Fic: Hobie's Just Fine (Firefly)
TITLE: Hobie's Just Fine
FANDOM: Whedonverse/Firefly
CHARACTERS: the Firefly crew plus Hobie (an OC from a previous fic) and some OC passengers
PROMPT: BLUE - blueberry pie at 5_prompts
RATING: PG-13
WORD COUNT: 3400
Written for: the whedonland ONE YEAR-END-OF-PHASE-CRAZY-FEST
WARNINGS: My use of Firefly Chinese is courtesy of this site but any misuse is my fault entirely. Also, it's now CANON that Zoe was pregnant by the end of the movie and had a little girl. Seriously! Check out Serenity: Float Out if you want to see for yourself. I suppose that is a spoiler in and of itself... sorry.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any part of, nor do I make any money from anything Joss Whedon created. I merely dabble in the playground he's given us.
Kaylee stomped into the mess hall, her boots making the most satisfyingly racket that she could muster at the moment. As she dropped into the chair Simon held out for her, she let out a loud groan. “Someone please tell that harridan that I’m the mechanic on this ship and not the ladies maid. She had me fetch water from the tanks ‘cause she says the pipes are probably full of rust and other scum that might affect her complexion.”
“Why didn’t you say no when she asked?”
Simon’s soothing hands up and down her back didn’t help her anger and frustration. She knew better than to take out these foul moods on him seeing as how he wasn’t the best person to help fix them. Instead, Kaylee let out a loud breath of air and tried very hard to smile. “That’s very good advice, Simon. If I heard you telling her no, it might help me out. Tell me, have you said no to her lately?”
His cheeks flushed. “Mrs. Garrison’s requests to me have been quite reasonable. I haven’t had any trouble doing what she asks me.”
“That’s ‘cause she flutters her lashes at you. You should do what I do.” Jayne flipped a knife from his waistband. “Show her just how sharp your bite can be and she’ll walk away real fast.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes at his suggestion. “I’m not about to threaten paying customers with physical violence.”
“No one said anything about getting physical,” Jayne protested, hiding away the weapon once again. “I just wanted to make sure that she and I understood each other. Worked, dinnit? Don’t see me whining about that godawfful woman instead of enjoying my pie.”
“There’s pie?” Kaylee purked up almost instantly. “No one told me there would be pie.”
Jayne lifted with chin to indicate the small cooking area. “He made it. Seeing as how he actually works for that woman and hasn’t tried to kill her, or gotten caught trying, I say the man’s all right.”
“If I were deaf, I’d probably be able to handle Mrs. Garrison that easily myself.” But Kaylee wasn’t going to dragged back into her foul mood. Instead, she went and got a piece of real blueberry pie from the cheerful little dumpling of a man who had come on board with the Garrison clan. Mrs. Garrison called him Cook as if that was his only name instead of the word used to describe him. It made Kaylee’s skin fairly crawl with irritation to hear the poor man misused but he didn’t seem to mind.
He nodded his greeting before continuing to spread something in a pan that smelled like… “Goose liver pate,” she exclaimed as she came back to the table. “I do believe that man is doing something with goose liver pate. Can you believe it? Now if he could just produce some real, honest for gosh strawberries from that bag of his, I might consider marrying him and cutting off my ears so I can work for that horrid woman myself.”
This statement made everyone but Simon laugh. Kaylee might have cared if she wasn’t eating the most sublime pie she’d had since coming on board Serenity. All else took a backseat to her sweet tooth.
Just then, a pretty little girl in a ruffly white dress came prancing through the door. Her hair was combed with curls hanging down her back in the most delightful array and all the skin that was showing was clean. Everyone gazed in awe as first the girl curtseyed and then began to circle the table to give everyone a kiss on the cheek.
“What kind of foolishness are you about, Hobie?” Jayne asked when the girl got to him.
After his kiss, she stuck out her tongue at him but thought better of it and smiled sweetly. “My name’s not Hobie. Amelia says that’s no fit name for a young woman.”
Kaylee was choking on laughter and pie and Simon was attempting to help her out by pounding her back so it was up to Jayne to ask, “What should we call you if Hobie ain’t good enough no more?”
