A/N: I'm alive! Hah. Sorry about the huge delay, ladies and menfolk, and thank you for your patience. Writer's block is an awful thing, when combined with the end of the semester and the holidays. Catching the flu, however, seems to be a cure although I don't recommend it.

The Christmas Special, "Voyage of the Damned" was fantastic, though in my opinion a bit over the top in places. (It's obvious that Russel T. Davies grew up on such fare as "The Poseidon Adventure".) It can, I understand, be seen in several parts on YouTube. It's certainly worth a watch. :D Me, I'm on a MacGyver kick at the moment.

Doctor Quote of the Day: "It's a good thing your tribe never developed guns; they'd have woken with a start one morning and wiped themselves out." --The Fourth Doctor, "Image of Fendahl"

Firefly Quote of the Day:

Mal: Gotta say, doctor, your talent for alienatin' folk is near miraculous.
Simon: Yes, I'm very proud. --Mal and Simon, "Safe"

"And in the fury of this darkest hour
I will be your light
A lifetime for this destiny
For I am Winterborn
And in this moment...
I will not run, it is my place to stand."
–The Cruxshadows, "Winterborn"

Mal blinked, feeling dust gritty in his eyes. He knew this place. In some ways, he'd never really left it. Around him fires burned, lighting up the night, their roar mingling with the shouts of men and the sound of gunfire, the familiar tian fuhn di fu of war. A dull howl made him look up, in time to see a skiff wheel overhead. He knew that skiff; he'd shot it down his own self nearly a decade ago.

"Juh shi shuh mo go dohng shee?" he demanded of the sky.

"I thought, Captain Reynolds, that you could use some reminding."

He whirled to see Vharaj standing several yards away, his arms clasped before him and shoulders tucked in a manner that made him look all the more birdlike. "What the hell is going on here?" he demanded. "What is this?"

Vharaj tilted his head, eyes widening. "Surely you recognize where you are?"

Mal's eyes narrowed. "You know damn well I do," he growled. He looked around again. Despite the noise around them, he saw no one else. "This is in my head, ain't it?"

"Of course," said Vharaj, inclining his head.

"Get out," snapped Mal. "Get the hell outta my head."

"No."

With a low snarl, Mal hurled himself toward the creature, closing the space between them in long, angry strides. But Vharaj flickered and was no longer there. Mal stumbled, caught himself. Gritty earth bit into his palms. For being in his head, it felt gorram real. He spun around and spotted the Moksha standing atop a jumbled pile of rock some twenty feet away.

"The Battle of Serenity Valley," said the alien. "I've studied this civilization's history. This battle...it was a fierce one."

"You have no idea," Mal said coldly.

The alien cocked one bright eye at him. "Oh, I think I do. I, too, watched my hopes crumble in fire and dust, Malcolm Reynolds. I know exactly how it felt."

"Then it's damn clear you didn't learn much."

"Didn't I? I don't want to see something like this repeated." Vharaj gestured around them. "And it will happen again. You know it will. The Alliance will seek to bring the border worlds more tightly under their control, and war will erupt again."

"Explain to me, then, just how turnin' a lot of Reavers loose is any different?" Mal folded his arms. "Carnage is carnage. At least here the folk weren't puppets dancin' on a string."

"I'm certain you are familiar with the concept of a preemptive strike, Captain. A single, hard strike at the heart of the Alliance will cripple them, shatter their foundations."

Mal let out a shout of bitter laughter. "You really believe that luh suh? I suppose that's what McKinney thinks, ain't it. The Alliance is gorram huge, bird-man. They got fleets spread out all over Core space, and more'n enough out here on the Rim. Even if your monsters took Londinium..." He broke off, and drew a sharp breath. "Ai yah tien ah. You're gonna hold the world hostage. A whole gorram world."

The alien's features arranged themselves into something like a smile. "You are a great deal smarter than you let on, Captain Reynolds. I'm impressed."

"Yeah, I'm a picture of brains," he snarled. "And you think that's gonna work? You think the Alliance won't firebomb Londinium rather than let you hold it ransom?"

