Twenty Facts About Hoban Washburne
Dec. 31st, 2005 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamcranverNot the most original thing ever--it's just this meme where you write twenty (made-up) facts about a character. And after...well, *sniff* watching Serenity, I thought I'd write a little about Wash.
TWENTY FACTS ABOUT HOBAN WASHBURNE
1.
He has a fraternal twin brother named Hollis. Hoban is younger by forty-six minutes, but he calls Hollis “Little Brother” anyway, like a joke. When they were younger, they used to tell people they were identical twins, because it sounded cooler. They were inseparable, until Hoban decided he wanted to be a pilot. Hollis would have liked to be a pilot, too, but through some quirk of nature or nurture, Hoban has excellent vision and Hollis needs glasses. They couldn’t afford the surgery it would take to make Hollis’s eyes pilot quality, not if they wanted to pay their sister’s college tuition and their parents’ medical bills. Hollis smiled and congratulated him the day Hoban got his first off-world piloting job, but they both knew it was the end. Somewhere on Orpheus, Hollis Washburne is the foreman of a factory that makes engine parts. He hasn’t seen his brother in seven years.
2.
Everybody on Serenity knows part of the reason Wash left Orpheus. They know about his love of ships and flying, his need to see a world beyond the factories and slums of his youth. Only Simon and Zoe know that years of overexposure to toxic industrial waste in the air have made Wash, like a good 40% of Orpheus’s inhabitants, severely asthmatic. He’s fine in space, because there’s nothing in space to set him off, but there are certain kinds of smoke he just can’t take, and he can’t set foot outside the boat on Orpheus without a gas mask. Simon only knows because he’s the ships’ medic. Zoe knows because it is inconceivable that she wouldn’t. After all, she knows all his other weaknesses.
3.
When Wash was thirteen, he fancied himself a poet. Everything inspired him—he wrote about the vehicles he saw in the street, what he had for dinner, the girls he likied. Then, for his fourteenth birthday, his sister Magda got him a book of love poetry. He spent the whole day reading it, and he was still reading it when Hollis went to sleep. The next morning, Hollis woke up to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Hollis asked.
“I suck.”
Hollis was too tired to understand this, so he said, “Huh?”
“My poetry. I’ve been reading this stuff all night, and it’s really good. I just suck.”
Afterwards, it occurred to Hollis that he should have told him that he didn’t suck, that he just needed to practice. But it was early in the morning and Hollis wasn’t really awake, so he just said, “Sorry.”
Wash grinned too brightly at him ande tossed the book of poetry under the bed.
4.
Wash tells Zoe he doesn’t want to have a baby because it’s too dangerous. He’s lying. He doesn’t want to have a baby because he knows he could never love a baby anywhere near as much as he loves Zoe, but Zoe would love a baby more than anything or anyone in the world. Wash tries hard not to be jealous. He does. He knows that Zoe and the captain have a special bond, something even he as the husband can’t touch. He knows that Mal isn’t really in the middle of his marriage, but sometimes it feels that way. He knows there’s nothing he can do about it.
But he can do something about having a baby. As stupid and irrational as he knows himself to be, he keeps putting off Zoe’s increasingly insistent arguments. He’s going to keep as much of her love to himself as long as he can.
5.
It wasn’t the legs, or the back, or her lips, or her breasts, though any one or combination of those would be enough to make a man fall head-over-heels in lust. No, it was the look in her eye, the cool, confident look of a woman who knew what she was capable of and what she wanted.
What she wanted wasn’t Wash. But that could change.
6.
The first night she was on the ship, Kaylee almost had sex with Wash. They’d both been naked, everyone else asleep, their faces inches away from each other, when the engine made a sort of grinding noise.
Kaylee’d run right out of his bunk, Wash on her heels. They arrived at the engine room just seconds apart.
“Intake valve, you think?” Wash had asked.
“Maybe. Sounds kind of like…”
It had hit them both at the same time, and they looked at each other and said as one, “The port-pin lock!”