Hobie set down carefully, making sure to keep the ruffles of her dress going in the right direction so that she didn’t wrinkle it unnecessarily. She smoothed a few curls over her shoulder as she’d seen Amelia do when she sat down. Mostly she just got her fingers tangled in the new hairstyle but it was a better attempt than the last time. When that was done, she clasped her hands together in her lap so that she wouldn’t fidget with anything. Amelia hated it when she fidgeted.
She was doing all this primping because she had no idea how to answer Jayne. No name had come to her yet. Amelia had given her a list of twenty names that were acceptable but she didn’t like any of them. They were all girly. That, she supposed, was exactly what Amelia had in mind but she didn’t want a girly name. When she’d tried to argue that Hoban had been her daddy’s name and she very much liked the idea of having his name as her own, Amelia had just looked down her nose in that perculiar way she had. It made Hobie feel very small and foolish to have her new friend look at her like that.
“From now on, you should call me by my middle name. Alleyne.” It wasn’t on Amelia’s list but Hobie hadn’t offered it up as a choice. It had just dawned on her that maybe it would work both for Amelia as a girly name and to keep some aspect of her heritage as her own.
“That’s your mama’s maiden name,” Kaylee announced, her lungs finally clearing of hilarity and dessert. “It’s real pretty.”
“I thought so, too.” Hobie graced a smile on her for getting at the two reasons she had at using it. “And I think Mama will like it.”
“Mama will like what?” Mal walked into the room but stopped short as he looked up and realized that he wasn’t looking at a new passenger but at the little girl that often ran through Serenity like it was her own personal play area. “What’d you do to yourself, Hobie? You better not have stolen that from our guests. You know your mama told you to stay away from them. They’re paying passengers and we don’t get many of those these days.”
“I didn’t steal it,” she replied, indignation coloring her words. “For your information, Amelia is loaning me this dress until I can get one of my own. A proper young lady should have at least three dresses for everyday so they can be changed if an offending stain makes them unwearable.”
“I think this one is pretty unwearable without needing a stain to make it so,” Jayne muttered as Kaylee shushed him. He often got shushed when Hobie was around but that had been okay before. There were plenty of times he got to have Hobie all to himself and he didn’t have to watch his language or stop himself from laughing at something that he might find funny and no one else did. They’d been buds. Now he wasn’t sure what he was to this prissy little girl. Amelia Garrison was his least favorite person at the moment.
Mal took a different approach. “Fine. Such finery has no place here. I’ve heard the most honorable Mrs. Garrison say that on several times. You want to look and act like her and her daughter, you go right back to your cabin and stay there such as they do. If someone remembers, you’ll get dinner.”
“But-“ Hobie’s face was white with shock. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The Captain was THE CAPTAIN and his word was law but he loved her and now he was telling her that she couldn’t be in the mess with the other members of the crew. He was telling her to leave.
The only thing that kept Hobie from bursting into tears was the memory of Amelia telling her that the other people onboard Serenity were little more than backworld fei-oo (trash). At the time, she’d suffered through the conversation in strained silence. Only the pretty things folded neatly in Amelia’s trunk kept her from lashing out at the horrid things she was saying about her family. Now, she didn’t care.
“Fine. I don’t want to be around any backworld fei-oo anyway.”
Holding her chin high, she attempted to flounce out of the room. Unfortunately, she forgot that while she hadn’t been fidgeting much, she had succeeded in wrapping her thumbs into the folds of a ruffle. Her planned exit was impeded when she found she couldn’t lift her arms. The momentum sent her forward but her feet were confused on which direction she should be going. She stumbled and might have been able to catch herself if her arms had been free. As it was, she began to tip forward and would have crashed into the table if Mal hadn’t grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on that would stop her tumble.
The only problem was that the first thing he grabbed was the sleeve of the white dress. It was mostly lace and had no real support, just hanging there for decoration and not meant to be of a help in a stressful situation. The rip of threads not meant for so much stress was both satisfying and horrific. Mal stared at the bit of lace that stayed in his fist.
