Title: Fearless

Summary: Pre Series There was a price to be paid for all that courage.

Author: Bashipforever

Rated: PG

Pairing: Zoe/Wash

Prompt: Deviant Muses “nothing scares me more than”

Word Count: 747

 

 

Zoë wasn’t afraid by nature. She never had been, not even as a child. She was five when she first confronted the monster in the closet. Her older brother had taken to sleeping with the light on because of the monster. Zoë hated to sleep with the light on. She’d gotten up, retrieved the plastic, child sized bat from her brother’s toy chest, thrown open the closet door and stood there with her hands on her hips, waiting for the monster to come out.

 

After much coercing from her parents, Zoë and her brother had gone back to bed, with the light off this time and assurances that the monster was most definitely scared away for good.

 

What monster wouldn’t run away from a warrior like that?

 

This bravery never wavered through out her child hood. There wasn’t a tree Zoë wouldn’t climb, a water hole she wouldn’t jump in or bully she wouldn’t set straight. All the kids knew if someone needed to do it first, Zoë would. She was the first to spend the night in the old haunted house out on the edge of town. No matter that it turned out not to be haunted, merely a way station for stray cats. She was lauded for her bravery, loved for her courage.

 

The admiration of that courage ended the day she volunteered for the Independents, at least where her family was concerned. They were less than thrilled that their beautiful, talented daughter had chosen to be a solider instead of the Opera singer she’d always planned on being.

 

“Some things more important than bein’ able to sing pretty,” she’d responded when asked why she’d volunteered.

 

Her backbone had only been stiffened, forged in steel during the war. She didn’t get faint at the sight of men blown to bits.  She didn’t tremble in the face of certain death. She held her calm, said silent prayers and faced the Alliance the same way she’d faced that monster in the closet when she was five years old. Only now the plastic bat was a machine gun and there was a lot more at stake then a good night’s sleep.

 

There was a price to be paid for all that courage. Somewhere between the monster in the closet and the war she’d lost the woman she might have been. It wasn’t a part of her she missed. There was no place for a woman on a ship like Serenity or on jobs the likes of the ones Malcom Reynolds secured for them. Women got no place in crime, Mal was fond of saying.

 

“Good thing I’m not a woman,” she was fond of responding.

 

She was beginning to have her doubts though. They usually started for what passed in the middle of the night out here in the black when she was lying next to Wash, watching him sleep or rather being kept awake by his snoring.

 

At some point between their first date and where they were now, she’d began to find slices of herself that she’d either never realized or had lost somewhere between starving in foxholes and watching people she knew being killed. She was finding pieces of the woman she might have been and with it came emotions she wasn’t accustomed to giving into. Weeks ago Zoë had begun to suspect she was falling in love with Wash.

 

As she contemplated holding the pillow over his face until the snoring ceased, she realized that for the first time in her life she was scared. Fear had been the motivator of those little butterflies in her stomach. Fear that in some way or another she’d lose this man she’d begun to love. Being who she was presented a variety of ways she could lose him. There was always the crime, the reavers or the fact that she was a difficult woman to be in a relationship with. Then again, if he always snored like this there was the possibility she’d kill him in his sleep.

 

Zoë slipped out of bed and sat in the chair across from it, watching as Wash proceeded to flail and take up the space she’d just vacated. She wasn’t sure she liked this new found fear but she liked the man snoring in her bed enough to start making a plan on how she’d deal with it. She suspected it’d take something more than a plastic bat or a machine gun this time.