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Author's Note: For improv #8 barren -- cracked -- rough -- smile. Thanks to Pearl-o and maure for goading, and Dangermom for last minute beta and the title!

Not Yet
by Tara O'Shea

He doesn't think she knows. He suspects, but he can't ask her. She catches him watching her sometimes, over the tattered pages of his symbol. Dark eyes like mirrors.

Secrets.

They all worry, she knows. Think that she can hear their voices when their lips don't move. She can't explain that it's not like that. It's not always voices. Sometimes, it's all she can do to keep the coloured threads on the warp so that they make a pattern. Past and present mingle, and she never knows if the scarlet and the purple are the future until they become the muddy grey of the now.

She tries to warn them, when she can. But the words get twisted up, and she can't push them past her lips in the proper pattern. Before, they just believed she didn't know what she was saying. Now, every apple may be an exodus from Eden, and it sends a prickle of fear down their spines when she lets her wings unfurl.

Book has more to worry about than most, but River keeps his counsel.

She doesn't mind sharing his secret--bearing part of it on her own shoulders makes her feel more solid. More real, when sometimes the slightest breeze could make her disperse like smoke. He's just trying to protect them, in his own way. Be a father when daddy has disappeared, melted away.

His hands are rough, the skin in the crease between his thumb cracked from the dryness of the air and many nights of dishes and laundry and all the jobs that no one else wants. He's never said it