fic: The Cure for A Bolt Action Heart
Fandom: SPN/Firefly mash-up AU
Pairing: w/incest.
Rating: PG, nothing to hurt the virgin eyes. Except for, you know, the above.
Spoilers: None for SPN, same old same old for Firefly.
Summary: Mal comes back from his sale with platinum in his pocket and a pair of dirty stragglers tagging along behind him like lost dogs.
Notes: This was supposed to be more priest-fic. Unfortunately, said priest-fic has been delayed by a week due to unforeseen circumstances. So I wrote these 3700-odd words to hold up my end of the bargain. Also, I stole the pretentious title from a band that specializes in pretentious titles, so I feel a minimum of guilt on that front.
Simon was sitting out on the loading ramp when they strolled up. He'd been reading an out-of-date medical text and feeling pretty glad to be out, sweating under a yellow sun like a real human being again.
Behind him, perched in the shadow of the cargo bay, Jayne was counting out his pennies on an empty container, audibly trying to figger whether his cut of the stolen Alliance-grade terraform fertilizer sales would cover the cost of the good knife he'd lost gambling with Wash. He had another, second-best knife out for the process, and some of his littler guns. Jayne hadn't badgered the Captain to let him go along on the sale like Zoe had, but Simon suspected that he'd chosen his place at the airlock with a mind to watching for trouble nonetheless.
Zoe was more obvious. She stood still halfway down the ramp, just within Simon's peripheral vision, scanning the long brown horizon in half-inch increments, and keeping an eye on the faint-hearted bustle of the tiny frontier town a half click off. She was wearing her guns, too.
None of them every really expected things to go smoothly anymore. All they really wanted here on this dustbowl rock was the platinum that would buy them some real food for the trip back to the core planets, rather than the godawful protein supplements they'd been slurping for the past couple weeks. Anything more would be an unwarranted grace. Especially if Mal came back not-shot, at a casual pace, with the platinum in his pocket and a smile on his face.
Which he did, excepting the last bit. Instead he scowled, said “Got us some passengers to Greenleaf,” and tossed the bag of currency to Zoe for safekeeping as he thudded up the ramp.
Zoe gave him the eye, and Simon stood up - politely - with his text half-closed in his hand. Jayne perked up from the bay like a lazy guard dog. “Sure as hell hope you're bringing your own damn dinner,” he told the men who'd stopped at the bottom of the ramp.
“Jayne, go with Zoe to pick up supplies. Enough for everyone.” Mal went straight into the ship, wet with sweat and grimacing unpleasant enough to silence even Kaylee, who smiled at him anyway and dropped down the steps to sidle up behind Simon and ogle the guests.
“Your Cap'n said something about a medic?” said one of them. He was the taller one, dirty hair over his eyes and a cramped slouch in his shoulders that betrayed something hurting deep in his ribs. He was dressed in the same drabs and leathers as his friend, and he squinted up at them like maybe he should still be asking permission to board.
“Simon ain't no medic,” protested Kaylee, “He's a first-class surgeon straight outta Capital City. You got something wrong he'll set it straight faster'n quick, better than it was to start.”
“Oh yeah?” The shorter, dirtier one started stumping up the ramp, and Zoe turned to give Jayne a little shove to remind him to start moving on those orders. “I don't need no surgery, just need someone to mend up this bastard gash,” the man walked with a strong lean, hand clamped against the join at thigh and hip. No blood on his clothes, but the other one moved to help him like they'd already seen enough of it to last.
Simon stepped forward, put his hand out to a shoulder. “We'll take a look at it,” he said, and got a tight look and a shrug for his troubles.
He led the wounded one to the examination table, and asked Kaylee in a murmur to go check up on River, let her know about the passengers, so she wouldn't fret.
The tall one hovered on the other side of the table as Simon peeled back trousers to get a decent look at the cut. Shallow and probably a few days old, for all that it wasn't clotting all that well. There was a stink of infection, the flesh around it was red and hot to the touch. For all his snapping, the injured man seemed too infuriated by the pain to mind the embarrassment of having his slacks rucked down around his knees, a towelette covering his nethers.
“What did this?” asked Simon, straightening and pulling forward the trolley with his antiseptics and bandages.
“Bar fight,” growled the one on the table.
Simon glanced at the tall one, who gave a sheepish shrug and nodded.
“I don't think so,” Focused and intent, Simon set about cleaning the cut of debris, careful to manage around what clots had formed.
“You calling us liars, Doc?” the dirty one leaned up and got pushed right back down.
“Yes. What did you say your names were, again?” Simon's well-bred politics always faded in the med bay, where professionalism was worth lives and platitudes were as bad for your health as outright lies.
