Fic: Something in Leather (Firefly, Zoe/Wash)
Following much angst and dueling beta readers, my story for the Cuff 'Em, Vamp 'Em, or Just Make 'Em Come Already Kink and Cliché Multi-Fandom Challenge is finished.
Obligatory re-pimping: Free Verse Challenge. freeversefic. I mean, look how shiny it is.
Title: Something in Leather
Author: Mosca
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing: Zoe/Wash
Rating: R
Summary: Wash has a thing for leather. And for Zoe. And for Zoe in leather.
Disclaimers: Firefly is the intellectual property of Twentieth Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2005 Mosca. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. You change like sugar cane.
Notes: Thanks to distraction77 for convincing me to write this pairing, and to her, callmesandy and vassilissa for beta reading. Chinese is from zhongwen.com and the Firefly Chinese Pinyinary. Written for a kink and/or cliche challenge with a long title; the prompt I chose was "something with leather."
1
Wash knew better than to browse in tanner's shops. One whiff of new leather and he was hard. That was di yu de inconvenient when Zoe was off with Mal, buying new body armor, and the whole purpose of this window-shopping excursion was to keep him occupied till she got back. But Kaylee'd wanted a look at the soft fringed jackets hanging in the window, and it was beyond Wash's toleration, standing outside while the rich smell of calfskin rushed out the door at him. He'd begged Kaylee not to be long, but she was lost in the imaginary world where she was a magical cowgirl princess. Wash understood imaginary worlds and was cautious of interfering in them.
He was staring at the belts hung along the wall, fists behind his back to keep himself from touching them. One had a pattern of steel diamonds and crosses studded into it. He imagined Zoe running it slowly down his back, the soft leather and the icy metal, and he shivered. He squeezed his fists tighter and walked away.
He bumped into the corner of a table laid out with gloves. The table rocked, and he cried out with surprise. He shook off the pain and found himself admiring the gloves. Most were thick work gloves, tooled for handling animals or hot metal. But the left side of the display was given over to more stylish pairs, wrist-length for driving or longer for warmth. His eyes lit on one pair, made of black calfskin and laced from the wrist to the end with leather thongs. Wash couldn't resist: he opened up his fist and ran his finger over the soft calfskin. The gloves would run just past Zoe's elbow, by his reckoning. He tried not to picture her in them, but he could practically feel her gloved hands all over him. He shuffled speedily away from the display, over to Kaylee, who was looking longingly at a rack of skirts.
She smiled at having caught Wash's attention, and she held a skirt up to herself. It had a pleated flare at the bottom and was the color of late-afternoon sunlight. "Whatcha reckon?" she said.
It was times like these when he longed for a magical helmet to tell him what people wanted to hear. "I think... it'll make you turn heads on every backwater moon from here to Whitefall. Maybe even some of the real planets."
"You think he would?" she said. "I mean, it would."
"No question," Wash said.
"It's on sale," she said. "I got just enough saved up." She examined the skirt like she'd be sad to give it up, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd have to put something pretty back on the rack. Wash wondered what it'd be like to have every little thing that caught his fancy. A whole great spaceship filled with dinosaurs and leather.
"I dunno," Kaylee said. "It's awful pretty, but there's tangerines down at the market. And this would clean me out." She hung the skirt back on its rack. "It'll give me a few sweet dreams." She looked Wash in the eye and put on a smile. "So," she said. "Whatcha got your eye on, over there?"
"Oh, nothing," he said. "An outrageously expensive present for Zoe. "
"Show me," Kaylee said.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "They're just-"
"Come on," she said.
"All right," Wash said, and he led her over to the table.
She lit right away on the gloves he'd chosen - apparently, they were just the thing for Zoe. "Re gai si," she said. She stroked the leather with her fingertips, and Wash felt like he was somehow cheating on his wife. "But you ain't got enough for 'em?" Kaylee said.
"All I've got are myself and my skills," Wash said, "and there's not much demand for comically gifted man-whores on this moon." When he looked at the price, though, he realized that wasn't true. Well, the stuff about the buyer's market for male prostitutes was probably accurate, but he had more than himself. He and Zoe had been saving up what little they could, and it had begun to add up to enough for a luxury or two. But Zoe always refused to use it, saying that the money was "for the future." He wanted to ask what kind of future she meant. Folks like them didn't have futures. They ran till they got pinched or shot, till their luck ran out. Wash tried not to think like that, but he knew the line of work they'd fallen into. If Zoe wanted to raise up a family and grow old together, they were both going to have to find new careers. And that wasn't something he could see himself doing. The only thing he wanted to do in this life was keep on flying.
