They thought she was getting better. They were wrong.

For the longest time they had the idea that she was just one piece of a girl, singled apart from many. In her eyes they saw the barest fragment of what should have been, of someone on the slip of adulthood but missing that elusive edge that might somehow make her steadfast and whole. They watched her through the eyes of others, their wariness and confusion making her something almost unreal. This girl of so many pieces, for the love of her brother, and the need to shout back at the voices in her head, had stood by Miranda and shattered their enemies into a thousand pieces more. For a time, the longest time when all hours before had passed in terrible, shocking speed, seeing the blood of demons at her feet--they might well have thought her a ghost.

It was true, for a few months anyway, that she was quite well, that her lucid periods were longer and less erratic. She smiled more often, and not only with Simon, but with Mal, too. Even Jayne, though he, having known and felt the fragment where it cut the most, remained the weariest of all, never leaving that post even when she ran barefoot in Kaylee's wake through the ship, and those who watched believed that there was happiness in her voice. He remained unbelieving, but because he was Jayne they let him be.

Zoe she left alone, but they all saw how River Tam knew, held her tongue when she wanted to speak of Wash, to explain and empathise; she understood the look in Zoe's eyes and so remained mute. It was better this way, Simon assured her. Better to give space than try and quantify its meaning. He was her brother, and so she believed him, and kept her thoughts to herself, to ponder alone as she considered it proper for a girl like her to do.

A girl like her. That hadn't changed. River would always be something very nearly in duplicate, the second free digit of a pair that never quite added up.

It is easy to image that a person with the strength to kill might recover just as quickly w