Jayne, on the other hand, had been able to pull himself out of the stupor the conversation had put him in and came to the rescue, sweeping the small girl up into his arms. For good measure, he tickled her in the spot on her right side that always made her laugh. “You’ll always be Hobie to me… Hobie.”
She stopped laughing and lay limply in his arms, her eyes searching the face of the man who had always been there to make a joke or a funny face when the tension of life on a transport ship got out of hand. If she was no longer allowed in the portions of the ship that only the crew were allowed, she would miss out on being tickled or having Mal try to tell a funny joke that was never very funny. She’d always laughed at him because Mama had told her it was the best thing to do.
Thoughts of Mama made her suddenly ashamed of this dress and her attempts at a new name. If a young woman couldn’t be with the crew that was her family or have a name that was the same as her Dad’s, Hobie didn’t want to be a young woman. How would she ever tell Mama what she’d done? She turned her head into Jayne’s shoulder to hide her expression of grief and embarrassment.
“Why do I always miss the dinner show?” Zoe looked at each person’s face, trying to gauge what had been happening in the moments before she entered the room. Her daughter in Jayne’s arms didn’t escape her notice but she also didn’t say anything. Events and people around Hobie always ended up going sideways but they always came back around in the end. She had that way of her and Zoe didn’t feel she had any right to change that part of her daughter.
“No dinner show,” Mal answered, still staring intently at the fabric in his hand. “Just a little misunderstanding. I was letting our newest passenger know the rules around these parts. We can’t have the gentry mingling with us lesser folks.”
Zoe’s heart fell to her stomach when she realized the gentry the Captain was talking about was her daughter. While she hadn’t discouraged Hobie from playing with the little Garrison girl, she’d never imagined that the frills and geegaws would sway Hobie’s attention to quite this level. “That’s true. There are places that aren’t safe for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Can’t have that.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Hobie murmured, her words muffled into Jayne’s shirtfront.
“I can’t have passengers where they don’t belong. It would create-“
“Cook!”
Everyone held their breath as the strident sounds of Mrs. Garrison’s voice could be heard bouncing off the metal of the hold. Luck was not with the crew today as she got closer, her voice increasing in volume until she was upon them.
“Have you seen Cook? I must talk to him about dinner tonight.” Even though she’d just had a bath, a cloud of perfume surrounded the woman’s body. Zoe, the closest, held her hand descreetly over her nose and mouth but it was clear to everyone that her eyes were watering.
Mrs. Garrison’s eyes weren’t affected one bit and she instantly spotted the one thing most amiss. “That is my daughter’s dress!”
“She said I could wear it,” Hobie exclaimed, turning her face back toward the room in general and trying to give Mrs. Garrison her most pleasant smile as if nothing was wrong. “It’s not her best, mind you. I wouldn’t dare wear that one.”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of letting her wear her best while on board this ship.” The sniff was audible. “The very air would dirty it.”
Mal held up his hand, the bit of lace dangling from his fist, to stop her misrepresentation of his beloved Serenity. “Now, listen here-“
“What is that?” Mrs. Garrison looked as if she’d just seen a Reaver ship coming alongside the port side.
Every eye was on the offending scrap. Hobie felt tears creeping into the corners of her eyes, something she had never had much experience with before. It appeared that the Captain was right when he said that she shouldn’t have been in the mess. Not only had she ruined Amelia’s dress but she’d acted like a sagwa (idiot) to her family. There was nothing she could do to own up to her mistakes.
“It was-“ she didn’t have time to say much else as Cook came into the room holding a large pan of something squishy and brown. He was smiling and nodding at everyone as if he was showing off a treasure and wanted to make sure they got a good look at it.
Kaylee’s eyes widened in surprise as he came close to her and she swayed toward him as he kept going. “Pate,” she whispered in clear admiration of the dish.
Jayne wrinkled his nose when he got a whiff. “Smells like-“
“No!” Kaylee and Mrs. Garrison screamed in unison as Cook pitched forward, his balance clearly comprimised as he tried to keep the pan steady. Hobie gasped as he lost the battle and she and Jayne were covered with the contents he’d been so proud of. The brown mess covered the white dress but Jayne’s outfit had also gotten its fair share of pate on it. Together they made a comical duo, both wearing expressions of surprise and distaste.
