Wrote this on the 10th Anniversary of Firefly after watching the marathon they had on SciFi channel- I died a little inside. So I had to get my feelings out there with a little fanfiction to help the hurt go away a little bit.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Co. owns this. He got a movie made, so I'm certainly not gonna take it from him.
Miranda helped, a little. River's head isn't quite so loud-like a dull roar instead of pitched screaming- and she'd gotten better at controlling her episodes.
But Simon is so, so wrong when he tells her she'll be cured soon.
The buzzing is muffled, yes, but it's still there. The secrets-the lies- the people; they're all still trapped in her head like insects in a jar. They're bumping against the glass but it won't be long before they're throwing themselves against the inside of her skull until something breaks.
The fly called Miranda is dead, twitching on the floor of her mind.
The others (flies, grasshoppers, spiders) whisper things when they brush along the bruised surface of her brain. They tell her their names (even though secrets don't have names at all. That's why they're secrets).
She learned not to tell Simon any of this because it upset him and just made him pump her full of drugs that made her sick and spinny and-
So she doesn't tell Simon that, without Miranda in there, all the Secrets aren't so bad.
They teach her things, and she's always loved to learn. One fills her limbs with a grace that River remembers from when dance was beautiful and she thinks this one was a dancer before- and another makes her feel like sharp, like (knives) cold intelligence and strategy and she thinks did this soldier volunteer or was he taken...?
Simon thinks they just rewired her brain and when she tells him that, no, that's not quite right, he whips out his charts and his diagrams and his drugs to convince her. To tell her. The part of River that remembers being River wishes that were true. It isn't, though.
There's too much information in her brain, too many different people (The people are the Secrets, you see) for simple rewiring. Rewiring means changing what's already there- that doesn't explain why she has so much new... stuff.
It's because the Alliance put them there.
River (or some part of her, does it matter?) accepts this and sometimes is even glad. In the dark, the sound of voices in her head is better than silence.
They're not so bad.
The Secrets teach her things, now that she can hear them. She couldn't before, because of (Miranda) the noise. River's always been good at learning- she supposed that's why she was chosen. River can't change, because change is hard, but she can learn to live with things. Like she said, she's good at it.
She'll never be okay, but her head is quieter now.