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In the Closet

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:35:54 GMT

Title: In the Closet
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Pairing: Ginny/Pansy
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter belongs to JKR.
Teaser: So here she was. In the closet.

In the Closet

So here she was. In the closet.

She liked to think she had a rapport with closets. At home, it was basically the only place she could get a square metre of space to herself without Fred and George transfiguring her stuffed animals, Ron whining about how Fred and George had transfigured his teddy bear, Percy prattling on about the thickness of cauldron bottoms, Charlie bandaging the latest in a line of nasty burns, or Bill ducking Mum's attempts to trim his hair. She did have her own room, of course, but even a locked door offered little protection against the onslaught of brotherdom. The only true guarantee of privacy was if no one could find her.

So whenever her brothers were being a little too brotherly, she would sneak into the hall closet where her mother kept skein upon skein of yarn, hundreds of sweaters yet to be knit. It was surprisingly cozy to tuck herself into the corner back behind the brooms, lose herself in the mountain of yarn, burrow into the rainbow of colors, and surround herself with the faintly wooly smell of mother's love.

This particular closet did not smell like anything at all lovely. Instead the aggressive stench of Mrs. Scower's Magical Mess Remover assaulted her nostrils as she attempted to breathe through her mouth as much as possible.

She was perched on a bucket, desperately trying to maintain her balance as she had not had enough time to determine whether said bucket was in fact empty before claiming it as the only possible perch in the place. And something was digging into her back; she was hoping it was only a mop handle but didn't particularly care to investigate the depths of the closet further. Who knew what Filch had back there?

No. This was not a friendly closet.

But in this case she was hiding from something rather worse than Fred and George testing their latest Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes brainstorm. She could hear members of the Inquisitorial Squad galumping up and down the corridor outside. That ponderous tread she was sure was Goyle. That was likely to be Crabbe, just as heavy but even slower. From time to time she caught a laugh that had to be Malfoy, all petty edges and little humor. And once she was sure she'd heard a triumphant hem, hem that couldn't be anyone but that hateful toad Umbridge.

She wasn't entirely sure how long she'd been stashed away in here. It seemed like an eternity, but that could be the painful bucket edge talking. And it wouldn't do to muck up all her good work hiding by striding out of the cupboard into the midst of an Inquisitorial Squad meeting. Emerging from a closet was sure to prompt some questions from even the densest of them.

She also wasn't entirely sure why the Squad had failed to check this particular closet. Of course they'd hardly been selected for their brains, so perhaps it was not so remarkable an oversight. Goyle might have had trouble working the doorknob.

Finally deciding that she hadn't heard anyone in a good long time (or, in closet time, perhaps several minutes), she rose from her precarious bucket seat and edged toward the door, pressing her ear against the rough wood and listening for any signs of movement. When she heard nothing, she twisted the doorknob and began edging it inward.

She only got it so far before it flew at her, the edge hitting her in the center of her forehead and knocking her backward. She shrieked as she fell, arms and legs flailing as she connected with mops and buckets, toppling in an avalanche of cleaning implements. Her waving foot connected with something a little more animate--it felt like a shin--and there was a sharp yelp as a body collapsed on top of her, knocking the wind out of her.

She gulped shallowly for air, trying to fill the empty hollow in her chest, the raspy noises from near her ear suggesting that her new closet buddy was doing the same. It was too dark to see who her visitor might be. At some point between the flailing and the falling and the waving of limbs, someone had kicked the door shut, leaving her and the weight on her chest marooned in darkness.

Forcing air into her lungs, she groped for her wand, hoping it hadn't flown too far in the melee, seeing as she couldn't exactly get up and look for it. She found it at last mired in a puddle of unknown and suspicious origin and jabbed it forward into the unknown, gasping, "Lu--"

"Ouch!"

"--mos!" she finished.

Light burst from the tip of her wand to illuminate the inner depths of Pansy Parkinson's delicately flaring right nostril.

To quote Ron--Bloody hell.

