Fly True
Title: Fly True
Word Count: 2,468
Spoilers: None in this baby.
Summery: Wash's first love wasn't Zoe.
Wash shoved his clothing into a huge duffle bag, cursing under his breath as zipper refused to budge even an inch. How the hell he managed to accumulate so much in such a small space was beyond him.. The rest of the dorm was in similar disarray, his other three roommates attempting to pack away their lives now that they were fresh graduates of The Lockerby School of Aviation and Interstellar Travel. After having spent the greater part of the last four years with these guys, he was going to miss them.
“Hey, Wash?” Darius Rutger, a spindly brunette, with wickedly dancing gray eyes, peered down at him from the top bunk. “Ya plannin’ on saying your goodbyes anytime soon?”
“Yeah, let’s get a move on,” Riace Buchan quipped, throwing his bag across the room and clapping his hands together. “I hear tell there’s gonna be a few heartbroken females ‘cross campus, just waitin’ for the right man to give ‘em a send off they’ll always remember.”
Darius grinned, watching the way Wash’s shoulders tensed, “Could name one in particular, could use some Rutger-style lovin’. Pretty brunette, what’s her name… used to run with a scrawny blonde, thought he knew everythin‘…”
“Smart ass, that one,” Riace smirked, “Stupid too. Leavin’ a good girl like that behind.”
“Fills out her flight suit, too.”
Miss them?
Maybe not so much.
Finally managing to get his bag closed, he swung it around, ramming it into Riace’s stomach, eliciting laughter from Darius above and Conn Radlee, who sat at the single desk below the window, his tiny corner of the dorm already as clean as it was they day he moved in.
“You were askin’ for that,” Conn smiled, pushing back his mop of dark hair. Where Darius and Riace were loud and outgoing, much like Wash himself, Conn was the exact opposite. Quiet, serious, and probably the only reason the three of them had successfully graduated the week before.
“Was not,” Riace grumbled, punching Wash playfully in the shoulder. Or at least, he thought it was playful. The big brute didn’t always know his own strength.
Wash moved back a few steps, ignoring the others as they continued to banter, his eyes taking in the room for the last time. The pale green walls that led them to christen the room Pukies, the bunks made of wood so old and pitted, it was impossible to tell what color the paint had been, the narrow window that had looked out over Jian lake. They’d all gone skinny dipping in on their first night there and to this day, all three of them claimed it was his idea. The experience was meant to bond them, but it was really that first week, being quarantined together with Mathitines rash, that had done it.
They were going their separate ways today and somewhere deep down, it stung to be the first to leave. Maybe that was what kept him from being a hundred percent thrilled about the future. And Wash had a pretty damn fine looking future. A job waiting for him on Greenleaf that promised all the freedom he’d ever desired. A good ship, decent crew, steady to all corners of the galaxy and money like he’d never dreamed.
But a future without his friends. Without Ivy.
“Yo! Wash!” He jerked himself out of his reverie, pasting an easy-going smile on his face as Darius leapt from the top bunk, “Let’s go. Your commuter leaves in half an hour, unless you don’t plan on makin’ it. In which case,” he flashed a grin, “I’ll be takin’ it.”
“Yeah, only in your fantasies do you wish you could be me.” He retorted, grabbing his bag and throwing it over his shoulder.
“Every night, Wash, every night,” he quipped, the three of them following him out the door.
The moment he set eyes on her, he’d known she was out of his league. Hell, they weren’t even playing the same sport. They’d met his Sophomore year, after they’d fleshed out all those prospective pilots who just couldn’t hack it as Freshman and the classes were smaller, more intimate. She sat in the front of all their classes and he spent the first quarter paying more attention to the back of her head, trying to imagine how the sleek, golden-brown tresses would feel sliding between his fingers than he did to his professors.
Which, as far as he was concerned, worked out quite perfectly since it necessitated he have a tutor. And he went through six, making each of them downright disgusted/annoyed/furious enough to quit, before he got Ivy. Of course, once he had her, he couldn’t seem to form complete sentences in her presence.