Mrs. Garrison’s shrill voice rose to a new decible level. “Cook! How could you? Our dinner is ruined! What were you thinking?” She marched over him and added tiny fists of fury with her lambasting. “How could you be so clumsy, you stupid man.”
Mal moved between the two as he attempted to stop the persecution. “Ma’am, please. Ma’am. Ma’am, if you could stop hitting me. You’ve got some liver just there. No, no. Just there. Why don’t you head back to your room before you get it all matted in your hair and you have to get cleaned up again.” Almost as an afterthought, he handed over the ripped lace. “Here, use this. Don’t want to get mussed, Mrs. Garrison. That won’t be a good thing.”
Kaylee came forward to lay claim to the still thundering woman. Using a series of pats and nonsense sounds meant to soothe, she forcibly evicted the woman from the room. When there was silence once again, Hobie launched herself from Jayne’s arms and into her mother’s waiting embrace.
“I’m so sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry. I ruined Amelia’s dress.”
Cook began to laugh. “No, no. Me,” he said with a thick accent. “You fine. You good. Little miss never know. She think it me but she love me.” He rubbed his hands together, looking altogether too smug with his hijinks. He cackled all the way back to the cooking area where he got to work on the rest of his dinner preparations.
“Thank you,” Hobie whispered, her glance grateful as she squeezed her mother tighter. “But I shouldn’t have come in here, putting on airs and thinking I was better than everyone else because I got to look like quality.”
“Quality is as quality does.” Jayne wasn’t happy as he tried to sponge the goo off his shirt. “That woman ain’t quality even if she is gentry.”
“Well said,” Simon chimed in. “You are definitely quality, Hobie. I mean… Alleyne.”
Zoe held her daughter away from her so she could see her face. “You want to change your name? What foolishness has come upon you, girl?”
“Not anymore, Mama. Not anymore. I was wrong to think that I needed to have a different name or be a different girl. I realize that now.”
“Iffen you want to change-“
“No. I like Hobie. Hobie’s just fine.”
“Yes, she is,” Mal answered, deliberately twisting the meaning of Hobie’s words. “And she can be in the parts of the ship she’s always been in now that she knows where she belongs.”
Hobie smiled brilliantly back at him. “Thank you, Captain. I think I should go get cleaned up.”
“If you hurry,” Simon called out as she left the room, “you can get Kaylee to bring you some water for your washing. I’m sure she’d enjoy that job.”
Zoe eyed the people in the room when they were alone once again. She shrugged when Mal asked, “Was that the end of it or is this just the beginning of new things to come?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. We won this one. Let’s hope the next is every bit as easy.”
Jayne had discovered that his coating tasted a lot better than it smelled. He was scrapping bits off his shirt, into his mouth. “And tasty!”
It was all Zoe could do not to start laughing. She knew better than to let that much emotion show when she was this close to tears. Hobie was growing up and she just wasn’t ready for it. No parent was, she supposed. These days she looked so much like Wash it made her heart ache. What would Wash do in this situation? she asked herself all the time. The answer was always the same… he would love her with every fiber of his being and let everything else fall into place.
“Thank you for setting some limits,” she told Mal. “It was exactly what she needed. She has the run of this ship sometimes that she forgets it’s not a place to play.”
“It was what she needed. That… and it was the truth. If that attitude had stuck, she would have been treated like a guest.”
“As long as you don’t make me pay for her passage.” Jayne laughed but he was the only one. This was not only the first salvo in the war that was going to be Hobie’s voyage into puberty but in the battles that Zoe fought the world for her daughter. Zoe knew, better than anyone, that she was the wall behind which Hobie could hide. One day she would need to take the bricks down but for now, she needed to be strong for her daughter.
“Not yet.” Mal’s tone said that he was joking but Zoe couldn’t know that for sure. “Besides, Hobie was right. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Mrs. Garrison will be gone soo and then we can go back to the usual cargo. No more passengers for awhile. Just the crew and some nice quiet boxes full of contraband. What do you say to that?”
She smirked at the Captain, a man who was one of her oldest friends. “Contraband is one of my favorite types of cargo. Let’s do it.”
