AN: Okay, so this is one of those “Hey…why don’t we…” stories that my muse kind of presents me with and then won’t shut up about, usually when I am supposed to be writing an essay of some kind. In any case, I spent a lot of time with some fairly serious Dixie Chicks fans last summer and went from knowing only “Good-bye Earl” to knowing every single song they have. And not really minding that much.
Spoilers: vague for Out of Gas
Pairing: None…really.
Disclaimer: Neither the characters nor the song is mine.
Summary:
She needs wide open spaces
Room to make the big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes
------
Wide Open Spaces
Her ma always thought it rather odd that a girl as girlish as her Kaylee would be so good with engines. Her daddy was proud, if similarly confused, and allowed his daughter full run of the mechanical sheds. Kaylee had no official education once past learning her letters and Bible stories on Sunday mornings, but she learned mechanics as easy as if it was breathing.
Her auntie said that the mech sheds was no place for a young lady, even on such a backward planet as this. There were standards, after all, and Kaylee was not meeting them. Kaylee always thought her auntie meant the dirt under her fingernails and the grease on her face until the day Coram Hutchison kissed her under the hydraulic lift. After that, mechanics got all the more interesting.
Some men never could reconcile the pretty girl in the ill-fitting floral dress who danced so lightly at the square-dance on Sunday nights with the smudged and cover-alled creature who dogged them through the sheds on Monday morning. It wasn’t that Kaylee was two different people, but that both situations saw her freakishly the same. Kaylee was a female from the top of her head to the bottom of her tiny little feet and no one could ever forget it.
The first time she saw the space port and her eyes turned from farm tractors to space ships, her daddy knew he’d lost his little girl forever. Soon after her sixteenth birthday, she moved in with a cousin in Capital City and began haunting the port mech sheds, soaking up this brave new world like a sponge, forever pestering questions that no one could resist answering because, even though she was a slight of a girl, she was irresistible.
Seeing the engines up close was another matter altogether, but Kaylee soon found a way to manage that as well. She learned which ships flew best with which engines and which engines couldn’t lift a bug off the ground, much less a ship. She also had a great deal of fun in the finding out.
But nothing could keep Kaylee on the ground forever. She’d been born to explore and she needed more than a planet on the rim could offer. So when he offered her the job, it was only habit that made her say she had to ask her daddy first. No one ever turned down work, and her daddy never said no when Kaylee asked.
Her mother packed up all her things and sent them into town with the same disapproving auntie who said that at least in the black, Kaylee would have a limited number of ways to get into trouble. Her daddy stood on the loading dock and waved as Serenity took off, her engines humming after Kaylee fixed them, and waved and waved as his girl flew off into the wide open spaces that waited for her.
------
finis
AN: I wasn’t sure that this song was right for Kaylee. But in the last verse, her daddy yells “Don’t forget to check the oil” as she’s driving away, and then I decided it would work after all.
GravityNotIncluded, December 2, 2006