“I'm Sam, he's Dean,” said the standing one, putting a hand on his companion's arm as the first sting of the astringent lanced upwards, releasing a gasped curse.
“And you were present when this happened?”
“Yessir,” Sam had his chin down, watching Simon's actions closely. His fingers strayed to the bare brown skin of the other's wrist, rubbing circles through the dirt and grease there.
“So you tell me if I'm right, here.” Simon kept on swabbing, “I'd say this was a knife, a big one, like a machete or a meat cleaver. And I'd say the business end was coated in something rotten. Like the fluids from a week-old corpse, or human excrement. And I'd also say that there's only so many souls in the 'verse keep corpses around to that end.” He let his eyes flicker up to scan both their faces. “You ran into a Reaver. No doubt about it.”
Dean let a loose laugh run out of his throat, and Sam gave another one of his docile shrugs, like maybe he'd thought the encounter hadn't been worth mentioning.
“Alright,” Simon finished his swabbing and taped a clean bandage over the wound. It wasn't any of his business, never mind that they'd somehow survived with mental faculties intact. He'd let them keep their secrets. “It's too infected for dermal mending - we'd just trap everything under the surface, get you gangrene - so you keep from jostling it for a few days, keep applying the antiseptic twice daily, and I'll fix it up when we know for sure that the wound's clean.” He patted Dean's forearm, turned to tidy up his tray. “You could probably put your pants back on.”
--
The run from the badland planets out along the edge of the black down to Asphar Landing on Greenleaf took a good three weeks along the back routes, and Mal dawdled quite a bit along the way. Inara had asked for two months on Greenleaf, and Simon got the distinct impression Mal planned on being late to pick her up.
They stopped a few more times on the border worlds, sales calls to ranchers and farmers looking to improve their lots with the high-quality fertilizer normally horded by the government-paid terraform engineers in the core. Between Jayne's moaning about Mal's piss-poor haggling skills, and the way Zoe kept stone silent on the topic, Simon knew that they'd barely be breaking even on this run. Maybe the fare their passengers had coughed up would somehow bump them up out of the red, but every time Mal took protein bars or spare parts as payment, the likelihood of even that diminished.
For their part, the fares kept quiet about themselves. Simon would occasionally wake up to hushed bickering coming from the bunk they shared, or choked hisses of pain as Sam applied antiseptic to Dean's healing gash. The wound itself stopped fussing pretty quick, and he limped around Serenity like a bored house cat, nosing into other people's business and eating scraps of food left in the open and seeming endlessly pleased with Jayne, who'd first tried to pick a fight and then got friendly when Dean voiced his admiration for the new knife.
They spent a lot of time at the table in the galley, talking guns and fightin' while the rest of the crew drifted in and out. Simon especially tried to avoid the galley then, given as he always ended up the butt of some joke or another. He'd grit his teeth and go about his business while Kaylee giggled into her hand and River laughed in soaring delight.
It was during one of those long middays that Simon was holed up in the med bay, fiddling with a low-grade subdermal scanner in the hopes he might modify it to read cracked bone and torn ligament more exactingly. Bring it up to par with the tools he used to work with on Osiris, was his hope. He was testing and recording and adjusting and testing when Sam inched into the room, quiet as River ever was.
He stood watching, silent, and Simon let him. He was using his left wrist as a test subject, because he'd snapped it in a clean break when he was thirteen, and the fracture line should've still been visible, though it wasn't, not yet.
“I didn't know River was your sister,” Sam eventually volunteered, leaning against the door frame.
Simon looked up, genuinely surprised, a little wary. Bounties were just as valuable out here at the edge of civilization as they were in the core, sometimes more so. But Sam didn't look triumphant, or predatory. Just curious. “Really? I would've thought it was pretty obvious.”
“Now that I look back, yeah.” Sam slouched forward a bit, thumbs hooked around his suspenders, eyes straying over the work in Simon's hands. “You'd do anything for her, that's obvious.”
Simon gave his own shrug, looked back down at his instruments. Tried not to think about what he'd done, what he might have to, and gladly.
“That's how Dean is, too.” Sam's tone was almost wistful, a lazy tune examining the facts of the universe as a whole. “It's funny, how much you grate on each other. You're very similar.”
“He's your brother?” Simon finished his adjustments, wiped his hands on his thighs, looked at the viewscreen again. Nothing. It made sense, brothers, though at first glance he'd assumed their relationship was something more.
“Yes.” Sam paused, “I know you mind me asking, but what happened to River - blue hands, right?”
Simon looked up, terror and astonishment whipping through him. His voice was glacial slow compared to his thoughts. He said simply: “What do you know?”
