Work Text:
It's the click and crackle of the radio that wakes Zoe. It's all subspace communication on ship and all kinds of fancy digital wireless highly encrypted (and regularly hacked) communications near the core, but out here, once you're planet side in a backwater like this, the most reliable form of communication is still a gorram short wave radio. Something both a little depressing and a little comforting about that. It would be all too easy to focus on the static and let her mind drift and slide back to sleep, but she knows her recent 'nap' was bit closer to 'passed out cold' than she's entirely comfortable with. She doesn't think she's got a head injury, but frankly every bit of her hurts, so probably best to stay conscious and inventory the injuries so nothing blind sides her at an inconvenient moment. She'll give Wash points for that one, his ability to follow instruction about field first aid was certainly refreshing, her bandages feel pretty secure, even if he doesn't appear to have stopped talking the entire time she was unconscious. The less said about her leg the better; not a lot either of them can do with that without medical training, but the other one feels like it might hold her weight in the morning, which is something.
“Zoe's pretty badly injured Captain.” It takes Zoe a moment to realise that Wash isn't actually talking to himself any more, but giving the Captain a status update. She adds the Captain and Jayne still being alive to her list of good points and their being captured to the bad points for good measure, and drags herself closer to the radio and the water so she can hear and be heard better. Her hand doesn't shake too badly when she grabs the water so she can do more than croak at them, and her voice when she does speak is steadier than she feels.
“Walking's a problem right now sir. Won't be doing any running anytime soon, but I can crawl now, and I'll be on my feet again in the morning.”
“Glad to hear it Zoe, cause it’s not looking good here, and ain't nobody else coming.” No giving up then, no sitting tight and waiting for backup. Time to see what their pilot is really made of then.
“Might take us some time sir, but we'll be there.”
“You both be careful.” There's a layer of sarcasm pasted over the top of that comment, though not quite enough to disguise the real concern underneath it. He's not stupid, she's pretty sure he knows she's worse than she's letting on but equally she's fairly certain she's successfully hidden how much worse that is from him. No sense him worrying about what he can't change.
“Won't let you down sir.” She really hopes that's true.
~
She's right. In the morning, her good leg does indeed take her weight. Most of it anyway, and Wash manages the rest of it with more competence then she would have expected from someone who hadn't done it before.
They get into a good rhythm and make good time all things considered, but by twilight they’ve barely covered three miles, at this rate it’ll take them days and Mal and Jayne don’t have days. Besides if she has to walk much further she’ll throw up or faint, and stubborn and proud she may be but stupid she ain’t so when a horse and cart appears over the hill ahead she outlines her plan.
Wash wouldn’t be her first choice to play the part of highwayman, and the plan is somewhat makeshift, but all in all it really shouldn’t have gone as badly as it did. (Jayne would have shot first, and likely got them all killed in the process, but still.) They end up in a ditch, bloody and bruised and instinct tells her they need to keep moving, so she keeps crawling despite Wash’s protests. The pain just might be interfering with her judgement right now, but there’s a nagging thought at the back of her mind driving her on. Eventually she turns on him, desperate for a little peace to let her focus.
“There is very high chance that if I stop moving right now, I will not be able to start again and that will do none of us any good. Captain’s got a saying, and it’s got us out of worse scrapes than this one. You can’t run you walk, can’t walk you crawl, can’t crawl…” she pauses there, there are spots in her vision and she needs to catch her breath. More than that she bites her tongue – literally as well as figuratively - to stop herself finishing the phrase. Wash isn’t a soldier, he isn’t trained or prepared for anything like this, and she can’t ask that of him. She’s aware though, of Wash talking, saying her name over and over like she’s been silent too long and worrying her, but it sounds distant and odd like he’s far away instead of beside her in the ditch.
“Zoe! When you can’t crawl, what? What happens when you can’t crawl?”
Somehow movement doesn’t seem important now. There’s darkness closing in from the edges of her vision and for the life of her she can’t remember the answer.
~
This time it’s the jolt as the cart bumps over a particularly large rut, which wakes her. It's pretty much full dark by now and there doesn't appear to be anyone else in back with her. This could either be a good thing or a very bad thing, as it either means Wash is driving the cart or that he's dead in a ditch somewhere and an unknown assailant is driving the cart to an equally unknown destination. Zoe takes a few minutes to gather her thoughts and her strength and to hope that if it’s the later case they're at least taking her in the correct direction. She's still got one of her guns and can feel the knife in her boot, which bodes a bit better, but she can't afford to presume. She takes the path of least resistance and, after some quiet shuffling to take advantage of all available leverage, lets out a pitiful and pained moan. It's a worryingly convincing sound, Zoe would infinitely rather be greeted by painkillers and dodgy facial hair than someone whose skull she'd have to crack right now, but she'll take what she can get.