Both buck naked, they’d crawled under the engine, Wash watching as she worked and handing her tools. When the necessary part was tightened into ship-shape, they’d come out, looked at each other’s grease-smudged bodies, and laughed.
“Maybe we better not…” Wash had said.
It was the first moment Kaylee had ever really loved Wash. “Yeah. ‘Sides, you’re in love with Zoe, anyway.”
Wash had sputtered, “What? No, no I’m not in love with…is it that obvious?”
She’d laughed and they’d gone to the kitchen to have tea and old bread.
7.
Wash has never told Zoe this, but he’d wanted to join the Alliance in the war, because he figured there was a better chance of his getting paid that way. But he happened to get hired by a prosperous Browncoat sympathizer, and that was that. It hadn’t really mattered, since he’d spent most of the war in prison camps. Came down to it, though, Wash was always grateful he still had the badge marking him an Independent POW. If he’d joined the Alliance, there was no way Zoe would ever have looked twice at him.
8.
Wash spent most of his youth in government-run boarding schools that had hoped to make an industrial laborer of him. He told Kaylee and Zoe horror stories about bad food and stupid teachers and how he and his brother had had to sneak out to meet their girlfriends.
When River came, Wash stopped telling his school stories.
9.
Wash had been in a POW camp on Metis, perfecting his shadow-puppet technique, when a fellow prisoner named Jonah had sneaked up behind him.
“Howdy,” Jonah had said.
Wash had jumped a good foot and a half in the air and then turned to give Jonah a weak grin. The guy had actually seen combat, some awful bloody battle on a border world, and was known for being a little crazy. “How’s it going, Jonah?”
“Liked your puppet show.”
‘Thanks,” Wash had said, flattered. He’d put on a reenactment of his sister’s favorite soap opera, condensed into 45 minutes. He’d thought the results were rather pleasing.
“You know what’d be good in a show?”
“What, Jonah?” He’d been a little nervous, then.
“These!” Jonah’d pulled a small plastic creature from inside his jumpsuit, a big lizard with sharp-looking teeth. It looked vaguely familiar.
“What…what’s that?”
“A dinosaur!” Jonah had moved it up and down in a deliberate rhythm for emphasis. “They ruled Earth-that-Was, like kings! Or gods!”
“Okay,” Wash had said, unsure how to respond.
“Here! I’ll show you!” Jonah had pulled another plastic figure out of his pocket, this one with three horns, and pushed it into Wash’s hand.
And before Wash could think about it too much, he and Jonah were on the dirt floor playing with Jonah’s dinosaurs like two little boys.
Jonah’d died three weeks later. They’d found his body hanging by his belt in his cell one morning. Nobody’d really wanted his dinosaurs, so Wash took them. He never did use them in his puppet shows, but when he was released, two and a half years later, he’d taken them to an antique toy dealer and bought a complete set of dinosaur toys.
10.
He’d grown a mustache when he grew tired of bosses treating him like a kid. He was eccentric, but he wasn’t a child. And if the mustache made him look a little like a sleazy salesman, well, that was one more thing to laugh about with the women who saw past the mustache and the dinosaurs and found their way into Wash’s bed.
11.
After the first job he’d done with Renfro and his crew—stealing a shipment of industrial cleaners they could sell for twice the price—Wash had gone back to the washroom outside his bunk and thrown up. He felt like an idiot. He should have known when he signed on that the work wouldn’t always be legal. That hadn’t seemed so frightening at the time, but thinking of how his mother would cry if she found out her son had turned criminal, and thinking of the black mark this job would be on his otherwise pure (more-or-less record), and thinking of how powerful the Alliance’s law enforcement was and how shoddy and motley the crew of the Dodger, Wash had been sick for half an hour.
Then he’d wiped his mouth, pasted on a grin, and gone out to the bridge to ask about his share of the loot. He’d chosen his path, and there was no turning back.
12.
The first time he slept with Zoe was absolutely perfect.
