Wash and Wendy sittin' in a tree...
Posts: 22
(8/15/05 10:14 am) Reply
Dreams~ Zoe 1/1
A/N: Once again you all get to beta me.
Prequel
Rating: PG-13 (For graphic gore?)
Catagory: General
Dream
by somedeepmystery
The scorched ground beneath her feet was stained dark with blood. The air she breathed was filled with the scent of gunpowder and burned flesh, decay and dust, fuel and incinerated machines. It tasted of copper. She stood in the middle of an enormous battlefield, surrounded by decaying bodies and the wreckage of machines, buildings, homes, families…people’s lives. Smoke, black and putrid, rose from the ground.
She wasn’t afraid. This was familiar territory. This place, with its stench, its pain, its chaos was known to her, it was home.
She pressed forward, climbing over debris, pushing aside obstacles she could actually move. Occasionally, as she made her way through the rubble, she flipped over a dead soldier just to be sure. This one wasn’t Mal, hopefully the next wouldn’t either. She looked under piles of rubble looking for him or his body.
Nope, not under there.
It didn’t matter, she knew he was there somewhere. He was apart of this place as well.
She continued to look for him, scanning the horizon and looking through chaos, until she had left the city and reached an expanse of wasteland, nothing but charred, gutted farmland, and smoldering trees, and bodies as far as her eyes could see. Where was Mal?
“Boy, this place is a mess.” Zoë turned sharply at the sound of the voice, and found Wash walking toward her, dressed in one of his riotous shirts, his shoes crunching in the burnt grass. She frowned. “Maybe we should clean it up?” he said.
“Why?” she said simply.
“See what there’s left to salvage under all this bing huang ma luan,” he responded. He looked down at a parched, sun bleached skeleton, the uniform, moments ago dirtied with mud blood and remnants of his own face, was now faded and tattered. “Sides, this guy’d probably rather be buried in a nice cozy grave then laying out here in the hot sun.” Wash continued. Zoë followed his gaze, did she know that soldier? She couldn’t remember.
“There is nothing here to salvage, Wash. Everything is dead.”
“Well, not everything,” he said, and nodded at something to her right, looking past her. She turned.
Just beyond her shoulder, stood a tall, slender Poplar tree, its round, green leaves flapping in the breeze, and its white bark reflecting the sun. She looked around her in surprise, as if she’d been trucked off to some other world without her notice, but she was still in the same battle torn land, only there was no longer smoke curling into the air around her. Everything seemed to have faded slightly, the bodies were now bones, crippled vehicles were beginning to molder, as were the remains of the city in the distance.
“I think there might maybe still be life here, hiding in the ground, just waiting,” Wash said looking around.
“Waiting for what?” she asked, confused, surprised, maybe desperate.
“For you to make room for it,” he replied simply, looking right at her as he spoke.
“Zoë, there you are.” She turned at the sound of Mal’s voice. He was in his uniform as usual, but his face was cleaned of mud. “Hey look, a tree, well wha’d’ya know. Didn’t expect to see that ‘round these parts.”
“Grass too, look,” Wash said pointing down.
“Huh, would ya look at that.”
Zoë followed their gaze, and sure enough, at the foot of the tree, there were small tender sprigs of grass pushing up into the light. She quickly scanned the rest of the ground searching amongst the decaying wreckage around her. Her thorough gaze came to rest upon a spot of pink poking out under a rusted out fender from an old mover. She walked over, lifted the twisted, blackened metal and looked down curiously at the incorrigible bloom. The plump, bulbous cluster of tiny pink flowers, surrounded by its broad variegated leaves, seemed to wave up at her as the breeze wafted over it. Zoë looked back up at the two men in astonishment.
“Well, well.” Mal said, sounding like the new Mal, and he frowned slightly, “Seems outta place in this bing lian huo jie de place, don’t it.”
“I think it’s purty,” Wash responded, rocking forward on the balls of his feet with his hands in his pocket, and Zoë simply stared at the two of them.
Where was that beeping coming from?
Zoë awoke slowly to the darkness of her bunk, pulling herself from the remnants of sleep, as the real world called her into awareness. Her alarm was sounding loudly on her bedside table, next to her dagger, and the smell of sweet red clover was still haunting her senses.
The battlefield was nothing new, she dreamt of it often. More often then not when the war had first ended. But as time passed, those dreams had decreased in number. But no matter their subtle changes, or frequency, Wash had never been there. There was never anyone but Mal and herself in those dreams. Then there was the clover…
She hadn’t thought about clover in a long time.
Their ship had needed an overhaul. The vessel needed to be in vacuum for the repairs, and since the company was footing the bill, she and her mother and father, along with the rest of the crew, had been put up planetside for the wait.
They had stayed in a small boarding house outside the city. Behind the house the hills had been covered in red clover, stretching out far as her eye could see. Never in her memory had she seen anything like it. All the bright freshness of color had put her in awe. And the smell!
She had picked a bundle of it for her mother.
It had been surrounding her on the hillside the day Will Chen, who had worked in the stable, had kissed her. She’d been thirteen. Her first kiss, a soft timid peck on the lips, followed by shy smiles and furtive glances, and then he had held her hand.
What an odd thing to remember after all this time.
She pushed aside all these thoughts and climbed from the warmth and softness of her bed. She didn’t find comfort there. Her comfort would come when she strapped on her gun and went to work. There she could concern herself with what needed to be done today. Everything else … everything else was in the past.
Wasn’t it?
Overhead she heard the footfalls of someone headed toward the bridge.
~
Jayne: (angrily) You wanna go little man? Wash: (unconcerned) Only if it's somewhere with candle light. Objects in Space Firefly
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