In this instance, Pansy's pug face was perhaps even more unfortunate than usual; it made it so much easier to really wedge her wand up there. The angles had aligned perfectly in an odd sort of kismet. Frightening really…

"In case you haven't noticed, Weasley," Pansy's voice was even nasal than usual, "but you do have your wand stuck up my nose." The accent on "my" was particularly heavy, as if it would have been acceptable if it had been stuck up anyone else's nose, noses being natural places to stick wands.

Ginny had a momentary urge to giggle, remembering Ron's story of Harry valiantly sticking his wand up the nose of a troll in order to save Hermione. In the scheme of things, troll boogies might only be slightly less loathsome than Pansy ones.

"Weasley," Pansy repeated, her voice climbing toward a whine.

Startled back to the situation at hand, she stifled the urge to mutter, "Sorry," and extracted her wand, drawing back just enough so that it was well within bat bogey hex range. Maybe Pansy's tone would improve if her face was sprouting little fluttery wings.

Just as Ginny did not apologize, Pansy did not offer any thanks for the rescue of her nose. She merely scrunched her nose, thin little lines appearing across the bridge, and tossed her hair back over her shoulder, wafting a delicate candied scent through the confined space. Hair wasn't supposed to smell like that. Was it?

"And what are you doing here, Weasley?" Pansy shifted, sending one bony hip crunching down on Ginny's stomach. "Hiding from the Inquisitorial Squad?" She shifted again, her hipbone forcing Ginny's stomach into a literal flip.

"No," Ginny said as coldly as she could manage, given that Pansy was all but straddling her now. "I'm not hiding in the closet. I'm just… in the closet," she finished lamely.

"Really?" Pansy's voice curled curiously around the word as her eyes shot Ginny an incomprehensible series of looks. Surprise at first followed by cold calculation and then a flutter of lashes that made Ginny's stomach do a somersault back into its rightful place. It was an awfully strange look.

"Just in the closet," she repeated, hoping that it might sound better the more times she said it. It didn't.

"That so?" A finger jabbed Ginny between the ribs. "You sound like you've been running."

"That's because you're sitting on me," she gritted out. "Been spending too long at the house tables?"

Pansy squeaked in outrage, a sharp distinctly feminine noise, and clambered off her as if burned. Ginny inhaled in relief, drawing her first clear breath in the last fifteen minutes, at least until it got stuck in her throat and she ended up coughing desperately.

When she recovered from the coughing fit, Pansy was glaring at her, arms crossed over her chest, nostrils flaring less than delicately now. "I suppose this would seem like a nice place to you, Weasley, since you were born in a--"

"Don't say it." Part of her wanted to demand that Pansy stop calling her Weasley. Weasley was Ron or Fred or George or someone larger and distinctly male. She was Ginny. She wanted to be Ginny.

Quashing the impulse to demand her name, she raised her wand in the direction of Pansy's nose again, not entirely sure if she planned to take full advantage of the pug shape once again or if she would settle for hexing her. Of course, nothing said she couldn't hex her once her wand was lodged up Pansy's nose again.

Looking utterly unconcerned by the waving wand and prospect of facial wings, Pansy sniffed and flipped her hair back once more. And there was that smell again, that distinct candy smell. It was like she was in Honeyduke's instead of Filch's fifth floor broom cupboard.

"Enjoy being…," she paused, eyes flashing again, "...in the closet, Weasley." And then she turned on her heel and slipped out the door, leaving Ginny mired in confusion--why hadn't Pansy turned her in?--and candy scent.

She sniffed the air again.

Fizzing Whizbee. She smelled like Fizzing Whizbee.

Her favorite candy.

North & South prettiness

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:05:01 GMT

I went a little crazy and made 200 (so far) icons for North & South (which, if you haven't seen it, is a stunning BBC production). Previews:

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Bothered & Bewildered, Part 4

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 14:29:43 GMT

Title: Bothered & Bewildered
Length: Four parts
Rating: PG-13 (allusions to sex)
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. Nope.
Characters: Wash/Zoë

Note: Last part, plus a post-script where some things clear up for Mal as well.

Bewildered, Part 2

He'd admit to being a mite bewildered the first time she seized him round the neck and dragged him off in the direction of her bunk. Not by the dragging, mind. After all, she was a warrior woman and he was only a large semi-muscular man; she could drag him anywhere she pleased and he'd be pleased to go.