Sam shook his head, raised his hands, “No, nothing. Just stories. Special kids. Taken. We don't know anything more than you do. Probably less. I mean, you're the doctor.”
Simon stood staring, waiting for more, heart tearing itself apart in his chest as Sam's quiet smile turned inward on itself, deferential. Then he reached across and adjusted the screen on the scanner, murmuring, “You altered the wavelength and depth, but the monitor needs be compensated for the additional interference. It's just the contrast means you can't see it.”
There, in green and white, Simon looked at the healed hairline crack in his own arm, and Sam slid back out the door.
--
After that it was easy to see how Sam could speak in River's own language, quick and low cadences that echoed unmoored in time or place. They would laugh together, even when Jayne was making his most serious threats, and Dean looked ready to tear a hole in the bulkhead. And it was Sam who could also turn, with a crumpled face and a spasm in his voice that he could barely control, to explain the joke to Kaylee so that she and Wash were laughing too, until Jayne's face got dark as thunderheads.
At night, Simon would give River her injection and kiss her on the forehead, and then linger in the corridor between paper-thin walls, listening for a clue, listening for anything besides the matched, steady breathing that rolled out from the brothers' bunk. Nothing.
Except later in the night, after the meds had woken her and sent her roaming the ship in search of her tormenting ghosts, River would slink to Simon's bed and kiss him on his forehead. It would barely even wake him from his standardly coma-like sleep, at least, not until she'd made a nest out of his limbs and placed her frigid toes on his bare calves and fallen asleep there with him, making tiny jealous noises in her throat and shifting restlessly in a way that bespoke the rocking of a tiny boat in a great ocean.
Then one night in particular River woke screaming nonsense, her shrieks rousing the rest of them in the passenger cabins. Reverend Book came in upon them in a panic, and observed Simon's bare chest, his position looming over her with the blankets thrown back over their entangling legs, with a terrible lack of judgement. Simon stroked her hair, murmured sweet things as Book hung back. But River refused to be gentled, instead swinging bare feet onto the metal grate floors and half-dragging, half-pushing them through the corridors toward the cockpit, training her urgent, ineloquent warnings on them like it might convince them to move faster.
Everyone was there already. Wash only just now awake and in the pilot's seat. Dean strapped into the co-pilot's like he'd been born there. And Sam leaning over Wash, murmuring suggestions in a low voice, pointing out a route of likely escape on the plotter.
Simon stood bewildered until Kaylee turned away from the view with her hand over her mouth and he noticed, finally, the small band of Reaver ships. Floating silent specks in the distant black, they were recognizable only by the insistent wail emerging from the radiological alarm. Everyone, even Mal, stood stricken like deer.
Except for the brothers. Dean was busy at his console, asking favours of the various readers, and Sam leaned in to confer with Mal, hands making minute, decisive gestures. Explaining options, rationalizing facts.
They were professionals, Simon realized. And knew how ludicrous that thought was.
Finally Zoe got her head about her, and turned to the pack of them, spreading her arms and herding them out of the cockpit. “Captain'll take care of it,” she assured them, one hand on Kaylee's back and the other unconsciously clinging to the spot where her holster would ride if she were dressed proper. “Go seat yourselves, you'll know what's happening as it happens. Kaylee, we need you with the engine. Jayne, you get your guns ready.”
They sat like refugees in the semi-darkness. The power was turned down around them, Serenity's normal hum muted to near silence. Simon had never felt the black press in so powerfully. River's hand found the place in his hair where his spine started, and her touch gave him comfort even as it frightened him. He looked at Book, who looked back, unsmiling. Jayne came clanking into the common room and sat down, his entire arsenal strapped to him. No one spoke.
When Zoe came in, she didn't update them, or give out any more answers. She just sat beside the Reverend and folded her hands across her knees and waited with the rest of them.
Four hours later they all ate breakfast together, except for Zoe, who brought some of Kaylee's Celebration Waffles up to share with Wash. The rest of them were mostly silent, eating the other treat: oranges, with rare appreciation.
It was Mal who cleared his throat and looked at their passengers and said, “I think we owe you two a kind sight more than gratitude, for what it is you did today.”
Sam shook his head at his plate, and Dean shrugged through his mouthful of waffle, giving a wink to Kaylee as he wiped a smudge of surrogate syrup off his chin. “Didn't do much as I saw,” he said, “Just pointed out the clearest path.”
“You two do this a lot, don't you?” Simon heard himself say.
“Just as it needs doin'.” Dean didn't bat a lash, took up another mouthful.
There was a long pause, and then Jayne let out an equally long burp, and River nearly killed herself laughing, and the incident - either of them - didn't come up again.
