A/N: This is set immediately after "Safe," with a few of my own assumptions about the Tam family thrown in.

While it is not exactly a songfic, it is very heavily inspired by the Goo Goo Dolls song entitled "Acoustic #3." I don't own the song, the characters, or the verse, but I like to play around with them; no money exchanged hands. Song lyrics appear at the end for interested parties.

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Simon wonders when it was that he knew. When the letters stopped coming? When she started writing again but stopped making sense? No. It was long before that. He may not have been a reader himself, but he had felt, deep in his gut, that something was not right. But how could he explain to his proud parents, to his brilliant sister that there was something wrong about her going to that place. That it was not jealousy, or loneliness, or simply his protective brotherly nature. Something was wrong.

He couldn’t.

So he stood back, and he watched River leave for the Academy. He listened to the tales his father told of all the amazing things she would learn there, and of all the opportunities that would be available for his genius of a daughter. And Simon ignored the pain that hid behind his mother’s eyes—what he had then thought was the face of a mother missing her daughter and what he now knew was the irrevocable guilt of a woman who had sold her soul.

Simon thinks about the way River was—he thinks about it every day. How can he see her wandering about the ship, an empty look in her eyes, and not think of the joy and grace with which her feet once danced? How can he hear the snatches of rationality and the random facts that no 17 year old girl should have stored in her brain escape her lips and not remember the amazing speed and agility with which her mind once worked? He looks at River the weapon and sees only River the girl. River that was. River that could be.

He sees her hiding inside her own mind, unable to escape. As much as he wants to believe that he