He was the most brilliant student in the class, and she thought he was an idiot. It wasn’t the greatest courtship known to man.
It wasn’t until a few months later, when Wash was in very real danger of flunking out of class and he’d forced all thoughts of Ivy out of his head in order to ace his finals and just scrape by in the courses, that he made her laugh for the first time. The sound jerked him out of his study of aeronautic maneuvers in surprise. He’d always imagined (to himself, and only himself) that her laugh would be the light tinkling of bells, or the sweet trickle of a brook. Instead, she had a deep belly laugh that shook her shoulders and took her breath with a quiet, lady-like snort.
It was music to his ears.
In what was still a mystery to Wash, they were dating within another few months, spending as much of their waking time together as classes and their respective friends would allow. She brought him home that summer to meet her family. Somehow meeting her parents, both of them renowned archeologists who studied the finds of Earth-that-was, reduced him to a bumbling idiot once more. He thought they hated him. Who knows, they probably did.
But it was there, in the display room of her family’s private collection of fossilized dinosaur bones (which were giant creatures that roamed Earth-that-was before humans), that they made love for the first time.
Wash had been nervous, sure that his heart would beat right out of his chest, but she had guided him down onto the blanket, lighting the candles she’d laid out around them, promising him they wouldn’t get caught. He’d remember that night for the rest of his life. Whispered endearments between kisses, soft wisps of dark hair trailing over his chest, the sheen of sweat kissed by candlelight, her petite body taut with passion. The black of her eyes dilating with pleasure when she reached her peak.
He told her he loved her. Meant it with ever fiber of his being.
He’d give up the sky for her.
He knew she loved him back, because she wouldn’t let him.
Darius and Riace led the way toward the airfield where he would meet the commuter that would take him to Greenleaf. Wash hung back a few steps with Conn, unable to keep up with the rapid fire banter and in no rush to reach his destination.
He kicked a pebble ahead of him, his eyes staring unfocused at the ground, he almost didn’t hear Conn speak. “It’s not the end, Wash. You’ll see her again. You’ll see all of us again.”
He glanced up, squinting against the sun to see his friend, “Maybe I will, maybe I wont. You can’t tell anything these days. What with the war looming and…” he trailed off. “Ivy and I? We agreed it’s over, you know? A clean cut so we’re both able to move on.”
Conn fell silent, nodding absently.
“Wont say it’s not hard,” he pushed forward, the words falling stilted from his mouth. “I’ll probably love her ‘till the day I die. She’s my first love, my first…everything. Nothing’s ever gonna replace that. For either of us.”
His friend ran a hand through his hair uncomfortably, “I don’t know what to say here, Wash.”
Grabbing Conn’s arm, Wash stopped walking, letting the others get a little further ahead of them before he studied Conn’s face. His friend kept his dark blue eyes averted, a furrow of discomfort in his brow, “Say you’ll look out for her.”
“I don’t-- I can’t--”
“Yes, you can.” He insisted, his grip tightening on the taller man’s bicep. “You’re both going to work for Lawtin’s, you’ll be seeing her every day and you guys are already friends. She’ll deny it up, down and sideways, but she’s going to need a friendly face there. You know what those guys are like, hardly a woman in employ, she’ll need you.”
“Wash,” he shook his head, taking a step back from his friend. “It’s not that simple…”
“Yes, it is!” he hissed determinedly. “You know the Alliance says they got this revolt handled, but you and I and every other idiot out there knows one day we’ll all be flyin’ for one side or the other. I can‘t go on, knowing she‘s might end up out there, somewhere, alone. She needs someone at her back.”
“That someone ain’t gonna be me!”
“Why the hell not!?” Wash demanded, his eyes narrowing icily.
“Because I’m in love with her!” He exploded, fight draining out of him with the admission. “I’m in love with her, Wash. I didn’t-- you have to know that I‘d never--”
Wash let out a long breath, watching his friend struggle to find the words to explain, and cut him off. “I know. I’ve always known, Conn.”
“I‘m sor-- wait, what?”
Wash gazed at him sadly, “Why do you think I’m asking you?”
