The Universe's Mixer

Wash had been quietly thankful that upon arriving at the hospital that Simon didn't look at all surprised to see that he was, in fact, alive. He was equally happy to find out that all the preliminary tests and scans that he'd so patiently went through were coming back negative as far as serious injury went. While he wasn't so pleased to be kept in a hospital bed overnight for 'observation', there had been one saving grace to all of this. As Wash stirred awake by the warming of the morning light spilling in from his window, that saving grace was so faithfully sitting there at his bedside.

A warm tray of hospital food.

Don't get him wrong, he loved his wife. And while she wasn't in the hospital room at this exact moment, she'd been there with him through the majority of his time there; out of love and perhaps a little out of guilt since she was the one who landed him in there. Oh, but hospital food. It wasn't artificially created, it wasn't pressed into some food-like shape. He reached over to draw the rolling bed-tray over to settle over his lap. Wash picked the cover up off of the plastic tray and set it aside to reveal his breakfast.

Reheated waffles, slightly burnt sausage links, slices of orange, a small carton of milk and an odd favorite he'd discovered from his meal the evening before. "Ooooh..It's my little, brightly colored, jiggly friend again.." He commented to himself as he picked up the clear plastic cup of strawberry jello. "I don't know what you are, but the fact that you're apparently served with every meal is making this new place very promising."

It was early on in her relationship with Hannibal that he told her about the open-air market near her apartment. That the City had such a thing was a boundless source of joy for River; that it was so close was something that caused her to lapse into Mandarin expressions of happiness that English just did not cover.

Today, she moved about the market holding a green canvas bag that said "SAVE THE EARTH" with a recycling symbol on the side. River didn't much think recycling was going to save the world, but she didn't figure that anything that would would fit under her arm and hold fruit quite so nicely, either.

River was moving through the fruit stands, now, and the bag was already half-full. There were three apples, three oranges, and a small bunch of grapes. River stuck her tongue out, stretching, concentrating, tiny hand grasping for a pomegranite as she ran over in her mind what she knew about the fruit.

Very red inside. No flesh, not really. The red was what made it delicious, though. The red had been used in the past to dye fabric. She wanted to crack the pomegranite open and get at its insides. She wanted the red.

Her hand closed over the fruit and she tossed it up in the air, catching it with the open bag on her hip.

"613 seeds," she said.

It was a test - some kind of elaborate behavior experiment conducted by the defense department. They wanted to see if they could get their top nuclear physicist back on the team without having to worry about the Hulk turning General Ross into Captain Crunch.

This was the only hypothesis Bruce could formulate to explain why he was sitting in an office on a school campus in a city, when just last night he was sitting in a Greyhound station, eating from a discarded bag of corn nuts. His hypothesis further supposed that the military had finally tracked him down, kidnapped him while he dozed on the bench, and placed him in some kind of idyllic environment where they could monitor how he performed under a variety of stresses. It was like that British TV show, the Prisoner, except he had his own name - the UCLA diploma on the wall read "Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, PhD., nuclear physics" - and there were no giant, menacing, white balloons to be seen.

Not yet, anyway...

Shaking his head and throwing his arms up, he sighed. "Oh well. Might as well show them what a super-scientist is good for." He gathered up his laptop - syllabus, powerpoint presentation, everything a good teacher ought to have for the first day of class - and walked in what he hoped was the direction of his classroom.

After a number of wrong turns, he finally found the room number indicated on his syllabus and stepped in. The room was a large, amphitheater-style array of predominantly empty desks. A smattering of students were in attendance. He eyed them suspiciously as he set up his laptop on the podium.

"All right," announced the professor, folding his arms, waiting for the class to act, "who wants to know the secrets of the universe?"

River stood in the wings, waiting.

A red dress flowed almost to her ankles, and her dark hair was pulled back, a red flower sitting behind one ear. Her eyes looked even larger than normal-- one of the corps de ballet girls had lined them with kohl and dark shadow. Her lips were red.

She was not River right now. This was the last night she was going to get to be Kitri.

( The ballet was in the second scene. It was time for her to enter. )

You should go. You have a place to be.

John Coffey was right. He told her to think of where she wanted to be, absolutely, down to her toes. River had. She'd left him after that, both still perplexed at what was going on and glad she did have somewhere to go.

Her feet would find the way.

River had rested for a short while. It was easy to get back to her apartment. She ducked her head into Alice's doorway, but River didn't see the girl there. And after sitting for an hour or two, thinking about what it meant that the City moved, that her mind no longer picked Simon out as the person whom she needed, River got back up and went out to find the person her mind did pick out.
( It was harder than she expected. )

River padded to the bedroom window on bare feet and pulled back a purple curtain with a motion far too graceful to be believed in any one else.

As she watched, the building across the street waivered, then sort of imploded and grew back slowly, out of the ground, like a plant on Miracle Grow. Her eyes went wide and dark and shiney, and there were not, by far, enough Mandarin curses for this.

She bounded down the stairs, past Alice Liddell's door and outside, not really sure where she was going.

Everything in the City was a silent scream. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, standing in the middle of the street and almost getting hit by a taxi driven by a cabbie who stopped to gawk at the rearranging cityscape to his left.

Amidst the cries in her mind, and knowing for sure now, beyond anything reasonable, that there was no making sense of this, River heard one train of thought, loud and clear and steady, like a metronome.

And she made her way toward it, navigating around the buildings that waxed and waned and fluxed, calculating, as she went, the odds of one shooting her up into the sky like a star in reverse, should she step down in the wrong spot.

When she found the man she was looking for--not, she mused to herself with a smile, her brother or her sweetheart, not this time--she tapped him gingerly on the shoulder.

"Is it roaring in your head, too?" River asked, eyes looking up at the skyscraper across the street that suddenly ceased existing. She smiled, then, a big gentle smile for the man that had made things in her head less like a car crash and more like a working consciousness.