But he was more than a little in the dark as to her intentions. He'd just bounced, dodged, and cartwheeled their way out of a rather hairy situation involving a number of large men with guns who wanted to kill them or at least bash their kneecaps, managing this heroic feat despite the distraction of Mal muttering long strains of nonsensical Chinese in the background. And that being so, he didn't figure on this being the day she found it necessary to kill him with her pinky.

Not that he hadn't been wrong about such things before. People were always blowing up at him in bits of random insanity as if he'd just insulted their mothers when, if only they'd let him get to the end of the joke, really he was talking about the gorilla he'd seen back on Arden, the one who liked to wear big feathery hats. But he was always out the airlock before anyone gave him a chance to explain.

Sometimes he thought it was the Hawaiian shirts. They did to seem prompt madness in others. Perhaps he should switch to something more pastoral. Or a nice bright plaid, a family tartan sort of thing. He could pull off a kilt…

But then she hadn't seemed particularly inclined to discuss his sartorial choices. And she wasn't dragging him in the direction of the airlock, which was promising all in all. She wasn't like to kill him in her bunk, what with the blood and the entrails and the extrails and all that. Too hard to get out of the rugs.

Of course she might not have rugs. She'd always struck him as a Spartan sort of gal. Sleep on a bed of nails and skin rabbits with her teeth and whatever else those Spartan types used to do back in the day.

He'd been about to make a remark or two on the subject, particularly when he noticed that her bed appeared to be as squashy and comfortable as his, but she cut him off with one of her First Mate looks that all but glued his lips together. Course about two seconds after that she ripped off his favorite Hawaiian shirt and the brown leather pants hit the floor and her intentions became clear to the point where he found out her furnishings really were entirely comfy.

And not that he could have said much with legs like those on display, looking even better out of brown leather than in. He thought he managed a perfectly serviceable, "Guuh," which she seemed to take more or less in the appreciative spirit in which it was meant. And talking wasn't really necessary at that point, now was it? Not that sort of talking anyway.

The second time he'd been seeing clearer as to her naughty intentions when her fingers knotted themselves up in his shirt. And he wasn't like to complain even if half of his brain was taken up with wonderment at his goddess choosing to repeat the experience with him.

He'd never been a particularly lucky guy. He got along, sure. Like a lot of people, he bounced along from world to world and job to job and ship to ship, never quite finding whatever was supposed to be gleaming at the end of the rainbow.

But this? This was like a lifetime of birthdays and Christmases and Moon Festivals all rolled up into one gorgeous package. And he hadn't even included her in his letter to Santa this year. Maybe the fat old man was making up for the pony he hadn't gotten when he was five. A pony would have never been happy on his homeworld anyway, not enough grass and not nearly enough sky. This was much better than a pony.

The third time he did the dragging and she didn't seem to mind. She seemed to revel in it almost, all those walls of hers falling to reveal a smile so rich and warm his heart all but did the hokey pokey at the sight of it. He'd always thought she needed to smile more, and to be the one to make her smile? Kris Kringle was being extra generous with the presents this year.

Afterward, in the cozy darkness, he'd wanted to ask why, why him, why were Lady Fortune and all her wacky nephews smiling on him. But then she threw her head back and laughed, a long, glorious, rippling laugh like she had been saving that one particular magic laugh all her life. And the questions didn't matter because it all made perfect crazy sense.

All those years of dreaming and looking at the sky and wishing for ponies and getting fired and flying and being put out the airlock and flying some more and bouncing from moon to moon and flying in what seemed like aimless circles, he'd been on the right course all along.

(Mostly) The End

Post-Script

A year and a half later

At first, he hadn't been entirely sure he saw it. His peripheral vision had always been a mite twitchy since the war, like to see dangers that weren't always there. So the twitch of movement that might have been Wash taking a swat at Zoë's backside couldn't have possibly been that. Zoë would have taken that hand right off, and he was sure he would have noticed if his pilot was only sporting one hand. Couldn't have possibly been that.

