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rivendellroseWritten for the 2nd annual Wash/Zoe ficathon, and I'm so sorry for the delay - many thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stormkpr for being understanding about it!
Title: An Unusual Situation
For: Nauticalgal
Who requested: Mal and Zoe fighting with Wash taking Mal's side, played for humor or seriously, and without explicit sex. I hope I managed it to your liking!
It should have been such a simple thing.
As far as Zoe was concerned, women had been getting pregnant and having babies since the dawn of time, and they'd managed to survive without being coddled and kept from their work more than was necessary. She vaguely recalled her mama telling her that centuries ago, back on Earth-That-Was, it was the normal thing for a woman to go out to the fields or whatever other work she did in the morning, take a break whenever her baby came, then go back to the work when it was done, carrying the newborn on her back. If women in days of poor medecine and manual labor could survive those conditions, Zoe figured she could handle going on jobs until she was showing, and do all her usual work around the ship without stop and Simon eventually gave in on the subject and agreed with her.
Of course, she wasn't about to refuse when Shepherd Book, Kaylee and the doctor all insisted that they would take whatever of the unsanitary chores she got by lot every week... and yes, she got a good laugh when Mal pushed the same chores off on Jayne, instead, citing necessity for his mechanic and doctor to be free for their real work rather than flushing the septic tanks and doing garbage duty. The only thing funnier was when Kaylee punched Jayne in the arm for cussing so violently when he found out. "We're gonna have a baby on the ship! You can't say that stuff anymore!" the girl snapped.
Knowing what choice bits of Mandarin the child would soon enough be learning from its godfather, Zoe just smiled.
Whether or not Mal would still be alive to act as the child's godfather by the time it was born, however, was starting to come into question. If he didn’t quit pestering her, she was tempted to do him in herself. The rest of the crew would surely agree to charges of justified homicide.
"Think you could'a waited just another few years on this one, Zo'?" her oldest friend grumbled as they went over the supplies list for their next stop-off. “Now really ain’t a good time for a baby.”
"Wash and I've been married two years, sir, and I've seen no sign waiting longer would make it any easier. In case you hadn't noticed, I ain't exactly getting younger. We want to do this without trouble, best to do it now,” she answered, gritting her teeth. Fourth time through, this argument was getting real tired.
"I ain't dumb enough to comment on that one," Mal remarked, eyeing her with a sideways glance that all too clearly said he was bright enough to see he was irking her, "but I don't see as how right now... Just another few months? Or a little warning?"
Shaking her head, Zoe turned her attention for a moment to the cup of herbal tea in her hands. "I'm sorry that basic matters of human reproduction aren't convenient to your plans, sir. If nine months isn't enough warning for you..."
"See, this is exactly the kind of emotional reaction that--"
Zoe raised a brow, deadpan and deadly. "Yes, sir?"
"I, uh..." Mal paused, and Zoe got the sense he was going over all the times back in the war when he'd seen her beat men far larger than him for far less insult. "Forget it."
"Good idea, sir. Anything else you'd like to share, while we're on the subject?"
"I just... Gorram it, Zoe, it's not like I'm not happy for you. I am. Can't wait to see the little thing. But... you're my first mate! How am I supposed to run this ship when I've got a first mate can't go on jobs with me? You expect me to live nine months with only Jayne at my back when I go on a run?"
"No, I expect you to go about... oh, three months, with only Jayne and whoever else on this ship goes with you. Til then, I expect I'll be able to do most everything I usually do, sir."
He laughed. "You're not serious about that."
"Do you recall the last time you said that, sir?"
Mal went visibly tense, the smile draining from his face. "You'd just told me you were thinking of accepting my pilot's offer of marriage."
"And do you recall my response to the statement, back then?"
Scowling, now, Mal leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose as if fighting a headache. Served him right, Zoe thought.
"Exact words escape me, but I seem to recall it ended with you threatening to find a new boat to work for if I didn't take back my order that you not marry my pilot."
"Then I trust I won't have to repeat anything."
Mal sighed and rubbed his cheek. "What the hell happened to that stern-as-steel sargeant I met, almost ten years ago? The one who did every damned thing I said, even when she thought I was being an idiot?"
"She got to know you, sir, and the war ended. You're my friend, and you're my captain. But I've got my own life to be running, as well as this ship."