He scooped up the gloves and fished some money out of his pocket. "For the future," he said to himself.
Kaylee slapped him on the back. "Good for you," she said. As he paid, she added, "Wish I had someone I could buy stuff for like that."
"I have a feeling I'm going to be paying all of this back," Wash said. "With interest. And backrubs."
2
Zoe couldn't quite be angry with Wash about the gloves. True, he'd dipped into their savings without discussing it, and he'd used that money to buy something they didn't need. But he'd been so pleased with them, and so jin zhang when he gave them to her, that she could only be charmed. And they were beautiful: real calfskin that followed the lines of her hands and forearms precisely. They made her feel exotic and sexy, and all the more so when he laced them up her arms.
He'd always liked her best in leather. She had the one bodice that she'd been fond of since before she met him - it kept her comfortable and held in when she was shooting at folks - and he loved looking at her in that. In fact, she was fairly sure that he'd begun courting her because of it. He admired her boots, too, and her belts and holsters. She'd used to think he loved them because they were hers, but as she'd come to know him better and date him longer, she'd seen that this was deeper and older than what he felt for her. Something he couldn't explain or control, primal as desire. It was no trouble to indulge him; she liked wearing leather anyway. Much easier to accommodate than if he'd wanted to see her in lace or some such impractical thing.
She opened up the doors of the tall recessed cabinet that served as a wardrobe. It'd been a long while since she'd had occasion to put on that slinky dress of hers. With the gloves and maybe her hair done up, she'd turn Wash into pudding. She'd show up on the bridge like that, and he wouldn't be able to do nothing but stare. And Zoe liked the way Wash stared.
She'd outfitted herself halfway before she discovered that she couldn't reach the zipper to close up her dress. The gloves' laces were a two-handed job, and they'd prevent her from fixing her hair. Worst, she didn't have any shoes. Combat boots were not quite the look with a curve-hugging dress. She shifted her weight for a moment, resisting surrender to the inevitable. She could take out men twice her size with her fists and careful timing, but when it came to more feminine matters, she couldn't go it alone.
It wasn't wise to go barefoot on Serenity, especially when walking where River had been recently. Zoe had a pair of plastic sandals that she would wear on the way to the shower, and she slipped them on her feet. With the gloves under her arm and her opposite hand holding up the front of her dress, she clacked her way self-consciously across Serenity.
She knocked on the door to Inara's shuttle. "Mal, I told you-" Inara said.
"It's Zoe."
"Oh," Inara said, and the door slid open. "I didn't mean to- I assumed-" One look at Zoe stopped her dead in her apologies, and she covered her mouth.
"I need help," Zoe said.
Inara let her in, saying, "You know, it's the flip-flops that really make that outfit."
Before Zoe had finished explaining that she didn't have any proper shoes, Inara had produced some. Black slippers with gold and red embroidered birds: some of the most beautiful shoes that Zoe'd ever seen. But they weren't right. "No," Zoe said. "They're- Wash will want leather ones. If you have them."
"I think I might," Inara said. "They won't match as well, but often, that's not the most important consideration."
This pair had high heels and thin straps that crossed over Zoe's foot and behind her ankle. They were a size too small, but the pinching wasn't beyond toleration. Zoe wasn't in the habit of worrying whether her feet looked sexy, but these shoes opened her eyes to the possibility.
Inara zipped and hooked Zoe's dress and centered the front part over her breasts. She laced Zoe's gloves up tight and tied pretty knots that looked like rosettes to keep them secure. "I was thinking we could do something with your hair," Inara said. "Maybe pile it up and-"
"With a few tendrils tumbling free?" Zoe said. "That'd be perfect." Inara swept Zoe's curls up and fastened them with clips shaped like orchids.
Zoe appraised herself in Inara's full-length mirror. She was surprised to still look like herself. Herself in a picture, lacquered and painted in rose and deep violet. She could already feel Wash's lips on her neck. He'd slip off her shoes and free her hair, slide the dress down her body but beg her to leave the gloves on when she wrapped her legs around him.
She thanked Inara and said she'd be on her way. "If there were more marriages like yours," Inara said, "I'd be out of a job."
The silky dress chafed Zoe's thighs, and the too-small shoes pinched worse when she walked in them. She minced back to her bunk, catching the shoes' delicate heels in the metal grate of the catwalk. She was so intent on keeping herself upright that she didn't notice Jayne passing by till he wolf-whistled her.
"You think?" she said. He kept leering as he walked on, like she was foolish to ask.