--
Two days out from Greenleaf, Simon knew for a fact that Sam was now avoiding him. Smiling at him safe enough from across the dinner table, sure, but melting away in the corridors, refusing to be pinned down for questioning.
Simon was in agony, knowing the brothers would disappear without another word about the Academy, and take with them all they knew.
So instead, he cornered Dean in the cargo hold when he was lifting weights with Jayne and Book. Simon cast a glance at the other men, and knew he didn't care what they heard. “They took Sam too, didn't they?” he hissed, “Blue hands.”
Dean was standing, spotting for the Reverend, and he waved Jayne over to take his place. He put a casual hand on Simon's back and walked him over to a wall of protein casks, settled with his weight on one foot. “Doc, I know I owe you one for saving my-” Dean sent a vague gesture down his front, “my future children n'all, but Sammy's my brother. You take care a yours, an I'll take care a mine. Fair's fair, right?”
“No. It's not fair,” Simon leaned in, hooked a hand on Dean's shoulder, held the desperation back from his voice. “Tell me what you know.”
Dean's answering smile was sardonic and sharp-toothed, his gaze fluttering over Simon's head, and he said through his white teeth, “If we ever find them, Doctor, we'll kill 'em just as dead for River as for Sammy. You can rest assured a that.”
Simon shook his head, let out a breath, and Dean brushed by him to resume his place.
--
Every good green Alliance planet had its layer of scum, and on Greenleaf, the scum pooled at Asphar Landing, to trade threats and pleasantries and illegal goods. Sam and Dean stepped off Serenity's loading ramp, and into the hot, perpetual drizzle that lent the planet a means to a name. Mal shook hands with both, nodding his silent well-wishing, and Jayne folded Dean in a bear hug that took the boy off his feet. They patted each other's biceps, nodding their heads at each other, then Jayne retreated onboard. Sam and River just looked, smiling, at each other, before River came to creep into Simon's arms, leaving wet tracks on his shirt and trailing her ghostly fingers along under his waistband.
Afterwards, Kaylee and the Reverend collected the lists and went shopping with what was left of the platinum, and the rest of them settled in for a dinner of protein supplements. Mal paced along the aft corridor, and everyone knew he was waiting for Inara to call with a warm smile and an ETA that he'd rebuff with a curt insult he hadn't planned on saying.
Simon found himself lingering, too. He stood at the airlock, and when Kaylee and Book got back with the supplies, both drenched to the bone, and flushed with the exhilaration of genuine gravity and infinite oxygen, he stepped out into the rain's thick heat.
He didn't know his way around, but either did they, maybe, and so he found one of them eventually. Sam was paused in a by-way, buying contraband meat from a vendor under an umbrella. Simon joined him there, dug into his pocket and ordered another. While the woman bent to grill up the sausage, Sam took a bite of one of his and smiled around the sauce he'd got on his chin and nose. “Dean says he likes the outworlds better, but you just can't beat this, huh?”
“I have to know,” said Simon, wiping his face, not sure if it was rain or sweat that trickled down from his hair, “After you escaped. How'd you get better? How did you learn to be normal again? What medicine could I get her, what therapy-” his voice broke, and to mask it he turned to accept his dinner and change from the woman behind the cart.
Sam raised a sleeve cuff to clean the sauce off his own face, but his voice was somber and thoughtful. “It was different, then. And I was out so quick, they didn't have me for long. But Simon.” He curved his spine, bent his knees to catch Simon's gaze, where it had wandered past him and into a hopeless future. “It was Dean. Dean got me out of there, Dean brought me back. I think for River you're the same.” And he bent forward and kissed Simon on the forehead, and walked to the end of the alley, and was gone.
--
That night, with Inara back, they felt like a family again. River draped herself across Simon's lap in the common area, and Wash told - ostensibly for Inara's benefit - the story about the day Dean and Jayne got in a tussle over Jayne's inflated Unification War kill count, and one of them kicked out the side of a protein cask in the cargo hold, and how both of them smelled like decomposing algae for three solid days 'till they finally got planetside and could get a chemical wash that would extract the fatty complex from their hair and skin and clothes.
“Sammy didn't like it all,” epilogued River into Simon's lap, so only he could hear. “He made Dean sleep in one of the empty cabins,”
“Did you hear that?” murmured Simon, stroking her hair out of her eyes.
“No,” her grin spread sly, and she wriggled to hide her face in the vee of his legs, “I actually didn't hear them.”
That night, when he woke to find she'd crawled into his bed and made her little nest of his arms and legs and heat, he didn't stiffen or push her away, but bent his face to her bare shoulder, and kissed her there, and held her closer.
