A/N: Hello everyone! I've gone for so long - did you miss me? ;-)

One of my new year's resolutions is to post some of the stories I've been hoarding on my desktop. So, here's the first ... of many!

I wrote this one a while ago and while it has flashbacks, it takes place approximately 4 months following the BDM. It focuses a lot on Simon, River and Mama and Papa Tam as well as Simon and Kaylee's relationship - plus hints of Mal and Inara. A little something for everyone!

I hope you enjoy - please leave comments if you do!

Dear Simon,

I miss you. That's probably not much of a surprise to the top three percent, but it was to me. I thought for sure that once I got here I'd be so consumed with my classes and friends, I wouldn't have time to miss you. But I was wrong.

I'm homesick, ge ge. How did that happen? I really don't miss mother or father, but I miss my room and my old school and my few friends ... I never really believed that old saying about absence making the heart grow fonder. But I believe it now.

It's not too bad here, really. My classes aren't really challenging yet, but the instructors tell me they will get much more difficult soon. No one else here is as smart as me, but I guess that's all right. I haven't been able to dance yet. Sometimes at night, I twirl around my room and pretend I can hear music, like when we went to see the Nutcracker last Christmas, do you remember? One minute I'm dancing with the sugar plum fairies and the next I'm waltzing with the Mouse King ... It's not as much fun as when you used to practice with me though ... And no one will play games. They're always quiet and reading, never running or jumping or playing. Why is that do you think? They remind me of you.

I can't wait until I can come home for a visit. You'll have so much to tell me. Like whether or not you ever asked out Candace Chang or if you became the youngest doctor ever appointed to the medical-elect. I'll probably find out about that one even in here. We're kind of isolated from the outside world, but something tells me that news would not pass me by.

I feel like everything else is though. Is that normal? Now I know why we never went to boarding school. Write me, Simon, please? Long letters about absolutely nothing or absolutely everything, I don't care, just as long as you write.

I still miss you. And I love you. Your mei mei, River

---- ----

Simon was tired and weary, his body aching from being on his feet and in surgery for almost eighteen hours. It had been a difficult operation, reattaching a young girl’s leg, but it had also been his first solo job and he felt immense pride at knowing he’d been successful.

Entering the grand foyer to his childhood home, Simon quickly deposited his bag and jacket. Looking towards the study, he called, “Mother? Father? I’m here.”

Not getting an answer, Simon moved towards the room, noticing the triangle of buttery light that was cast onto the black and white marble floor. Of course, it didn’t take a genius to figure out where his parents were. Before a meal, they always, without fail, had a drink in the study, waiting for one of the servants, more than likely Mary, to announce that the food was served.

Stepping past the threshold, Simon smiled slightly as he watched his mother and father, bent over something, laughing lightly. Clearing his throat, he moved to give his mother a kiss and said dryly, “I certainly hope you’ll let me in on the joke.”

Regan Tam offered her son her cheek, waiting until he had brushed his lips against it, before reaching for and squeezing his hand lightly. “Oh, Simon, you look absolutely exhausted. Are you all right?”

Keeping his small smile on his face, he told her, “I’m fine, mother. Just a long surgery.” Turning towards his father he stretched out a hand, Gabriel Tam taking it firmly in his grip and shaking it once. “Father,” Simon greeted him stiffly as was their custom.

“Simon.” The elder man’s gaze was still slightly bemused and Simon could only guess what had both of his parents in such high spirits. While they were not necessarily dour by nature, they were in no way jovial either. Walking to the sidebar to fix himself a drink, he asked, “So, what were you two laughing at?”

Suppressing another light chuckle, Regan told him, “Oh, it was nothing dear. Just one of River’s letters.”

Simon was grateful he had not yet brought his drink to his lips; he was fairly certain he’d now be wearing it if he had. Whirling around, his intense blue-eyed gaze studied them both as he breathed, “A letter? From River?”

