Author's Notes: This is another Gen standalone, kind of a speculative fic on River and Simon's past that I'm sure has been done before, but I wrote anyway. I may eventually write both a sequel and a prequel to it, but don't know for sure.

Simon was moonlighting as a criminal mastermind. Funny, the way things like that came to be. Used to be the worst thing he'd ever done was a climb a statue naked, and sing something he couldn't quite recall. Now he'd planned and carried out a robbery of a hospital, assisted in a siege on a spaceport and watched pieces of himself fall away, bit by bit, wondering how long until he ended up just like River and they both had nothing left.

It was melodramatic to think like that, of course, and he had better things to be thinking about. Like the bounty from the last heist he'd planned, the one he'd done without giving Mal any details. The one where he'd enlisted Book's aid and his handy ident card, and walked straight through the front doors of the academy that had tortured his sister. What he stole wasn't worth anything, not in terms of currency, but it meant enough to him to steal his voice until night—he was plenty vocal then, and it was no longer only River's voice haunting the passenger's quarters with screams.

His parents had sold her.

He had only gone there to find out once and for all exactly what had been done to her, what the end result was meant to be, how to fix it. He copied everything relating to her, and with the useful information came things he'd rather not have known. His parents hadn't paid the Academy to teach River, they'd been the ones paid. 200,000 credits straight to their account. They hadn't even tried to hide it, but Simon supposed that was because no one would have thought to look.

It made sense, really, if he thought about it. They had always been a few steps ahead of him when he had mentioned his fear for River—worrying about his future already when all he had mentioned was her letters holding a hidden code.

He hadn't been able