Victor and River sat side by side in the metallic silver speeder. Cathy had said the previous owner, a man named Burgess was a "right bastard". She'd painted the gold heart on the hood herself.

Victor had set the autopilot toward Waypoint. The semi-desert landscape was blurring past, their passing occasionally startling small animals. Victor was talking, trying to engage River in conversation, but it wasn't working. He was beginning to regret his "ask the pretty girl to come along" plan. The awkward silence coming from the passenger seat was beginning to make his ears hurt.

"So..." Victor was saying. "Where you from?"

River said nothing.

"That's cool..." Victor said lamely. "I'm originally from Osiris. My dad was a plastic surgeon, but joined the Unification War. So we got moved out to Mai Long, this dingy little moon a few orbits out from Persephone."

River said nothing.

"Yeah, so... he died in the war. A lot of people did, really, so I guess it's not the most unusual story, but... you know... It's my story so... whatever."

River said nothing.

Victor could feel himself start to sweat. This girl was making him nervous. "Yeah, I tried to join the Space Forces like my brother... but I got in trouble... in basic."

River said nothing.

"I knuckle-punched my drill instructor in the throat. It was totally his fault. He was like...two inches from my face, just screaming about something." That story had to get a reaction. Sometimes it impressed people. Sometimes people were offended Victor would do something so heinous. Either way, that story always got a reaction.

River said nothing.

"Yeah-" Victor cleared his throat. "Uh... my brother got me a job with Securicorp. Solutions and...the rest is... history."

River said nothing. Either she was really uninterested in Victor, or she was way too interested in watching the ground speed by. Victor found each option a little sad.

"So.." Victor began. He briefly considered not talking anymore, but curiosity had the better of him. What would it take to get River to talk? "Your brother's a doctor... that means you went to a university, right?"

River finally reacted. Victor breathed a sigh of relief as River blinked and turned to face him. "No. I got accepted into the Academy."

Victor scanned his memory. "Academy... the Academy?" He grinned. "I tried to get in when I was little. My test scores were two percent too low. Also, my psych profile denoted a tendency toward violent and anti social behavior, which is a load of gossen if I've ever heard one." Victor had been disappointed at the time, but quickly got over it. "What was it like?"

"It..." River began, staring off into the distance again. She tried to remember. Normally she tried to block those memories out, but she knew pretending nothing had happened didn't help. A lot of her memories were unreliable anyway. There were fabrications and extractions to sift through, each one more real than the last.

As she tried to get her thoughts together, she began breathing in fast shallow breaths. Victor saw her eyes go wide and thought for a moment she looked like a rabbit caught in a trap.

"I can't... go back," River gasped. She was truly hyperventilating now. The extra oxygen in her brain lent strength to her budding hallucination. The dash to the airspeeder flickered. It was momentarily the one from the speeder her "teachers" used to transport her from class to class. Outside, the landscape kept changing. One moment: desert. The next: dark sky's over a city.

"River," Victor said, concerned. The girl looked like she was having trouble. River looked to her left again. This time she saw two people. Victor and a teacher. They were right on top of each other, but River could see both of them clearly. "It's all right," they both said. "Just breath slow."

"Another experiment?!" River shrieked, terrified. She began yanking repeatedly on her door handle. It wouldn't open while the speeder was in motion. "No!"

The man/men sitting next to her said something that she didn't hear over the sound of her own beating heart.

"Yeah, if you want to stop, I can, but the autopilot's on and we're moving kind of fast so I don't think-" Victor cut short as River tried to jump from the moving speeder.

River was in two speeders at this point: one real and one not. She'd lost track of which was which and decided to take advantage of one of the vehicles' structural weaknesses: it had no roof.

"Run. Run. Run!" she told herself. Propping one foot up on the side of the door she made a leap for freedom.

Victor remembered what happened next in perfect clarity. Torn between disengaging the autopilot and helping River, his body took over. Diving across the cabin, he grabbed a handful of skirt and spandex shorts, fingernails cutting into River's back . River weighed less than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Victor weighed over two-thirty, last he checked. Not giving River a chance to react, he pulled hard on her dress, snatching her from the air.

Victor had a long history of laughing at inappropriate or stressful moments. It had given him no shortage of enemies, but he couldn't have stopped himself even if he wanted to. When he yanked on River's clothes, she changed directions so suddenly all he could think of was a small, yappy dog running to the end of it's leash only to get spun around at the last second. Add that to the sound of ripping skirt and the flash of pale butt cheeks as River's shorts stretched out like a rubber band, and Victor began laughing like a mad man.