Pairing: w/incest.
Rating: PG, nothing to hurt the virgin eyes. Except for, you know, the above.
Spoilers: None for SPN, same old same old for Firefly.
Summary: Mal comes back from his sale with platinum in his pocket and a pair of dirty stragglers tagging along behind him like lost dogs.
Notes: This was supposed to be more priest-fic. Unfortunately, said priest-fic has been delayed by a week due to unforeseen circumstances. So I wrote these 3700-odd words to hold up my end of the bargain. Also, I stole the pretentious title from a band that specializes in pretentious titles, so I feel a minimum of guilt on that front.
Simon was sitting out on the loading ramp when they strolled up. He'd been reading an out-of-date medical text and feeling pretty glad to be out, sweating under a yellow sun like a real human being again.
Behind him, perched in the shadow of the cargo bay, Jayne was counting out his pennies on an empty container, audibly trying to figger whether his cut of the stolen Alliance-grade terraform fertilizer sales would cover the cost of the good knife he'd lost gambling with Wash. He had another, second-best knife out for the process, and some of his littler guns. Jayne hadn't badgered the Captain to let him go along on the sale like Zoe had, but Simon suspected that he'd chosen his place at the airlock with a mind to watching for trouble nonetheless.
Zoe was more obvious. She stood still halfway down the ramp, just within Simon's peripheral vision, scanning the long brown horizon in half-inch increments, and keeping an eye on the faint-hearted bustle of the tiny frontier town a half click off. She was wearing her guns, too.
None of them every really expected things to go smoothly anymore. All they really wanted here on this dustbowl rock was the platinum that would buy them some real food for the trip back to the core planets, rather than the godawful protein supplements they'd been slurping for the past couple weeks. Anything more would be an unwarranted grace. Especially if Mal came back not-shot, at a casual pace, with the platinum in his pocket and a smile on his face.
Which he did, excepting the last bit. Instead he scowled, said “Got us some passengers to Greenleaf,” and tossed the bag of currency to Zoe for safekeeping as he thudded up the ramp.
Zoe gave him the eye, and Simon stood up - politely - with his text half-closed in his hand. Jayne perked up from the bay like a lazy guard dog. “Sure as hell hope you're bringing your own damn dinner,” he told the men who'd stopped at the bottom of the ramp.
“Jayne, go with Zoe to pick up supplies. Enough for everyone.” Mal went straight into the ship, wet with sweat and grimacing unpleasant enough to silence even Kaylee, who smiled at him anyway and dropped down the steps to sidle up behind Simon and ogle the guests.
“Your Cap'n said something about a medic?” said one of them. He was the taller one, dirty hair over his eyes and a cramped slouch in his shoulders that betrayed something hurting deep in his ribs. He was dressed in the same drabs and leathers as his friend, and he squinted up at them like maybe he should still be asking permission to board.
“Simon ain't no medic,” protested Kaylee, “He's a first-class surgeon straight outta Capital City. You got something wrong he'll set it straight faster'n quick, better than it was to start.”
“Oh yeah?” The shorter, dirtier one started stumping up the ramp, and Zoe turned to give Jayne a little shove to remind him to start moving on those orders. “I don't need no surgery, just need someone to mend up this bastard gash,” the man walked with a strong lean, hand clamped against the join at thigh and hip. No blood on his clothes, but the other one moved to help him like they'd already seen enough of it to last.
Simon stepped forward, put his hand out to a shoulder. “We'll take a look at it,” he said, and got a tight look and a shrug for his troubles.
He led the wounded one to the examination table, and asked Kaylee in a murmur to go check up on River, let her know about the passengers, so she wouldn't fret.
The tall one hovered on the other side of the table as Simon peeled back trousers to get a decent look at the cut. Shallow and probably a few days old, for all that it wasn't clotting all that well. There was a stink of infection, the flesh around it was red and hot to the touch. For all his snapping, the injured man seemed too infuriated by the pain to mind the embarrassment of having his slacks rucked down around his knees, a towelette covering his nethers.
“What did this?” asked Simon, straightening and pulling forward the trolley with his antiseptics and bandages.
“Bar fight,” growled the one on the table.
Simon glanced at the tall one, who gave a sheepish shrug and nodded.
“I don't think so,” Focused and intent, Simon set about cleaning the cut of debris, careful to manage around what clots had formed.
“You calling us liars, Doc?” the dirty one leaned up and got pushed right back down.
“Yes. What did you say your names were, again?” Simon's well-bred politics always faded in the med bay, where professionalism was worth lives and platitudes were as bad for your health as outright lies.