“What about your life? And can I help with it?” Wash poked his head into the galley, wide-eyed and curious.
“Just having a little debate about the necessity of your wife here coming on jobs while she’s in a delicate...” Mal caught the look of impending doom in Zoe’s eyes and coughed. “While she’s carrying our newest crewmember,” he amended.
“Nothing you need to worry about, husband,” Zoe assured him. “Mal here was just about to agree that three months sounded like a good maternity leave from my usual place in the crime.”
“Three months?” Wash’s eyebrows joined his hair in reaching for the ceiling. “Whoa, whoa - three months from now, right? As in you stopping going out with the crime once the baby’s three months along. Six months rest and staying out of the gun-fights and the death. I was sure we agreed on that.”
Mal looked back and forth between the two, then turned back to Zoe with a grin that was almost predatory in its glee. “Thought you said Wash was with you on this, Zo’. Sounds like he’s more on my side of the argument.”
“And as appalling as that is, I’ll have to let it slide for the moment.” Wash moved to his wife’s side and leaned on the table to look her in the eyes. “I thought we said we’d be careful.”
“Taking off the last three months of the pregnancy is being careful, husband.”
“Not as careful as we should be! You’re not exactly going to be in peak form for fighting with all of this baby stuff going on. I’ve been doing reading - your center of balance is going to change, and--”
“And I’m not going to let you two convince me I’ve gotta be an invalid for six months before I bring my baby into the world,” Zoe growled. “Six months of normal duty, three of staying on the ship. That’s the deal.”
“No deal!” both men snapped together, then looked at each other in shock and horror.
“In three months, you quit going planetside with me into the jobs we think might go bad,” Mal continued, rallying despite the confusion. “Little River’s good enough with a gun she can help out, and Doc won’t complain too bad if he finds out it’s either his sister or you and the baby.”
“All your jobs go bad,” Wash grumbled. “This is why I wanted to wait.”
Mal snorted. “That’s the other half - my concession to this is, we do our damnedest not to take jobs that put us in harm’s way while this is going on. Hell, after, too. Got a baby on board, we can’t be runnin’ from the law every five minutes like we used to. Gotta be smart.”
“And this is where someone else does the planning, right?” Wash frowned. “’Cause your plans haven’t exactly done the greatest job of keeping us out of the way of death and destruction.”
Another glare between the two men. “You might say that,” Mal admitted. “Zoe, soon as those three months we talked about are up, you’re on planning duty. You work with Inara - she’s been saying for months she’s got some ideas for how we could do jobs with less of the runnin’ and shootin’, so let’s see what you two can come up with together. Gotta go a little bit mainstream, maybe... well, maybe that’s what we have to do to keep together. For the baby’s sake.”
“This would have nothing at all to do with the fact that Inara’s actually been showing signs of staying with the ship, I suppose,” Zoe commented drily.
“Nothing at all,” Mal agreed, but Zoe could see a little smile tugging at the edges of his eyes. “All that acceptable to you, then?”
Zoe thought about it. It wasn’t what she wanted, that was for sure... but the two men at the table, one at her side and the other across from her, both watching all wary and determined, didn’t seem likely to relent. Inara’d showed signs in the past of being pretty good at planning, anyway, and fewer dangerous jobs all around would surely make it easier to raise a child on Serenity. “It’ll do,” she admitted.
“Good. Wash, get up there and put out those calls we talked about to our friends on Beylix, see what jobs they might have for us when we get there. And Zoe, don’t I recall our good doctor saying he wanted to have a look at you today, make sure things are progressing as they should?”
Nine months. Nine months of Mal and Wash tag-teaming with the babying on her, just so she could do what women had been doing since the dawn of time. Nine months of them watching her, working together to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous... hell, they’d probably start talking abouty her behind her back, chattering away and gossiping about how they were keeping her from doing anything that might be the slightest bit beyond what her condition allowed in their own delicate sensibilities.
After all she’d gone through. If she’d known it’d be so damned easy to get them to cooperate, she might’ve gotten pregnant a lot sooner.
“I do seem to remember something about that, sir,” she agreed, smiling at them both.
“Go see the doctor. When you’re done, you can come up and tell me everything he says the little sprout is up to,” Wash teased. He kissed her and headed back up to the cockpit, leaving Mal watching after him with a bemused expression.
