathing life-form appearing at the dinner table so often.

"Yes, I think they do. You always have an answer for everything, don't you, mei-mei?" Simon grinned at her and touched her shoulder in an almost-hug. When she peeked into the shelves that marked his thoughts, she saw them glowing with reflected amber lights, like the heart of Serenity. He had just been speaking to Kaylee—she had marked him with white lines bandaged across the rents in his flesh and trailing golden streamers floating through the rows of shelves and the white grin he had reclaimed.

"Don't touch me," she commanded, and stepped away from his hand.

His grin melted away, replaced by a trace of hurt. "River? What's wrong?"

"It leaches light from everything she touches. Don't get near it or all the streamers will disappear. Only duty will be left, stripped of joy."

"I don't understand," he said, a little sadly. She had tried to save him, tried to let him nurture the gold within, but it was draining away anyway, the warm amber tones that softened his intense, stormy hues replaced with echoes of the black shadows that followed in River's footsteps, haunted the places she would go, left behind a taint on all that she touched.

"Leave me alone!" she screamed at him, enraged suddenly. "Don't touch, don't touch, don't touch! A museum piece, shown to the highest bidders, taken out like a toy. Put her back on the shelf, turn off the lights, forget she's there, but she stays, hidden deep down—don't make a sound!"

"Oh, River." An exhalation, a lament, an outpouring of compassion.

The warmth from Kaylee was completely gone from him, and it was such a sad feeling, a sad thought, a sad touch in his mind, that she began to weep, tears leaking from her, a river whose source was his-River buried so incredibly deep and yet still mourning for all that had been lost.

"Simon, I stole all the gold," she murmured, and clung to him when he tentatively took her into his arms. "I stole it and now you'll have to go back for more, but you can't because the walls are too high."

She thought she remembered a feeling of empowerment, of hope, but it was too far gone, maybe only a dream, or the memory of a dream, and so she leaned on Simon, needing his strength, craving his resolve, basking in his love.

A blink, a shift in position and time and temperament, and there were tiny pinpricks of light shining in the darkness, symbols of years that had passed, only some of which she remembered. More pinpricks of light, bubbles glowing with individual colors and thoughts and voices, surrounding the cake where glowed the candles combating the darkness and representing the years of life that saved her from total despair and a descent into madness unhalted by his hand grasping hers. Eight individuals, eight voices, eight people…and her. Alone, isolated, different, broken.

"I didn't get you anything," she informed him solemnly, an unnecessary statement because surely he already knew that. The last gift she could remember giving him had been a blue sweater she had told him would keep him warm at MedAcad, and the red medkit she had pulled out to give him only after he made a show of being pleased with the sweater. Since then, she had given him only intransient things, abstract concepts that bound him in concrete chains—the life of a fugitive, the loneliness of a person trapped between the crew and his sister, the infrequent smiles that infused him with strength and hope whenever they snuck their way past the barricade left by torment and shattered sleep.

Simon's light glowed brighter as he looked away from the candles, upward into Kaylee's face, around at the smiling, happy faces of the people he often thought cared little for him or resented him for the trouble he brought to their home. There was something tender and slender and kinder in his being, something that made carpets appear between the shelves of his life, tapestries decorate the walls, a crooked cake with multi-colored chocolate sit proudly in a highly visible corner beneath a captured snapshot image of the generosity, the acceptance surrounding him, even Jayne with his finger in the frosting. Even River with a fledgling smile playing around her lips, making her look real, making her look happy.

And she was.

Simon was happy, so she was happy.

Two halves of the same whole, and maybe it wasn't doctor and assassin, after all. Maybe it was just doctor and patient.

"Fire," she warned him, pleased when the warning came out and Kaylee was saved and Serenity survived to fly another day, to shelter her ragged vagabonds through another trip throughout the Rim, to beat steadily and grant all within the safety of her exoskeleton a pocket of home, small and self-contained and so infinitely fragile.

Another blink and it was brightly lit again, the air full and free in her mouth, bits of the outside air entering her flesh to sit within her before she exhaled them out, like the things put inside her except there was no easy way to take those out, to expel them back out into the air, to separate them from her own self, nothing to do but let them sit and fester inside her, walls that kept her from truly being a part of the crew laughing and playing and talking.

They were laughing, yes, smiling, enjoying themselves, teeth flashing in an age-old expression signifying safety, pleasure, amusement, and yet there was so little real happiness evident. She could see it, feel it, hear it, each smile only a paper-thin mask, stretched to the point of tearing.

Inara, talking of laws and examinations, too afraid to examine herself beneath her Companion exterior, too reluctant to fully inoculate herself to the allure of this life, too shaken by just how deeply she'd fallen into blue eyes and a roguish grin and a spirit of nobility not fully obscured by cynicism, her thoughts all calm and centered above a roiling mass of doubts.