Conn glanced toward the commuter ship in the distance, avoiding his friend’s eyes. “Does she know?”
“No. And I don’t plan to tell her.” He inhaled a steadying breath, feeling his heart begin to crack just a little. “But you should. Not now, and maybe not even soon, but someday…when things are easier.”
“I couldn’t. What you guys have--”
“Is over,” Wash cut him off. “It’s raw and bleeding and painful, but time heals all wounds, so they say.” His voice broke a little and he cleared his throat. “You guys are friends and she’s going to need you. If that’s all you ever have between you, then… I’m sorry for you. But I know that woman better than anyone on the face of this world, and I know that she could love you, Conn. Stronger and better and more effortlessly than you could ever deserve.” He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his eyes, “And it kills me to say so.”
He gave Wash a sad smile, “Kills me to hear it.”
He cleared his throat again, “So you’ll look after her?”
“Until she makes me stop,” he smiled faintly. “That left hook of hers is no laughing matter.”
“Nothing compared to her right,” Wash joked weakly, as they started walking again, a new, unfamiliar tension charging the air between them.
Wash spotted her as they approached, standing between Riace and Damien with a smaller circle of their friends. She was chewing on her thumbnail, looking absently toward the transport shuttle, not really seeing it. She looked stunning in anything she wore, usually preferring the flight suits or jeans. Comfort over fashion any day, that was his girl. But today she wore a dress. Something soft and blue, with flowers decorating the hem that fluttered around her legs.
The crack in his heart split a little further.
Instinctively, her amber lifted to meet his, shining with tears she promised she wouldn’t shed. Dropping his bag, he opened his arms just in time to catch her petite body against his chest and bury his face in her honeyed hair. “Shhh,” he squeezed her tightly, his muscled arms turning to stone, as though they alone could stop the impending separation.
“Wash.”
His name cracked on her lips, and his throat was too tight to speak, and so he soothed her the only way he knew how. With lips and tongue and skin to skin.
Feed her thirst by pouring himself into her. But not enough, it could never be enough.
He left apologies at the corner of her mouth, promises broken in the barely there graze of his lower lip against hers, the beat of broken hearts in the nip of teeth, a lifetime of passion dying with the twist of his tongue around hers.
Wash would have stayed there forever, but her small hands slid between them pushing against his chest, and he blinked down at her through dazed eyes and shook his head. “No,” he whispered, “No.”
“Yes,” she sobbed, tears slipping down her cheeks, “You have to.”
“No,” he gasped her hands in his, refusing to lose contact with her until the last possible second. “Not really, I don’t. There are other jobs,” he told her frantically, the words tripping over themselves, “Other opportunities, I could find something else easy. You know I could. Even with you and Conn maybe. They’re always looking for pilots, you know that. I could stay, baby,” he whispered urgently, “I want to.”
“Please,” she whimpered, shaking her head, her face contorting with sorrow. “Don’t. You don’t want to stay here, you want to fly,” she gestured to the sky. “We already…,” she swallowed convulsively, “The decision was made.”
“I want you,” he insisted.
“And I want you,” she squeezed his hands once and forcibly extracted her fingers from his tight grip. “But more than anything, I want you to fly. You can‘t do that here. You were born for the black.”
He looked down at his empty hands for a moment, feeling the loss through every fiber of his being.
“I need you to soar, my love.”
“Wash,” Damien interrupted them, and he felt a jolt to remember they had an audience. “The shuttle’s going any minute now.”
His gaze slipped and slid over each of his friends, remembering the official goodbyes the day before, a whole party held in his honor. Laughter and memories and too much wine. Happy smiles laced with optimism and nostalgia.
There were no words left to say. He left with hugs and pats on the shoulder and one last lingering kiss from Ivy.
Finding a seat in the back, he tossed his bag onto the empty seat beside him, startled by the clatter of plastic on plastic as something fell out of his back. Reaching for it, he smiled, recognizing the toy as a small model of a T-rex.
A small roll of paper was tucked between his jaws and he pulled it out with a smile.
Fly true.
Smiling, he toyed with the dinosaur and wondered if he’d ever love another woman like he loved her.