Crossover fic: Anomalies - River/Peter - 1/? - PG

[withimpunity]

Title: Anomalies (1/?)
Pairing: River/Peter but not really
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Heroes belongs to Tim Kring, NBC, and co. Firefly belongs to Our Master, Joss Whedon, and Fox n stuff. Not I. No harm or profit is intended. A vague disclaimer is no one's friend.
Summary: River feels a change in the wind.
A/n: Heroes/Firefly crossover in which I intended to expand upon. Intend being the key word here.


River watches them all smile and move their mouths, like they're real people with feelings and problems all of their own, and she pokes at the lumpy glob of protein mush on her plate wtih her fork, laughing but not smiling as the Captain insults Jayne for something. She doesn't hear what.

Something is wrong. No. Wrong isn't the correct way to describe it. Neither is off or different, skewed, or misplaced. Warped; maybe that's what it is. Maybe. Everything feels new, the way the air feels the second the seasons change, and there's a low humming inside her head that she can't tune out no matter how hard she tries. All through dinner it grows louder, so that's its all she can hear, and it gets to where she can't even put on the face she calls her "Simon face," the one that makes him thinks she's not as crazy as she is. She also thinks this is probably what it would sounds like if you stuck your head into the microheater on full power.

Simon turns to her, the way he does every couple of minutes, and sees her with her hands over her ears and her lips moving, but not making a sound. He asks her what's wrong with a worried hand on her shoulder and River shakes her head, getting gravy on the ends of her hair. She thinks its gravy. Could be corn.

"Change in the wind," She mutters as she gets up from the table. "Low pressure system. I need to wash my hair." She sets her plate on top of Simon's and excuses herself to go wash up.

"Happy Birthday Kaylee," She says with a sweet smile and a curtsy before she walks off. She can feel them staring at her like she's lost even that shred of sanity she's been holding onto. She knows they're still afraid of her a little bit, but the noise in her head is so distracting she forgets to spin around and stick her tongue out at Kaylee like this is all just a game and she is not a psycho-genius, and Kaylee's birthday isn't for seven and a half months. The laughter from the dining hall fades as she rounds the corner and it happens so suddenly that she the scream of pain gets caught in her throat as she collapses on the steps.

***

River wakes up gasping, too busy concentrating on filling her lung with recycled air to notice the person hovering over her body.

"Thank God." The person says. Its even louder and more startling than the incessant humming she heard before she cracked her head on the metal steps and fell asleep. There's blood of her fingers when she touches the tender spot on her scalp; sticky like hodgeberry jam.

River looks up at him through a curtain of dark hair, inching away cautiously on her back like a sand crab, like he's some kind of contagious plague, except she's already caught it.

"I thought you were dead." He offers her his hand and she screams, knocking over the box of jacks she and Kaylee had been playing with earlier. She let Kaylee win three times out of seven; Kaylee made a face and tickled her. Everything hadn't been warped and out of order then.

"Not dead," She replies, scrambling to her feet, refusing to make eye contact with the anomaly pretending to be a boy; talking like a boy, looking pretty like a boy, but can't be a boy. Not here, not now. "You aren't supposed to be here. Please go home."

"I know," The not-boy frowns and it pulls at the corners of his mouth the way his entire existence pulls on her. "I wish I could. I don't even know how I got here."

"Time travel," River mumbles, creeping around the edges of the wall away from him, yet toward him at the same time, almost as if he's got his own gravitational pull; she barks out a laugh at the how ridiculous she sounds inside her head and he makes a startled face. "The concept of moving backward or forward to different points in time, in a manner analogous to moving through space."

"Yeah, uh, I got that part," He says with a crooked, almost-smile, and River doesn't like the way he looks at her. His face is all soft lines and bright, curious eyes, looking into her like she has answers for him. She doesn't have answers. She's made up of commas and question marks; maybe a semi colon on a good day, but not answers. Answers are for girls like Kaylee and men like Mal; people who know who they are and where they came from, and dream dreams that belong to them instead of the ghosts of a forgotten system.

"I"m Peter," He says and his nervous smile comforts her a little as he offers her his hand. She wants to take it - she does. River wants to be the polite little girl Daddy raised her to be and shake his hand and curtsy and feel his skin against her lips when she kisses his cheek, but she can't. She's afraid if she touches him, this anomaly, this thing that doesn't belong in this verse any more than she does, that she'll put a fracture in the space time continuum and it will implode, fold in on itself until nothing is left. Or maybe she's just afraid he'll touch her back.