"Since the government is on the planet, I imagine they will be interested in preserving their lives and those of their families from a horrific fate. All they have to do is surrender control of the government."

Mal snorted. "You really are some kinda ai chr jze se duh fohn diang gho ain't ya? That's a plot out of some gorram holo-comic. It's stupid."

"They will comply," said the alien. "Because you are going to convince them to. You are a very persuasive man, Malcolm Reynolds. As the symbol and figurehead of the new Independent faction...they will listen to you."

"Like hell they will. Like hell I am. You ain't gonna get me to cooperate. Not while I'm upright and breathin'."

"Oh, I think you will. You really haven't got any choice in the matter. You can choose to help us willingly, or I will...change your mind for you."

Mal froze. "You go neong yung duh. Get away from me!"

The alien's eyes glittered. "It's too late for that, Captain. I'm already in your head. Will you submit? Or will you drive me to force?"

Sudden agony drove Mal to his knees. His mental knees, but he suspected he was on his knees in the real world, too. "I've been tortured before, you freak," he grated. "And you can't break someone who's already been broken."

"Oh...you might be surprised. One last chance, Captain. Will you help us?"

"Not so much."

"Very well. Then let us begin."

Simon had heard the term 'heart in throat' before, but had never really understood what people meant by it. Over the past few rocky years, on the run with his sister, he'd become closely acquainted with stomach-twisting terror, with utter panic, and–particularly since he'd met the captain–with blind fury. Now, watching a man he knew to be an alien kneeling over his psychic sister, cradling her face in his hands, head bowed and skin gone as ghostly pale as her own, doing something within her mind that he could not begin to comprehend or even imagine...he thought that the lump of terror, suspicion, and breathtaking hope in his throat might just be his heart, crawled out of its usual place in his chest.

Kaylee stood beside him, clinging to his arm, watching the silent figures on the floor of the Zero Room, her expressive face showing every nuance of anxiety and hope she, too, felt. Simon still felt no small amount of wonder, that this bright, brilliant girl had not only handed him her heart, but included his strange, frightening sister in her love as well. He frequently felt that the universe had handed him an undeserved gift, one that might be snatched away at any moment, or that he, in his clumsy way, might shatter unintentionally. And yet no matter how often he infuriated the little mechanic, she always forgave him. It was so unlike his parents' polite, cool marriage, so like most of the high-society contracts he'd encountered, that he felt as though he'd been dropped into a tangled wilderness, blinded and without a guide.

Inara stood on his other side, and he realized that he had, at some point, grabbed hold of her hand. She hadn't protested, and he felt her fingers clasped tightly around his own. She was hardly old enough to be his mother–and yet, the comfort he felt now, holding her hand, reminded him of the rare occasions when he'd been very small and his own mother had shed her society mask long enough to show something warm and tender toward him. Strange to think of the glamorous Companion in that light, and yet... Zoe stood on the other side of the small ring that surrounded River and the Doctor, her face grim and stern and largely cold, though her hands cradled her belly in a way Simon had come to recognize as worry for one of the crew. She, too, woke in him a similar mother-comfort in Simon at this moment. Jayne slouched against the wall not far from her, doing his best to look disinterested, but failing to hide either his superstitious fear of the unknown events happening here, or even a faint concern for River herself. (Which, considering that River had once slashed him open with a kitchen knife, beaten him unconscious, and generally went out of her way to creepify the big mercenary, was saying something.)

Slight movement refocused the young surgeon's attention on his sister and the man attempting to (Simon hoped) help her. The Doctor's thick, crooked eyebrows had snapped together into a single dark line. He was nearly as pale now as he had been when Inara had brought him bleeding onto the ship; the freckles spattering his nose and cheeks seemed to glow against the bloodless backdrop of his skin. River's face remained serene, still as–he hated to think it–death.