FANDOM: Whedonverse/Firefly
CHARACTERS: the Firefly crew plus Hobie (an OC from a previous fic) and some OC passengers
PROMPT: BLUE - blueberry pie at 5_prompts
RATING: PG-13
WORD COUNT: 3400
Written for: the whedonland ONE YEAR-END-OF-PHASE-CRAZY-FEST
WARNINGS: My use of Firefly Chinese is courtesy of this site but any misuse is my fault entirely. Also, it's now CANON that Zoe was pregnant by the end of the movie and had a little girl. Seriously! Check out Serenity: Float Out if you want to see for yourself. I suppose that is a spoiler in and of itself... sorry.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any part of, nor do I make any money from anything Joss Whedon created. I merely dabble in the playground he's given us.
Kaylee stomped into the mess hall, her boots making the most satisfyingly racket that she could muster at the moment. As she dropped into the chair Simon held out for her, she let out a loud groan. “Someone please tell that harridan that I’m the mechanic on this ship and not the ladies maid. She had me fetch water from the tanks ‘cause she says the pipes are probably full of rust and other scum that might affect her complexion.”
“Why didn’t you say no when she asked?”
Simon’s soothing hands up and down her back didn’t help her anger and frustration. She knew better than to take out these foul moods on him seeing as how he wasn’t the best person to help fix them. Instead, Kaylee let out a loud breath of air and tried very hard to smile. “That’s very good advice, Simon. If I heard you telling her no, it might help me out. Tell me, have you said no to her lately?”
His cheeks flushed. “Mrs. Garrison’s requests to me have been quite reasonable. I haven’t had any trouble doing what she asks me.”
“That’s ‘cause she flutters her lashes at you. You should do what I do.” Jayne flipped a knife from his waistband. “Show her just how sharp your bite can be and she’ll walk away real fast.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes at his suggestion. “I’m not about to threaten paying customers with physical violence.”
“No one said anything about getting physical,” Jayne protested, hiding away the weapon once again. “I just wanted to make sure that she and I understood each other. Worked, dinnit? Don’t see me whining about that godawfful woman instead of enjoying my pie.”
“There’s pie?” Kaylee purked up almost instantly. “No one told me there would be pie.”
Jayne lifted with chin to indicate the small cooking area. “He made it. Seeing as how he actually works for that woman and hasn’t tried to kill her, or gotten caught trying, I say the man’s all right.”
“If I were deaf, I’d probably be able to handle Mrs. Garrison that easily myself.” But Kaylee wasn’t going to dragged back into her foul mood. Instead, she went and got a piece of real blueberry pie from the cheerful little dumpling of a man who had come on board with the Garrison clan. Mrs. Garrison called him Cook as if that was his only name instead of the word used to describe him. It made Kaylee’s skin fairly crawl with irritation to hear the poor man misused but he didn’t seem to mind.
He nodded his greeting before continuing to spread something in a pan that smelled like… “Goose liver pate,” she exclaimed as she came back to the table. “I do believe that man is doing something with goose liver pate. Can you believe it? Now if he could just produce some real, honest for gosh strawberries from that bag of his, I might consider marrying him and cutting off my ears so I can work for that horrid woman myself.”
This statement made everyone but Simon laugh. Kaylee might have cared if she wasn’t eating the most sublime pie she’d had since coming on board Serenity. All else took a backseat to her sweet tooth.
Just then, a pretty little girl in a ruffly white dress came prancing through the door. Her hair was combed with curls hanging down her back in the most delightful array and all the skin that was showing was clean. Everyone gazed in awe as first the girl curtseyed and then began to circle the table to give everyone a kiss on the cheek.
“What kind of foolishness are you about, Hobie?” Jayne asked when the girl got to him.
After his kiss, she stuck out her tongue at him but thought better of it and smiled sweetly. “My name’s not Hobie. Amelia says that’s no fit name for a young woman.”
Kaylee was choking on laughter and pie and Simon was attempting to help her out by pounding her back so it was up to Jayne to ask, “What should we call you if Hobie ain’t good enough no more?”
