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Fic: Advances in Thermodynamics (2/6)
Title: Advances in Thermodynamics (2/6)
Fandom: Firefly/Iron Man (movie)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony Stark/Kaylee Frye
Necessary explanation: I asked for prompts, last week, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agonistes told me to write Tony/Kaylee. I said 'MWAHAHA' at the time and happily started writing in things designed to make Sweeney twitch, but I think that she officially gets the last laugh, because this is eating my brain alive, and, God help me, there are more parts forthcoming. I'm thinking the final count will be somewhere around five parts, though I'm unsure. Part 1 can be found here.
Kaylee hears the voice before she sees anybody. A huge ZAP! echoes down the freighter’s open ramp; it’s followed closely by “Gaīsĭ! Cào nĭ zŭxiān shí bă dai, you chùsheng xai-jiao de xiang huo useless sack of gŏushĭ!” Something thumps. “Gāoyáng zhōng d—”
Don’t sound so yōumĕi now, Kaylee thinks smugly. She walks up the ramp, stopping before stepping in. “Nĭ hăo?” she calls.
Something clangs, followed closely by footsteps. Tony Stark steps into the small cargo bay, his hair slicked back and his sleeves rolled all the way up. Kaylee’s face is bright; her eyes may linger a second or two too long on his biceps. She’s glad of her trousers and fitted pink shirt, clean hair and scrubbed face.
“Yes, hi,” says Stark, and Kaylee doesn’t miss the impatience. “Can I help you?”
“Hi, Mr. Stark.” She waves at him.
Stark squints, then recognizes her. “—Wŏ de mā, you’re actually person-colored under all that dust,” he says, wiping his hands on a rag as he steps toward her. “Highly unexpected. Hi there—”
After the awkward pause goes on five seconds too long, Kaylee supplies, “Kaylee. Kaylee Frye.”
“Wèi, Miss Kaylee, Kaylee Frye,” says Tony Stark. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“For me?”
“I don’t see any other you’s around. Where’s my mechanic?”
Kaylee hefts her toolbox and smiles sunnily. “Right here.”
“—Excuse me, what?”
“Can I—?” He nods, and she steps into the bay. “My daddy’s the best mechanic this side of Jiangyin,” she says, and if she talks uneven as she tries to look at every part of the ship at once, Stark is enough of a gentleman not to comment. “Only he’s not feelin’ too good, so instead, you got me.” She turns to beam at him.
He regards her for a minute. “Yeah, well, my usual righthand man managed to burn half the skin off his hands, so I guess we’re even. Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.” He turns, motioning sharply for her to follow. Ordinarily, Kaylee might take the time to appreciate his rear some – and it’s a mighty fine rear, she can see that at a glance – but not when there’s so much shiny to look at.
It’s the cargo bay and then a corridor, sure, nothing real special to see, but Kaylee’s never seen a ship so white and pristine in her life.
The engine, though, that’s not so pristine.
It looks like somebody took a real sharp two-by-four to it, combined with an explosive or six. Kaylee stops just inside the door and lays a hand on the bulkhead. “Oh, poor girl,” she whispers.
Stark turns around, eyebrows quirked up. “Are you talking to my ship?”
“Machines is people, too, you know,” says Kaylee, setting down her toolbox and taking several slow steps toward the section of engine that has already been expertly gutted. “You listen, they’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with ‘em.”
“I didn’t realize I programmed this one to talk,” Stark says dryly, but Kaylee can feel his gaze between her shoulder blades as she runs a gentle hand across the deepest rent in the engine casing.
“I heard her loud and clear when you was comin’ down.” Kaylee’s voice is absent at best, as she spins the turbine up to take a look. “Engine’ll need a couple days of work, but your auxiliary power converter’s shot to hell, too.”
He lays a grimy hand on the engine, catching her attention, and she glances up into his skeptical face. “One, you can’t possibly know that; it’s housed over there behind that closed panel, and two,” matter of fact, “no, it’s not. Everything’s in the green – it’s fine.”
Kaylee shakes her head. “No, it ain’t.” She walks across the engine room and opens the access panel. Something snap-hisses as it sparks with a flash of heat; a sharp pop and all the lights go out, and the ship goes silent.
