Current mood:

drained

[ficbit] [firefly] something
Zoe, Wash. Typing disjointed things out 'til I can grab thoughts back with my fingers, make them fit.


First thing, captain's signed the strawberry blond on as pilot and he's moving in with box after box of gorram toys trailin' after him.

Next thing she knows he's got himself a place all set out, plastic dinosaurs and molded palm trees clutterin' the bridge like he's gotta bring with him half a jungle. She'd ask Mal, but he'd just hold up his hands and say something 'bout simple folk and their ways, and she don't often take to questioning her captain.

But.

"--Dinosaurs," she says, after a week of finding dinosaurs in the galley, dinosaurs tipped on their guts in the hall, dinosaurs underfoot every which way she goes. Got to feelin' like she's living with a twelve-year old boy. First time she's talked to him without his speaking first, but hell, she thinks, someone's gotta bring the subject up before she beans him in the nose with the next bronto she finds on the table.

Captain wouldn't take kindly to her killing the pilot.

"Oh, yeah," says the pilot. He spins 'round in the chair, almost looking like one of them villains from the old shows, excepting for his mustache being blonde and looking like nothing so much as a caterpillar roosting on his lip, and him turning a T. Rex over and over in his hands. "Got a whole set," he adds. "Stegosaur, triceratops, a couple of allosaurs made out of the old rubber. Could show you?" Leans forward like a kid, smiling, turning the toy over and over. "If you want, I mean. I've got 'em all."

"Don't rightly care," she says. "Just make sure you keep your eyes on the sky."

He fumbles the T. Rex, and looks down to his hands, back at her in the next second with another cocksure smile. "I'll promise one eye," he says, resting back in the chair and waving the damn dinosaur at her. "Guarantee two for a kiss."

"Don't like men with beards," she says, already turning to leave, "and keep your toys out of the nuts and bolts of the ship." Got her hands on the rail, foot on the first step. He says, "It's a mustache," but she's gone, then, just Hoban-the-pilot-Wash and his dinosaurs and the molded palm tree by his elbow.





eta: omg Chira! :O