DISCLAIMER: These people aren't mine. Whatever. Everybody knows I'm just saying that to make Joss feel better. Honestly.

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I didn’t hate him. Honestly, I didn’t think he was worth the effort. I just… didn’t like him. He made my stomach flip in a way I wasn’t used to, and I didn’t like that. He made stupid jokes and never took anything seriously, and I really didn’t like that. He never lost an opportunity to touch me, and I really, really didn’t like that.

But most of all, every once in a while, he’d look at me, and I wouldn’t be able to look away.

I didn’t like that most of all.

From the beginning, when Mal first showed his new pilot to me, I was unimpressed. Hawaiian shirt, baggy trousers, a pink, sunburned face and a mop of blond hair. And that ridiculous mustache. He’d been working beneath the pilot’s console, fiddling with something and humming loudly. When Mal cleared his throat, he’d spun around, banging his head on the bottom of the console before straightening to grin at me. Well, at both of us, but his eyes never left my face. Mal had been so proud, showing Wash off, looking from me to the pilot and back to me. He’d been so excited. Made me feel good, just for him. But me? Well, as I told Mal later, I just didn’t like Blondie.

But Mal had, and everybody else had, too. Hell, even Jayne, in his own way. Wash was… well, he was like that.

Only I resisted.

And, natural-enough, I was the one Wash fixated on. He watched me. Smiled at me. Caught my arm in the halls just to tell me some joke and try to make me smile. That was annoying. He’d… brush by me, ghost a hand down my hair, things like that. Never anything obvious. Never anything that woulda given me the right to take him down. Just little things. But they built up, they did.

I remember the first time he got a little braver.

Was back ‘fore ‘Nara joined us, after a job. I’d gotten shot. Just a skim, on the arm, like, but Wash’d scuttled off to the infirmary just