Title: Darkness Underneath
Author: knightshade
Rating: PG
Summary: Simon's bothered by River's threat.
Author Notes: This was written for the River challenge at the LiveJournal community fffriday.
Thank you so much to jebbypal and pheral for beta reading.
This takes place after Trash.
And no, they aren't mine -- they belong to Joss.
Darkness Underneath
I can kill you with my brain.
Simon pinched the bridge of his nose and looked up from the medical journals and articles that he had been poring over. Why did that one statement bother him so much? It wasn't that different from so many of the other outlandish things River said.
He glanced at the scans he had taken of her brain while they were on Ariel. The way they had sliced her brain into disjointed fragments, it quite frankly amazed Simon that River was able to think anything even semi-coherent, let alone communicate. Yet somehow this particular fragment of an idea was eating away at his peace of mind.
True, it was probably just an idle threat. But River did have a history of violence when it came to Jayne -- not that he didn't deserve it. And Simon had to admit that her one sentence threat would have far more effect on Jayne than his own civilized, 'treat me as you would be treated' argument. Threats and violence were concepts Jayne understood – not trust and loyalty. So maybe she had just used his fear of her to protect them in a way that would be effective. Or maybe it was simply River-speak and what she meant was that she was smarter than Jayne and would be able to think of a clever way to do him harm, despite his size and strength.
But somehow he didn't think so.
And that's why it bothered him so much. It just made too much sense. And that turned his blood cold.
All along there had been one overriding question occupying his mind. Why? True he had been sidetracked with learning what they had done for a while, but he never strayed far from wondering why. What purpose was there in taking the brightest minds in the universe and dissecting them? At first he had thought that maybe it was some sick way of trying to find out what made a genius tick. But that didn't make sense. There were plenty of non-destructive ways to study the nature of intelligence.
So what were they after? What were they trying to accomplish? Simon had of course noticed how River knew things that she couldn't possibly have a way of knowing. He had tried to dismiss it as delusions that were vague enough to appear right from time to time, or maybe just that she was more sensitive to her surroundings than most people. After seeing the scans, there was a logic to the latter assumption. They had cut out River's ability to control her thoughts and feelings. Everything ran wild in her mind. All sensory input had equal footing. Maybe the people who had done this to her had determined that in taking away the brain's natural ability to filter out information, their subjects became more observant. In most people, information that the brain deemed unimportant was immediately discarded without being consciously processed, but not in River's case.
The ability to notice things that would be invisible to most others would be very useful to the Alliance or whoever else. If River could see and even remember that sort of information, it would make her a perfect spy. Well, except for the instability, of course.
But what if it went further than that? What if they weren't trying to create perfect spies, but perfect weapons? It made Simon ill to think of someone turning River into a creature meant to harm others. But by cutting out her inhibitions and controls, maybe they were really trying to separate the human from the conscience. What if they were creating an all Id that they could somehow control? And there were more insidious ideas that crossed his mind on nights like this too. What if River was being literal in a way that only appeared figurative? There were certainly plenty of things about the human mind and it's capabilities that were still a mystery. What if someone was fishing around to find out what else was possible?
He shook his head. That was the stuff of nightmares. It was ridiculous to spend time worrying about it.
As if on cue, River poked her head around the door, the same way she had when she had threatened Jayne.
"He only comes if you're sleeping," she said earnestly.
Sometimes Simon envied the freedom the rest of the crew had to simply dismiss the things she said, to dismiss her. But there was no way he could do that – he loved her too much.
"Who?" Simon asked, trying to read between the lines. "Who only comes if you're sleeping?"
But she had stepped into the doorway and was starring at him, her eyes big and lost.
"River?"
Slowly she tilted her head to one side and stared off at a point somewhere over his head, like she was listening to something. The corners of her mouth curled into a dreamy half-smile. "Innocence. Beauty." She said the words slowly, as though reading them off a sign. Then her face clouded over and her head lolled down so that she was staring at her boots, her hair falling in front of her face. "Darkness underneath."
Simon stared at her dumbfounded, filled with an inexplicable dread. What was she trying to tell him?
He shook his head slightly to try to ward away the feeling. He was in too morose a mood tonight to try to interpret his sister's cryptic musings. "River, why don't you get ready for bed. I'll be done here in a minute."
She lifted her head and stared at him, the Lost Little Girl look filling her eyes with emptiness. Then she smiled sadly. "Minute. A unit of time consisting of 60 seconds," she said in a forlorn sing-song and then slipped away from the doorway. "60,000 milliseconds, 60,000,000 microseconds, 60,000,000,000 nanoseconds . . ."
Her voice trailed off with her footsteps as she disappeared down the corridor.
Simon had to remind himself to breath. He stared down at the monitor displaying River's brain scan, meaning to turn it off, but he hesitated, caught by the ugliness in the images of her mangled brain. This was all the stuff of nightmares. How could he ever separate the real horrors from those that were only imagined?
It was not a question for tonight. Simon hit the button and the monitor powered down with a staticy hiss. He paused at the door to the infirmary, listening to his sister's fading voice, and then headed out into the corridor, slowly following River's meandering path.
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- knightshade
- December 22, 2004