Hobie set down carefully, making sure to keep the ruffles of her dress going in the right direction so that she didn’t wrinkle it unnecessarily. She smoothed a few curls over her shoulder as she’d seen Amelia do when she sat down. Mostly she just got her fingers tangled in the new hairstyle but it was a better attempt than the last time. When that was done, she clasped her hands together in her lap so that she wouldn’t fidget with anything. Amelia hated it when she fidgeted.
She was doing all this primping because she had no idea how to answer Jayne. No name had come to her yet. Amelia had given her a list of twenty names that were acceptable but she didn’t like any of them. They were all girly. That, she supposed, was exactly what Amelia had in mind but she didn’t want a girly name. When she’d tried to argue that Hoban had been her daddy’s name and she very much liked the idea of having his name as her own, Amelia had just looked down her nose in that perculiar way she had. It made Hobie feel very small and foolish to have her new friend look at her like that.
“From now on, you should call me by my middle name. Alleyne.” It wasn’t on Amelia’s list but Hobie hadn’t offered it up as a choice. It had just dawned on her that maybe it would work both for Amelia as a girly name and to keep some aspect of her heritage as her own.
“That’s your mama’s maiden name,” Kaylee announced, her lungs finally clearing of hilarity and dessert. “It’s real pretty.”
“I thought so, too.” Hobie graced a smile on her for getting at the two reasons she had at using it. “And I think Mama will like it.”
“Mama will like what?” Mal walked into the room but stopped short as he looked up and realized that he wasn’t looking at a new passenger but at the little girl that often ran through Serenity like it was her own personal play area. “What’d you do to yourself, Hobie? You better not have stolen that from our guests. You know your mama told you to stay away from them. They’re paying passengers and we don’t get many of those these days.”
“I didn’t steal it,” she replied, indignation coloring her words. “For your information, Amelia is loaning me this dress until I can get one of my own. A proper young lady should have at least three dresses for everyday so they can be changed if an offending stain makes them unwearable.”
“I think this one is pretty unwearable without needing a stain to make it so,” Jayne muttered as Kaylee shushed him. He often got shushed when Hobie was around but that had been okay before. There were plenty of times he got to have Hobie all to himself and he didn’t have to watch his language or stop himself from laughing at something that he might find funny and no one else did. They’d been buds. Now he wasn’t sure what he was to this prissy little girl. Amelia Garrison was his least favorite person at the moment.
Mal took a different approach. “Fine. Such finery has no place here. I’ve heard the most honorable Mrs. Garrison say that on several times. You want to look and act like her and her daughter, you go right back to your cabin and stay there such as they do. If someone remembers, you’ll get dinner.”
“But-“ Hobie’s face was white with shock. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The Captain was THE CAPTAIN and his word was law but he loved her and now he was telling her that she couldn’t be in the mess with the other members of the crew. He was telling her to leave.
The only thing that kept Hobie from bursting into tears was the memory of Amelia telling her that the other people onboard Serenity were little more than backworld fei-oo (trash). At the time, she’d suffered through the conversation in strained silence. Only the pretty things folded neatly in Amelia’s trunk kept her from lashing out at the horrid things she was saying about her family. Now, she didn’t care.
“Fine. I don’t want to be around any backworld fei-oo anyway.”
Holding her chin high, she attempted to flounce out of the room. Unfortunately, she forgot that while she hadn’t been fidgeting much, she had succeeded in wrapping her thumbs into the folds of a ruffle. Her planned exit was impeded when she found she couldn’t lift her arms. The momentum sent her forward but her feet were confused on which direction she should be going. She stumbled and might have been able to catch herself if her arms had been free. As it was, she began to tip forward and would have crashed into the table if Mal hadn’t grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on that would stop her tumble.
The only problem was that the first thing he grabbed was the sleeve of the white dress. It was mostly lace and had no real support, just hanging there for decoration and not meant to be of a help in a stressful situation. The rip of threads not meant for so much stress was both satisfying and horrific. Mal stared at the bit of lace that stayed in his fist.
Jayne, on the other hand, had been able to pull himself out of the stupor the conversation had put him in and came to the rescue, sweeping the small girl up into his arms. For good measure, he tickled her in the spot on her right side that always made her laugh. “You’ll always be Hobie to me… Hobie.”