Finally the Doctor spoke, breaking the silence that had stretched–had it only been a few minutes? It felt like years, to Simon. "You've had some cowboys in here, my girl," he growled. His lip curled back into a snarl, and his eyes opened, blazing furiously. Color flooded back into his face "If I everget my hands on the lot that did this to you, I'll make them sorry the Universe everbirthed their molecules." Then he took a deep breath, and the anger smoothed out of his face. "But that doesn't matter so much to you, does it? Let's see what we can do about this wide-open brain of yours, shall we?" And his eyes drifted shut once more, the color draining again from his narrow features.

"D'you think he can help her?" whispered Kaylee. "I mean, d'you think he can make her better?"

Simon didn't answer. He didn't have one. Part of him hoped desperately that the Doctor could help his sister, make her better. Restore her to what she had been, before the Academy.

And yet...

Was that what River herself wanted? Without the terrible burden of Miranda burning up her mind, she'd seemed more at peace with her new strangeness. And her abilities had, without doubt, been more than useful.

God, I sound like Mal. 'Useful' indeed.

The silence stretched. Even the sound of their breathing seemed swallowed up in the odd embrace of the Zero Room. Simon's arm was growing numb from Kaylee's grip, but he made no effort to shift it. Zoe's hands were pale-knuckled where they clutched her abdomen. Simon had the sensation that something of great weight hung in the air, though he could not say what it might be.

Finally, the Doctor sighed and sat back on his heels, pulling his hands away from River's face. River's eyes blinked open and she sat up. They remained frozen that way for a long moment, the girl and the Time Lord, holding one another's gaze. Something passed between them, and then River gave a curt nod and climbed to her feet. She turned to Simon. "Well?" she demanded, sounding for all the world as though they'd all been standing around wasting time. "Let's go."

"River!" Simon pulled himself free of Kaylee and Inara and darted to her, grasping her shoulders. "You're all right?"

"Of course I am." She raised her eyebrows at him. "For now, anyway." She looked around at the others and smiled luminously. "Family," She said. She looked back at Simon. "He wants to talk to you. Alone."

Simon blinked, and looked around. The Doctor was smiling his manic grin and herding the rest of the crew out the door, babbling over their protests with his usual light-speed stream of inanity. And, surprisingly, they went. For all his apparent silliness, the Doctor possessed an ability to command that rivaled Mal's steel-laced authority.

River left the room last of all, still looking oddly serene and frighteningly normal. The Doctor stuck his head out into the corridor–presumably to discourage lingerers–then, apparently satisfied, turned to Simon. "Go on, then," he said.

"Whathappened? What–what did you see? What did you do?"

The Doctor held up a finger. "Let's get one thing very clear, right now. Your sister's mind is hers, and hers alone, and what's in it belongs to her. She graciously–and very bravely–allowed me into it. What I saw and witnessed in there is a confidence I will not betray. Anyway, trying to describe the mind of a sentient being is impossible, even for me. As to what happened and what I did...well, that's complicated. The truth is, I didn't do much."

Simon frowned. "You just said it was complicated."

"Because it is," insisted the Doctor. He burst into movement then, incapable of any more stillness, striding toward Simon and sweeping him up in his wake. They left the Zero Room for the green-gold glow of the strange ship's corridors. "How much do you know about what those–those–" his mouth twisted in disgust "–cretins, though calling them that is an insult to cretins everywhere, did to your sister's brain?"

"They cut into it," said Simon tightly. "And they stripped the part of her brain that–"

"–allows her to filter out sensory and emotional input," finished the Doctor. "Butchers," he growled. "They make Vlad the Impaler look like a gentleman. Actually," he added, looking distant, "Vlad wasn't such a bad chap. Bit psychotic, and really big on brutal forms of capital punishment, but polite as hell once you got on his good side. It was staying on his good side that was the problem...Anyway," he shook himself, "they were trying to produce a psychic, yes?"

"Yes. I didn't think it was possible, until I saw what River could do." Simon shook his head. "It was like waking up in a science fiction novel."

The Doctor cocked an eyebrow. "You live in a spaceship," he said.

