CHAPTER TWO

Mal counted people as River and Zoe ushered them through the cargo bay doors, and the final count came to eighty-four. Eighty-four men, women, and a few children that had just been saved from lives of slavery.

"Nice job," he told River. She looked at him quickly, something flickering in her eyes so fast that he couldn't make out the expression. "You all right? Your hand's bleedin'."

River curled her hand into a fist. "It's nothing."

"Well, why don't you bandage that 'nothing' and then get to flyin' us back to Triumph. We'll drop these folks off and pick up Jayne's sorry ass."

River gave the barest nod and wove her way through the crowd in the cargo bay. Mal watched her head up the stairs, and then turned back to help Zoe try to keep the people calm and somewhat organized.

Within an hour, they had unloaded all of their grateful passengers onto Triumph and roused Jayne enough to get him on Serenity. Glad that the ordeal was over with, and that they'd actually come out on top for once, he ordered a course set for Persephone. River disappeared into the cockpit without a word—in fact, Mal realized, other than telling him her injured finger was nothing, she hadn't said anything since boarding Serenity. Considering he didn't really know what she had dealt with on the slavers' ship, he thought it might be best to have a word with her now that things were quiet.

Once they were out of atmo, he went to the cockpit, but River had set the ship on autopilot and wasn't there. He did a quick search of her usual haunts—she wasn't on the catwalks, not in the kitchen or the common room, and not in her bedroom in the passenger quarters. He'd offered her a room in the crew quarters with all of the rest of them a long time ago, but she had turned him down.

He was a mite concerned then, but when River wanted to hide, she could do it pretty damn well. She knew the ship as well as he did, and she could also tell when he was coming, so she had the advantage there. And the fact that she was hiding meant that she likely didn't want to talk, so he figured he might just need to wait till she emerged.

However, when River didn't surface for lunch or dinner, Mal got truly worried. After Zoe and a hung-over Jayne had retired for the night, Mal made another sweep of the ship, and found that the door to her room was shut, where it had been open earlier. He tapped on it. "River." There was no reply, and Mal wondered if she'd fallen asleep. "River? You in there?"

"No." River's voice was muffled.

Mal smiled. "Fine. You decent?"

A heavy sigh met his ears, and River muttered, "Yes."

Mal slid the door to the side, and saw that she was crouched on the bed, her back pressed into the corner where the walls met. He stepped into the room and approached, setting a plate with several rolls on it beside her. "You missed dinner. Should be eatin'; you're bitty enough as it is."

"I wasn't hungry," River replied, her eyes flickering from the rolls to Mal's face and then settling on her bedspread. She ran her hand over it, picking at a loose thread. "Still not hungry."

Mal sat awkwardly on the edge of her bed.

"You want to know what's wrong."

To his surprise and further concern, her voice trembled, and he realized that there were tears in her eyes. He reached out and wiped a tear off her cheek, only then feeling how cold her skin was. "Suo-you de dou shi-dang, River—" He snatched a blanket from the bottom of the bed and draped it over her huddled form. "Brain like yours, you'd think you'd have sense enough not to freeze."

"Intellect and sense don't always go hand in hand," River whispered, but it was a ghost of her usual humor.

"Might be right, but you got better sense," Mal said. "Honest, though, sweetheart. Why're you in here all by your lonesome? Somethin' happen on that ship you ain't said?" He was wondering, honestly, if she might've killed someone. It was the only thing he could figure might explain her mood.

River shook her head silently, several more tears sliding down her cheeks. "It's not what you think. I didn't kill anyone."

"Then what?"

River turned her eyes back on Mal, and they were dark and haunted. She licked her lips nervously and stretched a hand toward Mal, but faltered, leaving her hand hanging mid-air. Mal met her halfway and took her cold hand between both of his. "I—" Her voice faltered, and then strengthened. "Darkness everywhere. Minds clouded with it, dark, heavy, unforgiving. Dragging me down and drowning me in a sea of corruption."

Mal knew River had to be especially frazzled, if she was starting to talk riddles. Fortunately for him, he was familiar with dialogue of all sorts from her, and thought he had an inkling what she meant. "You been round bad men before," he said quietly.

"Not like this. It was different. Like the Reavers, but conscious. Reavers are what they were made, instinct and madness, but these men walked paths of their own choosing. They chose it. I've been in darkness before, but I don't know…" Her breath hitched, the tears washing steadily down her face now. "I don't understand what could make a man like that." She bowed her head, her tears dripping off her nose and onto her blanket.