And when he noticed Wash climbing down into Zoë's bunk, he thought sure that she'd only taken one of the man's dinosaurs and he was trying to get it back. He'd confiscated a stegosaurus a time or two himself; it was always amusing to see the man's face when he saw that one of his friends had climbed the crew lockers and was now dangling precariously over the edge.

It was only when he found himself scurrying away from the bridge having seen one or two things he hoped never to have to think about ever again that things crashed into startling realization.

Now that was an interesting development.

Bothered & Bewildered, Part 3

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:10:56 GMT

Title: Bothered & Bewildered
Length: Four parts
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. Nope.
Characters: Wash/Zoë

Bewildered, Part 1

He'd shaved.

There was something disturbing about that. Something mighty disturbing about the conspicuous absence of the lip ferret. Something powerful disturbing about the very nice face visible now, clear of hair. It was a nice face, pleasing you might say.

Mighty powerful disturbing.

She'd only just gotten used to having someone else there, no longer just her and Mal and a couple of unreliable grunts liable to fall to pieces and give in. When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't do that, you find someone to carry you. She'd always known Mal would carry her if it came to that. That's she would walk through the Valley of Death at his side so long as he believed it could be done. She knew he wouldn't leave her behind.

But this? Being part of a crew? That was different. More people she had to trust to carry her if it came to that. Too many people had already failed her for that trust to come easy.

Crew was fast becoming one of Mal's favorite new words. It meant something to him in a way that she hadn't seen since the Alliance rolled into Serenity Valley and the homilies stopped and the cross 'round his neck disappeared. She'd never asked where it went. She'd never needed to.

Crew seemed to be Mal's new faith. Not one that she exactly shared. They'd done fine alone before. She watched his back and he watched hers and anybody else would be one more exposed back. But then she couldn't exactly fix this heap of junk and she couldn't exactly keep it in the sky if she did fix it, so she could admit the need for a few more people around.

She hadn't expected to grow accustomed to having him around, hairy face grinning at the breakfast table, the slightly manic energy like he'd mainlined caffeine, the appallingly loud shirts, the curve of his biceps as he battled through some of Serenity's rockier landings. Those were some beautiful arms though…

And then there was that odd feeling of comfort when she walked by the bridge and heard funny voices and evil laughs and the skitter of plastic across consoles. She could feel herself relaxing, spine uncoiling just the slightest bit from its perpetual soldier's salute, knowing he was at the helm in case death and danger came calling.

They did come calling pretty much every day and twice on Tuesdays when Mal got some of his better ideas. But if they could fly out of them, they did. And if they couldn't, they bumped and scraped along just as they always had, and he didn't seem to interfere in the bumping and scraping process. He seemed to revel in it almost.

Odder still, more than once she'd found herself in the position of having to reassure Mal as they plummeted toward hard ground that this would not be the time they exploded and died. That Wash would get 'em safe on the ground, landing light as a feather. Supposed to be she was the one with the more than understandable doubts. When had that changed?

She had only just come around to accepting all that, to accepting that the manic hairy man might actually have been one of Mal's better ideas, and then he had to go and confuse her all to hell again by becoming less hairy. And now it was a completely different face across the breakfast table, and she could feel herself softening for reasons that had nothing to do with piloty competence.

Mighty powerful disturbing.

The rest of the fabled crew were catching on. Occasionally she caught Kaylee's eyes darting from her to Wash and back again, bright with delight, smile so sunny you almost didn't dare to look directly at it for fear of becoming blind. Such honest glee at the prospect of… something, whatever this something was. But then Kaylee and her spinning romances would be right at home with Wash and his dinosaur tales, both fantastical creations.

Unlike Kaylee, Mal was, as ever, thankfully blind, deaf, and dumb when it came to matters of the heart. Couldn't see it for himself, let alone for anyone else. She'd probably have to lean across the table and plant a big, wet kiss right on Wash's clean-shaven face to activate Mal's amazing powers of romantic deduction. Even then it might take him awhile to process things and come around to the right conclusion.

Not that Mal's giant blindspot was a bad thing, all things considered. Otherwise, she'd be taking all kinds of chuff about how shipboard romances complicate things, divide loyalties, and all that. And Mal could go on for days once he got a bone to worry. The constant needling could get extremely annoying after awhile.