“That – should not have done that,” says Tony Stark’s voice.
“Nope,” she says cheerfully, producing a handheld light and switching it on. Her easy smile doesn’t dim one bit as she pulls a pair of heavy-duty work gloves out of her back pocket. The air stinks of burned rubber and wiring; Kaylee can’t see it real clear through the dim light coming from the open cargo bay outside, but she knows the interior of the panel is a flash-fried mess.
“Pass me a pair of pliers?” she asks.
Stark shoots her a look in the low light, but he pulls a pair out of his pocket. “Will needlenose do?” If his voice got any dryer, it’d be outside in the sand bowl.
“Yep.” With light and pliers now poised in her other hand, she reaches into the panel with wirecutters, and she snips before Stark can stop her. “Problem is, wiring for the converter shouldn’t be in the same junction as the shield generator to start with. It ain’t too likely one blows out, in a Korai, but if one does, it takes the other one right along with it, and then you got yourself a fèifèi de pìyăn.”
Kaylee swaps tools from one hand to the other. “But, if you rig it so your shield generator hooks up with propulsion on the left,” she’s deftly maneuvering two bits of wire, putting the light between her teeth just long enough to pull a strip of sticky conductor from her pocket, knead it between her fingers, and wrap it around the two connecting wires, “and your converter to your subspeed drive on the right…” She starts on the next two cables. “It ain’t gonna get you nowhere fast, but it’s the best I can do for you with what I got, and it oughta get you where you’re goin’ in one piece.”
Stark is crouching at her side, his expression unreadable. When she goes to put the light in her mouth again, he extends a hand. “Allow me.” She passes it to him with a bright smile, a silent thank you, and he holds it for her. “What would you do if you had unlimited time and supplies?”
She snorts, half-laughing. “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
“C’mon. Indulge me.”
“Well, for starters, I’d rip out all this ugly and rewire the whole thing,” she says. “From what I saw on the engine, I’d fix you up a new grav boot, take a look-see if anything’s tacking up the works in—” She fits the two sections of wire together; the lights flicker, then turn on and stay that way. The air scrubbers sputter to life. “—there.” Kaylee rocks back on her heels and beams.
“Where in the ‘verse did you learn your mechanics, Miss Frye?” Stark flicks off the small light, flipping it between his fingers.
“Well, my daddy taught me some,” says Kaylee, stickying the wires together. “The rest – I just know it, I guess. I listen to an engine or watch a mule go and I can figure what needs fixin’.” She sits back again, dusting off her hands.
She finds Tony Stark looking at her with an intensity that makes her cheeks hot. He’s good at that. “That’s a pretty impressive talent, Miss Frye,” he says. “What is it that you do around Jefferson?”
“Odd jobs, mostly,” she says, stripping off her gloves. “Refuelin’ supply ships, fixin’ tractors, that sort.”
Stark chuckles lightly. “It’s the life of the party out here, huh?”
Quadrillionaire inventor or not, Kaylee shoots him a look over her shoulder. “They’re good folk, tryin’ to make an honest livin’.”
Stark lifts his hands in half apology, half mock surrender. “Didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”
Kaylee purses her lips. “Yeah, you did,” she says. “You ‘meant to imply’ we’re dull as a sack of rocks and twice as dumb.”
Stark looks at her – and then he suddenly smiles. Kaylee stares at him. Is he crazy? Is he a crazy man? Is that what this is? “My God. Are you always this honest?”
She narrows her eyes. “Only when people’re bein’ mean.”
Stark smiles faintly. “Touché. What I was wondering, and articulating poorly, was this – why not get the Alliance out here, build a hospital, seed in some industry?”
“Well,” says Kaylee, a little less mad, “the Alliance ain’t real welcome out here.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve walked right into a hornet’s nest of smiling Browncoats,” says Stark. “Should I not have left a wounded Alliance officer out there with all those pies and cooing women?” He asks it flippantly, but Kaylee fancies there’s a note of genuine wariness in his voice.
“Oh, it’s nothin’ like that,” Kaylee tells him. She sets her hands on a panel but can’t immediately find the latches. Stark reaches over and pops it open. “Colonel’s dandy where he is. It’s just that – folk around here, they don’t take kindly to anybody stickin’ their heads in, tellin’ ‘em how to live.”