The second time, they’d just come off a job that had gone bad, and Zoe was tense and angry and Wash was still a little shaky and nauseated. Zoe’s kisses were so aggressive that Wash was actually a little afraid, and to his extreme embarrassment, his little Wash refused to cooperate, waking up only to spurt a little on Zoe’s pants and then returning to its limp position.
Zoe didn’t look like she was in the mood for a rain check, so Wash fell to his knees and did what he could with his tongue, hoping it was enough to keep her from finding release elsewhere next time. When they were done, Zoe lay there in silence and Wash, feeling extremely awkward, threw his shirt on and went back to his own bunk.
The next morning, he found Zoe waiting for him when he went to the cockpit.
“Morning,” he said cheerfully.
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Last night…” she said, frowning.
“Yeah?” Wash was filled with dread.
“Never had a man do…” She cleared her throat and let the thought trail away. “It was nice.” She stepped toward him and kissed him, not hard and angry like the night before, but gentle, almost curious, as if she was trying to figure him out by the feel of his tongue and the inside of his mouth.
They slept together again that night, in his bunk. Little Wash performed just fine.
13.
His favorite part of Zoe’s body is a little place by her right shoulder, right above her armpit. There’s a scar there—not a battle wound, but a place she cut on a rock while swimming in a creek when she was fifteen. The scar is slightly pale and raised, but only slightly—it’s barely visible from a distance. But when Wash licks it, Zoe squirms and sighs and calls out his name.
Sometimes during the day he stares at her shoulder, as if he could see the scar through her shirt. Zoe glares at him and mouths “Not in front of the captain!” Wash only grins. He bets the captain doesn’t know about that rock, that scar, that vision of a Zoe so young and innocent she swam naked in a creek without fear.
14.
Inara and Zoe are gathering Wash’s things. Some of them they will send to his parents on Orpheus, some of them Zoe will keep, and some of them they will just throw away. They haven’t yet come across any of this last kind.
Inara pulls out a capture from an old shoebox under Zoe and Wash’s bunk. It’s from their wedding day. She barely recognizes Wash at first, with longer hair and a bushy mustache and dressed in a second-hand tuxedo. Zoe is beautiful in the same white dress she wore when they buried him. The ceremony is over in this capture and the new bride and groom are dancing.
“That was good cake. Real cake, almost! Tasted kind of like coconut, didn’t it?” the image of Wash is saying.
“It was vanilla, husband,” capture-Zoe says. Wash lookes up at this with an almost comical expression of joy, and Inara guesses that that was the first time Zoe ever called him ‘husband.’
“The wedding was real small,” Zoe says, looking over Inara’s shoulder at the capture. “Just me and the captain and Wash and Kaylee and Jayne and the preacher. Wash just about fainted during the ceremony..”
“You both look so happy,” Inara murmurs, looking at capture-Wash burying his face in his wife’s neck.
Zoe sits in silence for a moment, and then says, “The two of us ran off into the woods that night. Didn’t want Jayne and Kaylee and the captain hearing—wedding night’s just supposed to be between us. So we ran off, found some leaves and moss to lie down in. It was a warm night, and we just lay there for a while, talking and looking at the stars. We got so caught up in it, we fell asleep right there.”
Inara is surprised at this. “You never…”
Zoe shrugs. “We’d done that a hundred times before.” Watching the younger Wash twirl his bride around the floor, she says, “He’d never told me about how his parents met before.”
“How did they meet?” Inara asks, entranced. Zoe has never opened up like this to her before.
“Met at school, same as mine.” Zoe smiles. “Hadn’t ever really thought before that about how similar things are. No matter where you are in the ‘verse, people find each other in just about the same ways.”
Capture-Zoe laughs, planting a kiss on Wash’s brow. Zoe’s mouth tightens ever so slightly and she puts the capture back in its box.
15.