“I'm Sam, he's Dean,” said the standing one, putting a hand on his companion's arm as the first sting of the astringent lanced upwards, releasing a gasped curse.
“And you were present when this happened?”
“Yessir,” Sam had his chin down, watching Simon's actions closely. His fingers strayed to the bare brown skin of the other's wrist, rubbing circles through the dirt and grease there.
“So you tell me if I'm right, here.” Simon kept on swabbing, “I'd say this was a knife, a big one, like a machete or a meat cleaver. And I'd say the business end was coated in something rotten. Like the fluids from a week-old corpse, or human excrement. And I'd also say that there's only so many souls in the 'verse keep corpses around to that end.” He let his eyes flicker up to scan both their faces. “You ran into a Reaver. No doubt about it.”
Dean let a loose laugh run out of his throat, and Sam gave another one of his docile shrugs, like maybe he'd thought the encounter hadn't been worth mentioning.
“Alright,” Simon finished his swabbing and taped a clean bandage over the wound. It wasn't any of his business, never mind that they'd somehow survived with mental faculties intact. He'd let them keep their secrets. “It's too infected for dermal mending - we'd just trap everything under the surface, get you gangrene - so you keep from jostling it for a few days, keep applying the antiseptic twice daily, and I'll fix it up when we know for sure that the wound's clean.” He patted Dean's forearm, turned to tidy up his tray. “You could probably put your pants back on.”
--
The run from the badland planets out along the edge of the black down to Asphar Landing on Greenleaf took a good three weeks along the back routes, and Mal dawdled quite a bit along the way. Inara had asked for two months on Greenleaf, and Simon got the distinct impression Mal planned on being late to pick her up.
They stopped a few more times on the border worlds, sales calls to ranchers and farmers looking to improve their lots with the high-quality fertilizer normally horded by the government-paid terraform engineers in the core. Between Jayne's moaning about Mal's piss-poor haggling skills, and the way Zoe kept stone silent on the topic, Simon knew that they'd barely be breaking even on this run. Maybe the fare their passengers had coughed up would somehow bump them up out of the red, but every time Mal took protein bars or spare parts as payment, the likelihood of even that diminished.
For their part, the fares kept quiet about themselves. Simon would occasionally wake up to hushed bickering coming from the bunk they shared, or choked hisses of pain as Sam applied antiseptic to Dean's healing gash. The wound itself stopped fussing pretty quick, and he limped around Serenity like a bored house cat, nosing into other people's business and eating scraps of food left in the open and seeming endlessly pleased with Jayne, who'd first tried to pick a fight and then got friendly when Dean voiced his admiration for the new knife.
They spent a lot of time at the table in the galley, talking guns and fightin' while the rest of the crew drifted in and out. Simon especially tried to avoid the galley then, given as he always ended up the butt of some joke or another. He'd grit his teeth and go about his business while Kaylee giggled into her hand and River laughed in soaring delight.
It was during one of those long middays that Simon was holed up in the med bay, fiddling with a low-grade subdermal scanner in the hopes he might modify it to read cracked bone and torn ligament more exactingly. Bring it up to par with the tools he used to work with on Osiris, was his hope. He was testing and recording and adjusting and testing when Sam inched into the room, quiet as River ever was.
He stood watching, silent, and Simon let him. He was using his left wrist as a test subject, because he'd snapped it in a clean break when he was thirteen, and the fracture line should've still been visible, though it wasn't, not yet.
“I didn't know River was your sister,” Sam eventually volunteered, leaning against the door frame.
Simon looked up, genuinely surprised, a little wary. Bounties were just as valuable out here at the edge of civilization as they were in the core, sometimes more so. But Sam didn't look triumphant, or predatory. Just curious. “Really? I would've thought it was pretty obvious.”
“Now that I look back, yeah.” Sam slouched forward a bit, thumbs hooked around his suspenders, eyes straying over the work in Simon's hands. “You'd do anything for her, that's obvious.”
Simon gave his own shrug, looked back down at his instruments. Tried not to think about what he'd done, what he might have to, and gladly.
“That's how Dean is, too.” Sam's tone was almost wistful, a lazy tune examining the facts of the universe as a whole. “It's funny, how much you grate on each other. You're very similar.”
“He's your brother?” Simon finished his adjustments, wiped his hands on his thighs, looked at the viewscreen again. Nothing. It made sense, brothers, though at first glance he'd assumed their relationship was something more.
“Yes.” Sam paused, “I know you mind me asking, but what happened to River - blue hands, right?”
Simon looked up, terror and astonishment whipping through him. His voice was glacial slow compared to his thoughts. He said simply: “What do you know?”