“And that includes the Alliance. Charming.”
“You’re bein’ mean again,” Kaylee says, from her position halfway inside the engine. It don’t look pretty.
“Miss Frye, I’ve never been accused of being a particularly nice man.” She hears him open the next panel. “Have you worked on a Korai-class before?”
Kaylee touches a dangling wire, and hisses at the shock she gets for her trouble. “Well, you could try.”
“—Shénme?”
“It don’t take that much effort to be nice, Mr. Stark,” she says, her mouth set stubbornly. “And no, I only ever seen ‘em on the news captures.”
“You’ve only seem them on the news captures, and you’re disassembling that engine like it was an erector set.”
Kaylee’s eyebrows rise sharply, even if she knows he can’t see it while she’s got her head in the engine. “A what?”
“Tut tut, Miss Frye, dig your mind out of that gutter. A toy, from Earth-that-Was,” he says, but he sounds amused. “So, you think the problem lies in the design?”
“Of the ship? The design’s shiny,” says Kaylee, tugging a wrench out of her belt. “Real practical-like, ‘sides where you can’t get parts for somethin’ like this out on the Rim. The wiring was a dumb mistake, real dumb, but the guy who designed this, he knew what he was doin’.”
“Thanks.”
Kaylee whacks the back of her head on the engine casing.
“Hey,” says Stark. “No brains in my engine, Frye.”
She sits up straight, staring at him. “You designed this?”
“Guilty as charged.” She should have guessed, she thinks, knowing what she does about the man; he looks like he thinks she should have guessed, anyway, grinning at her like a real smug wánnào.
Kaylee looks around, sitting on her feet, and then her smile begins its comeback. “It’s real pretty,” she says. “She’s a beautiful boat.”
“Stop, I’m blushing,” says Stark, still smirking arrogantly, and Kaylee ought to be put off but can’t help but grin back. “How long do you think it’ll take to put this real pretty jigsaw back together?”
Her brow furrows. “Off hand? I’d guess somewhere ‘round four days.”
“That’s a pretty conservative estimate,” says Stark. “I think we can do it in two.”
Kaylee shoots him a sidelong look. “ ‘We’?”
“I built most of the first prototype engine myself,” Stark says dryly. “I’d hope I could put this behemoth back together.”
“Well, then,” says Kaylee, and she grins at him with mischievous energy that borders on reckless. “Let’s see what you got.”
“Tell me, you ever worked on state of the art stuff, with state of the art tools?” asks Stark, on his back under the engine.
Kaylee laughs beside him, smudging her forehead black as she brushes her hair out of her face. “Depends what you mean by state of the art.”
“Brand new, top of the line. That is generally what ‘state of the art’ means.”
“Nope,” she says, reaching up to wipe her head with her cleaner sleeve.
“You wanna?”
Kaylee freezes with her hand halfway to her forehead. “Duìbùqĭ?” She rolls onto her side too fast and nearly slams her shoulder into the engine for the second time in as many days. “You offerin’—”
“You a job? Yep.” Stark turns his eyes upward again, away from her, making a show of being thoughtful. “I’m thinking a starting salary of somewhere around 70,000 a year, plus benefits, 701k, the bonus for moving – Stark Enterprises’ dental isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.”
Her hands are covering her mouth.
Stark sighs. “I could use someone with your instinct on my staff,” he says. “I’m looking for people to work on my top engineering team, building new forms of tech. And you don’t tolerate gŏu pì. I like that in a woman.” He tilts his head back against the deckplates. Airily: “Of course, I’d ask you to take some classes as a fallback for that gut of yours, and you’d have to come to Osiris—”
“Yes,” says Kaylee, and she can hardly breathe, her face shining in its barely-contained glee. “Yes.” Her smile threatens to go supernova.
“Are you going to hug me? Please don't hug me.”
“Okay, okay,” says Kaylee, beaming, but the second they're out from under the engine, she hugs the stuffing out of him.
“She’s awful young, Tony.”
“What are you talking about? She’s perfectly mature. She walked right by a bunch of kids playing wǔ shí yesterday and she didn’t even slow down.”
“She can’t be more than 20.”