Mal sighed and rested one of his hands on the crown of her head, the other still holding her hand. "Can't rightly say I understand it any better, River. Some people just turn out that way."

"They did it for money, but not just for money. They liked what they did." Her voice took on a fierce tone. "I wanted to kill them, Mal. They were all inside my head and I wanted them dead."

Mal tried to figure out what to say. The fact that River had wanted to kill anyone was no small admission. She'd killed before, when triggers in her brain made her, and later to save them all from Reavers, but since that time, he hadn't seen her kill a single soul. Fact was, she hated what the Alliance had tried to make her, and the only reason she used their teaching at all was to keep the people she loved safe. He could only imagine some of the things she might've seen in the slavers' minds, if she was admitting to wishing them dead.

"Not just the slavers' minds," she said. She shivered and her hand tightened convulsively in Mal's. "Some of those people will be forever traumatized by it. They don't have the strength of will to move on."

Mal ran his hand over her hair. "Life's hard sometimes. Not everyone's got the courage to face it. I think us on this boat know that more'n some."

River gave a slight nod and closed her eyes. Mal waited a moment, but she didn't seem inclined to say anything more, so he gave her hand a quick pat and released it. "You try and get some rest. You need anythin', you know where to find me." He tucked the blanket snuggly around her shoulders and left her room, sliding the door shut behind him. She had seen some awful things in her lifetime, and had survived far, far worse, so he had little doubt that with some time, those fresh thoughts in her brain would settle a bit and she'd move on.

:-:-:

It soon became apparent that it wasn't going to happen quickly. The last time Mal had seen River anything like this had been when she'd been dealing with the Parliament and Blue Sun battling over the Academy, around a year and a half back. Then, she'd come face-to-face with the dead bodies of some of the 'students' there, and it had taken her quite some time to recover from that. Hell, it'd taken Mal quite some time to recover from the gruesome sights he saw in that place, and he'd had fair more than one nasty dream about what things might've been done to River at the Academy.

River was very quiet and distracted the next few days. Mal found her twice in Simon and Kaylee's bunk, curled up with Simon's pillow. Her brother had always been there to comfort her, and Mal supposed that River was getting comfort where she could. He also noticed her taking one of the meds that Simon had left for her. She still had to take medicine occasionally, when she felt her brain was particularly muddled. No matter how much she had healed, the fact remained that her brain had been changed, and sometimes she needed drugs to stabilize it. But she hadn't taken meds in a while, and it was just another thing that told Mal she wasn't at the top of her game at the moment.

It would have helped if Simon, Kaylee, and their little daughter Ren had been on board. Simon could've probably helped better than Mal, and Kaylee would've just been there to comfort River. And Ren, whose mind River had always found so peaceful despite her very loud vocals, would've lent some soothing to River. It was altogether too quiet without the other Tams around, and Mal started to contemplate calling Simon and Kaylee about coming back early.

River, however, caught that thought from him one day while they were in the cockpit—River staring at the stars and Mal sending a wave to confirm his meeting with Badger the following morning—and quite firmly told him, "No." She said it with more strength than she'd said anything the past days. "Kaylee's parents haven't seen them since Ren was two months old. They deserve some time with her family."

Mal turned and placed his hands on River's console, leaning over it to stare directly at her eyes. "You ain't well."

One eyebrow rose and she copied his inflections. "Ain't really been well for a while."

Mal let out an impatient breath. "You know what I meant."

River waved one hand dismissively, not really focusing her eyes on him. "I'm all right, Mal."

"River, I've seen you in every state most can imagine, and this ain't your 'all right' state."

River looked at him directly now, almost impatiently. "You don't know what's going on in my head, Mal."

"No, but seems you get plenty of looks in mine," Mal replied, standing up and crossing his arms. "So seein' as I can't peek into your brain, why don't you tell me what's goin' through it? 'Cause, River—"

"I want to help them."

Mal paused, suddenly a little confused and a lot wary. "Help who?"

"The slaves." River stood to her feet and faced Mal. "I've been thinking and thinking. I can't do anything but think about it. About what I saw. It's in my head all day, all night. Cries, pleas, voices begging for help."

