Wash wondered, bemusedly, when his life had turned into a romantic comedy. It had crept up so quietly: one moment he was, you know, eating breakfast, trimming his moustache, picking out his lucky jumpsuit, and the next he was committed to rebuilding the navigating system of a C-class Firefly practically from scratch for between 100 and 150 credits. And the moment after that little episode, he was falling down a ladder into a half-naked woman's bunk--the single most stunning half-naked woman he'd ever seen, even from behind--and being manhandled all over. And then out of some misguided notion of...what? his brain queried wearily. What the hell notion was that back there? Bad notion. BAD. Anyway, he'd kissed her. It was just sex, though, he reminded himself, staring now down the barrel of the gun his boss and ex, Sondra Tanaka, currently had aimed at his face. Wash had a type when it came to romance, he acknowledged: he liked his women tall, gorgeous...smart...wanting to kill him... Maybe it stemmed from his relationship with his mother. "Oh, it's you," Tanaka said, tossing the gun onto her desk. "Sorry. I was expecting someone." "Really?" Wash said politely. She gave him half a glance and her mouth quirked. "Barry," she ordered the guy with the sword strapped on his back standing behind her desk, "outside, please." Barry went. The door shut with a gentle click. "So," Sondra said. She leaned back, propped her feet on the desk, and lit a cigarillo. Wash shoved his hands in his pockets. His hearty respect for her talents in violence, based on a theoretical understanding of the precepts it entailed, had been upped to a measure of terror when he'd seen, accidentally, the kind of work her yakuzas really engaged in. Sondra hadn't just maneuvered her way up to the top of New Calcutta's underground ladder. Why do I get involved with these people? he asked himself for maybe the six thousandth time in his life. I just take one job, one innocuous little job, or make one innocuous little contact in order to stay afloat financially, and suddenly I'm mid-bloodbath and screwing a woman whose sense of morality is best described as a sort of variegated gray wash. And yet it kept happening. Over and over. "Did you take that job on Serenity?" she asked. "Sewhatity?" Wash asked. Sondra had blue eyes. They looked like chips of turquoise: hard, cold, brilliant. Wash gulped, hopefully innocuously--he was keeping everything innocuous. It wasn't like he'd never had a successful relationship with a sweet, loving girl. It was just that these warrior women were commandeering the concentration of his bloodstream. He worked very hard, envisioning old, angry nuns, with rulers, picking out every detail of surplice and wrinkle. It wasn't going well. "Serenity. That Firefly of Reynolds'." Wash hated kissing Sondra when she'd been smoking. Or so he told himself, watching the words, embodied by the smoke, leave her lips and caress the air. "Ah. Ah, yep." Sondra had a thin, fine mouth. He liked it. Stop, his brain told him. Stop now, or I'll never speak to you again. But it was with a certain sense of relief that he fought the lust; this was familiar territory. Just sex. Fierce, guilty, extremely satisfactory sex that left him smiling through his self-abrogation: he knew it like the back of his hand. He was terrified of all the things Sondra was...but he knew, quite solidly, where he stood in relation to her. For instance, if she wanted him, he ended up under her. Always. And that was absolute fact. Plus the whole current interaction with Sondra was absorbing enough to make him forget Zoe, his mind reminded him brutally. He put the thought away hurriedly. "Reynolds is a good guy," Sondra said. "He deserves the best." "So I need the other half of that payment," Wash said, then stopped. Visions of blood, guts, parts, and bobble-headed geisha dolls scattered everywhere stopped his sentence: his last delivery for Sondra had sure ended bloodily. It wasn't entirely her fault; the monks had simply refused to pay up, Wash had seen for himself. And her organization had a reputation to uphold. And apparently, toward such a purpose, violence was the answer. Sondra examined him for a second, then, with half a smile, reached into a desk drawer and threw him a bag of coin. It clinked heavily. "I feel foolish for saying something, but isn't this too much?" Wash asked, slightly apologetic. "Bonus," Sondra said. Wash stuck the coin in a pocket. His jumpsuit sagged slightly. She has such a finely-drawn face, he thought, admiring, guiltily, the mass of gold hair that fell to her shoulders, the cold eyes, the sensitive lips. Something felt as though it were ending to Wash, and he ignored the feeling by delving deeper into the hopeless conundrum that was his relationship with Sondra. Shame, his brain told him. You feel shame. And lust. You've got lust. Also some anger, and that amount of admiration and genuine liking that you thought maybe could lead you two into a functional relationship--and the hurt engendered by the fact that she has no similar idea. You go ahead and get busy on feeling all that, and you'll be too busy to think of Zoe. Shut up with the "Z" word, he told his brain firmly. "You don't want me...not to go, do you?" he asked. Sondra considered him for a second. "No," she said. "No you don't or no you do?" Wash said. She smiled a little harder. "No I don't," she said. "Do you think we could have made it work?" Wash asked. She took measured pauses. Wash couldn't tell if he liked or hated that. He shifted from his left to his right foot as she looked at him. "There's no 'it,'" she said, finally, her face...not blank, but secret, polite, vaguely amused, the face she constantly wore. "But there could have been," he said, somewhat tentatively. Sondra paused, then let out a bark of a laugh. It wasn't bitter, just sudden, and her eyes warmed slightly. "You're a romantic, Wash," she said. "Now take off your pants." He wasn't sure what name slipped out, at the end...dark hair, dark eyes, a sinuous line of back, a punishing grip: he closed his eyes and lost all of himself in it.