A/N: This chapter is a little different... the mirror/parallel version will be posted in a new chapter as soon as I work out the kinks. Thanks for following so far! Reviews are love :)
River was utterly crazy until the moment she wasn't. Doctor Tam had read every paper he could find on brainwashing and torture and trauma while planning her rescue, so he thought he knew what to expect. Disorientation, personality changes, triggers, nightmares, disillusions, maladaptive habits, addiction, panic attacks… he was a doctor: he would handle it. He'd seen it all before when he was working at the hospital, after all.
Simon had never been so wrong.
River was nothing like she'd been Before. She recognized him… sometimes. It was difficult to convince her to eat anything, and she despised her old favorite foods. She no longer found their inside jokes funny. The most random thing could be a trigger for a panic attack one day, but the next she would be utterly indifferent to it. She was still brilliant, maybe even more so, but she was so abstract and disconnected that her logic was all but impossible to follow.
River was completely insane… until she wasn't.
All days were bad days, but some days were less bad. Some days River would skip and run and dance and play and generally act like any happy little girl. Sometimes she'd even keep up the illusion of normality for hours at a time. But something always happened. One of her completely erratic triggers would set off a panic attack, or the medication would make her sick and shaky, or she'd just shut down and stare into space for the next four hours.
Simon remembered the days when River would curl herself under his arm and explain the poetry from the Earth-That-Was. Sometimes she'd speak in nothing but iambic pentameter or limericks for days. She'd write and perform fantastic plays on the spot. Now she would mutter nonsense to herself and interject confusing commentary into unrelated conversations. Her incoherent ramblings now were a poor mockery of her earlier artistic wit.
Simon remembered the days when River first came home from the hospital, all rosy cheeks and big eyes and chubby fingers. She'd rarely cried then, and she'd started sleeping through the night almost immediately. Simon hadn't realized at the time what a blessing that had been. He certainly was paying for it now: River rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time unless she was heavily medicated. When she woke, she'd scream and cry inconsolably. Simon would hold her helplessly while she rambled inarticulately for hours about the horrors her unconscious mind had dredged up.
What had been done to her… he couldn't even imagine. The fact that doctors and surgeons - people trained to heal, people supposedly bound by the same oaths he had taken, possibly people he'd even gone to school with - had done this made it even worse. Every medication he tried that made her sick, every blood sample he took from her arm that made her wince, every scan he took of her brain that made her shudder… Simon didn't want to be a doctor anymore, if all he could do was cause his beloved sister even more pain. He was her big brother. He was supposed to be able to protect her, to comfort her.
Nothing he did seemed to make any difference at all. He grew to hate the tantalizing glimpses of what his sister used to be, the moments of lucidity that took his breath away with her sheer brilliance. The Academy had stolen this from her, from the 'Verse. And every time that brilliance slipped away it was his fault for not being able to fix what had been done. Simon almost preferred it when she was crazy, because then he didn't have to remember what she used to be like Before and face his guilt and grief that the River-that-Was was lost forever.