She stopped laughing and lay limply in his arms, her eyes searching the face of the man who had always been there to make a joke or a funny face when the tension of life on a transport ship got out of hand. If she was no longer allowed in the portions of the ship that only the crew were allowed, she would miss out on being tickled or having Mal try to tell a funny joke that was never very funny. She’d always laughed at him because Mama had told her it was the best thing to do.
Thoughts of Mama made her suddenly ashamed of this dress and her attempts at a new name. If a young woman couldn’t be with the crew that was her family or have a name that was the same as her Dad’s, Hobie didn’t want to be a young woman. How would she ever tell Mama what she’d done? She turned her head into Jayne’s shoulder to hide her expression of grief and embarrassment.
“Why do I always miss the dinner show?” Zoe looked at each person’s face, trying to gauge what had been happening in the moments before she entered the room. Her daughter in Jayne’s arms didn’t escape her notice but she also didn’t say anything. Events and people around Hobie always ended up going sideways but they always came back around in the end. She had that way of her and Zoe didn’t feel she had any right to change that part of her daughter.
“No dinner show,” Mal answered, still staring intently at the fabric in his hand. “Just a little misunderstanding. I was letting our newest passenger know the rules around these parts. We can’t have the gentry mingling with us lesser folks.”
Zoe’s heart fell to her stomach when she realized the gentry the Captain was talking about was her daughter. While she hadn’t discouraged Hobie from playing with the little Garrison girl, she’d never imagined that the frills and geegaws would sway Hobie’s attention to quite this level. “That’s true. There are places that aren’t safe for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Can’t have that.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Hobie murmured, her words muffled into Jayne’s shirtfront.
“I can’t have passengers where they don’t belong. It would create-“
“Cook!”
Everyone held their breath as the strident sounds of Mrs. Garrison’s voice could be heard bouncing off the metal of the hold. Luck was not with the crew today as she got closer, her voice increasing in volume until she was upon them.
“Have you seen Cook? I must talk to him about dinner tonight.” Even though she’d just had a bath, a cloud of perfume surrounded the woman’s body. Zoe, the closest, held her hand descreetly over her nose and mouth but it was clear to everyone that her eyes were watering.
Mrs. Garrison’s eyes weren’t affected one bit and she instantly spotted the one thing most amiss. “That is my daughter’s dress!”
“She said I could wear it,” Hobie exclaimed, turning her face back toward the room in general and trying to give Mrs. Garrison her most pleasant smile as if nothing was wrong. “It’s not her best, mind you. I wouldn’t dare wear that one.”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of letting her wear her best while on board this ship.” The sniff was audible. “The very air would dirty it.”
Mal held up his hand, the bit of lace dangling from his fist, to stop her misrepresentation of his beloved Serenity. “Now, listen here-“
“What is that?” Mrs. Garrison looked as if she’d just seen a Reaver ship coming alongside the port side.
Every eye was on the offending scrap. Hobie felt tears creeping into the corners of her eyes, something she had never had much experience with before. It appeared that the Captain was right when he said that she shouldn’t have been in the mess. Not only had she ruined Amelia’s dress but she’d acted like a sagwa (idiot) to her family. There was nothing she could do to own up to her mistakes.
“It was-“ she didn’t have time to say much else as Cook came into the room holding a large pan of something squishy and brown. He was smiling and nodding at everyone as if he was showing off a treasure and wanted to make sure they got a good look at it.
Kaylee’s eyes widened in surprise as he came close to her and she swayed toward him as he kept going. “Pate,” she whispered in clear admiration of the dish.
Jayne wrinkled his nose when he got a whiff. “Smells like-“
“No!” Kaylee and Mrs. Garrison screamed in unison as Cook pitched forward, his balance clearly comprimised as he tried to keep the pan steady. Hobie gasped as he lost the battle and she and Jayne were covered with the contents he’d been so proud of. The brown mess covered the white dress but Jayne’s outfit had also gotten its fair share of pate on it. Together they made a comical duo, both wearing expressions of surprise and distaste.