The captain, watching the ones he so reluctantly and so quickly took under his wing and sheltered, so afraid of admitting he cared for them yet caring too much to deny that he did, tired after tossing and turning with nightmares of losing everything again, having this Serenity ripped from him as surely as he'd had the last taken away, his victories turned to ash and blood in his mouth.

Zoë and Wash, their minds full of different things—one fixated on blue skies and open spaces and bioluminescent lakes, the other on home and refuge and staying far away from planets bought and paid for with the blood of her comrades—yet each reflecting bits of the other, Wash's thoughts tinged with silken laughter and slow smiles and smooth skin, Zoë's sprinkled with dinosaurs and twinkling eyes and arms with a strength far beyond the physical.

Kaylee, so quiet and reserved, her smiles banked, her shine dimmed just the slightest bit, and River wondered if anyone else noticed how Kaylee sat where she could watch Simon, sat away from him, watching him, studying him, looking at him and wishing he would talk to her as easily as Serenity did, wishing she could bring back the smiles he'd shown her when they'd talked about manners and swearing, wishing his birthday had ended oh so differently, wondering all the while if all her looks and smiles and optimism would ever make Simon look at her with just a hint of the devotion he showed his sister.

Simon, unaware, oblivious, forcing himself to eat the bowl of foul-smelling food he'd made for her, pretending to himself that he belonged at this table, this ship, this life, trying to change the shape and style of his shelves to accept Serenity even as he kept everything packed, ready to move on should the captain abandon them just like Daddy had, just like his money and position and career had.

And Jayne…he was the unhappiest of all, even surrounded by gleaming, sharp edges, fondling and playing with the weapons that made him think he was strong. Throwing randomly aimed weapons of words at Simon to hide his envy, his distrust, his resentment, laughing and spitting because it made everyone around him underestimate him just a bit even though it seemed to him that everyone had grown just a bit too used to dismissing and overlooking him. The blood that had stained his hands, the blood of a young boy who'd looked up to him as a hero, still painted his thoughts with a dark and rosy hue, but it frightened him, and so he hardened himself, pretended it didn't matter at all, eager for a chance to prove to himself—and to Mal—that he hadn't grown soft or weak or vulnerable.

When the money's good enough…

It flitted through his cluttered, straightforward mind, never too far away, never alighting for long. And yet…there was danger there. Danger, and she could smell it as surely as she could taste the food in the bowl Simon had given her, a scent just as bad and twice as pervasive, a scent that made it hard for her to breathe, clinging to her nostrils so that she thought she might choke.

Simon had promised her he'd find them a safe place, and he was just beginning to think that Serenity might actually be that place, but the silver edges of Jayne's knives gleamed, and in their reflection River saw pain and terror and wrongness given shape and form and weapon in her, and the shards-that-were-her shimmered with that reflected light, magnifying and amplifying them until she was consumed with danger! danger! danger! and blue hands coming toward her, gleaming with blue-white-silver in the shape of a crude sun.

She was only a reflection and the gleaming sharp blade was in her hand because there was one in Jayne's hand, the thought of revenge and envy and resentment in her head because it was in Jayne's, and the cold blue was clothing her because it clothed Jayne. And the red…the red, rosy hues left by a man's sacrifice for something he believed greater than himself, it was the only hope River could see in that instant, the only good thing still visible through the blue and silver glare rising off all the serrated edges.

She tried to explain that—He looks better in red—but no one heard her past the glare reflecting off the broken glass.

Not even Simon.

Horror and shock and terrible, crushing helplessness, all of it swirling around and through and inside him…but no fear. At least, not fear of her, which was enough for her to let him touch her and wash the blood from her mouth and guide her slowly to her room.

"Don't be mad," she pleaded with him when he wanted to leave her, needle and thread already prepared in his mind to mend the little bit of hope River had carved out in Jayne.

Simon stopped at the door, his back turned to her, his shoulders slumped just the slightest bit, and inside…inside, he was already double-checking everything to make sure it was all packed and ready to go, already pulling out maps and plans of where they might go from here, already trying to let go of the things he had grown to like, trying to hide away the crooked birthday cake and admiring glances from Kaylee and calm solace from Inara and friendship from Wash and the rare looks of approval he so treasured receiving from Mal. Shadows cloaked all the boxes she loved to look through when she remembered that she was River and yet found it hard to catch hold of her own memories.

"Don't be mad," she whispered again, curling in on herself, hating the blue tint to everything she looked at.

"I'm…I'm not mad, River." His shoulders dipped lower and he leaned his forehead against the door, his surgeon's hands empty and tense at his sides. She thought she had never seen him look so defeated before. "I just…I wish there was some way I could help you."

