FicWad

-I-I-I-

Gently, Simon swabbed the wet cloth over his sister's face, cleaning off the blood left after the fight in the Maidenhead. She gave no indication she even realized he was there, instead staring fixedly at the ship's captain lounging against the doorframe.

"You're afraid of me," she whispered, her eyes big and chillingly knowing.

Mal opened his mouth to refute that plainly false statement, but then she made a sudden movement, and instincts sent him back a step even though there was no way she could have done anything, bound as she was by her chains.

Okay, so maybe he was a little... cautious. That was all. No need to go slinging 'round words like 'afraid'.

River smiled, a stretching of her lips that had nothing to do with humor. "You should be. You all should be, should be afraid of me, afraid of what's coming... what I'll show you..." The smile fractured as tears began to spill down her cheeks.

"What's coming?" Mal demanded, stepping forward again. Simon turned to glare at him, and he softened his tone. "What are you going to show us?"

Her brother ran a hand through her hair, trying to comfort her. It had no affect on her distant gaze. "Dogs and ponies, in a circus, going round and round and round... So many fall, blades of grass, but they don't care, don't see it. I see it, I always see, I can't not see! /They won't get up/!"

Simon pulled her into his embrace, murmuring soft nonsense words into her hair. "I don't know what I'm saying. I never know what I'm saying..." the girl whispered.

Mal cleared his throat, pushing away the sympathy that threatened to rise. She only looked like a helpless little girl, and he had his crew to consider. "In the Maidenhead, you said something. Happen to remember what it was?"

River's head lifted. "Miranda."

The captain nodded. "Don't suppose you'd feel like enlightening us as to what the hell that signifies?"

She laughed, high and bitter. "It's all about Miranda. She'll show you, show you everything."

The two men exchanged a glance, frowning. "Miranda is a... person?" Simon asked, before a thought occurred to him. "Am I... am I talking to Miranda now?"

The look River turned upon him needed no words to translate. "I'm not a multiple, dumbo."

Smirking, Mal opened his mouth to comment and was interrupted by running footsteps coming down the corridor. "Cap'n!" Kaylee said, out of breath. "Harry's awake!"

Relief crashed through Mal, strong enough to be a surprise, and muscles relaxed he hadn't realized were tense. "Shiny. Zoë with him?" he asked, taking a step into the corridor.

She nodded, shooting Simon a tentative smile. "Yeah. They're in one of the passenger rooms. She's tryin' to get some broth down him, but it's not goin' too well." The mechanic hesitated. "He's... he's different, Cap'n."

He frowned again. "Better?"

"...I don't rightly know. Just... different." Kaylee vanished into the corridor. "Come an' see!" she called back.

"Coming, Doctor?" Mal asked in a tone that sounded remarkably like an order. The man was the only medically trained person on board, and the captain figured he could trust him to examine the kid if there was one of them standing behind him with a gun in hand.

'Sides, there was no gorram way Mal was leaving him alone with his sister.

The three of them walked between the crew quarters, only to meet Zoë as she nearly leaped up the stairs. "Did he go by here?" she snapped, her lips tight and pale.

Mal came to a stop and blinked at her. "He... Harry? You saying you've lost him?"

The first mate's face went blanker than usual. "I turned around for a moment and he was gone," she replied, not making an excuse, but explaining the situation.

Mal swore luridly in Chinese. "Kaylee, check the engine room. Doc, the infirmary. Go with him, Zoë." No way in hell was the doctor going anywhere on his boat unescorted. "I'll check crew quarters and the bridge." Could Harry have gone to the bridge? It was his favorite place, but after all that had happened, could it really be that simple?

They split up as he'd ordered. Mal checked his room first and came up nothing, and then Kaylee's with a grimace for her unrelentingly cheerful decorations. A further search of Jayne's quarters (where Harry thankfully was not- that kid and access to Jayne's grenades definitely wasn't a good thing), and Wash and Zoë's shared room revealed no twelve-year-old.

Mal stepped out into the corridor again wearing a worried frown. He'd hoped Harry would be in one of the rooms, because a little boy loose among heavy machinery or sharp objects like the Doc's scalpels didn't bear thinking about. And surely if he was in the cockpit, Wash would've said something over the intercom...

That was when he heard a quiet voice singing. He followed the sound, back to the storage locker that held River Tam, and had a sudden, sinking feeling.

And sure enough, when he opened the door, there was little Harry being rocked in the crazy girl's arms as she sang him a lullaby.