Wash is a sucker for science fiction. He loves watching old vids, seeing how the people that were thought the world would be. He laughs at their visions of teleporters and computers that think for themselves. He marvels at how close they came to predicting how some spacecraft would look, and how clean everything is. He wonders if humans will ever find life beyond themselves in the reaches of the black, and he keeps an eye out for alien ships every time Serenity flies out to the rim.
16.
He still flies piloting simulations whenever he can, buying them secondhand on core planets and running through them over and over again when the captain and Zoe are out on a job. There is no real trick to plotting a course to another world and sticking to it, and Wash wants all his reflexes sharp for when he is needed to fly them all away from Reavers or Alliance officers or local law enforcement. The ways in which Wash can be a hero are limited, and he wants all of them at his disposal.
17.
His birthday is the 28th of Tiger, March 10th in Earth-That-Was time. Until he was twenty-two, he and Hollis had joint parties. Usually these parties ended in somebody getting so drunk he did something ridiculous and someone else getting so drunk the cops got called. Once they ended in Wash losing his virginity to Hannah, a girl in his mechanics class.
He spent his thirty-third birthday in his bunk, drinking a fine malt whiskey he’d been saving and listening to Gary Li and the Startamers, his favorite band from college. A week later, Kaylee had smacked him upside the head for not telling her about his birthday. She’d then hugged him and given him her present—a little toy palm tree he could use with his dinosaur set.
His thirty-fourth birthday, they had a party in the mess hall. Jayne had clapped him rather too heartily on the back and Kaylee had tried to make a cake. Mal wished him some rather sarcastic birthday well-wishes and Zoe had smiled and given him her present sometime later in their bunk.
His thirty-fifth birthday had been spent running from a seller who claimed they owed him money. “Do we?” Wash had asked as the ship jerked through some satellite’s orbit.
“Owe is such a strong word,” Mal had said. “I’m sure the fella’d like it if we gave him more money. But I frankly don’t feel obliged to.” As an afterthought, he added, “Hey, happy birthday, Wash.”
His thirty-sixth birthday, his wife sat alone on their bed, his wedding ring in her hands, and hoped that there was a heaven.
18.
Once he beat Simon at chess. Simon, who’d been playing with half his attention on River and another significant portion on Kaylee, was shocked. Kaylee grinned and congratulated him. River danced over, knocked the board onto the floor, and said, “It doesn’t matter in the end. Check isn’t checkmate.”
“No, I know that,” Wash said. “Check’s when it looks like the guy’s trapped, but you can still do stuff. Checkmate’s where you win.”
River nodded eagerly, as if Wash understood something important. “Simon lost his knights early. Nobody likes the knights, they think the knights are usless and they can’t remember how they move, but they can go where others can’t. Fly across obstacles.”
“River, you don’t just throw things on the floor like that,” Simon said. “Help me pick this up.”
River smiled at Wash and then skipped out of the room. As Wash bent to help Simon pick up the pieces, he thought maybe she’d been talking about him, but he wasn’t sure what it all meant.
Wash never beat Simon at chess again, but River and Kaylee and the expressions on Simon’s face were always a hoot, and a good time was had by all.
19.
In Wash’s bitterest moments, he thinks that Zoe wouldn’t miss him at all if he went away.
20.
What Wash loves most about Serenity—apart from Zoe or course—is dinnner. He frequently misses the first part of it, or sometimes all of it, because hey, someone’s gotta pilot the ship. But sometimes, even when he’s really hungry, he pauses outside the mess door for just a moment to watch the crew dining within. Somehow, at dinner, Jayne’s fear and loathing of the siblings Tam is transformed into teasing banter. Mal’s bitterness softens and he laughs like a proud father at the head of the table. Kaylee is more cheerful than ever, and the tension between her and Simon becomes sweet and awkward. When Inara is there at all, she and Mal save their sniping for another time. Dinner time is when Inara is more than polite, when she’s warm and she jokes along with everyone and, despite her perfect table manners and fine clothes, she’s just one of the crew. Book talks happily about his cooking and offers advice and anecdotes. And Zoe, well, Zoe always greets Wash with a kiss and a plate of warm food. He doesn’t understand why she feels the need for a baby so keenly. All the family anyone could ever want is right there, gathered around the table.
