Title: Colorless
Author: Rory divided_poet
Summary: "Your world is black and white now, Simon."
Rating: G
Character(s): Simon Tam, River Tam.
Prompt: #054. Colorless
Word Count: 339
Notes: This is unbeta and written in about 20 minutes, all mistakes are mine.


Simon didn’t know when he’d become like this, so distant. He couldn’t pinpoint a time. All he knew was he was pushing people farther and farther away, receding into his work even more. He’d been like this for months, he was aware of that. After the first few weeks Kaylee stopped coming around the infirmary. Then River stopped popping up at odd moments.

He could remember that last time she did it. He had been in the infirmary, as always, when suddenly she was standing next to him.

She’d tilted her head to the side. “You work to hard, Simon. It won’t help; you’re always going to feel like an outsider,” she said, the most normal thing she’d said to him in a long time, if not one of the more un-nerving. He still always found himself surprised by how…intuitive she was. Then she added something that sounded much more like herself. “At this rate, it’s all going to pull away. All the colors in your world are going to shrink back so fast that by the time you turn around they’ll be gone. It’s already begun.”

With that she’d disappeared out the door and around the corner. Now, just like almost everyone else on the ship, Simon only saw River at meals (Or on the odd occasion that Jayne was hurt on a job, but he wasn’t going to touch that one).

The one person that kept visiting for longest period of time was Mal. The Captain came down to the infirmary on a regular basis for a while. He was rarely hurt when he visited.

“Just in need of the peace and quiet,” he’d say.

The day Mal finally stopped coming Simon was surprised to see River walk into the infirmary.

The look on her face was somber. “Your world is black and white now, Simon. You should be on the road to pulling the colors back, but you won’t. For awhile the colors blended together to form one, then it turned grey too. I’m sorry Simon.”