Nodding once, Gabriel handed the piece of paper to him and Simon snatched it readily, his eyes scanning over her neat script. It was the first they’d heard from her in months and Simon was craving any information, any contact with his baby sister. He hadn’t liked it when her letters, coming almost every two weeks when she’d first gone away, had stopped coming so regularly.

Frowning as he read her words, Simon found himself puzzling over each sentence. What was she talking about? While each line was made out of the requisite verbs, nouns, adverbs and the like, they made little to no sense. Looking worriedly to his father, he asked, “Do you understand this?”

Waving it away, it was Regan who spoke. “Oh, Simon you know how your sister is. Although I’ll admit, we didn’t send her to that school to learn how to speak in riddles.”

An uncanny fear gripping his heart, Simon again looked down the page, trying to decipher his sister’s meaning from the gibberish she had so carefully written. Shaking his head, he said softly, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Clapping a strong hand to his son’s shoulder, Gabriel steered him towards the dining room, plucking the paper from his hands and setting it on the desk as they walked by. “You’ve had a long, hard day, Simon,” the older man reassured. “I’m sure that once you’ve eaten and gotten some rest, you’ll be able to figure out the game your sister’s playing in no time.”

Not at all certain that was the case, Simon found his appetite severely diminished and his mind guiltily drifting towards the letter of nonsense for the rest of the night.

---- ----

It was very late and Simon knew he would regret his lack of sleep tomorrow when he started another forty-eight hour shift at the hospital. Leaning forward over the few sheets of paper he was studying, Simon squinted a bit, trying desperately to decipher the code he knew was imbedded in the pages before him.

In the past three months they’d received three more letters from River. They came regularly on the last day of each month and Simon waited for them now in anxious anticipation. He read them hungrily, pouring over each sentence, each word, each letter, looking for clues. Whether it was his highly logical mind or just a sixth sense borne from a sibling connection, Simon knew that his sister was trying to tell him something, through these cryptic and nonsensical statements. And Simon was going to discover it.

With a sigh, he finished re-reading the most recent letter and slumped back in his desk chair. Rubbing a hand along his neck, he tried to ease the tension there, his muscles already severely cramping from spending the last day and a half as the on-call surgeon. He’d been bounced around from ortho to emergency to oncology and while each case had been engrossing, the end result was mind-numbing exhaustion.

Rising slowly, he stretched, his arms reaching far over his head as he cracked his back and wandered towards the large bay window in his living room. He didn’t live far from the hospital, which wasn’t a surprise to anyone who knew him. Simon liked things to be in order, he liked things to make sense, he liked logic. It was just another reason why surgery had never really been a career choice, it had been a calling.

Grinning slightly, he caught sight of a flashing light as it whizzed by, no doubt just a passing hovercar, but in Simon’s mind that red streak was the latest laser blast in the Alliance’s war against the Independents. The war that he and his sister had acted out for hours at a time in their youth, falling and yelling with abandon often not afforded to children of high society, like the Tams. But River had never cared about such propriety and for a few years, she had made Simon not care about it either.

But he did now and when measured against that strict social code, he knew how insane he was behaving. His parents had basically told him as much last month after the latest letter had shown up on his doorstep. He’d gone flying over to the mansion, waving it about wildly and demanding that they read it, understand it and find the pattern. His mother had blamed his ranting on stress, his father on co-dependency and so Simon had been forced to drop it. He had not mentioned his suspicions to his parents since, appeasing them and allowing both Regan and Gabriel Tam to move about with confidence in their social circles, once again free to boast and brag about their prodigal son.

With a heavy sigh, Simon felt his shoulders tensing again. He had only a few more hours before he’d be expected at the hospital and none of his investigating had uncovered a thing. He had thought he might have hit upon something an hour or so ago, but once he’d implemented the hypothesis he’d only managed to come away with another code, three letters and four digits that made absolutely no sense to him. After running it through the Cortex he’d dismissed THX 1138 as a false conclusion and started again.

Forcing himself back to his desk and the papers strewn about, Simon did his best to clear his mind and focus. His baby sister was trying to tell him something and it was a message Simon was dying to hear.

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Chapter 1