TWENTY FACTS ABOUT HOBAN WASHBURNE
1.
He has a fraternal twin brother named Hollis. Hoban is younger by forty-six minutes, but he calls Hollis “Little Brother” anyway, like a joke. When they were younger, they used to tell people they were identical twins, because it sounded cooler. They were inseparable, until Hoban decided he wanted to be a pilot. Hollis would have liked to be a pilot, too, but through some quirk of nature or nurture, Hoban has excellent vision and Hollis needs glasses. They couldn’t afford the surgery it would take to make Hollis’s eyes pilot quality, not if they wanted to pay their sister’s college tuition and their parents’ medical bills. Hollis smiled and congratulated him the day Hoban got his first off-world piloting job, but they both knew it was the end. Somewhere on Orpheus, Hollis Washburne is the foreman of a factory that makes engine parts. He hasn’t seen his brother in seven years.
2.
Everybody on Serenity knows part of the reason Wash left Orpheus. They know about his love of ships and flying, his need to see a world beyond the factories and slums of his youth. Only Simon and Zoe know that years of overexposure to toxic industrial waste in the air have made Wash, like a good 40% of Orpheus’s inhabitants, severely asthmatic. He’s fine in space, because there’s nothing in space to set him off, but there are certain kinds of smoke he just can’t take, and he can’t set foot outside the boat on Orpheus without a gas mask. Simon only knows because he’s the ships’ medic. Zoe knows because it is inconceivable that she wouldn’t. After all, she knows all his other weaknesses.
3.
When Wash was thirteen, he fancied himself a poet. Everything inspired him—he wrote about the vehicles he saw in the street, what he had for dinner, the girls he likied. Then, for his fourteenth birthday, his sister Magda got him a book of love poetry. He spent the whole day reading it, and he was still reading it when Hollis went to sleep. The next morning, Hollis woke up to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Hollis asked.
“I suck.”
Hollis was too tired to understand this, so he said, “Huh?”
“My poetry. I’ve been reading this stuff all night, and it’s really good. I just suck.”
Afterwards, it occurred to Hollis that he should have told him that he didn’t suck, that he just needed to practice. But it was early in the morning and Hollis wasn’t really awake, so he just said, “Sorry.”
Wash grinned too brightly at him ande tossed the book of poetry under the bed.
4.
Wash tells Zoe he doesn’t want to have a baby because it’s too dangerous. He’s lying. He doesn’t want to have a baby because he knows he could never love a baby anywhere near as much as he loves Zoe, but Zoe would love a baby more than anything or anyone in the world. Wash tries hard not to be jealous. He does. He knows that Zoe and the captain have a special bond, something even he as the husband can’t touch. He knows that Mal isn’t really in the middle of his marriage, but sometimes it feels that way. He knows there’s nothing he can do about it.
But he can do something about having a baby. As stupid and irrational as he knows himself to be, he keeps putting off Zoe’s increasingly insistent arguments. He’s going to keep as much of her love to himself as long as he can.
5.
It wasn’t the legs, or the back, or her lips, or her breasts, though any one or combination of those would be enough to make a man fall head-over-heels in lust. No, it was the look in her eye, the cool, confident look of a woman who knew what she was capable of and what she wanted.
What she wanted wasn’t Wash. But that could change.
6.
The first night she was on the ship, Kaylee almost had sex with Wash. They’d both been naked, everyone else asleep, their faces inches away from each other, when the engine made a sort of grinding noise.
Kaylee’d run right out of his bunk, Wash on her heels. They arrived at the engine room just seconds apart.
“Intake valve, you think?” Wash had asked.
“Maybe. Sounds kind of like…”
It had hit them both at the same time, and they looked at each other and said as one, “The port-pin lock!”
Both buck naked, they’d crawled under the engine, Wash watching as she worked and handing her tools. When the necessary part was tightened into ship-shape, they’d come out, looked at each other’s grease-smudged bodies, and laughed.