3
Mal tended to know when Zoe was having sex. Sometimes, he really could feel the wall vibrating, or worse, hear them. But mostly it was a gut sense. A sense that he should be far away from his bunk and the wall it shared with theirs. Purely out of decency and respect - well, purely except for the part that was avoiding ever again imagining them together.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, working out the month's finances. Simon and the shepherd were about and hadn't asked questions, so he reckoned his cover story was working well enough.
Which meant, of course, that Jayne had to thunder in, going on about Zoe in some dress that inspired him to gesture about her breasts. "And she had gloves on," Jayne said. "Black leather, all the way up to her... ta ma de, if that woman wasn't married..."
"...she still wouldn't sleep with you," Simon said, not looking up from his book.
Black leather gloves. At the top of the list of things that Mal wished he didn't know about his pilot was his thing for leather. He'd known probably longer than Zoe had - those first few weeks of Wash's employment, he'd felt Wash's eyes linger. One swift right hook had gotten Wash to admit, "It's not you. It's really not. It's the holster and the boots." It had taken Mal a long time to get himself convinced that Wash was in love with Zoe for who she was and not for what she wore.
And now he was doing that thing where he was picturing them again. "I didn't come here to be bothered," he said.
He hadn't meant to direct it at anyone, but Book said, "In that case, may I suggest you go somewhere less public?"
"If I was more tolerant of the sound of creaking bedsprings, I would," Mal said. Even Simon chuckled at that. But Mal knew the real way that sentence went, and it wasn't half so amusing. If he was more tolerant, he wouldn't be alone. It drove him crazy that Zoe indulged Wash the way she did, but it drove him crazy because he knew he couldn't be that flexible for anyone.
It was a fault easier to ignore when he was sharing space with the solitary and impossible. Jayne got out the deck of cards, and Mal asked to be dealt in. "Ain't like you're getting paid any sooner," he said. All these perfectly acceptable men in a circle playing cards - well, a few perfectly acceptable men, plus Jayne - but Wash was the one who'd gotten himself a wife. Mal fingered the soft leather of his belt and tried to see how it was more than a thing.
"It ain't," he said under his breath. Louder, to cover it, he drew a card and raised the pot. They were wagering chores and privileges. A slip of paper with "dishes" scrawled on it was the most precious legal tender on Serenity. Worthless anyplace else, though. Things were what folks put into them. Di yu de, he was a man who loved a spaceship.
Obligatory re-pimping: Free Verse Challenge. freeversefic. I mean, look how shiny it is.
Title: Something in Leather
Author: Mosca
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing: Zoe/Wash
Rating: R
Summary: Wash has a thing for leather. And for Zoe. And for Zoe in leather.
Disclaimers: Firefly is the intellectual property of Twentieth Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2005 Mosca. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. You change like sugar cane.
Notes: Thanks to distraction77 for convincing me to write this pairing, and to her, callmesandy and vassilissa for beta reading. Chinese is from zhongwen.com and the Firefly Chinese Pinyinary. Written for a kink and/or cliche challenge with a long title; the prompt I chose was "something with leather."
1
Wash knew better than to browse in tanner's shops. One whiff of new leather and he was hard. That was di yu de inconvenient when Zoe was off with Mal, buying new body armor, and the whole purpose of this window-shopping excursion was to keep him occupied till she got back. But Kaylee'd wanted a look at the soft fringed jackets hanging in the window, and it was beyond Wash's toleration, standing outside while the rich smell of calfskin rushed out the door at him. He'd begged Kaylee not to be long, but she was lost in the imaginary world where she was a magical cowgirl princess. Wash understood imaginary worlds and was cautious of interfering in them.
He was staring at the belts hung along the wall, fists behind his back to keep himself from touching them. One had a pattern of steel diamonds and crosses studded into it. He imagined Zoe running it slowly down his back, the soft leather and the icy metal, and he shivered. He squeezed his fists tighter and walked away.
He bumped into the corner of a table laid out with gloves. The table rocked, and he cried out with surprise. He shook off the pain and found himself admiring the gloves. Most were thick work gloves, tooled for handling animals or hot metal. But the left side of the display was given over to more stylish pairs, wrist-length for driving or longer for warmth. His eyes lit on one pair, made of black calfskin and laced from the wrist to the end with leather thongs. Wash couldn't resist: he opened up his fist and ran his finger over the soft calfskin. The gloves would run just past Zoe's elbow, by his reckoning. He tried not to picture her in them, but he could practically feel her gloved hands all over him. He shuffled speedily away from the display, over to Kaylee, who was looking longingly at a rack of skirts.