“I hope you know you’ve made a holy terror of that man, Zoe.”
“Out of him? Thought I was the one everybody was supposed to be afraid of for the next year or so.”
"Have you been watching him lately? Thought he was gonna bite my head off when I suggested maybe milk wasn't on the top of the supply list for this week, and the doc looked like to cry when your husband yelled at him for not stocking prenatal vitamins and the like. That man's gonna have us all on eggshells by the end of this, if we aren't catering to you like some kind of queen."
Zoe smiled warmly. "That sounds about like my man."
"You're going to enjoy this, aren't you?"
She thought of the chance to work with Inara and get some jobs that actually made sense, make some changes for the better in how the ship run. She thought of having a baby, a little bit of her and Wash rolled together into something wonderful and new. And she thought of Jayne doing septic vac for the next nine months at the least.
"Oh, hell yes," she replied. "Yeah, I think there's going to be plenty to enjoy."
stormkpr for being understanding about it!Title: An Unusual Situation
For: Nauticalgal
Who requested: Mal and Zoe fighting with Wash taking Mal's side, played for humor or seriously, and without explicit sex. I hope I managed it to your liking!
It should have been such a simple thing.
As far as Zoe was concerned, women had been getting pregnant and having babies since the dawn of time, and they'd managed to survive without being coddled and kept from their work more than was necessary. She vaguely recalled her mama telling her that centuries ago, back on Earth-That-Was, it was the normal thing for a woman to go out to the fields or whatever other work she did in the morning, take a break whenever her baby came, then go back to the work when it was done, carrying the newborn on her back. If women in days of poor medecine and manual labor could survive those conditions, Zoe figured she could handle going on jobs until she was showing, and do all her usual work around the ship without stop and Simon eventually gave in on the subject and agreed with her.
Of course, she wasn't about to refuse when Shepherd Book, Kaylee and the doctor all insisted that they would take whatever of the unsanitary chores she got by lot every week... and yes, she got a good laugh when Mal pushed the same chores off on Jayne, instead, citing necessity for his mechanic and doctor to be free for their real work rather than flushing the septic tanks and doing garbage duty. The only thing funnier was when Kaylee punched Jayne in the arm for cussing so violently when he found out. "We're gonna have a baby on the ship! You can't say that stuff anymore!" the girl snapped.
Knowing what choice bits of Mandarin the child would soon enough be learning from its godfather, Zoe just smiled.
Whether or not Mal would still be alive to act as the child's godfather by the time it was born, however, was starting to come into question. If he didn’t quit pestering her, she was tempted to do him in herself. The rest of the crew would surely agree to charges of justified homicide.
"Think you could'a waited just another few years on this one, Zo'?" her oldest friend grumbled as they went over the supplies list for their next stop-off. “Now really ain’t a good time for a baby.”
"Wash and I've been married two years, sir, and I've seen no sign waiting longer would make it any easier. In case you hadn't noticed, I ain't exactly getting younger. We want to do this without trouble, best to do it now,” she answered, gritting her teeth. Fourth time through, this argument was getting real tired.
"I ain't dumb enough to comment on that one," Mal remarked, eyeing her with a sideways glance that all too clearly said he was bright enough to see he was irking her, "but I don't see as how right now... Just another few months? Or a little warning?"
Shaking her head, Zoe turned her attention for a moment to the cup of herbal tea in her hands. "I'm sorry that basic matters of human reproduction aren't convenient to your plans, sir. If nine months isn't enough warning for you..."
"See, this is exactly the kind of emotional reaction that--"
Zoe raised a brow, deadpan and deadly. "Yes, sir?"
"I, uh..." Mal paused, and Zoe got the sense he was going over all the times back in the war when he'd seen her beat men far larger than him for far less insult. "Forget it."
"Good idea, sir. Anything else you'd like to share, while we're on the subject?"
"I just... Gorram it, Zoe, it's not like I'm not happy for you. I am. Can't wait to see the little thing. But... you're my first mate! How am I supposed to run this ship when I've got a first mate can't go on jobs with me? You expect me to live nine months with only Jayne at my back when I go on a run?"
"No, I expect you to go about... oh, three months, with only Jayne and whoever else on this ship goes with you. Til then, I expect I'll be able to do most everything I usually do, sir."
He laughed. "You're not serious about that."
"Do you recall the last time you said that, sir?"