Sam shook his head, raised his hands, “No, nothing. Just stories. Special kids. Taken. We don't know anything more than you do. Probably less. I mean, you're the doctor.”
Simon stood staring, waiting for more, heart tearing itself apart in his chest as Sam's quiet smile turned inward on itself, deferential. Then he reached across and adjusted the screen on the scanner, murmuring, “You altered the wavelength and depth, but the monitor needs be compensated for the additional interference. It's just the contrast means you can't see it.”
There, in green and white, Simon looked at the healed hairline crack in his own arm, and Sam slid back out the door.
--
After that it was easy to see how Sam could speak in River's own language, quick and low cadences that echoed unmoored in time or place. They would laugh together, even when Jayne was making his most serious threats, and Dean looked ready to tear a hole in the bulkhead. And it was Sam who could also turn, with a crumpled face and a spasm in his voice that he could barely control, to explain the joke to Kaylee so that she and Wash were laughing too, until Jayne's face got dark as thunderheads.
At night, Simon would give River her injection and kiss her on the forehead, and then linger in the corridor between paper-thin walls, listening for a clue, listening for anything besides the matched, steady breathing that rolled out from the brothers' bunk. Nothing.
Except later in the night, after the meds had woken her and sent her roaming the ship in search of her tormenting ghosts, River would slink to Simon's bed and kiss him on his forehead. It would barely even wake him from his standardly coma-like sleep, at least, not until she'd made a nest out of his limbs and placed her frigid toes on his bare calves and fallen asleep there with him, making tiny jealous noises in her throat and shifting restlessly in a way that bespoke the rocking of a tiny boat in a great ocean.
Then one night in particular River woke screaming nonsense, her shrieks rousing the rest of them in the passenger cabins. Reverend Book came in upon them in a panic, and observed Simon's bare chest, his position looming over her with the blankets thrown back over their entangling legs, with a terrible lack of judgement. Simon stroked her hair, murmured sweet things as Book hung back. But River refused to be gentled, instead swinging bare feet onto the metal grate floors and half-dragging, half-pushing them through the corridors toward the cockpit, training her urgent, ineloquent warnings on them like it might convince them to move faster.
Everyone was there already. Wash only just now awake and in the pilot's seat. Dean strapped into the co-pilot's like he'd been born there. And Sam leaning over Wash, murmuring suggestions in a low voice, pointing out a route of likely escape on the plotter.
Simon stood bewildered until Kaylee turned away from the view with her hand over her mouth and he noticed, finally, the small band of Reaver ships. Floating silent specks in the distant black, they were recognizable only by the insistent wail emerging from the radiological alarm. Everyone, even Mal, stood stricken like deer.
Except for the brothers. Dean was busy at his console, asking favours of the various readers, and Sam leaned in to confer with Mal, hands making minute, decisive gestures. Explaining options, rationalizing facts.
They were professionals, Simon realized. And knew how ludicrous that thought was.
Finally Zoe got her head about her, and turned to the pack of them, spreading her arms and herding them out of the cockpit. “Captain'll take care of it,” she assured them, one hand on Kaylee's back and the other unconsciously clinging to the spot where her holster would ride if she were dressed proper. “Go seat yourselves, you'll know what's happening as it happens. Kaylee, we need you with the engine. Jayne, you get your guns ready.”
They sat like refugees in the semi-darkness. The power was turned down around them, Serenity's normal hum muted to near silence. Simon had never felt the black press in so powerfully. River's hand found the place in his hair where his spine started, and her touch gave him comfort even as it frightened him. He looked at Book, who looked back, unsmiling. Jayne came clanking into the common room and sat down, his entire arsenal strapped to him. No one spoke.
When Zoe came in, she didn't update them, or give out any more answers. She just sat beside the Reverend and folded her hands across her knees and waited with the rest of them.
Four hours later they all ate breakfast together, except for Zoe, who brought some of Kaylee's Celebration Waffles up to share with Wash. The rest of them were mostly silent, eating the other treat: oranges, with rare appreciation.
It was Mal who cleared his throat and looked at their passengers and said, “I think we owe you two a kind sight more than gratitude, for what it is you did today.”
Sam shook his head at his plate, and Dean shrugged through his mouthful of waffle, giving a wink to Kaylee as he wiped a smudge of surrogate syrup off his chin. “Didn't do much as I saw,” he said, “Just pointed out the clearest path.”
“You two do this a lot, don't you?” Simon heard himself say.
“Just as it needs doin'.” Dean didn't bat a lash, took up another mouthful.
There was a long pause, and then Jayne let out an equally long burp, and River nearly killed herself laughing, and the incident - either of them - didn't come up again.