She wasn't really prepared to soldier through all that annoyance when she hadn't quite figured out what in the chin sha da was going on. She disagreed with Mal when she needed to, could outlast him in a fight if she believed in her side. She'd outlast him in this fight if it came to that.

But right now she wasn't even sure if it would come to that. She was too bewildered by the death of the mustache to do much in the way of rational thinking at the moment.

He'd shaved.

Mighty powerful bewildering disturbing.

Bothered & Bewildered, Part 2

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:48:14 GMT

Title: Bothered & Bewildered
Length: Four parts
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. Nope.
Characters: Wash/Zoë
Teaser: Facial hair and brown leather pants

Bothered, Part 2

Maybe it was the mustache.

He thought it gave him an air of impressive manliness, but then he'd just gotten off a world where even the women had facial hair. Or at least he thought they were women. It was difficult to tell with all the hairiness. They did seem a bit more padded in certain… areas…

And they did juggle goslings for fun there, which was hardly a sparkling recommendation of anyone's sanity. He'd tried it a time or two, but the darn things kept chewing on his fingers when he tried to catch them. Vicious beasties, geese. Why couldn't they juggle baby chickens or turkeys or doves? Doves seemed friendlier, symbol of peace and all, and a nice size for juggling too. They should juggle doves; he'd have to mention that the next time he swung through there.

So obviously between the hirsute women and the geese juggling, that world was probably not the best place to look for fashion tips or advice on how to woo the ladies. He wanted to woo. She looked like she needed some good old fashioned woo. Definitely lots of woo.

He'd thought that the moment he set foot on the boat and she greeted him with a look that said, "I know this is a piece of gose, but he hasn't figured that out yet and if you tell him I will hurt you." People who threatened to hurt him usually didn't make it seem so appealing. She was making him reconsider his staunch anti-pain stance.

He'd thought that even more as he paused in his examination of the masterful muck up they'd made of the control panel to study the even more masterful curves of her legs. Those legs were in need of some serious woo.

He'd decided to take the job then and there just for those legs. Hadn't needed to take a look at the rest of the ship. He'd flown better, and he'd definitely flown worse. Flown boats that would fall out of the sky if you looked at them cross-eyed. Flown boats you had to baby through the night, sit and spin them stories if they came across a bit cranky while the rest of the world was asleep. The last one was especially soothed by tales of vicious but not entirely unexpected betrayals. He'd never quite figured that out.

He'd learned over the years that it wasn't the state of the ship that mattered so much as the state of the crew. Plenty of times he'd been fooled by shiny ships into signing up with a Captain who never saw anything but the destination, never thought of anything but getting there faster, never noticed anything except how many fuel cells it took to get there. Those were the kind that wanted him to wear a uniform and tried to drop Rexnord IV out an airlock when he wasn't looking and wouldn't know a Crazy Ivan from Lucid Sally if it did cartwheels on their head. The kind that would never understand what flying was, the moment where metal danced on air, where the whole ship was nothing but an extension of his fingertips and everything was calm.

This Captain'd looked a bit rough around the edges, like he wasn't quite sure what a boat was let alone what he should do with it. Both too young and too old for it to be his first time out in the black. But all the same the Amazon with the impossible legs was staring at the guy like she knew he was crazy but she'd still follow him anywhere. Now that was the kind of man that might make flying interesting.

And how was a man supposed to say no to those legs? Forget about it.

But his pitch of woo was not going quite as expected. She never smiled. She looked like she wanted to sometimes, but the muscles so adept at so many other things had difficulty with that one tiny gesture. He'd caught her trying a time or two, though she'd deny it.

And he could never quite tell where the First Mate ended and Zoë began. Because there were times when she was Zoë, eyes dancing, lips twitching, and her saying something that ended in "sir" but didn't sound at all like a salute. But then next minute she'd be stone-faced and waving that rifle of hers around in a way you weren't meant to question.