Uttering a cry that sounded like "Blerg!", River found herself being sucked back into her prison transport(s). Now laying on her back with her legs handing out the window, she heard her captor laughing and realized the whole thing had been a trick. There'd never been a chance for her to escape that way. Spitting a colorful curse in Chinese (Victor later recalled hearing "shit brained son of a goat humper") she spun around. Now that her feet were facing the inside of the cabin, she could fight. Kicking out with both feet, she connected solidly with the laughing man's head. While he was still recoiling from her fist kick, she kicked the control yoke of the speeder forward.

"Holy fuck," Victor sputtered as he realized what was happening. The vehicle's speed was set. The kick to the yoke had sent the speeder into a nose dive.

"If I'm going down, you're going down with me," River snarled.

Victor barely pulled up on the control yoke in time to keep the speeder in one piece. Even so, the speeder bounced off the ground bottom first and skipped like a rock. On the first skip, Victor and River were ejected from the vehicle. The speeder shut down and slid to a stop. As he fell from the sky with River, he had time to think Why did they make a speeder with no safety harness?

The fall was a little over ten feet and into soft sand, sparing either of the crashees serious injury. It still hurt though. A lot.

Victor pulled himself to his feet. A lifetime of fighting had taught him to never stay down. "Why?" was all he could get out before River kicked her feet up. Her whole body followed the motion of her boots in an "S" shape before her momentum landed her on her feet. Without looking to see if her captor was in pursuit, she sprinted for the speeder, torn dress streaming out behind her, barely holding on by the sleeves. River was going to use the very means of her capture to escape.

Victor went from being confused to enraged. He was beyond being sensitive to what ever River had wrong with her at this point. She'd just tried to kill him. Twice. In Victor's mind, that was a "no, no". Determined to stop her, he broke into his own sprint. Being nearly two feet taller and having trained for years at chasing people down, he caught up with her. Despite his "advantages", it still took every ounce of strength just to close the distance.

"River, stop!" he shouted. River did no such thing and for a moment Victor was glad. Even if she had stopped, he probably wouldn't have. Now that the distance between them was close, Victor snatched at River again. This time, he caught a handful of her hair.

Pulling hard toward himself, he briefly had an image of her whole scalp popping off in a bloody mess. The idea didn't make him hold back though. He was still too angry.

Fortunately, the integrity of River's scalp held. Roaring wordlessly, Victor slammed River to the ground, knocking the air and fight out of her.

Moving a safe distance away from the gasping girl, Victor shouted "What the hell is wrong with you, woman?!" Later, he'd feel bad about that.

River lay on her back gasping and twitching. Victor's first thought was that he'd injured her spinal cord. When he heard what she was trying to say, he realized the twitches were probably from excess adrenaline.

"S...S...Sorry," she stammered around her hitching breath. She seemed to be convulsing.

"Sit up," Victor snapped, stepping closer. "You're turning pale. If you don't calm down, you may go into shock and pass out." His adrenaline and pulse rate was up as well. The difference was he preferred it that way. It made him feel alive. "Come on" he said, stepping behind River. He propped her up in the sitting position, using his legs as a back rest. "No blood, no foul. We're both okay. Just breath," he said in what was meant to be a soothing voice.

Truth be told, Victor didn't know if they were stranded. The speeder may have been totalled. Also his neck was killing him. He'd rolled with the "double face kick of fury" as best he could, but it still hurt like hell. Insensitive and angry as he was, Victor knew better than to tell these things to a mental patient having a psychotic episode.

Tears were streaming out of River's face now. Victor heard her whisper something like "girl not a monster" before she began trying to speak between sobs.

"Can you (hic) get my (hic) bag?"

"Are you going to run away?"

River shook her head and Victor trusted she was telling the truth.

Striding to the speeder, he shook his head. He knew he should have come alone. He looked off into the distance. It was almost midday and he could see Waypoint from where he was standing. Retrieving River's leather satchel and returning, he pondered how long it would take to walk if the speeder didn't turn back on.

Walking back to River, who's back was turned, he began laughing quietly. Her dress was split from the bottom up to the collar. He had a mental image of her trying to walk around town like that. In his head, she looked ridiculous, not sad.

"You're purse, my lady," he said, handing River her satchel.

"What's so funny?" River asked as Victor continued to chuckle.

"I'm sorry, it's just... you look like you just survived a bad rape attempt."