“Actually, she’s 19.”
“That doesn’t prove your point.”
“It proves she’s legally allowed to come and work for me.”
“Just let her be. Leave her here.”
“Let her be? Why would I do that? Rhodey, she’s the single greatest mechanical genius I’ve ever seen. Present company excluded.”
“And by ‘present company’ you mean you.”
“Exactly.”
“She’s cute.”
“You noticed? I didn’t think you noticed cute girls anymore.”
“She’s too young for your niúshĭ, Tony. She’s a sweet kid.”
“I don’t know what kind of life the Alliance has you living, but I don’t generally carry niúshĭ around with me.”
“Tony, come on.”
“You’re just ticked off because this ship is very small, we have a long flight, and she talks more than both of us combined.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Do I ever?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go.”
Chinese translations [from here]:
Gaīsĭ! - Damn it!
Cào nĭ zŭxiān shí bă dai - Fuck 18 generations of your ancestors
Gŏushĭ - Crap
Gāoyáng zhōng de gūyáng - Motherless goats of all motherless goats*
Yōumĕi – Elegant
Nĭ hăo – Hello [formal]
Wŏ de mā - Mother of God
Wèi - Hey [standard greeting/exclamation]
Fèifèi de pìyăn - A baboon's asscrack [i.e. "a load of crap"]
Shénme? - I'm sorry?; what?
Wánnào - Troublemaker; rascal
Duìbùqĭ? - I'm sorry?; excuse me?
Gŏu pì - Bullshit
Wǔ shí - Five stones**
Niúshĭ - Cow dung
* Tony starts to say this but doesn't finish it; I have no idea what his half-finished sentence is actually saying.
** Five stones is a traditional children's game played in Singapore, which is played with five small objects which are thrown up and caught in various ways. It's analogous to the modern game of jacks. I could not find the name of the game in Mandarin or Malay, so I fed 'five' and 'stone' into an English-Chinese translator. There is a chance that wǔ shí is not actually saying what I am trying to say.
Part 3
Fandom: Firefly/Iron Man (movie)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony Stark/Kaylee Frye
Necessary explanation: I asked for prompts, last week, and
agonistes told me to write Tony/Kaylee. I said 'MWAHAHA' at the time and happily started writing in things designed to make Sweeney twitch, but I think that she officially gets the last laugh, because this is eating my brain alive, and, God help me, there are more parts forthcoming. I'm thinking the final count will be somewhere around five parts, though I'm unsure. Part 1 can be found here.Kaylee hears the voice before she sees anybody. A huge ZAP! echoes down the freighter’s open ramp; it’s followed closely by “Gaīsĭ! Cào nĭ zŭxiān shí bă dai, you chùsheng xai-jiao de xiang huo useless sack of gŏushĭ!” Something thumps. “Gāoyáng zhōng d—”
Don’t sound so yōumĕi now, Kaylee thinks smugly. She walks up the ramp, stopping before stepping in. “Nĭ hăo?” she calls.
Something clangs, followed closely by footsteps. Tony Stark steps into the small cargo bay, his hair slicked back and his sleeves rolled all the way up. Kaylee’s face is bright; her eyes may linger a second or two too long on his biceps. She’s glad of her trousers and fitted pink shirt, clean hair and scrubbed face.
“Yes, hi,” says Stark, and Kaylee doesn’t miss the impatience. “Can I help you?”
“Hi, Mr. Stark.” She waves at him.
Stark squints, then recognizes her. “—Wŏ de mā, you’re actually person-colored under all that dust,” he says, wiping his hands on a rag as he steps toward her. “Highly unexpected. Hi there—”
After the awkward pause goes on five seconds too long, Kaylee supplies, “Kaylee. Kaylee Frye.”
“Wèi, Miss Kaylee, Kaylee Frye,” says Tony Stark. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“For me?”
“I don’t see any other you’s around. Where’s my mechanic?”
Kaylee hefts her toolbox and smiles sunnily. “Right here.”
“—Excuse me, what?”
“Can I—?” He nods, and she steps into the bay. “My daddy’s the best mechanic this side of Jiangyin,” she says, and if she talks uneven as she tries to look at every part of the ship at once, Stark is enough of a gentleman not to comment. “Only he’s not feelin’ too good, so instead, you got me.” She turns to beam at him.