Mal went visibly tense, the smile draining from his face. "You'd just told me you were thinking of accepting my pilot's offer of marriage."
"And do you recall my response to the statement, back then?"
Scowling, now, Mal leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose as if fighting a headache. Served him right, Zoe thought.
"Exact words escape me, but I seem to recall it ended with you threatening to find a new boat to work for if I didn't take back my order that you not marry my pilot."
"Then I trust I won't have to repeat anything."
Mal sighed and rubbed his cheek. "What the hell happened to that stern-as-steel sargeant I met, almost ten years ago? The one who did every damned thing I said, even when she thought I was being an idiot?"
"She got to know you, sir, and the war ended. You're my friend, and you're my captain. But I've got my own life to be running, as well as this ship."
“What about your life? And can I help with it?” Wash poked his head into the galley, wide-eyed and curious.
“Just having a little debate about the necessity of your wife here coming on jobs while she’s in a delicate...” Mal caught the look of impending doom in Zoe’s eyes and coughed. “While she’s carrying our newest crewmember,” he amended.
“Nothing you need to worry about, husband,” Zoe assured him. “Mal here was just about to agree that three months sounded like a good maternity leave from my usual place in the crime.”
“Three months?” Wash’s eyebrows joined his hair in reaching for the ceiling. “Whoa, whoa - three months from now, right? As in you stopping going out with the crime once the baby’s three months along. Six months rest and staying out of the gun-fights and the death. I was sure we agreed on that.”
Mal looked back and forth between the two, then turned back to Zoe with a grin that was almost predatory in its glee. “Thought you said Wash was with you on this, Zo’. Sounds like he’s more on my side of the argument.”
“And as appalling as that is, I’ll have to let it slide for the moment.” Wash moved to his wife’s side and leaned on the table to look her in the eyes. “I thought we said we’d be careful.”
“Taking off the last three months of the pregnancy is being careful, husband.”
“Not as careful as we should be! You’re not exactly going to be in peak form for fighting with all of this baby stuff going on. I’ve been doing reading - your center of balance is going to change, and--”
“And I’m not going to let you two convince me I’ve gotta be an invalid for six months before I bring my baby into the world,” Zoe growled. “Six months of normal duty, three of staying on the ship. That’s the deal.”
“No deal!” both men snapped together, then looked at each other in shock and horror.
“In three months, you quit going planetside with me into the jobs we think might go bad,” Mal continued, rallying despite the confusion. “Little River’s good enough with a gun she can help out, and Doc won’t complain too bad if he finds out it’s either his sister or you and the baby.”
“All your jobs go bad,” Wash grumbled. “This is why I wanted to wait.”
Mal snorted. “That’s the other half - my concession to this is, we do our damnedest not to take jobs that put us in harm’s way while this is going on. Hell, after, too. Got a baby on board, we can’t be runnin’ from the law every five minutes like we used to. Gotta be smart.”
“And this is where someone else does the planning, right?” Wash frowned. “’Cause your plans haven’t exactly done the greatest job of keeping us out of the way of death and destruction.”
Another glare between the two men. “You might say that,” Mal admitted. “Zoe, soon as those three months we talked about are up, you’re on planning duty. You work with Inara - she’s been saying for months she’s got some ideas for how we could do jobs with less of the runnin’ and shootin’, so let’s see what you two can come up with together. Gotta go a little bit mainstream, maybe... well, maybe that’s what we have to do to keep together. For the baby’s sake.”
“This would have nothing at all to do with the fact that Inara’s actually been showing signs of staying with the ship, I suppose,” Zoe commented drily.
“Nothing at all,” Mal agreed, but Zoe could see a little smile tugging at the edges of his eyes. “All that acceptable to you, then?”
Zoe thought about it. It wasn’t what she wanted, that was for sure... but the two men at the table, one at her side and the other across from her, both watching all wary and determined, didn’t seem likely to relent. Inara’d showed signs in the past of being pretty good at planning, anyway, and fewer dangerous jobs all around would surely make it easier to raise a child on Serenity. “It’ll do,” she admitted.
“Good. Wash, get up there and put out those calls we talked about to our friends on Beylix, see what jobs they might have for us when we get there. And Zoe, don’t I recall our good doctor saying he wanted to have a look at you today, make sure things are progressing as they should?”