Mal'd had quite a lot of experience with River's psychic abilities, and the way the 'voices' of the dead or the hurt could stay in her head for long periods of time. He understood it, in his own way. He'd heard the dead in his head for months after the battle of Serenity Valley. The screams of the dying, the injured. River had lived through her own personal Serenity Valley during her years at the Academy, and when things like this happened, she revisited it. He thought that besides Zoe, he was probably the only person that could understand that about River. The only difference between him and Zoe was that Zoe lived in the here and now, and forced her way onto the future, while Mal—well, he'd always had a tendency to sink into the past.

So he stood there looking at River, and he knew what she meant. Knew, in a way, how she must be feeling. But still, he really didn't like the direction this conversation was headed. Didn't take psychic abilities to see where River was going. "River, you already helped them people."

"Only a small part. A section of the whole."

"There's always gonna be slavers in this 'verse, darlin', and nothin' you do is gonna change that."

"I don't want to change all of it, Mal," River replied desperately. "This, this I might be able to fix. This isn't random. I saw, in their minds. I saw. This isn't random slavers picking off people; this is the slave ring that the authorities have been after. Someone's running it. Someone's getting rich off of this." She started pacing back and forth in front of her console, arms pinned across her chest. "I saw where they were going. The drop point, on Cassia—it's probably been changed now that the Alliance picked up the slavers on Triumph, but there was a drop point. I can—"

Mal moved around the console and took her shoulders, stopping her pacing. "River," he said firmly. "We got a job. We gotta meet with Badger tomorrow morn and transport cargo to Greenleaf. This job'll take a few days to finish, and I need your head in the game."

River's jaw tightened, and she studied him with a sad, almost lost look in her eyes that made Mal want to look away, if only because it tugged at him in a way that had become increasingly familiar of late, for reasons he refused to contemplate. But she only nodded once, slowly. "All right," she said softly.

Mal was a little surprised that she had agreed, just like that. Not that River wasn't generally agreeable, but he had expected to have to do a bit more convincing. He nodded in return, grateful to escape a big ordeal. "All right, then."

:-:-:

Later that night, River again lay curled up in Simon and Kaylee's bunk, wishing that they were here, that Simon could hold her and try to chase her nightmares away. Not that he had ever been able to, but he had tried, her knight in shining armor always wanting to rescue her. River wished she could be rescued now.

Simon's pillow smelled comfortingly like him, and Kaylee's flowery scent was faintly there, too. River held it close and stared at her niece's crib on the other side of the tiny room, but her mind was elsewhere. Back on that ship, with the voices screaming and crying and despairing in her mind.

River knew Mal was coming before she even heard the hatch open. She squeezed her eyes shut and quickly wiped her remaining tears away, trying to compose herself. The truth was, she wanted to do something so badly to help shut down this horrible slaving ring, but she hadn't argued with Mal about it. He was the captain, she was the crew. She might not always agree with everything he did, but she had long chosen to follow under his command, and really, Jayne was mutinous enough for everyone.

"River." River forced herself to focus on Mal, standing at the bottom of the ladder. He watched her for a moment, then sighed. "Fancy havin' a chat?"

River squished Simon's pillow against her stomach and wrapped her arms around it. "All right." Mal's thoughts were muddled, a little confused. He sighed again and ran a hand over his face.

"Been thinkin' 'bout what you were wantin' to do." Mal's gaze turned a little sharper. "You really think you got any chance of trackin' this thing to its root?"

River's eyes widened. "I…I can't say for sure," she admitted. "It might be a dead end now, what I saw in the slavers' minds. But…I have more of a chance than anyone else."

Mal motioned to her, his thoughts—can't believe I'm even considerin' this—very clear now. "Why don't you come on and we'll talk some more. 'Cause if this is gonna be on the table at all, we're gonna talk details."

Despite all of her precognition and all of her insight, this was the last thing River had expected Mal to say, and she quickly followed him up the ladder and into the cockpit, while he continued, "We still got this job to do, so we do that and then we'll look into this drop point you saw on Cassia—it ain't but a day's flight from Greenleaf. A few days longer ain't gonna make much difference if it's already moved, and even if it did, this job's gotta get done."

One realization was clear. He was offering to do this for her. There was no money in it, nothing to make it worth his while, except that she wanted to do it. Needed to do it.

River had always loved Mal, ever since she was lucid enough to understand what he had done for her and Simon, all the incredible—and almost insane, sometimes—lengths he had gone to in order to ensure their safety. She knew she would be in Alliance hands, tortured and twisted, a shell of herself, if it wasn't for this man. River didn't stay on Serenity out of gratitude or because she felt she owed Mal something. She stayed because this was her home. Her family. She stayed because Mal had long earned her loyalty. Because—because she loved him. Had loved him for quite some time, and it was more than just love for her captain.