“Maybe we better not…” Wash had said.
It was the first moment Kaylee had ever really loved Wash. “Yeah. ‘Sides, you’re in love with Zoe, anyway.”
Wash had sputtered, “What? No, no I’m not in love with…is it that obvious?”
She’d laughed and they’d gone to the kitchen to have tea and old bread.
7.
Wash has never told Zoe this, but he’d wanted to join the Alliance in the war, because he figured there was a better chance of his getting paid that way. But he happened to get hired by a prosperous Browncoat sympathizer, and that was that. It hadn’t really mattered, since he’d spent most of the war in prison camps. Came down to it, though, Wash was always grateful he still had the badge marking him an Independent POW. If he’d joined the Alliance, there was no way Zoe would ever have looked twice at him.
8.
Wash spent most of his youth in government-run boarding schools that had hoped to make an industrial laborer of him. He told Kaylee and Zoe horror stories about bad food and stupid teachers and how he and his brother had had to sneak out to meet their girlfriends.
When River came, Wash stopped telling his school stories.
9.
Wash had been in a POW camp on Metis, perfecting his shadow-puppet technique, when a fellow prisoner named Jonah had sneaked up behind him.
“Howdy,” Jonah had said.
Wash had jumped a good foot and a half in the air and then turned to give Jonah a weak grin. The guy had actually seen combat, some awful bloody battle on a border world, and was known for being a little crazy. “How’s it going, Jonah?”
“Liked your puppet show.”
‘Thanks,” Wash had said, flattered. He’d put on a reenactment of his sister’s favorite soap opera, condensed into 45 minutes. He’d thought the results were rather pleasing.
“You know what’d be good in a show?”
“What, Jonah?” He’d been a little nervous, then.
“These!” Jonah’d pulled a small plastic creature from inside his jumpsuit, a big lizard with sharp-looking teeth. It looked vaguely familiar.
“What…what’s that?”
“A dinosaur!” Jonah had moved it up and down in a deliberate rhythm for emphasis. “They ruled Earth-that-Was, like kings! Or gods!”
“Okay,” Wash had said, unsure how to respond.
“Here! I’ll show you!” Jonah had pulled another plastic figure out of his pocket, this one with three horns, and pushed it into Wash’s hand.
And before Wash could think about it too much, he and Jonah were on the dirt floor playing with Jonah’s dinosaurs like two little boys.
Jonah’d died three weeks later. They’d found his body hanging by his belt in his cell one morning. Nobody’d really wanted his dinosaurs, so Wash took them. He never did use them in his puppet shows, but when he was released, two and a half years later, he’d taken them to an antique toy dealer and bought a complete set of dinosaur toys.
10.
He’d grown a mustache when he grew tired of bosses treating him like a kid. He was eccentric, but he wasn’t a child. And if the mustache made him look a little like a sleazy salesman, well, that was one more thing to laugh about with the women who saw past the mustache and the dinosaurs and found their way into Wash’s bed.
11.
After the first job he’d done with Renfro and his crew—stealing a shipment of industrial cleaners they could sell for twice the price—Wash had gone back to the washroom outside his bunk and thrown up. He felt like an idiot. He should have known when he signed on that the work wouldn’t always be legal. That hadn’t seemed so frightening at the time, but thinking of how his mother would cry if she found out her son had turned criminal, and thinking of the black mark this job would be on his otherwise pure (more-or-less record), and thinking of how powerful the Alliance’s law enforcement was and how shoddy and motley the crew of the Dodger, Wash had been sick for half an hour.
Then he’d wiped his mouth, pasted on a grin, and gone out to the bridge to ask about his share of the loot. He’d chosen his path, and there was no turning back.
12.
The first time he slept with Zoe was absolutely perfect.
