Title: Ruffles

Character, Pairings: Jaylee, Crew

Rating: PG

Set: During the episode Shindig

A/N: I was doing some graphic work when I saw a screencap of Jayne looking at Kaylee while she is utterly entranced by that big fluffy dress. WARNING: Very fluffy fic. Practically cotton candy (it's because my BIG fic is so dark and angsty right now).

Persephone was always full of shiney new things, things that you could have, if you paid enough coin.

Kaylee's eyes'd lit up like stars goin supernova when she'd seen that dress. To her it had looked absolutely perfect, the kind of dress a perfect Kaylee would wear. The kind of Kaylee that people thought of as pretty or even beautiful, not the kind of Kaylee who fixed machines and got dirty. A Kaylee that Simon would notice and love. A Kaylee like Inara.

Jayne saw the look she got in her eyes when that dress'd come into view. There was an innocent delight in them and also a deep wanting. He couldn't understand why somebody'd want a dress, of all things, so bad.

Then Jayne realized that he'd only seen Kaylee in one dress ever, the tatty pink one she'd probably out-grown at 14. He pictured Kaylee wearing the big thing, buried in ruffles. She wouldn't look sexy in it but she'd look damned cute.

"What would you do in that rig anyway? Flounce around the engine room? Be like a sheep walking on it's hind legs!" Mal said irritably.

Jayne immediately pictured a sheep walking around the engine room in a dress. He snorted loudly.

Kaylee's face fell and she gave both of them a hard look, trying to be mad but looking only like she was going to cry.

Zoe, for her part was furious. She knew what it was like to be considered barely female. Hell, if anyone in the whole 'Verse knew it was Zoe Washburne. Maybe that was why she had taken Wash's name, knowing full-well he would have put up no fight if she had kept hers. Sometimes she felt like he was the only thing that kept her a woman, what with the captain being so tetchy about women and prefering to practically th