For some reason, she had always thought that falling in love would be different. Like being hit with a bolt of lightning, but it wasn't. It was just…there, a bright, sunny patch in her heart and mind. It had grown there so slowly and surely that now it was not a huge, ground-shaking epiphany, but a deep, quiet ache of longing, one that was impossible to hide from, given that some idiot doctors had stripped her ability to hide from any emotion. When she had first begun to realize it, not so long ago, she hadn't been sure if it was something she was experiencing, or something she was picking up from someone else. Sometimes she was unsure about which was which. However, it hadn't taken long before she knew without a doubt that this was all her.

Still, River had made an effort to at least make a pretense of ignoring it, because honestly, it scared her. It amazed her and thrilled her and frightened her to death, and right now, as he talked about doing something just for her, it was staring her dead in the face, and it wasn't just being a quiet ache. It was more like it had suddenly decided to start screaming in her ear. She couldn't say anything to Mal; he had never shown any outward sign that he might ever regard her in that way, and River hadn't picked up anything particular in his thoughts about it. She didn't want to risk their friendship. She couldn't lose his approval. It meant too much to her. But it was so hard, especially right then, to keep quiet.

Mal must have realized something was wrong, because he stopped talking—River wasn't even sure what he had been saying at that point—and turned concerned regard on her. "River? You all right?"

River took an involuntary step backward, as if moving away from Mal would lessen the sudden intensity of her longing. The cold metal of the floor pressed into her feet, normally a comforting sensation, but now, the cold seemed to seep upward through her body, freezing her to the deck. And still she stared at Mal, who took a step forward and put a hand on her arm. "River?"

River sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes locked on Mal's, a swirl of thoughts crossing her mind, most of them hers. What could she say? 'Thank you' seemed insufficient, and 'I love you, take me I'm yours' was a bit extreme. She knew he loved her, but because she was family, a member of his crew. Right?

"River." Mal repeated her name, trying to get her attention, but she was still frozen, staring at him, her skin burning where Mal touched her arm, the only warm part of her body. He was close, so close, peering down at her with worry in his face.

"I-I'm all right," she managed to stammer. She quickly stepped back again, out of his reach, turning away from him and taking a deep, steadying breath, trying to force her thoughts back into some semblance of sense. Logic, however, did not quiet her suddenly-loud feelings, so when Mal said, "It's late. Why don't you go on and get some sleep, and we'll talk this over with Zoe and Jayne in the mornin'," she was more than happy to hurry away to her bedroom.

With that in her head, on top of the voices of the slaves gamboling through her brain, she had a horrible night's sleep. By the following morning, however, at least the screaming-loud feelings for Mal had settled back down to the quiet simmer they had been before, so when Mal called over the intercom to bring everyone to the dining area, her stomach only leapt halfway to her throat at the sound of his voice. Actually seeing him, however, made the butterflies start dancing in her stomach, and she sat tensely on a chair beside Zoe, her hands clasped firmly in her lap, not allowing any of her stray thoughts to betray her on her face.

Mal quickly told Zoe and Jayne the plan to swing by Cassia after their drop at Greenleaf in an attempt to see if River could pick up anything about the gorramed slave ring. Their reactions were quite predictable. Jayne complained loudly about the fact that there "ain't no payin' involved" and demanded to know why they were doing it for no pay. Mal just gave him the "because I'm the captain" spiel. Zoe just shot Mal a quick look, one eyebrow going up a bit. She looked quickly between Mal and River, but refrained from saying anything.

Shortly thereafter, they landed on Persephone. Mal left River in charge of the ship while he, Jayne, and Zoe went to their rendezvous with Badger. He gave her a stern look and told her, "Now, don't you go hitchin' no rides nowhere while I'm gone. We'll get to Cassia soon enough."

One corner of River's mouth twitched up in a smile. Mal didn't really believe she would leave. It was funny to her how often people said what they didn't mean. Or how often they didn't say what they meant. Maybe because they, too, were scared that their world would flip on its axis and they would go falling, falling out of control and be lost forever.

"Don't worry," she said softly, as he passed her on the ramp. She watched him walk away with Jayne and Zoe, sighing to herself. "I'm not going anywhere."