The second time, they’d just come off a job that had gone bad, and Zoe was tense and angry and Wash was still a little shaky and nauseated. Zoe’s kisses were so aggressive that Wash was actually a little afraid, and to his extreme embarrassment, his little Wash refused to cooperate, waking up only to spurt a little on Zoe’s pants and then returning to its limp position.
Zoe didn’t look like she was in the mood for a rain check, so Wash fell to his knees and did what he could with his tongue, hoping it was enough to keep her from finding release elsewhere next time. When they were done, Zoe lay there in silence and Wash, feeling extremely awkward, threw his shirt on and went back to his own bunk.
The next morning, he found Zoe waiting for him when he went to the cockpit.
“Morning,” he said cheerfully.
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Last night…” she said, frowning.
“Yeah?” Wash was filled with dread.
“Never had a man do…” She cleared her throat and let the thought trail away. “It was nice.” She stepped toward him and kissed him, not hard and angry like the night before, but gentle, almost curious, as if she was trying to figure him out by the feel of his tongue and the inside of his mouth.
They slept together again that night, in his bunk. Little Wash performed just fine.
13.
His favorite part of Zoe’s body is a little place by her right shoulder, right above her armpit. There’s a scar there—not a battle wound, but a place she cut on a rock while swimming in a creek when she was fifteen. The scar is slightly pale and raised, but only slightly—it’s barely visible from a distance. But when Wash licks it, Zoe squirms and sighs and calls out his name.
Sometimes during the day he stares at her shoulder, as if he could see the scar through her shirt. Zoe glares at him and mouths “Not in front of the captain!” Wash only grins. He bets the captain doesn’t know about that rock, that scar, that vision of a Zoe so young and innocent she swam naked in a creek without fear.
14.
Inara and Zoe are gathering Wash’s things. Some of them they will send to his parents on Orpheus, some of them Zoe will keep, and some of them they will just throw away. They haven’t yet come across any of this last kind.
Inara pulls out a capture from an old shoebox under Zoe and Wash’s bunk. It’s from their wedding day. She barely recognizes Wash at first, with longer hair and a bushy mustache and dressed in a second-hand tuxedo. Zoe is beautiful in the same white dress she wore when they buried him. The ceremony is over in this capture and the new bride and groom are dancing.
“That was good cake. Real cake, almost! Tasted kind of like coconut, didn’t it?” the image of Wash is saying.
“It was vanilla, husband,” capture-Zoe says. Wash lookes up at this with an almost comical expression of joy, and Inara guesses that that was the first time Zoe ever called him ‘husband.’
“The wedding was real small,” Zoe says, looking over Inara’s shoulder at the capture. “Just me and the captain and Wash and Kaylee and Jayne and the preacher. Wash just about fainted during the ceremony..”
“You both look so happy,” Inara murmurs, looking at capture-Wash burying his face in his wife’s neck.
Zoe sits in silence for a moment, and then says, “The two of us ran off into the woods that night. Didn’t want Jayne and Kaylee and the captain hearing—wedding night’s just supposed to be between us. So we ran off, found some leaves and moss to lie down in. It was a warm night, and we just lay there for a while, talking and looking at the stars. We got so caught up in it, we fell asleep right there.”
Inara is surprised at this. “You never…”
Zoe shrugs. “We’d done that a hundred times before.” Watching the younger Wash twirl his bride around the floor, she says, “He’d never told me about how his parents met before.”
“How did they meet?” Inara asks, entranced. Zoe has never opened up like this to her before.
“Met at school, same as mine.” Zoe smiles. “Hadn’t ever really thought before that about how similar things are. No matter where you are in the ‘verse, people find each other in just about the same ways.”
Capture-Zoe laughs, planting a kiss on Wash’s brow. Zoe’s mouth tightens ever so slightly and she puts the capture back in its box.
15.
Wash is a sucker for science fiction. He loves watching old vids, seeing how the people that were thought the world would be. He laughs at their visions of teleporters and computers that think for themselves. He marvels at how close they came to predicting how some spacecraft would look, and how clean everything is. He wonders if humans will ever find life beyond themselves in the reaches of the black, and he keeps an eye out for alien ships every time Serenity flies out to the rim.