He regards her for a minute. “Yeah, well, my usual righthand man managed to burn half the skin off his hands, so I guess we’re even. Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.” He turns, motioning sharply for her to follow. Ordinarily, Kaylee might take the time to appreciate his rear some – and it’s a mighty fine rear, she can see that at a glance – but not when there’s so much shiny to look at.
It’s the cargo bay and then a corridor, sure, nothing real special to see, but Kaylee’s never seen a ship so white and pristine in her life.
The engine, though, that’s not so pristine.
It looks like somebody took a real sharp two-by-four to it, combined with an explosive or six. Kaylee stops just inside the door and lays a hand on the bulkhead. “Oh, poor girl,” she whispers.
Stark turns around, eyebrows quirked up. “Are you talking to my ship?”
“Machines is people, too, you know,” says Kaylee, setting down her toolbox and taking several slow steps toward the section of engine that has already been expertly gutted. “You listen, they’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with ‘em.”
“I didn’t realize I programmed this one to talk,” Stark says dryly, but Kaylee can feel his gaze between her shoulder blades as she runs a gentle hand across the deepest rent in the engine casing.
“I heard her loud and clear when you was comin’ down.” Kaylee’s voice is absent at best, as she spins the turbine up to take a look. “Engine’ll need a couple days of work, but your auxiliary power converter’s shot to hell, too.”
He lays a grimy hand on the engine, catching her attention, and she glances up into his skeptical face. “One, you can’t possibly know that; it’s housed over there behind that closed panel, and two,” matter of fact, “no, it’s not. Everything’s in the green – it’s fine.”
Kaylee shakes her head. “No, it ain’t.” She walks across the engine room and opens the access panel. Something snap-hisses as it sparks with a flash of heat; a sharp pop and all the lights go out, and the ship goes silent.
“That – should not have done that,” says Tony Stark’s voice.
“Nope,” she says cheerfully, producing a handheld light and switching it on. Her easy smile doesn’t dim one bit as she pulls a pair of heavy-duty work gloves out of her back pocket. The air stinks of burned rubber and wiring; Kaylee can’t see it real clear through the dim light coming from the open cargo bay outside, but she knows the interior of the panel is a flash-fried mess.
“Pass me a pair of pliers?” she asks.
Stark shoots her a look in the low light, but he pulls a pair out of his pocket. “Will needlenose do?” If his voice got any dryer, it’d be outside in the sand bowl.
“Yep.” With light and pliers now poised in her other hand, she reaches into the panel with wirecutters, and she snips before Stark can stop her. “Problem is, wiring for the converter shouldn’t be in the same junction as the shield generator to start with. It ain’t too likely one blows out, in a Korai, but if one does, it takes the other one right along with it, and then you got yourself a fèifèi de pìyăn.”
Kaylee swaps tools from one hand to the other. “But, if you rig it so your shield generator hooks up with propulsion on the left,” she’s deftly maneuvering two bits of wire, putting the light between her teeth just long enough to pull a strip of sticky conductor from her pocket, knead it between her fingers, and wrap it around the two connecting wires, “and your converter to your subspeed drive on the right…” She starts on the next two cables. “It ain’t gonna get you nowhere fast, but it’s the best I can do for you with what I got, and it oughta get you where you’re goin’ in one piece.”
Stark is crouching at her side, his expression unreadable. When she goes to put the light in her mouth again, he extends a hand. “Allow me.” She passes it to him with a bright smile, a silent thank you, and he holds it for her. “What would you do if you had unlimited time and supplies?”
She snorts, half-laughing. “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
“C’mon. Indulge me.”
“Well, for starters, I’d rip out all this ugly and rewire the whole thing,” she says. “From what I saw on the engine, I’d fix you up a new grav boot, take a look-see if anything’s tacking up the works in—” She fits the two sections of wire together; the lights flicker, then turn on and stay that way. The air scrubbers sputter to life. “—there.” Kaylee rocks back on her heels and beams.
“Where in the ‘verse did you learn your mechanics, Miss Frye?” Stark flicks off the small light, flipping it between his fingers.