River's eyes went wide with surprise and disgust as she struggled to undo the belt on her satchel. "That's not funny!" she snapped.

Victor took a seat in front of River. He had his normal grin fixed on his face. "Babe, you just kicked me in the face so hard I fell out of the sky. Trust me: everything is funny right now." Seeing how much trouble River was having with her satchel (or more accurately, her shaky hands) he took the satchel from her and opened it. "What are we looking for?"

River removed a prefilled syringe-and-needle as well as a small alcohol wipe in a paper wrapper. "It's a tranquilizer and anti-anxiety med blend... for just such an emergency." She placed the med supplies on the lap of what could theoretically be called her "dress" and retrieved a blue, rubber pressure band from her bag. "Simon can't fix what they did to me at the Academy, but he said we could manage the side effects."

"What do you mean?" Victor asked. Seeing how much trouble she was having, he tied the pressure band himself. When her veins distended, he wiped one clean and administered the dose. He even knew to take off the pressure band before pushing the plunger on the syringe. Then, he stabbed the needle face down in the dirt on the remote chance someone might step on it.

"How do you know how to do that?" River asked.

"Job requirement," Victor said. He held River's arm in one hand with his thumb over the injection site to prevent it from bleeding. River noticed his grip went all the way around to the point where his forefinger was resting on top of his thumb, lending to the pressure. "In my line of work, everyone was required to know some emergency medicine. I was the only one on my team to show any real aptitude, so I got an actual paramedic's license and everything."

"Mal, Zoe, and Jayne were paramedics once," River said, relaxing as the drugs began to take effect. "They had do kill me and Simon, but Jayne brought us back to life so Simon could look at my brain."

"Indeed," Victor said, dismissing what River said as post-paranoia ranting. "What were you saying before about what the Academy did?"

"The Academy was a front for a psychic assassin training program. Part of the training involved cutting into my brain and putting the training directly into my mind. Since it was all experimental, Simon has no way of knowing exactly what was done to me or how to fix it."

Victor froze, staring at River. His grin faded. He waited a moment, fully expecting River to say she was joking. When he realized she was serious and cognizant, he spoke. "Dude... that's pretty fucked up."

"Indeed," River said, making fun of Victor. They both smiled at that one.

"Look," Victor started. "I'm sorry I asked you to come with me. I didn't know it was going to cause you problems. I probably should have listened to your brother-"

River grabbed Victor's coat sleeve. "Don't tell him, please," she said suddenly.

"Huh?" Victor asked, confused.

"He thinks I'm better than I am," she explained. "I'm doing good, but sometimes..."

"Sometimes not so much," Victor finished. He tried to run his hands through his hair, forgetting he had a ponytail these days. "Look, babe... If you're still doing this bad, maybe telling the doctor is a good idea-"

River began shaking Victor's arm and looked like she was about to start crying again. "No! He's already done everything he can. I'm doing better, but you can't tell him, please!"

Victor took her hand off his coat and held it in both of his. An onlooker might have taken it as a romantic gesture. Victor was more concerned with having his arm shaken off. "I'll keep it to myself, okay? Just relax, babe."

"Stop calling me that," River said.

"Yes, ma'am," Victor said without missing a beat. "If you can stand, I'll see what I can do about fixing your dress. Then we can check the speeder."

"Okay," River said standing. Victor took a roll of duct tape out of his coat and set about taping the back of River's dress closed.

"You keep duct tape in your coat?" River asked, holding her hair up out of the way.

"I keep everything in my coat. I'm like Batman," Victor said, finishing up with River's dress.

"Who?" River asked.

"Earth That Was legend," Victor said, dismissively. At his company, he'd always been given a hard time for his passion for old movies. "Ask me sometime and I'll show you the movies."

"How do I look?" River asked in regard to Victor's handiwork.

"Like a pretty girl in a seriously messed up dress," Victor said, cheerfully.

"Great," River moaned.

"Fear not kind lady!" Victor declared sounding like an actor on a stage. "For I have... a plan!"

River turned and clasped her hands together beneath her chin, playing along. "Whatever could your amazing plan be, Mr. Prince?" She batted her eyes and pretended to resist swooning.

"I plan to..." Victor began pinwheeling his arms in a bad kung fu drill. When he stopped, one hand was pointed towards Waypoint. "Take you shopping!"

I spite of herself, River laughed. Victor had a way of making everything seem less serious. His energy was infectious, too. It was as if the Captain were a professional entertainer. As miserable as River felt, she was surprised that she was looking forward to something as simple as getting a new dress.