Prompt #26- Broken

River stared down at her hands, twisted in her lap and in the centre of her pretty dress. She'd worn it specially this morning and had even tried to tame her hair into something a little less robust than its usual rats nest.

She'd tried so hard to make herself look pretty like Kaylee or Inara.

It obviously hadn't worked.

"Attentiveness to personal appearance is futile," she muttered to herself. "Girl can't be girl when the knowledge is lost. Not lost. Never had. Mother wouldn't teach to play with hair and make red face. Why paint a brain?"

River bit her lip and dragged a hand through her hair. "Mistakes. Erroneous supposition that the male wanted a painted doll. Not a gorram doll. Attractiveness is chemical synapses misfiring into subdural hemisphere. Pheromones and noxious open pores of brain juice. That's all love is … brain juice."

She giggled to herself and then looked around quickly to make sure that no one was listening. They tended to feel uneasy when she let herself slip back into the lyrical nonsense that made up the majority of her brain's processes. They had no idea of the sheer effort that went into making herself even semi-coherent.

She tried to tell Simon that she was broken, like a smashed pot, and no matter how much glue you put on it, no matter how you covered the cracks in the pottery, it was still broken and would always be.

She tried to cover the cracks, but underneath she was destroyed and could never forget it.

Except she had. For a few moments in Jayne's arms she had forgotten that she could calculate the exact velocity it would take to puncture a hole in someone's chest with a pencil. She forgot that she was one of the most dangerous things in the verse and, for a few precious moments, River, the assassin, mei mei, screwed up misfit and genius, was just an ordinary girl.

Jayne had made her feel that.

And now Jayne had made her feel broken again.

She swiped at her face and cursed the tear that rolled down her cheek.

"How exceptionally asinine to be … leaking over a—" she stopped.

Her chest was hurting and her eyes stung.

"Bear." She finished quietly. "Carnivorous quadruped in the family Ursidae of the order of carnivore."

"Carni-who?" Mal asked, wandering in. He had a huge smile on his face as he looked down at her. He had just had what was possibly the best nights' sleep he had had since before the Independent's War and it was thanks to this little girl sitting here in her very pretty dress.

He grinned. "You are looking mighty fine today River."

"Chemical synapses firing randomly," she said glumly. "The colour runs because the vessel is broken. Water runs out and all that's left is an empty shell."

Silence.

"Huh?" Mal gave a baffled laugh. "Girl, you ain't making any kind of sense."

"Don't want to try today," she said fiercely and, for the first time, Mal saw the traces of years on her face.

"Hey, hey, hey, now, Li'l albatross, what's got a pretty girl looking like her birthday's done been cancelled?"

He knelt down and looked up into her sad eyes. "Now that there is a travesty. It just about breaks my heart to see big eyes that sad. I mean seriously—there could be tears."

River found the corners of her mouth turning up at the Captains silliness.

He grinned at being able to make her smile. "I am damn good."

"Captain is ridiculous," she pointed out and pushed her hair behind her ear.

"Yeah, that ain't no kind of secret. Now tell the ridiculous ol' Captain what caused the resident mei mei to be so sad."

River shrugged. "Misconceptions and broken ideals, culminating in destruction of esteem and disproportionate disenchantment."

"Can we have that in Captain dummy speak? I ain't a jen duh sh tyen tsai, unlike you."

"Genius?" River wrinkled her nose. "Pretty brain? Not a girl. She dressed up in pretty clothes and did her hair like gorram doll but he …"

"He?" Mal blinked. There was a he here?

River nodded, too miserable to keep it to herself. "He made her feel broken again."

Mal's temper started to rise. "He who, he what? What did the he do? Who he?" His mind raced. She'd be mad at Simon but would take matters into her own hands by throwing things at him. She wouldn't have spoken to Mal if he'd been the 'he' which left …

"Jayne?" He swore. "What did Jayne do? Do we need to be having an airlock talk again?"

River gave him a small smile. "No. She made a mistake."

"A mistake with Jayne?"

"He saw a girl and she was a girl with Jayne and then when she tried to be a girl he didn't see her anymore." River looked up at him. "Did she do wrong?"

Mal looked at the heart-broken expression on her face and his hands clenched into fists as he thought about the huge man-shaped liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh ur-tze. If that man-ape gone wrong had hurt little River in any way—scratch that—if he'd touched little River in any way, he was in for more than a world of pain.

He stood up, his fullest height and took a deep breath.

"What. Did. He. Do?"