AN: This is it. I can't believe it's really over. Wow. You guys have all been great, and I'm so grateful for your comments and support. This was the hardest chapter by far to write, so I hope it holds up. You all knew someone had to die, and I tried not to make it too painful. But... enough excuses. You don't care about my excuses.

So....

Here we go.

***

"I knew you would come. Eventually. I spent thousands trying to find you, but I knew you would come to me." River said nothing in reply. She had dropped, silently, from the vent in the ceiling to the floor of the small, dark room. In the center of the room sat a monster.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, River could see expensive medical equipment.

"You're River Tam," Dillon Saunders said. He was not afraid.

"Yes," River said slowly, prowling around the chair to face him. "And you're the monster." He smiled, his mutilated features stretching oddly to accomadate it.

"Maybe. But I'm not the only monster," he continued, tone growing grim.

"You want to hurt people."

"And you're going to help me." She gasped in a breath, a hand dancing to her breast.

"Am I?"

"Why else would you have come?" River did a graceful pirouette, turning on the spin to look at him over her shoulder.

"To save the nice people," she sang. "To stop you."

"Why would you want to do that? These people, the ones I want to punish, they hate you. They wouldn't blink an eye if what was done to me was done to you." River fell out of her extended ballet pose and knelt at his feet.

"Oh, but I'm a girl," she whispered confidingly. "A sweet, pretty little girl. They don't like it when we get hurt."

"You're forgetting one thing," Saunders wheezed through the tubes in his throat. "You're not a girl."

"What am I, then?"

"A weapon, like I was. You were made into what you are, like I was made into this. You have nothing out there."

"I have my Simon."

"Which brings me to my other point. You don't, actually. I do.