To her relief it is Wash who pulls the cart over and appears bearing painkillers. He's also evidentially high on adrenalin and fills her in on his adventures while she takes her painkillers.
“So apparently, filthy, blood-covered men who appear out of the twilight, with a badly injured woman over one shoulder and a rifle over the other are pretty scary to some people. So scary in fact, that if they ask politely for your cart, you'll abandon it and flee for your lives without a shot having to be fired. I feel considerably better than expected, is this how Mal and Jayne feel all the time?”
There a lot of ways she could answer that one, the option she chooses is mostly to distract them both from the blood-covered comment, as her bandages feel newer so she'd rather not think about bleeding all over him.
“You carried me over your shoulder?” She asks instead. He's barely two inches taller than her on top of her other objections.
“Only way I could carry you and still be able to shoot the gun if I had to, and believe me my shoulder got the bad end of that deal. You're a tall woman and when they built me they did not have romantic hero or cave man in mind.”
It may well be the painkillers talking but Zoe finds the unexpected image of Wash as a fireman amusing so she lets it go.
~
Funnily enough, Zoe’s plans turn out to be better when she’s not nearly delirious with pain. With the horse and cart, they’re respectable travellers, no one bothers them. It gives them time to breathe and time to think. Without the desperate press of time upon them they can make proper plans for when they reach Mal and Jayne, rather than being blinded by the focus of getting to them. They can afford to detour into a local trading post for supplies.
Oddly enough, Wash was right about the bloodstains, between them and the shotgun, they’re able to get half-decent painkillers and better weaponry. Zoe doesn’t normally share Jayne’s love of grenades, but for this they need to create the impression of a vicious attack force and her broken leg means stealth and therefor several of her usual tactics are out.
In the end it turns out that Mal and Jayne have staged a small, if unsuccessful, insurrection at the fort where they’re being held. So by the time she and Wash turn up with their grenades and fireworks, the officer in charge is seeing spies and betrayal everywhere and easily fooled into thinking there’s more attackers than there are (injured she may be, and a shotgun is hardly a sniper rifle, but she’s still a crack shot) and equally easily goaded into making a stupid mistake. A mistake that ends with him tied up and muttering paranoid theories into the mud, while Zoe and Wash enter the fort like a returning Queen and…well prince consort she’ll allow…to lay claim to the place and release the prisoners. They mostly disguise her hobbling until they get to the control room at which point Wash starts imperiously demanding a chair for the ‘General’ and when it turns up as a bench carried between Mal and Jayne, she honestly could tell if she was gladder to see them or it.
~
Mal brings her a medic at gunpoint, and Wash stays by her side even after she's settled onto the bench and he's passed on what he knows of her injuries. The medic's eyes get wider and wider, as he examines and cleans her wounds. She had worse in the war, and she catches Mal's eye and gives the tiniest shake of her head, to which he gives an equally tiny nod of acknowledgement. They dearly need a ship's doctor, but this one will not do.
From thoughts of the future, they're all brought brutally back into the present.
“Tzao-gao! You shouldn't have walked 10 feet on this leg, never mind 10 miles...” the medic looks like as to be getting set for good rant, so Zoe's relieved when Mal cuts him off.
“Well she did, and like as not, we'd all be dead if she hadn't, so better that you say thank you and show your gratitude by not charging her for your services, than sitting there tutting like an old woman.”
The medic subsides at that, and concentrates on his work. She nearly breaks Wash's hand when the medic re-splints her leg before he can put her in plaster, but it serves only to add a few small points in his favour as he winces less at the feel of it than Mal does at the sight of it.
Leg set and crutch obtained, and Wash having been dragged off to play good bandit to Jayne's bad bandit, while the medic sorts out painkillers for her leg, Zoë feels ready to try standing again. Between herself and Mal they get her levered back upright, and he gives her his arm in a gentlemanly fashion that disguises the fact that she's leaning most of her weight on him. It's a fiction, her walking like this, but its one she's grateful for nonetheless.
“How did you walk ten miles on that leg, Zoë?” He asks quietly.
“Found someone to carry me, sir,” she tells him with a smile.
“I can keep my pilot then?” he asks wryly.
“He'll do,” she agrees, watching Wash and Jayne make a not horrendous job of getting her better drugs, and feels oddly fond at that moment, of Wash and his frankly horrendous facial hair.