“Well, my daddy taught me some,” says Kaylee, stickying the wires together. “The rest – I just know it, I guess. I listen to an engine or watch a mule go and I can figure what needs fixin’.” She sits back again, dusting off her hands.
She finds Tony Stark looking at her with an intensity that makes her cheeks hot. He’s good at that. “That’s a pretty impressive talent, Miss Frye,” he says. “What is it that you do around Jefferson?”
“Odd jobs, mostly,” she says, stripping off her gloves. “Refuelin’ supply ships, fixin’ tractors, that sort.”
Stark chuckles lightly. “It’s the life of the party out here, huh?”
Quadrillionaire inventor or not, Kaylee shoots him a look over her shoulder. “They’re good folk, tryin’ to make an honest livin’.”
Stark lifts his hands in half apology, half mock surrender. “Didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”
Kaylee purses her lips. “Yeah, you did,” she says. “You ‘meant to imply’ we’re dull as a sack of rocks and twice as dumb.”
Stark looks at her – and then he suddenly smiles. Kaylee stares at him. Is he crazy? Is he a crazy man? Is that what this is? “My God. Are you always this honest?”
She narrows her eyes. “Only when people’re bein’ mean.”
Stark smiles faintly. “Touché. What I was wondering, and articulating poorly, was this – why not get the Alliance out here, build a hospital, seed in some industry?”
“Well,” says Kaylee, a little less mad, “the Alliance ain’t real welcome out here.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve walked right into a hornet’s nest of smiling Browncoats,” says Stark. “Should I not have left a wounded Alliance officer out there with all those pies and cooing women?” He asks it flippantly, but Kaylee fancies there’s a note of genuine wariness in his voice.
“Oh, it’s nothin’ like that,” Kaylee tells him. She sets her hands on a panel but can’t immediately find the latches. Stark reaches over and pops it open. “Colonel’s dandy where he is. It’s just that – folk around here, they don’t take kindly to anybody stickin’ their heads in, tellin’ ‘em how to live.”
“And that includes the Alliance. Charming.”
“You’re bein’ mean again,” Kaylee says, from her position halfway inside the engine. It don’t look pretty.
“Miss Frye, I’ve never been accused of being a particularly nice man.” She hears him open the next panel. “Have you worked on a Korai-class before?”
Kaylee touches a dangling wire, and hisses at the shock she gets for her trouble. “Well, you could try.”
“—Shénme?”
“It don’t take that much effort to be nice, Mr. Stark,” she says, her mouth set stubbornly. “And no, I only ever seen ‘em on the news captures.”
“You’ve only seem them on the news captures, and you’re disassembling that engine like it was an erector set.”
Kaylee’s eyebrows rise sharply, even if she knows he can’t see it while she’s got her head in the engine. “A what?”
“Tut tut, Miss Frye, dig your mind out of that gutter. A toy, from Earth-that-Was,” he says, but he sounds amused. “So, you think the problem lies in the design?”
“Of the ship? The design’s shiny,” says Kaylee, tugging a wrench out of her belt. “Real practical-like, ‘sides where you can’t get parts for somethin’ like this out on the Rim. The wiring was a dumb mistake, real dumb, but the guy who designed this, he knew what he was doin’.”
“Thanks.”
Kaylee whacks the back of her head on the engine casing.
“Hey,” says Stark. “No brains in my engine, Frye.”
She sits up straight, staring at him. “You designed this?”
“Guilty as charged.” She should have guessed, she thinks, knowing what she does about the man; he looks like he thinks she should have guessed, anyway, grinning at her like a real smug wánnào.
Kaylee looks around, sitting on her feet, and then her smile begins its comeback. “It’s real pretty,” she says. “She’s a beautiful boat.”
“Stop, I’m blushing,” says Stark, still smirking arrogantly, and Kaylee ought to be put off but can’t help but grin back. “How long do you think it’ll take to put this real pretty jigsaw back together?”
Her brow furrows. “Off hand? I’d guess somewhere ‘round four days.”
“That’s a pretty conservative estimate,” says Stark. “I think we can do it in two.”
Kaylee shoots him a sidelong look. “ ‘We’?”
“I built most of the first prototype engine myself,” Stark says dryly. “I’d hope I could put this behemoth back together.”
