Disclaimer: I don't own Firefly.

Prompt #13: Miranda - The word haunted her, and she didn't know what it meant.

Words: 554

She didn't mean to. She never does.

But the man was so loud. His brain couldn't stop shouting.

Why does he want to talk about Miranda now?

Nothing odd, but something about it tugged at River's brain. The word itself. It sounded like a secret.

But her brain hurt already from the latest round of tests and stripping, so she let it go.

Two weeks, five days, fifteen hours, and seventeen minutes later (she's hyperaware of the passage of time lately, another side effect of her 'training') she hears the name again. This time, it was from a man with general's clusters on his shoulders and government ID on his lapel.

I can't believe they want to discuss Miranda again. What's done is done.

That name again. River twitched as broken images of a great, silent city flashed through her mind like a slideshow. Thousands upon thousands of people laying on the ground, in their beds, at their chairs, in the street. Everyone was laying down, but nobody was getting back up.

They had to get up. They had to. They have to -

"GET UP!" she screamed to the still bodies.

Her monitor blared an alarm.

The silence hurt even worse than the needles in her arms and brain, because eventually they took the needles away. The silence never went away.

A silence even louder than the screams of her fellow Academy classmates.

River couldn't handle the silence. She started looking around, seeking out other minds. Their chatter, their secrets, their lies filled her mind until the silence was all but forgotten.

Then the councilman came. He was a stuffy man, puffed up and important to everyone and to himself. He was preoccupied as the scientist showed River off. Tired and sleepy, River couldn't shut off his thoughts from her mind.

Damn those Reavers. Should obliterate the whole fleet of them.

River couldn't stop the scream. Now a different noise raged in her mind, twisted and cut up and wrong, wrong, wrong. They yelled and roared with the voices of the silent people, but they couldn't stop the silence. Nothing could stop the silence.

She screamed again, loud enough to make the nearby nurses cover their ears. She screamed loud and long and hard, trying to drown out all the noise and silence in her own mind. She screamed for what seemed like forever. Even when they sedated her, she kept screaming.

When she woke up, she only said one thing. "Get up."

They never understood why.

Miranda.

It echoed around her head, a secret and a lie and a truth all wrapped in one.

Miranda.

Dead people began haunting her dreams. Sleeping corpses. Screaming corpses. Ships that floated through space and trailed death in their wake.

Miranda.

She heard it all the time. Even when Simon brought her out of the laboratory. Even when the resistance arranged for her to be cryo-frozen for shipment. Even when the lid of the unit closed and the cryo-gas filled her lungs, she heard it.

Miranda

Then there was only darkness and silence. She floated amid nothingness, deaf and dumb and blind. She slept without dreams.

Until the unit was ripped open and light and sound returned.

Then all she heard were the screams.

Something I remember from Serenity when the Operative talked about top brass being in the same room as a psychic. This spawned from that.

Review please!