Author: Sonya

Email: sonyajeb@swbell.net

Summary: Rushing like waves, falling like rain.

Disclaimer: Not mine. Though by god, I wish that at least Simon was mine. *snuggles* He's so pretty!

Characters: River, Simon

Rating: PG

Note: Written for Challenge #11 at ff_chronicles

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Water has many forms. She knows that. Rushing. Falling. Freezing. Rising. Forming a mist around her thoughts and rendering them cloudy. She spends so much time trying to sort through the clouds. Sometimes they form pictures, shapes she can name. And sometimes they remain elusive, drifting away from her seeking, eager fingers.

Water is made up of smaller parts. She knows that. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Two and one. Bonded together. Pieces that fit.

She is split. Separate elements, completely incomplete. Her edges are jagged. They cut like splinters, icicles that rip through her mind and impale her thoughts on their icy points.

Cold. Freezing. Ice. Blue.

Sometimes, when she dreams, her mind is frozen, her world turned a hundred, thousand, million shades of blue. Fingers gone numb. Hands trembling. These are the bad nights, when she stops being a girl and becomes instead an angry slash of muddled emotion, knocking the stars down from their lofty homes in the sky.

Other times, her dreams are warm. Delicate hands with long, tapered fingers. Surgeon's hands. Gentle and sure, a touch made to heal. But even then, her world is tinted blue. Blue like water, blue like the sky of Earth-that-was. Blue-black hair combed just so over a high forehead, concerned eyes and a face she would know blindfolded.

But the worst is when she has the wakeful dreams. Moving, standing, smiling, eyes closed, breathingBreathingBREATHING... Don't forget to breathe. You'll drown if you don't breathe.

Sometimes life suffocates her like water. The memories crash against her mind like angry waves, pulling her under. She fights with everything she has, but it's never enough. Blue surrounds her, closing over her head and pushing her down and down and down and down...

Blue hands, blue life.

And that's when he comes. Big brother holds her and pulls her free of the seething waves. For a time, she can be a girl again and she lovesHATESloves the feel of real things. Smiles, apples, and no more secret thoughts.

But it is only temporary, a transitory state of being. Like water. Like ice. Like vapor. And soon she will fade away, falling into the murky depths of her own mind.

River knows the truth, even if Simon refuses to acknowledge it. Life is a dream, always changing like water, and she is its unwilling puppet.