“Well, then,” says Kaylee, and she grins at him with mischievous energy that borders on reckless. “Let’s see what you got.”
“Tell me, you ever worked on state of the art stuff, with state of the art tools?” asks Stark, on his back under the engine.
Kaylee laughs beside him, smudging her forehead black as she brushes her hair out of her face. “Depends what you mean by state of the art.”
“Brand new, top of the line. That is generally what ‘state of the art’ means.”
“Nope,” she says, reaching up to wipe her head with her cleaner sleeve.
“You wanna?”
Kaylee freezes with her hand halfway to her forehead. “Duìbùqĭ?” She rolls onto her side too fast and nearly slams her shoulder into the engine for the second time in as many days. “You offerin’—”
“You a job? Yep.” Stark turns his eyes upward again, away from her, making a show of being thoughtful. “I’m thinking a starting salary of somewhere around 70,000 a year, plus benefits, 701k, the bonus for moving – Stark Enterprises’ dental isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.”
Her hands are covering her mouth.
Stark sighs. “I could use someone with your instinct on my staff,” he says. “I’m looking for people to work on my top engineering team, building new forms of tech. And you don’t tolerate gŏu pì. I like that in a woman.” He tilts his head back against the deckplates. Airily: “Of course, I’d ask you to take some classes as a fallback for that gut of yours, and you’d have to come to Osiris—”
“Yes,” says Kaylee, and she can hardly breathe, her face shining in its barely-contained glee. “Yes.” Her smile threatens to go supernova.
“Are you going to hug me? Please don't hug me.”
“Okay, okay,” says Kaylee, beaming, but the second they're out from under the engine, she hugs the stuffing out of him.
“She’s awful young, Tony.”
“What are you talking about? She’s perfectly mature. She walked right by a bunch of kids playing wǔ shí yesterday and she didn’t even slow down.”
“She can’t be more than 20.”
“Actually, she’s 19.”
“That doesn’t prove your point.”
“It proves she’s legally allowed to come and work for me.”
“Just let her be. Leave her here.”
“Let her be? Why would I do that? Rhodey, she’s the single greatest mechanical genius I’ve ever seen. Present company excluded.”
“And by ‘present company’ you mean you.”
“Exactly.”
“She’s cute.”
“You noticed? I didn’t think you noticed cute girls anymore.”
“She’s too young for your niúshĭ, Tony. She’s a sweet kid.”
“I don’t know what kind of life the Alliance has you living, but I don’t generally carry niúshĭ around with me.”
“Tony, come on.”
“You’re just ticked off because this ship is very small, we have a long flight, and she talks more than both of us combined.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Do I ever?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go.”
Chinese translations [from here]:
Gaīsĭ! - Damn it!
Cào nĭ zŭxiān shí bă dai - Fuck 18 generations of your ancestors
Gŏushĭ - Crap
Gāoyáng zhōng de gūyáng - Motherless goats of all motherless goats*
Yōumĕi – Elegant
Nĭ hăo – Hello [formal]
Wŏ de mā - Mother of God
Wèi - Hey [standard greeting/exclamation]
Fèifèi de pìyăn - A baboon's asscrack [i.e. "a load of crap"]
Shénme? - I'm sorry?; what?
Wánnào - Troublemaker; rascal
Duìbùqĭ? - I'm sorry?; excuse me?
Gŏu pì - Bullshit
Wǔ shí - Five stones**
Niúshĭ - Cow dung
* Tony starts to say this but doesn't finish it; I have no idea what his half-finished sentence is actually saying.
** Five stones is a traditional children's game played in Singapore, which is played with five small objects which are thrown up and caught in various ways. It's analogous to the modern game of jacks. I could not find the name of the game in Mandarin or Malay, so I fed 'five' and 'stone' into an English-Chinese translator. There is a chance that wǔ shí is not actually saying what I am trying to say.
Part 3
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“Okay, okay,” says Kaylee, beaming, but the second they're out from under the engine, she hugs the stuffing out of him.
Ahahaha!
This is brilliant.
I don't understand how you do this.
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"The wiring was a dumb mistake, real dumb, but the guy who designed this, he knew what he was doin’."
"Thanks."
