Title: You Oughta Be In Pictures

Fandom: Firefly

Author: Tiamat's Child

Warning: None

Summary: Wash takes in a movie.

You Oughta Be In Pictures

They stop over in a small town, middle of no-where continent, middle of no-where rock, not much to recommend it, but Kaylee (God bless Kaylee) chats up a few of the locals and finds up that there is, in fact, an old film projector in town, and also a bed sheet, and also, in the oddly assorted shipment Serenity brought in, a reel of film that everybody hasn't seen six hundred times, and the crew's invited, if they want to go.

Which they do.

Wash sits up front, cross legged on dusty grass, Zoe in a chair behind him, leaning back against her long, solid shins, and tries to match the characters in the pro forma war flick to the people he knows. There's Mal, harassed front line officer bickering with the staff officers, there's Jayne, simple enough, the guy who refuses to let go of the radio, and there's Simon, thoroughly harassed medic who looks about ready to strangle the team he's with, and Kaylee's there at the very beginning, taking a break from fixing a plane to kiss the hero (no one Wash knows) goodbye. The briefness of the kiss makes Wash doubt his identification for a moment, but he figures she probably wished the guy good luck more thoroughly the night before, can't show that in a family film, never mind it's how you end up with families. Wash wonders to himself if the hero (making friends with the medic now) will die and the medic will go home and fall in love with the Kaylee analogue, but he doubts it, because guys like Simon get girls like Kaylee only in real life, never in the movies.

He can't find Zoe, though, and that bugs him – Book'll be along later, once the main characters start dying – but he wants to find Zoe, even if there's no Inara, which there probably won't be, and no River, which there almost certainly won't be, since it doesn't look like that kind of film. Wash likes Zoe adventures best. He wants this movie to be a Zoe adventure.

He finally spots her when the solid, no nonsense sergeant, reloading his rifle, tells Our Overly Friendly Hero: "It doesn't matter if I like you, my job is to get you through, and get you through I will."

Ah, Wash thinks, There's my girl, and settles in to spend the rest of the movie hoping the sergeant doesn't buy it.