She smiled at having caught Wash's attention, and she held a skirt up to herself. It had a pleated flare at the bottom and was the color of late-afternoon sunlight. "Whatcha reckon?" she said.
It was times like these when he longed for a magical helmet to tell him what people wanted to hear. "I think... it'll make you turn heads on every backwater moon from here to Whitefall. Maybe even some of the real planets."
"You think he would?" she said. "I mean, it would."
"No question," Wash said.
"It's on sale," she said. "I got just enough saved up." She examined the skirt like she'd be sad to give it up, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd have to put something pretty back on the rack. Wash wondered what it'd be like to have every little thing that caught his fancy. A whole great spaceship filled with dinosaurs and leather.
"I dunno," Kaylee said. "It's awful pretty, but there's tangerines down at the market. And this would clean me out." She hung the skirt back on its rack. "It'll give me a few sweet dreams." She looked Wash in the eye and put on a smile. "So," she said. "Whatcha got your eye on, over there?"
"Oh, nothing," he said. "An outrageously expensive present for Zoe. "
"Show me," Kaylee said.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "They're just-"
"Come on," she said.
"All right," Wash said, and he led her over to the table.
She lit right away on the gloves he'd chosen - apparently, they were just the thing for Zoe. "Re gai si," she said. She stroked the leather with her fingertips, and Wash felt like he was somehow cheating on his wife. "But you ain't got enough for 'em?" Kaylee said.
"All I've got are myself and my skills," Wash said, "and there's not much demand for comically gifted man-whores on this moon." When he looked at the price, though, he realized that wasn't true. Well, the stuff about the buyer's market for male prostitutes was probably accurate, but he had more than himself. He and Zoe had been saving up what little they could, and it had begun to add up to enough for a luxury or two. But Zoe always refused to use it, saying that the money was "for the future." He wanted to ask what kind of future she meant. Folks like them didn't have futures. They ran till they got pinched or shot, till their luck ran out. Wash tried not to think like that, but he knew the line of work they'd fallen into. If Zoe wanted to raise up a family and grow old together, they were both going to have to find new careers. And that wasn't something he could see himself doing. The only thing he wanted to do in this life was keep on flying.
He scooped up the gloves and fished some money out of his pocket. "For the future," he said to himself.
Kaylee slapped him on the back. "Good for you," she said. As he paid, she added, "Wish I had someone I could buy stuff for like that."
"I have a feeling I'm going to be paying all of this back," Wash said. "With interest. And backrubs."
2
Zoe couldn't quite be angry with Wash about the gloves. True, he'd dipped into their savings without discussing it, and he'd used that money to buy something they didn't need. But he'd been so pleased with them, and so jin zhang when he gave them to her, that she could only be charmed. And they were beautiful: real calfskin that followed the lines of her hands and forearms precisely. They made her feel exotic and sexy, and all the more so when he laced them up her arms.
He'd always liked her best in leather. She had the one bodice that she'd been fond of since before she met him - it kept her comfortable and held in when she was shooting at folks - and he loved looking at her in that. In fact, she was fairly sure that he'd begun courting her because of it. He admired her boots, too, and her belts and holsters. She'd used to think he loved them because they were hers, but as she'd come to know him better and date him longer, she'd seen that this was deeper and older than what he felt for her. Something he couldn't explain or control, primal as desire. It was no trouble to indulge him; she liked wearing leather anyway. Much easier to accommodate than if he'd wanted to see her in lace or some such impractical thing.
She opened up the doors of the tall recessed cabinet that served as a wardrobe. It'd been a long while since she'd had occasion to put on that slinky dress of hers. With the gloves and maybe her hair done up, she'd turn Wash into pudding. She'd show up on the bridge like that, and he wouldn't be able to do nothing but stare. And Zoe liked the way Wash stared.
She'd outfitted herself halfway before she discovered that she couldn't reach the zipper to close up her dress. The gloves' laces were a two-handed job, and they'd prevent her from fixing her hair. Worst, she didn't have any shoes. Combat boots were not quite the look with a curve-hugging dress. She shifted her weight for a moment, resisting surrender to the inevitable. She could take out men twice her size with her fists and careful timing, but when it came to more feminine matters, she couldn't go it alone.
It wasn't wise to go barefoot on Serenity, especially when walking where River had been recently. Zoe had a pair of plastic sandals that she would wear on the way to the shower, and she slipped them on her feet. With the gloves under her arm and her opposite hand holding up the front of her dress, she clacked her way self-consciously across Serenity.