Kaylee whacks the back of her head on the engine casing.
"Hey," says Stark. "No brains in my engine, Frye."
and
"Are you going to hug me? Please don't hug me."
"Okay, okay," says Kaylee, beaming, but the second they're out from under the engine, she hugs the stuffing out of him.
embody a lot of what I adore about this piece.
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.. Not that any of us have done that. *cough*
“That – should not have done that,” says Tony Stark’s voice.
Muahahah. Do not doubt the mechanic, she knows everything. And she's so darn sweet you can't even be annoyed at her for it.
“It don’t take that much effort to be nice, Mr. Stark,” she says, her mouth set stubbornly.
Annnnd that is why we love her.
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Kaylee's a real darling; I've written her a couple times in the past, and I've always had a blast. Thanks for reading! :D
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LOL
Shiny.
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Thank you. :D
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“You noticed? I didn’t think you noticed cute girls anymore.”
rehlefikshjidwks
hi, my rhodey/tony, it may be showing A LITTLE
this continues to be amazing. "no brains in my engine, frye" and others. oh my gosh, what can i say i didn't say before.
i enjoy how tony and kaylee are flirting in ways only engineering geeks can flirt, namely: she fixes his engine and he waits until AFTER she's started to tell her it's his, and then he looks a lot like i imagine most boys are supposed to look when they give a girl they like something they drew themselves, except in tony's case he's not praying she doesn't notice the one edge where the dog nibbled at it first.
mostly because tony is not a dog person, and he's probably programmed that twitchy fire-extinguisher coding out of his robot pets by now.
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I just giggled so hard at that analogy; too true! He completely loves lording it about that he designed this, and loves that she's more than impressed by it. I mean, what's Bester's line in "Out of Gas"? "Captain, this girl, engines get her hot," or something like that. That was a big part of what made me crack up and start plotting for this entire enterprise. Thank you so much!
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And Tony's is ringing in my ears as I stumble in from yet another showing of the movie, hahaah :P
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(Meanwhile: Either I gave myself a plot bunny or just wrote it out of my system, I'm not sure yet.)
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*DIES LIKE A DEAD THING*
OH MAN. SO MUCH AWESOME. It's a little thing, but the last line, where he's trying to figure out how to make it "harder to smash the armor's faceplate in"? I cracked up to within an inch of my life.
And thank you! :D
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Hee! Oh, that's so Tony. You rock so hard.
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Oh my god.
Everybody has touched on the hugging thing, which I ADORED, so instead I am going to say how absolutely fucking blown away I am by the technical talk. That stuff is a bitch and a half to write, and it flows like you're not even making it up. <33333
MOAR PLS
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I loved the voices, can't wait to see Kaylee in snazzy Stark Enterprise HQ's.
Loved the hug, the techno-babble, the dialouge between Tony/Rhodey.
Again, seamless and brilliant!
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701K!!!!! Ha!
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*applauds fic dance!* Thank you. :D
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Will Pepper make an appearance?
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Because ahahahahahahaha. :D
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I don't know, but I think I'm going to go with my general strategy of blaming it entirely on
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Also, I love your Rhodey/Tony interaction. So, so, so much love for that.
Incidentally, now I have Mal in my head being jealous of Tony, who is a favoured client of Inara.
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favoritismlove is probably coming through very loud and very clear, but I just can't help it! I love the dynamic between the pair of them (and the character himself) too much to leave him out. Thank you very much! Here's hoping I win you over. :D... Also, I highly encourage you to write that. *grinning*
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Oh, this is AWESOME. Seriously, Kaylee/Tony makes so much sense (even though it totally shouldn't), and then you had to go and make this story COMPLETELY AMAZING, and augh I want more.
"Are you going to hug me? Please don't hug me."
♥
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five stones thing in malay : selambut (se as in the, lam as in hum, but as in boat). seremban uses five stones (se, for rem, imagine re rhyming with the and add m after that, ban as in bun).
skulking back to lurk in the shadows....
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Loved every line!! I'm so glad there's more!! =D
Hope you don't mind, but I must friend now!
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I don't mind at all! My journal is not much but linkspams and dull talk about my life, typically, but as long as you know what you're in for! I friended you back. :D