Work Text:
"JIGSAW PIECES"
A "Firefly" story
Written by Alison M. DOBELL
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It wasn't supposed to be like this. Running, hiding, not knowing who to trust or where to go for help. He hated the every day slide into practised deceit. The way he was turning his razor intellect to cut a whole new deal from the cloth of life that left him feeling more of a hollow man than survivor. Then he would look into his sister's eyes. His beautiful gifted sister and all the sacrifices were as nought. Only River mattered.
Silent in the world her damaged mind had conjured he watched her staring at images inside her head that he could not see. Some days were better than others and in the recovery stakes memory was as treacherous to her as another flick of the scapel that had merged fantasy and reality in her brain. She spoke to him in cryptic disjointed sentences. Gave clues that were often abstract in the extreme. It hurt him. More than gorram reavers he was pained by his parents' rejection of her and by extension himself. *Tianna* how could they just wash their hands of their own daughter? How could his father expect him to walk away when she needed him the most? For what? The power play of position and status that were the coin of the truly self absorbed *hundan* for whom the Alliance rose and set? It made him wonder just how the things he had taken for granted all his life had been paid for. Had other Rivers suffered a like fate to make the Tam Estate warm and snug, protected from the stark realities of truth by the exotic lies of privilege?
Simon sighed quietly to mask his unease. River turned restlessly in her sleep. He stretched forth a hand, unaware that he had even moved. Gently brushing the hair from her face until her nightmare stilled. Limbs acquiessent to his touch. In this 'verse of pain and terror he was her safe place. The rock on which all her fragile hopes were built. Serenity for now held them in her walls of thrumming steel. Her Captain and crew a makeshift family who carried them through the Black yet could not make them whole again. Nor help them unlearn the skill of the surgeon's knife blessed as they were by the mirror of its' aftermath walking among them. Trauma. This he lived with every day. This she endured, lurching from one new drug to the next. Simon trawling the Cortex for every new update on medical procedures and wonder cures.
Biting back a tear his heart felt the bitter coin of betrayal. His father's eyes flat and cold as he told him point blank that he would not come for him again. His mother trying to placate him with lies so thin you could read a paper through the tissue. Telling him River was fine, that one day he would turn around and there she would be so why worry? One single indomitable and sear fact engraved itself on his heart and mind. He loved his sister. A bond between them nothing in the 'verse could break. His parents had casually jettisoned any pretence to loving her. No burden of care did they carry. He and River were alone and it was time to nail the past in a box and fire it into the nearest sun.
A step sounded behind him. Not overly loud but with just enough weight deployed to tell him that the owner wanted to alert him to his presence. Odd how that step was no longer a threat. A challenge to their safety or freedom. Something to be feared not embraced. Funny how a few ascerbic or harsh words translated into a world of care that left him feeling even more keenly the hole in his heart where his parents had once been. Their ghosts exorcised in the measure of a few simple words. "How she doin'?"
He shrugged, not needing to turn to look at the Captain. "Some days are better than others."
Mal nodded. A look of fleeting sorrow softening his eyes as they rested on the girl then he was gone and Simon hugged himself. One day Simon would find a way to right what the Alliance doctors had done to her.
The Captain continued on to the bridge and relieved Wash, telling him to go to his wife. Get some sleep. Once alone he stared into the Black and remembered the first time he had set rutting eyes on River Tam. The young vulnerable girl curled naked and unconscious inside the box, echoing memories from his own past that he wanted to forget. But memories were treacherous things. It was why he was so patient with River. Understood the warped slide into chaos that greeted her daily. The pain of a thing that was broken. He sighed and for a time his mind emptied of all but grief. Only as the Black stilled his conscience and lulled him to the edge of sleep did images flash through his mind's eye.
Zoe had called them his misfits but Simon did not know the half of it. That Zoe was the biggest misfit of all. Only the Captain's presence kept all the broken pieces in place where they could function with a facsimile of 'normal'. It was how he understood River Tam so easily and why it scared the *diyu* out of him. Not afraid of what had been done to her so much as what she could do to them. Remembering sobered him quicker than a cold shower in sub zero temperatures. Some memories were best consigned to the past. But how long would it be before Top Three Per Cent figured it out? Jigsaw pieces yet they all fit together. Too bad the picture they made had no recognisable face.
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CHINESE GLOSSARY: (Mandarin - Pinyin)
*tianna* = oh God!
*hundan* = asshole/bastard
*diyu* = hell