Complicated
The world was a very simple place.
Everything made perfect sense if you just knew how to look at it. The worlds were tilted in certain directions, and spun in certain rotations. The stars and suns aligned to make some planets hospitable and others not. There were rules for terraforming and rules for space travel. The world was like one incredible mathematical equation that River Tam understood perfectly.
Except for the part with people.
People, she had learned, could never be counted on to do the logical, rational thing. And when they did irrational things, it was never for the obvious reasons. People changed all the variables, reversed all the symbols, fouled up the equation beyond any hope of understanding.
River knew that her brother loved her very much.
This fit into the equation. Her parents loved her because she was their progeny. She was the continuation of their DNA. Their ticket into theoretical immortality. Through her, they, in some small form, would continue to exist even after they had passed away. Simon loved her by extension because she was his sister, she shared his DNA, and therefore they existed on the same level in the equation.
Which didn’t make a single thing that had happened in the past year make sense.
She had written to her brother out of a sense of desperation, not because she expected him to come rescue her, but simply because she didn’t want to disappear and not have anyone know what had happened to her. She knew he would break the code. He was her brother. He was a genius. He would break the code and then he and her parents would know what had happened to her. There would be no wondering, no lingering uncertainty to haunt them after she was gone.
The possibility that her brother might give up everything for her had never even entered her mind.
But he had. Money, friends, career, prestige, and most importantly, his lifelong dream of being a doctor. He had talked about that as long as she could remember. Helping people. Saving lives. Simon, her brother, was going to be a doctor. Then he had given up everything for her. And continued to give up things he didn’t even have, throwing them in with a group of outlaws, turning into a thief, a smuggler, a criminal. Simon, her brother, the criminal.
Who loved her.
River watched her brother, the doctor, the criminal who loved her, stitch up a wound in Jayne’s arm, all the while delivering a lecture to the mercenary on being cautious when it came to grenades filled with nails because things like that could be dangerous, despite the cavalier way Jayne treated them. She watched him be a doctor again. Her feet kicked back and forth as she lost himself in his voice, thinking of the fact that Simon had thrown his life away for her and didn’t even regret it.
He left all the regret for her.
She wondered how a simple world could hold such a complicated thing.