And there were all kinds of crazy bonds of brown running around this ship that he couldn't figure out if he needed to sever or if they were the only things keeping her standing. Brown or purple, he'd always been rather partial to orange himself. Orange was a misunderstood color, all the other little colors picked on it at color school…

But the brown lead to the part of her that was Zoë as much as it held up the façade of officer automaton. Brown was the key to it all, he was sure of it. Brown Captain, brown bonds, browncoats, brown leather pants…

Brown leather pants…

He needed to go shave.

Bothered & Bewildered

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:26:49 GMT

Title: Bothered & Bewildered
Length: Four parts (two parts Bothered and two parts Bewildered) with a post-script
Rating: PG-13 (allusions to sex)
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. Nope. Not at all.
Character: Wash/Zoë
Teaser: Wash bothers Zoë, but she doesn't understand why. Throw in some legs, some arms, some facial hair, and some brown leather pants.

Notes: A small foray into the 'verse. The first part wrote itself as wheels hit tarmac at the Detroit airport.

Bothered, Part 1

He just bothers me.

She couldn't put her finger on why. It didn't seem to be any of the usual reasons.

He seemed competent enough. All that dial-fiddling of his was producing promising beeps and flashes from the console, and, if all those recommendations were to be believed, he could thread a ship through the eye of a needle with one eye closed. And knowing Mal, they'd probably need him to do that one of these days.

He wasn't one of those male swaggerers either. She'd seen plenty of those in the war, shot enough to be able to recognize at twenty paces the ones with more hormones than brains. And this one definitely didn't swagger; his walk was more… skippy.

And while thanks to various incarnations of Mal's smooth plans she knew he could handle a gun, he did it just well enough to recognize that he probably shouldn't, that violence was best left to others better suited for it. Which was good because it was the ones who were the most eager to wave around a gun that most tended to get shot. Except, of course, for Mal who tended to get shot no matter what he thought about his weapon.

So if he wasn't an incompetent trigger-happy lump of testosterone, just what was making her guts twist up in warning?

Twisty guts meant something, and she'd learned to listen to them long ago. A rumbling stomach had kept her alive and on her feet and fighting more times than she could remember during a time when a man could be killed by something as innocuous as apples falling from the sky. She trusted her gut more than she trusted most people, more than she trusted anyone except the sergeant who'd lived and died in Serenity Valley with her, who was missing the same bits and parts that she was struggling to find again.

And so she hadn't put her foot down when Mal settled on buying this tub, gazing at the sheets of rust like a schoolboy with his first crush, despite her gut telling her this was about the least smooth plan that had ever entered his head. And she hadn't put her foot down when Mal insisted on hiring flyboy despite the kink in her small intestine indicating that the man was looking awfully bumpy too.

But something about him bothered her.

Maybe he was just too happy. Always smiling and joking at hours of the morning when, to her mind, the only acceptable form of communication was grunting. Even that hair of his seemed to be happy, blazing away like the flashes of enemy infantry over the valley. The happy people always broke first, she'd found. Always fell longest and hardest when the chance of happiness was stripped away. And the people around when they broke tended to get killed.

She'd gotten used to seeing emotions as liabilities, things trampled into dust by the need to survive. She and Mal didn't feel unless they had to, but this guy just put it all out there to be used against him, so transparent that she could read his lifestory in a glance. He wasn't Mal; he wouldn't have lasted a week in the Valley.

And yet he didn't seem to be scared of her, and everyone was scared of her. Even Mal was scared of her when she wanted him to be. But despite exchanging a series of looks where she'd made it clear she could kill him with her pinky toe and he'd made it equally clear that he both understood and respected this indisputable fact, he didn't seem to be scared of her. He did have a tendency to get a bit squirrelly, words coming and going in a half-squeaky jumble, when she leveled her best glare at her, but his eyes didn't say fear. She wasn't used to that.

In fact, his eyes did a lot of things that she wasn't quite used to. Like the way she would catch them fixed on her legs when he thought she wasn't looking. Or the way they would go especially round and blue when one his jokes nipped Mal a little too closely and she was forced to stifle laughter with coughing.

She wasn't used to laughing. People didn't make her laugh.

And then there were the dinosaurs. And that mustache...

Just something about him bothered her. She only wished she knew what it was.

