WASH: DOUBLE BOOKED

by AintWeJust

Part 3: Turbulence

This here is the third chapter of a sequel to WASH: CONNECTING FLIGHT, so you might want to go read that first. Just a suggestion. *grin*

As much as she would have liked to be with the group, River needed to be elsewhere. If Zoe’s plan was going to work, everyone had to feel like these men held themselves back just because they should -- that they had the willpower and the basic goodness not to behave like a horde of sexists, rapists and thugs. The funny thing was, River’s initial scan of the crowd revealed that most of the men who worked here would behave themselves, just as Zoe and Inara thought they would. It was the very small percentage that actually were sexists, rapists and thugs that River had to worry about.

All River had to do was keep a lid on those few simmering pots of misogynistic rage and hormonal excess, and stop them from boiling over just long enough for Wash and the ladies to reach the dispatch office, do what needed to be done, and get back to Serenity in one piece.

‘As the Captain would say,’ she muttered to herself, ‘best be about it.’

She moved through the dispatch yard like a ghost. It was partly because of her natural grace and her stillness, and partly because of those abilities the Alliance had enhanced in her to make her become a living weapon. Mostly, she would reach into the minds of the men around her and just make herself ... unnoticed. To the men she touched with her talent, she was a shadow, or a doorway, or a drainpipe -- just another part of the everyday landscape for the eye to pass over and ignore.

From on top of the ship, Jayne watched as River flowed around the groups of working men like ... well, like a river around a bunch of rocks. It was pretty, how she moved, almost like she was dancing. But that made it all manner of creepifying, too, since none of the men on the field seemed to see her at all.

He