Nine months. Nine months of Mal and Wash tag-teaming with the babying on her, just so she could do what women had been doing since the dawn of time. Nine months of them watching her, working together to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous... hell, they’d probably start talking abouty her behind her back, chattering away and gossiping about how they were keeping her from doing anything that might be the slightest bit beyond what her condition allowed in their own delicate sensibilities.
After all she’d gone through. If she’d known it’d be so damned easy to get them to cooperate, she might’ve gotten pregnant a lot sooner.
“I do seem to remember something about that, sir,” she agreed, smiling at them both.
“Go see the doctor. When you’re done, you can come up and tell me everything he says the little sprout is up to,” Wash teased. He kissed her and headed back up to the cockpit, leaving Mal watching after him with a bemused expression.
“I hope you know you’ve made a holy terror of that man, Zoe.”
“Out of him? Thought I was the one everybody was supposed to be afraid of for the next year or so.”
"Have you been watching him lately? Thought he was gonna bite my head off when I suggested maybe milk wasn't on the top of the supply list for this week, and the doc looked like to cry when your husband yelled at him for not stocking prenatal vitamins and the like. That man's gonna have us all on eggshells by the end of this, if we aren't catering to you like some kind of queen."
Zoe smiled warmly. "That sounds about like my man."
"You're going to enjoy this, aren't you?"
She thought of the chance to work with Inara and get some jobs that actually made sense, make some changes for the better in how the ship run. She thought of having a baby, a little bit of her and Wash rolled together into something wonderful and new. And she thought of Jayne doing septic vac for the next nine months at the least.
"Oh, hell yes," she replied. "Yeah, I think there's going to be plenty to enjoy."
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 01:24 am (UTC)Thanks for being part of the ficathon!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 03:40 am (UTC)Lovely fic and thank you again for being part of it. Yay to Zoe asserting herself with Mal!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 05:49 am (UTC)(No Firefly icons, I'm afraid. You'll have to do with B5. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 07:07 am (UTC)(No worries, I love that icon. :D)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 06:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 07:08 am (UTC)Goodie!
Date: 2007-02-16 02:09 pm (UTC)This was fun -- and not something I ever would have thought of!
“And as appalling as that is, I’ll have to let it slide for the moment.” Hah!
Many favorite bits in this one -- too many for me to quote right now -- thanks so much!
Re: Goodie!
Date: 2007-02-16 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-17 06:37 am (UTC)Actually having it be the one thing that make Mal and Wash work together and be in agreement is very funny. I can see this being a happy future for the crew.
I love your journal too, very stylish.
I'd love to see how they all react just when the baby's born too. I can see Mal being almost as excited by Wash at seeing the baby.
Thanks again for writing.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-18 09:00 am (UTC)Mal's going to be totally neurotic about the baby - he'd pretend to be all cranky and stoic about the whole thing, but the instant Zoe put it in his arms and told him he was the godfather, he'd turn into a puddle of goo. That kid'll have the most doting aunties and uncles in all the 'verse!
And thanks for the journal compliment! It's actually a pre-fab available under the 'style contest' option. I don't have nearly the graphics skills to do something this cool on my own. XD
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-22 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 09:56 am (UTC)"She got to know you, sir, and the war ended. You're my friend, and you're my captain. But I've got my own life to be running, as well as this ship."
had Zoe cheerfully crossing Mal's wishes.
Because making a safe and sane place to raise a child is what would shake Zoe into a healthier relationship with the dratted man. Also:
And she thought of Jayne doing septic vac for the next nine months at the least.
"Oh, hell yes," she replied. "Yeah, I think there's going to be plenty to enjoy
she's still very Zoe.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-22 08:50 pm (UTC)Zoe's reactions to Mal are so interesting to me - she's deeply loyal, but also perfectly comfortable telling him off when she thinks he's wrong and, more than that, of totally ignoring his orders when she thinks it's important. I love that about their relationship. ♥
no subject
Date: 2007-03-22 01:20 am (UTC)"After all she’d gone through. If she’d known it’d be so damned easy to get them to cooperate, she might’ve gotten pregnant a lot sooner."
So funny, her realization that having a baby is going to be easier than getting Mal and Wash into accord ever was.
I really enjoyed the sense of family, with all the Serenity crew, that you created here.
Thanks for the fine read,
Leven