Soul Serene

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:22:47 GMT

Title: Soul Serene
Length: One-Shot
Rating: PG (I guess. Possibly as low as G given the state of Disney movies these days.)
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine. Nope. Not at all.
Character: Book, Serenity
Prompt: Soulmates

Notes: I blame Missy. As I usually do.

"Well, what about you, Shepherd? Why are you flying about with us brigands? I mean, shouldn't you be off bringing religiosity to the fuzzy wuzzies or some such?"

"Oh, I got heathens aplenty right here."

"If I'm your mission, Shepherd, best give it up. You're welcome on my boat. But God aint."

Not to quibble with the Captain about his hospitality, but in his months onboard ship he'd begun to have his doubts. There was something at work on Serenity; he couldn't be sure it was God. But there was most definitely… something.

In his first moments aboard, he'd thought he'd found the perfect ship for his maiden voyage back in the world. He'd thought he'd found people he could help, teach, show, center. The Captain, bitter and broken and lost, drowning slowly in the loss of faith. Zoë, cold and brittle and distant, weak in the hardness she mistook for strength. Jayne, big and ignorant and crude, too wrapped up in self to even notice the others in his path, or perhaps he merely didn't care. Even the young doctor with his fine, fancy clothes, masking his annoyance as questions of concern. It would be a good place for him to do good work.

Not a day out in the black and he'd already started to reconsider, felt life twisting his story once more. In the Abbey, he'd forgotten the world. He'd wanted to forget, needed to forget. He'd needed to cleanse his soul of choices made and deeds done and promises made and broken. Take leave of the life that was and make himself over into something new, someone new, full of blank shiny pages for life to etch a new story on.

But having forgotten, newborn Book was scarcely prepared to deal with black reality, to deal with life once more, to make the daily choices life demanded. Live or die, right or wrong, light or dark, brown or purple, fight or surrender. All the complexity battered at the simplicity of his newfound faith, a faith he was discovering was not so simple after all.

And he was remembering that people out here in the black were not so simple either. Could not be known in a single moment or defined by a single phrase. Each was more than that, deserved more time than that.

Even disjointed and broken, these people were so much more than he first thought, more than they knew themselves. And put together? Brought together and forged into a crew by forces inexplicable, they became ten hundred times more than the orphaned bits had ever dreamed of being.

Kaylee's sunbeam smile lit the shadows of Simon's doubts, faith not warring with reason but offering comfort when it seemed lost.

Simon anchored River when she couldn't anchor herself, giving her a home to come back to.

River felt too much to balance Inara who forced herself to feel too little, equilibrium restored in a way that made no sense and perfect sense all at once.

Inara's sophistication tempered Jayne's more primeval urges, casting his movements into their own kind of grace.

Jayne's brute strength, however distasteful, offered a strange sort of solace to Wash who knew that at least his wife was not alone at the Captain's back.

Wash brightened Zoë with tales of fertile lands and sudden but inevitable betrayals, reassuring her that a smile would not break her.

And Zoë made Mal think that perhaps all was not lost in the Valley, that perhaps life went on.

But then Mal gave to Inara, and she to him, and Kaylee to Jayne, and Wash to Kaylee, and Simon to Inara, and Zoë to Wash, and River giving and taking from all, in a circle without end or beginning. Scattered bits of tattered soul finding the pieces they needed not to heal precisely but to survive, to stand on two feet, to fly once more. He was surrounded by patched up souls held together only by presence of another. And holding them all together in one great whole was the ship.

It was a strange place, Serenity. At once a memory and a demon and a ghost. A place people never managed to leave because they'd left too much of themselves behind. He had a place or two like that himself, back before Book was written. But it was also this place, this ship that picked people up and let them fly free again.

He knew that because he'd felt it. At the Abbey, he'd packed his old self away, wounds not healed but hidden. And all the things he was had followed him here, clinging to his footsteps, holding him to the ground.

But then he too had felt the balm of Serenity, his soul mended enough to stand against the confusion and doubt of the black and sail through it. Enough for faith to remain his traveling companion. Enough for him to find his own Serenity.

"I believe. I just-- I think I'm on the wrong ship."

"Maybe. But maybe you're exactly where you ought to be."