16.
He still flies piloting simulations whenever he can, buying them secondhand on core planets and running through them over and over again when the captain and Zoe are out on a job. There is no real trick to plotting a course to another world and sticking to it, and Wash wants all his reflexes sharp for when he is needed to fly them all away from Reavers or Alliance officers or local law enforcement. The ways in which Wash can be a hero are limited, and he wants all of them at his disposal.
17.
His birthday is the 28th of Tiger, March 10th in Earth-That-Was time. Until he was twenty-two, he and Hollis had joint parties. Usually these parties ended in somebody getting so drunk he did something ridiculous and someone else getting so drunk the cops got called. Once they ended in Wash losing his virginity to Hannah, a girl in his mechanics class.
He spent his thirty-third birthday in his bunk, drinking a fine malt whiskey he’d been saving and listening to Gary Li and the Startamers, his favorite band from college. A week later, Kaylee had smacked him upside the head for not telling her about his birthday. She’d then hugged him and given him her present—a little toy palm tree he could use with his dinosaur set.
His thirty-fourth birthday, they had a party in the mess hall. Jayne had clapped him rather too heartily on the back and Kaylee had tried to make a cake. Mal wished him some rather sarcastic birthday well-wishes and Zoe had smiled and given him her present sometime later in their bunk.
His thirty-fifth birthday had been spent running from a seller who claimed they owed him money. “Do we?” Wash had asked as the ship jerked through some satellite’s orbit.
“Owe is such a strong word,” Mal had said. “I’m sure the fella’d like it if we gave him more money. But I frankly don’t feel obliged to.” As an afterthought, he added, “Hey, happy birthday, Wash.”
His thirty-sixth birthday, his wife sat alone on their bed, his wedding ring in her hands, and hoped that there was a heaven.
18.
Once he beat Simon at chess. Simon, who’d been playing with half his attention on River and another significant portion on Kaylee, was shocked. Kaylee grinned and congratulated him. River danced over, knocked the board onto the floor, and said, “It doesn’t matter in the end. Check isn’t checkmate.”
“No, I know that,” Wash said. “Check’s when it looks like the guy’s trapped, but you can still do stuff. Checkmate’s where you win.”
River nodded eagerly, as if Wash understood something important. “Simon lost his knights early. Nobody likes the knights, they think the knights are usless and they can’t remember how they move, but they can go where others can’t. Fly across obstacles.”
“River, you don’t just throw things on the floor like that,” Simon said. “Help me pick this up.”
River smiled at Wash and then skipped out of the room. As Wash bent to help Simon pick up the pieces, he thought maybe she’d been talking about him, but he wasn’t sure what it all meant.
Wash never beat Simon at chess again, but River and Kaylee and the expressions on Simon’s face were always a hoot, and a good time was had by all.
19.
In Wash’s bitterest moments, he thinks that Zoe wouldn’t miss him at all if he went away.
20.
What Wash loves most about Serenity—apart from Zoe or course—is dinnner. He frequently misses the first part of it, or sometimes all of it, because hey, someone’s gotta pilot the ship. But sometimes, even when he’s really hungry, he pauses outside the mess door for just a moment to watch the crew dining within. Somehow, at dinner, Jayne’s fear and loathing of the siblings Tam is transformed into teasing banter. Mal’s bitterness softens and he laughs like a proud father at the head of the table. Kaylee is more cheerful than ever, and the tension between her and Simon becomes sweet and awkward. When Inara is there at all, she and Mal save their sniping for another time. Dinner time is when Inara is more than polite, when she’s warm and she jokes along with everyone and, despite her perfect table manners and fine clothes, she’s just one of the crew. Book talks happily about his cooking and offers advice and anecdotes. And Zoe, well, Zoe always greets Wash with a kiss and a plate of warm food. He doesn’t understand why she feels the need for a baby so keenly. All the family anyone could ever want is right there, gathered around the table.