-I-I-I-

Mal was staring out at the black an hour later when Zoë came up next to him. "I'm sorry, sir," she said quietly, electing to stand rather than sit in the copilot's seat.

He didn't said anything, and had she been any other woman she would have fidgeted. "It won't happen again," she added.

There was another silence, this one longer. "You know, I just can't conjure it," Mal finally said, still looking out at the darkness broken only by a few unblinking stars.

"Conjure what?" his second-in-command asked, a shade of uneasiness in her voice.

"How in the 'verse the kid managed to get past us to the locker," Mal replied with a little shake of his head. "I mean, you were right behind him, and we were coming up from the other direction, so how could we not have seen him go past us?"

"Maybe he hid in one of the bunks."

"There wasn't time." Mal fell silent again for a minute. "That's not the only thing bugging me. There was something about that fight on Beaumonde. Something offish, but it's just not coming clear to me."

"If it's important, I'm sure it will." She stood there for a moment longer, before nodding to his reflection in the screen. "I'll be with my man if you need me." He nodded back, and then he was alone in the cockpit again.

Though, not for long. A sound only just on this side of audible made Mal turn his head to the side, and he found himself staring into green eyes.

"Harry!" he yelped, startled. "You're supposed to be with Kaylee-"

"I know you," the boy said quietly, and Mal abruptly stopped talking. Those were the same green eyes he'd come to know, but now that he looked closer... They'd always been just a little dull before, a little blank, with depths to them that put you in mind of space's vacuum. But now...

They were aware. And looking at him. And, miracles heaped upon miracles, seeing him.

"...Yeah, you do," Mal at last managed to reply. "Been almost a year now, so we should pretty much know each other."

Harry quirked his head to the side, briefly reminding the captain of a curious puppy. "That's not so very long, if you think about it."

Mal was put in mind of all the times he'd felt like strangling the Doc. "Or it can be a lifetime."

A smile flitted over the boy's face. "True enough." He sank back into the copilot's seat, his movements slow and unhurried as though he were completing the action out of reflex. His eyes never left Mal's, and the ex-soldier was startled to see wariness in their depths. "So we know each other."

Mal nodded, putting his empty palms in plain sight. The attempt to reassure the boy seemed to work, since he relaxed just a little. "Name's Mal, since you don't seem to remember the introductions," he said dryly.

Again there was that quirk of the head. "Did you know your name means 'bad' in Latin?"

He winced. "So I've heard." The kid was definitely spending too much time with River. The way she'd been carping about that, he'd actually considered switching to a different name.

Harry wasn't looking at him anymore. "You shouldn't worry," he said, looking out at the black. "Bad doesn't always stay bad. Sometimes it switches to good. But then, good doesn't always stay good, either. Sometimes it goes bad, very bad, even if it thinks it's still good."

Mal listened as the boy's voice changed as he spoke, growing confidence and an ease it'd been lacking. He should've been glad Harry was relaxing around him, but something was setting off warning klaxons in his mind.

That was when Harry turned back to him, smiling sadly. "Don't you remember Professor Snape and Professor Umbridge, Ron? Severus saved me so many times, and Umbridge nearly killed us all. You can never know with people, you just can't."

Yeah, Harry could see now, alright.

It was just that what he was seeing had taken a sharp right turn from reality.

-I-I-I-

For so long, it had felt empty. Not empty in that there was nothing there, but in that what should have been there was gone, gone so far away he couldn't be reached. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Not at all. They weren't ever supposed to be apart, not until the final parting.

For the briefest time, minutes, hours, days earlier, it hadn't been. He'd been within reach again, though the connection had been so attenuated it hadn't been able to do more than stretch out and know it wasn't alone.

It gave it hope, even though the connection had soon dwindled, and it was alone again. But now it knew it wasn't forever. All it had to do was wait, because he was coming. He'd be there soon, though there would be some stops and turns along the way.

Soon or not, it would be far too long for comfort, as it had already been. It longed to simply fly to him, but the distance was yet too far. Soon, though. It had to remember. Soon.

With a mournful shudder, it made itself comfortable and began drifting off to sleep. It wasn't worried that another might find it, and try to hurt it, because there were no others. Not anymore. The buildings around it were empty, perfectly, austerely empty.

Just as it, so briefly, hadn't been. But the boy was coming, if it just waited.

And if it had to, it would wait for him for eternity.