Simon glared at him. "And now I'm talking to an alien. And my sister really is a psychic."

"Yes, well..." The other man cleared his throat and looked away. "Let me tell you something about psychic ability, Simon Tam. It is, mostly, science fiction. Hardly any races out there ever have or ever will develop true mental powers. Oh, sure, you get the occasional freak of DNA, and you get the sort of clairvoyant or poor beleaguered soul who helps policemen find bodies, but even most of them are really only extremely intuitive and only borderline psychic. But–and this is important–every sentient race in the Universe has thepotential to become psychic. It's the genetic code, as it were. The brains of sentient beings are enormously complex. Even human brains. But the vast majority of 'em never use more than a fraction of their own brains' potential. There's not more than four or five races in all of Time who ever came even close to accessing their brains' full abilities. My people were one of them–and we only achieved our sort of psychic ability through the use of bio-technology and thousands of years of research and experimentation."

"You mean like what was done to River."

The Doctor opened his mouth as if to protest, but hesitated. "You know, that's not impossible," he said. "What was done to her...itdoes seem like the sort of jumping off point some over-ambitious Gallifreyan scientist might have come up with." He sighed. "I wish I could say that my people did it properly, and on willing subjects, but probably not. The truth is, my people were hardly ever the benevolent gods we wanted the rest of the Universe to see us as."

Simon raised his eyebrows. It was impossible not to get sidetracked in conversations with this man; he dropped so many fascinating asides. "Is that how you view yourself? A benevolent god?" He didn't bother to hide the incredulity in his voice.

"Can we leave my ego out of this conversation? Thank you. Back to yoursister. The point I was trying to reach–and aren't points hard to get to?–is that she, like ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the beings in this Universe is not nor ever should have been psychic. But the potential existed, nonetheless, lying dormant in her brain and emerging as things like intuition or insight. Possibly even one of her children or grandchildren would have become one of those borderline psychics, I don't know."

He sighed, and rubbed a hand over his hair. "Enter your meddling governmental scientist-goons. They decided they want a psychic, and so they approach it in a typically ham-handed and brutal manner: they stripped her brain, denied her the ability to filter out the world when it became too much. It's no wonder she became unstable. Add to that all the other lovely little tortures they put her through..." The Doctor's teeth bared briefly. "I expect most of the other children they did this to really did shatter into nothing. But your River...her mind," his voice softened with wonder. "I've met many of humanity's best and brightest–and worst and brightest, too–but I've almostneverseen a mind like your sister's. Such brilliance. She should have been the bright star of your system. Of your galaxy. Possibly of the whole human universe. And they broke it. Broke her." His eyes glittered for a moment–with tears or rage, Simon wasn't certain. "Anyway. What they did to her made her, in essence, a physical psychic. All that input–sights, sounds, smells, touch, even taste–flooding into her brain in a tidal wave. A single mind couldn't hope to cope with that much data all at once. But her mind, the mind of a genius...A genius's mind is wired differently from other people's, walking a very fine line between brilliance and insanity. I ought to know; I am a genius. Your sister, being something of a genius's genius, coped the only way she could."

"She became a real psychic," said Simon.

"That she did. But because of the physical damage done to her brain, she was stripped of even the basic mental shields that all creatures of higher brain-function possess. She had no way to shut out either the physical input, or, as her brain rewired itself, the mental. As far as I can tell, she's learned to cope somewhat. Or at least, she's learned to cope now that she hasn't got the secret of Miranda torturing her." He caught Simon's look. "Yes, your captain told me about that incident." His eyes flashed again–definitely anger this time. "One of these days, I'm going to have to make the time to pay that Academy a little visit."

Simon frowned. "It's been tried, or so the contacts I made when I rescued River told me. They just pop up again elsewhere."

The Doctor's grin was savage. "Oh, they won't pop up again ever after they've met me, I promise you." He sniffed. "But that is not our concern at the moment." He stopped, and stepped around to face Simon. "I've constructed her some temporary shields, as much as she would allow me. She didn't want to lose all her access to her abilities, not, as she informed me, so long as the captain is in need of rescue. But it's only a temporary stopgap, Simon. Her limbic system is physically damaged, and wants treatment. That's where you come in." His eyes held Simon's, searching him. "Your sister told me that you're an extremely gifted surgeon."