She knocked on the door to Inara's shuttle. "Mal, I told you-" Inara said.
"It's Zoe."
"Oh," Inara said, and the door slid open. "I didn't mean to- I assumed-" One look at Zoe stopped her dead in her apologies, and she covered her mouth.
"I need help," Zoe said.
Inara let her in, saying, "You know, it's the flip-flops that really make that outfit."
Before Zoe had finished explaining that she didn't have any proper shoes, Inara had produced some. Black slippers with gold and red embroidered birds: some of the most beautiful shoes that Zoe'd ever seen. But they weren't right. "No," Zoe said. "They're- Wash will want leather ones. If you have them."
"I think I might," Inara said. "They won't match as well, but often, that's not the most important consideration."
This pair had high heels and thin straps that crossed over Zoe's foot and behind her ankle. They were a size too small, but the pinching wasn't beyond toleration. Zoe wasn't in the habit of worrying whether her feet looked sexy, but these shoes opened her eyes to the possibility.
Inara zipped and hooked Zoe's dress and centered the front part over her breasts. She laced Zoe's gloves up tight and tied pretty knots that looked like rosettes to keep them secure. "I was thinking we could do something with your hair," Inara said. "Maybe pile it up and-"
"With a few tendrils tumbling free?" Zoe said. "That'd be perfect." Inara swept Zoe's curls up and fastened them with clips shaped like orchids.
Zoe appraised herself in Inara's full-length mirror. She was surprised to still look like herself. Herself in a picture, lacquered and painted in rose and deep violet. She could already feel Wash's lips on her neck. He'd slip off her shoes and free her hair, slide the dress down her body but beg her to leave the gloves on when she wrapped her legs around him.
She thanked Inara and said she'd be on her way. "If there were more marriages like yours," Inara said, "I'd be out of a job."
The silky dress chafed Zoe's thighs, and the too-small shoes pinched worse when she walked in them. She minced back to her bunk, catching the shoes' delicate heels in the metal grate of the catwalk. She was so intent on keeping herself upright that she didn't notice Jayne passing by till he wolf-whistled her.
"You think?" she said. He kept leering as he walked on, like she was foolish to ask.
3
Mal tended to know when Zoe was having sex. Sometimes, he really could feel the wall vibrating, or worse, hear them. But mostly it was a gut sense. A sense that he should be far away from his bunk and the wall it shared with theirs. Purely out of decency and respect - well, purely except for the part that was avoiding ever again imagining them together.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, working out the month's finances. Simon and the shepherd were about and hadn't asked questions, so he reckoned his cover story was working well enough.
Which meant, of course, that Jayne had to thunder in, going on about Zoe in some dress that inspired him to gesture about her breasts. "And she had gloves on," Jayne said. "Black leather, all the way up to her... ta ma de, if that woman wasn't married..."
"...she still wouldn't sleep with you," Simon said, not looking up from his book.
Black leather gloves. At the top of the list of things that Mal wished he didn't know about his pilot was his thing for leather. He'd known probably longer than Zoe had - those first few weeks of Wash's employment, he'd felt Wash's eyes linger. One swift right hook had gotten Wash to admit, "It's not you. It's really not. It's the holster and the boots." It had taken Mal a long time to get himself convinced that Wash was in love with Zoe for who she was and not for what she wore.
And now he was doing that thing where he was picturing them again. "I didn't come here to be bothered," he said.
He hadn't meant to direct it at anyone, but Book said, "In that case, may I suggest you go somewhere less public?"
"If I was more tolerant of the sound of creaking bedsprings, I would," Mal said. Even Simon chuckled at that. But Mal knew the real way that sentence went, and it wasn't half so amusing. If he was more tolerant, he wouldn't be alone. It drove him crazy that Zoe indulged Wash the way she did, but it drove him crazy because he knew he couldn't be that flexible for anyone.
It was a fault easier to ignore when he was sharing space with the solitary and impossible. Jayne got out the deck of cards, and Mal asked to be dealt in. "Ain't like you're getting paid any sooner," he said. All these perfectly acceptable men in a circle playing cards - well, a few perfectly acceptable men, plus Jayne - but Wash was the one who'd gotten himself a wife. Mal fingered the soft leather of his belt and tried to see how it was more than a thing.
"It ain't," he said under his breath. Louder, to cover it, he drew a card and raised the pot. They were wagering chores and privileges. A slip of paper with "dishes" scrawled on it was the most precious legal tender on Serenity. Worthless anyplace else, though. Things were what folks put into them. Di yu de, he was a man who loved a spaceship.