(no subject)

[daylightsparks.livejournal.com]

Title: Bee to Honey
Fandom: Firefly
Rating: PG
Word Count: 371
Character: Saffron
Author’s Note: My very first Firefly fic, written for the challenge at 6impearfics. The prompt was Sundew. Partly inspired by Memoirs of a Geisha, except for the ending.
Summary: A little backstory for everyone's favorite con artist.



The purpose of a flower is to entice.

The bright petals and sweet scent did not evolve to please humans, but rather for the plant’s own advantage. Insects are the key to its survival, spreading its genetic material from flower to flower, and so the plant does its best to draw them in, to intoxicate them, to seduce them. Drunk with nectar, laden with pollen, the insects move on to the next flower, and so the species thrives.

A plain girl from a backwater world, she was a closed bud until the Companions taught her to bloom.

She learned all the skills of seduction: not just clothing and jewelry and cosmetics, but the subtleties of body language, the pitch and tone of one’s voice, how to play on emotions like a musical instrument. A graduate of a Companion Training House can make someone fall in love with her using only a flick of her eyes, a turn of phrase, or a precisely-chosen scent. Her art appeals to all the senses, but most of all it appeals to the mind and to the heart.

They taught her that she was not to use that art for her own advantage, but rather for the greater good. To give comfort and pleasure and healing is a high calling, and requires one to let go of selfishness and materialism. It’s not about money, they said, and it’s not about sex. It’s about love.

“Screw that,” she said.

It was surprisingly easy to break into the house priestess’s private quarters - there wasn’t even an alarm system. Probably the students had had that goody-goody crap drilled into them for so long that nobody dreamed they’d actually steal anything. All it took was feigning illness to get out of class and some judicious use of a hairpin, and soon she was wrist-deep in the old bat’s antique jewelry. It would go for a mint on the Core planets.

When she walked in the door of the training house, her name wasn’t Saffron, or Bridget, or Yolanda. It was something else, but by the time she walked out that same door with pockets stuffed full of emeralds and pearls, she had already forgotten what it was.

Comments

[budclare.livejournal.com]

Very nice. :)

[daylightsparks.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[ncb1.livejournal.com]

I really liked that.

[daylightsparks.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)