WHO: River Tam, Jacen Solo WHAT: Some things can't ever be fixed, but River's gambling on her not being one of them / Jacen has a new pupil WHEN: A night or two after War dies. WHERE: Jacen's apartment, Lawrence, Kansas. RATING: TBC
It hadn’t been hard, waiting for Simon to fall asleep.
That was a lie. Impatience wasn’t anything new – even as a child she’d never learned fast enough to satisfy her own standards, her peers had never been smart enough to keep up, the days between ‘now’ and ‘leaving for the Academy’ had never passed quickly enough – and now that things felt sharper, brighter, it was like an itch somewhere too deep under her skin to scratch. But it was just waiting. Waiting she could do.
It didn’t help that Simon was on edge, which made her twitchy and in turn made him worry more. But he was still only human, and eventually even his stubborn determination to keep an eye on River come hell or high water had to give in.
And then she’d gone.
She supposed she was meant to feel bad about the subterfuge, the betrayal in finding someone else to fix her when Simon was trying so gorram hard that the right should have been his just by sheer willpower. But the universe wasn’t fair like that, and he was beating his head against a brick wall with the drugs and the surgery and Jacen offered something new, something real, something she could sense but not hope to explain, and so she went.
It was not hard to find the address Jacen had given; she felt like she knew the city, hours spent on the roof with Creeper and Karl translating neatly into a birds-eye view a child could have translated into a pathway on the ground, and the streets were empty, ragged wounds scabbed over with the last glimmers of fire, with wrecked vehicles and rubble and the lingering scent of fear, of war. The hardest part was not allowing herself to be distracted; this was nothing, granted, next to the flood of emotion while War had been pulling the strings, but the little things were almost harder - relief was heavy, bloated, dragged her down and made her sluggish, while grief was raw and wild, heady like wine brewed in engine cooler systems on a transport ship a million miles and almost as many years away.
Smoothing out her skirt, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, River knocked at the apartment door and waited. The ground was gritty underneath her bare feet, the night air cool on her skin after days confined by the apartment walls.