Title: from the place it occurred
Author: Shannon
Rating: PG
Warning/Spoilers: Pre-series.
Summary: Zoe learns to save her words at her papa's knee.
A/N: For the Awesome Ladies Ficathon '10. Title from lyrics by Darren Hanlon.
from the place it occurred
Zoe learns to save her words at her papa's knee.
While Zoe's mama counts the books, Zoe's papa plaits her hair, shakes his head, and tells her, "If you don't use them when you don't need them, you'll have them when you do."
Later, when he goes to check the engine, her mama beckons her over. "Your papa tells you the truth, little one," her mama says, as she guides Zoe through the balancing, showing where to squeeze some stock and where to find a credit, "but it's not the only way."
Zoe does believe her mama, but she is inclined to her father's path. So she calmly learns to choose her words, tasting each one in her mouth before she lets it free. She learns their power and their faults, the way to tell a story; the way to tell the truth.
But then three years later, the Alliance takes her from her parents, and she doesn't speak at all.
In training, her commanders yell. They spit, they curse, they trample on the soldiers with nary more than a word hacked with bile from their throats. (There are other ways, of course – Zoe's mama told the truth – but those other ways are not the Alliance way; well, that is what they say. And say, and say, and if you were to tell it different, they would say that was not the truth.)
But in the eve, they smile so soft and speak with sweetness, as though packs of syrup were trapped in their cheeks. The commanders tell them it was to show them how those out there, so far from the Core, would treat them and all others - though they would not just stop with words (as the Alliance always says they did).
Then the Alliance puts weapons in their hands, shows them how to use them, and points them where to go. The words don't drip with honey anymore.
She meets a skinny pale-faced boy in a bloody ditch. Zoe was to go behind enemy lines, and source some needed intel, but before she even leaves her side, they've crossed into hers.
Zoe glances at the jagged stitching that would spell his name, had she not already cut his coat. She holds her knife against his throat, but he does not stay quiet.
"Do you believe in this?" he asks her, "Do you believe what they're doing is right?"
I don't believe, she doesn't hiss. I think they're lies, she doesn't whisper.
"Come with me," Zoe says, then leads them out her way.