Simon nodded. "I am, particularly with trauma surgery. Though next to my sister, I'm an idiot."

"I expect that the majority of the universe is an idiot next to your sister," said the Doctor, smiling faintly. "Possibly even me. How are you with neuro-surgery?"

Simon gulped. "Um..."

"Can you do it?"

"With time and–and study. But Doctor, I'm not about to just start cutting on my sister's brain–"

"I'm not suggesting you do any such thing. But I can give you information, Simon Tam. Not a procedure, because I'm not that kind of a Doctor and I don't use scalpels to help people. But the TARDIS's databanks are vast, and they span not only the civilizations of the universe, but also it's past, present, and future. I can give you everything I've got in my ship's libraries regarding neurological research, as well as psychic trauma and psychic phenomenon dealing with humans and near-humans. Including," he swallowed, and his eyes flickered away from Simons' briefly, "my own people's research."

Simon felt his jaw drop. "Are–are you serious? That's–that's–"

"–interference on a grand scale," said the Doctor, "and if my people were still around I'd be in trouble like you couldn't believe. But..." He ran a hand through his hair–leaving it standing on end, as usual–and sighed. "I'm not even sure I should be doing this. But I promised River that I would do my very best to help her, and I mean to keep that promise as best I can." He fixed Simon with a penetrating stare. "And it means that I'm going to place an awful lot of trust in you, Simon Tam. And it comes with a price."

"What–what sort of price?"

"I'd settle for, oh, your firstborn child–I'm kidding," he added hastily, smiling at the expression on Simon's face. Then he sobered again. "What I'll ask is very nearly as hard, though. I don't even know if you'll be able to make use of the information I give you. If you're clever enough, and patient enough, you might be able to do something with it. But the information goes no further than you and, I suppose by default, your sister and the crew of Serenity. And if you develop a procedure to help your sister, then you are under an obligation to help any others like her that you come across." He held up a hand to forestall Simon's comment. "I'm not telling you that you have to go out and rescue every single one of them yourself. Serenity hasn't got those kind of resources, and while I don't doubt the idea would appeal to Malcolm Reynolds' heroic side, his pragmatic side would probably have a few rude things to say about it. And I won't argue with it; I know you have to survive out here." He grinned. "Not everyone can do what I do every day. But you are obligated, my young friend, to help those who need it should you find them. And any procedure you develop to assist them is to be used only for that purpose, and none other. I want your word on that, Simon Tam, a solemn promise that you'll do as I ask."

Simon swallowed, hard. "I promise," he said softly. "I wouldn't do otherwise," he added.

The Doctor eyed him thoughtfully. "No," he said. "I don't think you would. I think I can trust you. Mind you," he added. "I ought to warn you that the Universe seems to be very big on karmic rebound, so if you do break your promise to me, well...expect to see me again. The TARDIS will make sure of that. And there won't be a second chance."

Simon believed him. There was something very cold and very, very sincere in the Doctor's dark eyes as he said this. He nodded.

"Good, then." The Doctor beamed at him. "Once your captain is safe and sound, I'll pass over the data." He turned, and opened a door that Simon was almost certain hadn't been there a moment before. Beyond lay the console room. Simon blinked. "Now, let's see what we can do about saving Mal, shall we?"

"I suppose you have a plan?" asked Simon, only a little dryly, as they entered the room. The others were waiting there, and they all turned as he spoke.

The Doctor grinned. "You bet I do. I'm going to surrender."

Chinese Translations:

tian fuhn di fu: pandemonium

Juh shi shuh mo go dohng shee?: What the hell is this crap?

luh suh: crap

Ai yah tien ah: merciless hell

ai chr jze se duh fohn diang gho: crazy dog in love with its own feces

go neong yung duh: son of a bitch