"The blue sun was burning a hole through him—I had to let it out!" she explained, a hint of desperation touching her voice, flavoring it with more seasoning than their food held. And then, in that moment, she couldn't read him, couldn't hear his voice whispering in her ear—not because the unnatural ability deserted her, but because she did not want to see what he was thinking, what he was feeling. His sorrow, his guilt, his self-reproach cut too deeply, left scars too deep, made an ocean of tears threaten to wipe away even the shards that were left of her.

"I know you didn't mean to hurt him," Simon said softly, turning to face her, making her flinch away, curled up in the corner of her bed against the wall. "But…but you did, and…and we may have to leave. Hopefully, it won't…" Something tugged at his voice, changing it, roughening it, and River flinched away. "Just stay here, River, okay? I'll be back in…in a while. Please don't leave the room."

"I won't," she whispered. But the sound of the door sliding open, of his steps taking him away from her, it left her sick and shaky and pricked with a thousand fiery needles. "Simon!" she called out, viciously biting back a whimper lest it upset the tenuous hold on coherency she so temporarily possessed. "Please…please don't be afraid of me."

He was there instantly, sitting on the edge of the bed, tugging at her until she fell forward into his arms, stiff and unwieldy and awkward yet anxious and eager. "Oh, mei-mei. I'm not afraid of you. We have to be careful, but this isn't your fault—this is what they did to you. And I promise, River, I promise you I'm going to fix this. I will—I'll find a way, no matter what it takes. You just…I just need you to trust me—just be patient with me. Okay? Can you do that?"

"I promise," she vowed, and hoped she would remember the vow long enough and often enough to see it fulfilled.

She'd promised him she'd trust him and so she laid back when he told her and faced her deepest terrors and let him infuse her body with physical sleep to match the sedation enforced on her abstract self, the River-that-had-been, the one still sleeping now, stirring only infrequently. He had vowed to fix her and if anyone could do it, River had no doubt but that it was Simon simply because he would never give up, never stop searching, never let her go. And she did trust him, had trusted him her entire life, that trust given worth and proven infinitely creditable when he'd walked straight into the heart of the evil blue-white-silver place and taken her away from them and their nightmares. It wasn't his fault that the nightmares had stowed away inside her and now tried to invade Serenity.

If she had been able to keep the thought long enough, she would have thought it ironic that it took the semblance of death to remind her just how much she wanted to live. Even in The Academy, when her sleep had been used as battlefields and her skin as a pincushion and her mind as an experiment, she had prayed not for death, but for Simon to come and save her. Even on Serenity, when there were days she did not even possess awareness of self and nights when she thought terror was the only emotion left to her and long hazy periods of time when she recognized no one except Simon—even then, she had never longed for death.

Yet, conversely, she had not really been fighting to live either, too entrenched in her despair and helplessness to think anything of the breaths she continued to take and the days she continued to sporadically see.

But then they came, followed her to this hospital where Jayne thought on all the Christmases he could have had with this kind of money and Simon gave life with a wave of his hand…and she actually remembered that she loved the sound of Kaylee's laughter when she talked to her like she was a real girl, and the way Mal would absentmindedly ruffle her hair when he thought no one else could see, and the coolness of Inara's fingers when they brushed the screams out of her head, and the deep calmness of Shepherd's presence, and the humor brought by Wash's teasing, and the sturdy safety inferred by Zoë's loyalty, and even the way Jayne would sometimes leap to their defense before he reminded himself of all the reasons not to.

And Simon.

Simon…he was here. And so were they. And this time, if they caught them, they wouldn't just leave Simon behind. They'd take him too, bring him with them back to the blue-white-silver place that haunted her steps and nights…or they would just kill him. Release the scream they carried in their pockets and let him fall to the floor, just another bundle of flesh and cloth, emptied of everything that made River love him, never able to save another life or quiet her nightmares or drive back the silence, just hollow materials that weren't Simon anymore.

River—his-River and broken-River—did love her life. She could see into Simon's head, see how he was adjusting, but she couldn't see into her own mind, hadn't realized that she wasn't packed and ready to go at all, that she had set up her own memories and expectations and was not ready to move them.

She didn't want to go back with them, and she couldn't stand to lose Simon.

So she ran. She pulled Simon after her and begged him to follow her, spilled warnings from her lips, pleaded voicelessly with him.

And he followed her.

He had always followed her, really, all through their lives, dogging her steps, either to keep her out of trouble or because she cajoled him, but always the reaction to her action.

But this time, there was more. She could feel it, hear it, taste it.

He trusted her, believed her, had faith in her. And if finding out that she could chase his nightmares away had been empowering, this…this was overwhelming. Incomprehensible. Cleansing.

He trusted her, followed her out of danger, out of that blue-white-silver place, and she led him away from the ones who came two by two, straight to the captain where there was safety. Led him back to Serenity.

And she trusted him, allowed him to slide more cool, burning liquids through her skin to the traceries of veins beneath…and he led his-River out of stasis, welcomed her home.

Two halves of one whole.

Simon and River.

-Firefly-