Mrs. Garrison’s shrill voice rose to a new decible level. “Cook! How could you? Our dinner is ruined! What were you thinking?” She marched over him and added tiny fists of fury with her lambasting. “How could you be so clumsy, you stupid man.”
Mal moved between the two as he attempted to stop the persecution. “Ma’am, please. Ma’am. Ma’am, if you could stop hitting me. You’ve got some liver just there. No, no. Just there. Why don’t you head back to your room before you get it all matted in your hair and you have to get cleaned up again.” Almost as an afterthought, he handed over the ripped lace. “Here, use this. Don’t want to get mussed, Mrs. Garrison. That won’t be a good thing.”
Kaylee came forward to lay claim to the still thundering woman. Using a series of pats and nonsense sounds meant to soothe, she forcibly evicted the woman from the room. When there was silence once again, Hobie launched herself from Jayne’s arms and into her mother’s waiting embrace.
“I’m so sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry. I ruined Amelia’s dress.”
Cook began to laugh. “No, no. Me,” he said with a thick accent. “You fine. You good. Little miss never know. She think it me but she love me.” He rubbed his hands together, looking altogether too smug with his hijinks. He cackled all the way back to the cooking area where he got to work on the rest of his dinner preparations.
“Thank you,” Hobie whispered, her glance grateful as she squeezed her mother tighter. “But I shouldn’t have come in here, putting on airs and thinking I was better than everyone else because I got to look like quality.”
“Quality is as quality does.” Jayne wasn’t happy as he tried to sponge the goo off his shirt. “That woman ain’t quality even if she is gentry.”
“Well said,” Simon chimed in. “You are definitely quality, Hobie. I mean… Alleyne.”
Zoe held her daughter away from her so she could see her face. “You want to change your name? What foolishness has come upon you, girl?”
“Not anymore, Mama. Not anymore. I was wrong to think that I needed to have a different name or be a different girl. I realize that now.”
“Iffen you want to change-“
“No. I like Hobie. Hobie’s just fine.”
“Yes, she is,” Mal answered, deliberately twisting the meaning of Hobie’s words. “And she can be in the parts of the ship she’s always been in now that she knows where she belongs.”
Hobie smiled brilliantly back at him. “Thank you, Captain. I think I should go get cleaned up.”
“If you hurry,” Simon called out as she left the room, “you can get Kaylee to bring you some water for your washing. I’m sure she’d enjoy that job.”
Zoe eyed the people in the room when they were alone once again. She shrugged when Mal asked, “Was that the end of it or is this just the beginning of new things to come?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. We won this one. Let’s hope the next is every bit as easy.”
Jayne had discovered that his coating tasted a lot better than it smelled. He was scrapping bits off his shirt, into his mouth. “And tasty!”
It was all Zoe could do not to start laughing. She knew better than to let that much emotion show when she was this close to tears. Hobie was growing up and she just wasn’t ready for it. No parent was, she supposed. These days she looked so much like Wash it made her heart ache. What would Wash do in this situation? she asked herself all the time. The answer was always the same… he would love her with every fiber of his being and let everything else fall into place.
“Thank you for setting some limits,” she told Mal. “It was exactly what she needed. She has the run of this ship sometimes that she forgets it’s not a place to play.”
“It was what she needed. That… and it was the truth. If that attitude had stuck, she would have been treated like a guest.”
“As long as you don’t make me pay for her passage.” Jayne laughed but he was the only one. This was not only the first salvo in the war that was going to be Hobie’s voyage into puberty but in the battles that Zoe fought the world for her daughter. Zoe knew, better than anyone, that she was the wall behind which Hobie could hide. One day she would need to take the bricks down but for now, she needed to be strong for her daughter.
“Not yet.” Mal’s tone said that he was joking but Zoe couldn’t know that for sure. “Besides, Hobie was right. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Mrs. Garrison will be gone soo and then we can go back to the usual cargo. No more passengers for awhile. Just the crew and some nice quiet boxes full of contraband. What do you say to that?”
She smirked at the Captain, a man who was one of her oldest friends. “Contraband is one of my favorite types of cargo. Let’s do it.”