--
Two days out from Greenleaf, Simon knew for a fact that Sam was now avoiding him. Smiling at him safe enough from across the dinner table, sure, but melting away in the corridors, refusing to be pinned down for questioning.
Simon was in agony, knowing the brothers would disappear without another word about the Academy, and take with them all they knew.
So instead, he cornered Dean in the cargo hold when he was lifting weights with Jayne and Book. Simon cast a glance at the other men, and knew he didn't care what they heard. “They took Sam too, didn't they?” he hissed, “Blue hands.”
Dean was standing, spotting for the Reverend, and he waved Jayne over to take his place. He put a casual hand on Simon's back and walked him over to a wall of protein casks, settled with his weight on one foot. “Doc, I know I owe you one for saving my-” Dean sent a vague gesture down his front, “my future children n'all, but Sammy's my brother. You take care a yours, an I'll take care a mine. Fair's fair, right?”
“No. It's not fair,” Simon leaned in, hooked a hand on Dean's shoulder, held the desperation back from his voice. “Tell me what you know.”
Dean's answering smile was sardonic and sharp-toothed, his gaze fluttering over Simon's head, and he said through his white teeth, “If we ever find them, Doctor, we'll kill 'em just as dead for River as for Sammy. You can rest assured a that.”
Simon shook his head, let out a breath, and Dean brushed by him to resume his place.
--
Every good green Alliance planet had its layer of scum, and on Greenleaf, the scum pooled at Asphar Landing, to trade threats and pleasantries and illegal goods. Sam and Dean stepped off Serenity's loading ramp, and into the hot, perpetual drizzle that lent the planet a means to a name. Mal shook hands with both, nodding his silent well-wishing, and Jayne folded Dean in a bear hug that took the boy off his feet. They patted each other's biceps, nodding their heads at each other, then Jayne retreated onboard. Sam and River just looked, smiling, at each other, before River came to creep into Simon's arms, leaving wet tracks on his shirt and trailing her ghostly fingers along under his waistband.
Afterwards, Kaylee and the Reverend collected the lists and went shopping with what was left of the platinum, and the rest of them settled in for a dinner of protein supplements. Mal paced along the aft corridor, and everyone knew he was waiting for Inara to call with a warm smile and an ETA that he'd rebuff with a curt insult he hadn't planned on saying.
Simon found himself lingering, too. He stood at the airlock, and when Kaylee and Book got back with the supplies, both drenched to the bone, and flushed with the exhilaration of genuine gravity and infinite oxygen, he stepped out into the rain's thick heat.
He didn't know his way around, but either did they, maybe, and so he found one of them eventually. Sam was paused in a by-way, buying contraband meat from a vendor under an umbrella. Simon joined him there, dug into his pocket and ordered another. While the woman bent to grill up the sausage, Sam took a bite of one of his and smiled around the sauce he'd got on his chin and nose. “Dean says he likes the outworlds better, but you just can't beat this, huh?”
“I have to know,” said Simon, wiping his face, not sure if it was rain or sweat that trickled down from his hair, “After you escaped. How'd you get better? How did you learn to be normal again? What medicine could I get her, what therapy-” his voice broke, and to mask it he turned to accept his dinner and change from the woman behind the cart.
Sam raised a sleeve cuff to clean the sauce off his own face, but his voice was somber and thoughtful. “It was different, then. And I was out so quick, they didn't have me for long. But Simon.” He curved his spine, bent his knees to catch Simon's gaze, where it had wandered past him and into a hopeless future. “It was Dean. Dean got me out of there, Dean brought me back. I think for River you're the same.” And he bent forward and kissed Simon on the forehead, and walked to the end of the alley, and was gone.
--
That night, with Inara back, they felt like a family again. River draped herself across Simon's lap in the common area, and Wash told - ostensibly for Inara's benefit - the story about the day Dean and Jayne got in a tussle over Jayne's inflated Unification War kill count, and one of them kicked out the side of a protein cask in the cargo hold, and how both of them smelled like decomposing algae for three solid days 'till they finally got planetside and could get a chemical wash that would extract the fatty complex from their hair and skin and clothes.
“Sammy didn't like it all,” epilogued River into Simon's lap, so only he could hear. “He made Dean sleep in one of the empty cabins,”
“Did you hear that?” murmured Simon, stroking her hair out of her eyes.
“No,” her grin spread sly, and she wriggled to hide her face in the vee of his legs, “I actually didn't hear them.”
That night, when he woke to find she'd crawled into his bed and made her little nest of his arms and legs and heat, he didn't stiffen or push her away, but bent his face to her bare shoulder, and kissed her there, and held her closer.