We Invented the Remix...Redux V

Title: Incurable (The "All You Zombies" Remix)
Author: alixtii
Summary: She knows there is only one person who can find, and save, her.
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Firefly/Harry Potter
Pairings: Minerva McGonagall/Rupert Giles/River Tam, Winifred Burkle/Kaywinnit Lee Frye
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Joss' and Jo's, not mine
Original story: Incurable by Ari

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Incurable (The "All You Zombies" Remix)

 "You lost her." It's not a question when Lilah says it.

Of course they wouldn't be able to find you, you think. They could not help but to lose you, with their hands of blue, two by two; you were hidden so well, so deeply that it would be a challenge even for you to find yourself.

"There were complications," they say. "The Parliament authorized a--"

"I didn't ask for your excuses." They shut up. Lilah turns her back on them, looks at you, her gaze unrelenting in its penetration. "I don't suppose I need to stress how important our target is to the interests of the firm, under the circumstances."

"No, ma'am," you say.

---

You're nearby, you know. You can sense your own presence, and it's suddenly difficult to separate your thoughts from, well, your own. It's hard enough to keep a rein on the insanity which still rages, sometimes, in the back of your brain, but now here it is again, and out of control, engulfing, fashioning its own world which consumes you and threatens to consume you as well. You wish you could teach yourself how to control yourself. You will in time, you know, but not yet. Not until later. Or before.

Not to mention all the other mad thoughts which threaten to pierce your shields, the twisted and perverted realities of not only Potter and Summers but all the other poor architects of the multiverse as well: Wormwood, Mars, Craig, Kincaid, plus others whose names you never managed to learn. It is maddeningly impossible to keep your focus (your focii, really, under the circumstances), and so you key in on the closest mind whose thoughts could almost be seen as half-sane: the night watchman.

Holmer's mind is an impressive edifice of doublethink--it is, of course, the only thing that keeps him sane--at least in comparison to those he watches.

His thoughts are mundane, of his flat and of his telly; they have to be, really. He is at the moment the only one aware of the brick and of the rock which provides a house to the asylum; without him to anchor them all in this place they'd all drift apart forever, their realities to never touch or merge again. He is the only one who can do it; you cannot be trusted to, not today.

You look deeper. There it is: the memory of a man in twenty-first century garb and a woman in robes, already willed to be forgotten. Rupert, of course, with Minerva. Buried even deeper is the door through which they came, a door which isn't when all the rest of St. Bruno's is. He must forget, but you can't afford to.

Holmer took them to the director, of course, who will take them to you. And you will find them, and you will--no. It's too early. Or is it? You can't remember. Are the memories in front of you or behind you? You can't tell anymore.

Which is the real you? You laugh at the question. Would the other be the fake you? Absurd.

"Are any of the residents truly mad?" Rupert asks you.

"Course they are," you answer. "I am. The Summers girl was."

This gets a reaction from Rupert, and an internal laugh from Minerva. "Buffy wasn't mad," Rupert argues. "She really was the Slayer."

But of course Buffy was the Slayer. And Harry really was a wizard. Matilda's a telekinetic, Veronica's in love with her father, Max is genetically engineered, Claudia Jean will really grow up to be the 46th President of the United States of America, et cetera. What does Rupert think the world is made out of? All those bits and molecules no one's ever seen?

Of course not. You know enough to trust eyes and heart alone. Life is a tale told by an idiot--or, more precisely, a madman. Or a madwoman. Dreams and fantasies are the only thing left to live on.

But Minerva understands. "Those two don't necessarily contradict each other, Rupert."

The three of you, Rupert, Minerva, and youtself, apparate away, so you're not there anymore, and as you're ripped away from yourself, the barriers go down as the insanity at last wears away your shields.

Darkness.

---

"Thank God," Simon says as you open your eyes to Fred's smiling face. "I thought we lost her."

"Nah," says Kaylee, standing next to Fred, holding her hand. Fred's other hand still holds an empty syringe. "Fred's smart. And River's too much of a fighter."

"That she is," Fred agrees cheerfully as she puts down the syringe. Then she pauses, an expression of horror passes over her features, and she spasms.

Simon catches her before she falls, his doctor's instincts kicking in. "What is it?" he asks.

Kaylee just looks at her girlfriend in horror as Fred's eyes, hair, lips change color.

"It's my fault," you say, suddenly understanding. You thought you were home, here on Serenity, but realization hits as you watch. You remember.

"What?" Simon asks, not looking at you, checking the pupils of Fred's newly blue eyes. "Of course it isn't, mei-mei."

But it is. Reality's unraveling, destabilized. You have to fix it before that fearful symmetry is shattered now and forever.

You pick up a full syringe, lying next to where Fred placed the empty one, and plunge it into your chest.

Again, darkness. No, wait: not darkness. Whiteness. You are given unto it.

---

You're in a white room--if it is a room at all. It might just be whiteness, you're not sure.

Alone in the room is yourself--just the one of you, mercifully--and another woman, younger than you. She wears a button: 73.9% Ravenclaw. You wonder what the other twenty-six percent is.

She looks at you, and if you thought Lilah's gaze was penetrating, this is no comparison. She can see into the very depths of your soul, understands you like no man or woman in your world possibly could. You know this without knowing how you know it. You know it because she wants you to know it.

"You remember now," the woman says, as with certainty. You wonder if it is possible for her, in this room, to tell a lie. Somehow it seems that when she speaks, truth and falsity drop out of the equation. You exist in the space between her words. "Where they took you."

"A chateau," you answer. "In the south of France."

She makes no expression, as if she knew all of this all along. "The universe?" she asks, but you know she already knows the answer.

"Potter's," you answer.

She nods. "You'll go there, of course. You remember what you need to do."

"But . . . why?" You have no more articulate a question than that,

She pauses, smiles a sad smile. "Because you suffer so beautifully, River."

The whiteness consumes you again, and you find yourself in Wolfram & Hart's elevator.

---

Why the Lassiter? you wonder sometimes. You still don't know, and you suppose you never will. Some things don't need reasons; that's why there are loops. Why the complicated and twisted, beautiful pattern of time and space came to be the way it is is something you doubt you will ever manage to figure out; if anyone at all knows, perhaps it is that girl in that white room atop the elevator.

You take the Lassiter and travel to ago, to the south of France, to the chateau.

Rupert and Minerva will teach you--did teach you--are teaching you--you go through the entire conjugation in your mind and it almost, as a sum, manages to describe the teaching. There is teaching, past, present, and/or future, and the teaching is (you stick to the present tense; every moment is an eternal now) the source of many lessons for you, perhaps the most important lessons of them all, and you will always be very grateful for them.

But there is a time for the teaching to come to the end. It is time to teach yourself what you need to learn now.

The cottage is warded--Albus wouldn't have left Minerva an unwarded cottage--but the wards don't recognize you as a threat. You are what they are set up to protect, after all.

Minerva looks from you to you as you open the door and enter the room. "River?" You're not sure which of you she is speaking to.

"I'm sorry, Minerva," you say and fire the Lassiter once, twice. Both Minerva and Rupert are wizards of a sort, but they are both mortal and unprepared, and they fall, inevitably, to the Lassiter's blasts.

You look at yourself, and you're not afraid--why should you be? You know you're not a threat. You take your hand. "Come, River," you say. You leave the cottage hand in hand, and only one of you looks back.

In so many worlds of fantasy, precious grand illusions come true, in all the dreams dreamt by Harry and by Buffy and by you, there are still some inexorable truths which cannot be escaped, as much as you would like to try.

You've always known that you were the only one who could ever save you from yourself.