Property By Mona Rating: R, for violence and some gore. Spoilers: Nothing in particular.

A/N: 1) This was inspired by a visual of Zoe from The Message. I think you’ll figure out which one. . . 2) I also assumed that the Mudders in Jaynestown were pretty much the norm for slaves/indentured servants (the line seems blurry in the Firefly ‘verse) and considered a possible reason that Mal does not have Zoe come with them. . . 3) Zoe is the only crew member whose last name we never know and who never talks about her life before the war. . . 4) Raiden is the Japanese god of lightning. I know it’s not Chinese but I couldn’t resist the image and figured that many Asian cultures were assimilated into the Firefly world.

Feedback is my lifeblood!!!! (mona1347@livejournal.com)

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Their masters didn’t provide nearly enough food for their "indentured workers” and her momma was gettin’ too old to work so hard all day at the Lightning Plant and then try to find a way to make sure her children got enough. That’s why Zoe was out hunting in the brush for that night’s dinner under the jagged white electric light crisscrossing the sky when Alliance soldiers, fresh from a successful battle with the taste of blood still on their lips, swept into the backwater slave-town and blazed their way through the populace. Apparently someone got a report of Independent activity on Raiden. For the Alliance, it was enough to justify the bodies in the streets.

Zoe doesn’t remember much of what happened between then and when she rose up from Raiden for the first and last time, terrified of the deadly electricity slicing through the air around the ship. The Alliance didn’t much care what happened to a 19 year old slave-girl with a dirty face and calloused hands and no family left or even a last name. No one was looking for her. No one missed her or claimed her.

The owners wrote off the whole town as a loss and played nice with the Alliance. Anyone who survived got Off-World as soon as possible. So she left too, with nothing but her hunting knife and the clothes on her back. Picked up and brought onto a tiny and (now she’s seen enough to recognize) not hardly spaceworthy ship captained by one of the wealthier citizens of Raiden. The boat’s captain was a scumbag of the lowest order with a go-se little ship just barely capable of making it Off-World. In her grief and rage and pain she didn’t let herself think much about why he agreed to take her on but when he gave her a claustrophobic little bunk of her own when she had nothing to offer in exchange, she knew why she was there. And she waited.

She slit his throat late one night when he finally came into her bunk looking for his ‘payment.’ Zoe calmly let him slither up on top of her without a fight and let him struggle to get his ragged pants open without letting her up. She slowly reached down with her right hand for the fishing knife she had stored under the bunk. With feigned passion, she grabbed at the back of his head, tangling her left hand in his greasy hair and jerked his head back. Lifted his eyes to lock on hers and sliced her blade along the pulse she saw jump in his neck. Just like slaughtering a pig, she thought in a strange, detached way.

Blood is hot.

She didn’t think his blood would be so hot on her face and neck and chest and arms. She didn’t know it would pulse out on to her skin in jets while she struggled, panicked, to throw the captain’s body off onto the floor. But she knew it had been a good idea to keep her knife under her bunk. Zoe’s survival instincts were honed from years of being strong and beautiful and someone else’s possession.

He was the first person she ever killed. He was surely not the last. She didn’t ever regret it. She would never be anyone’s property ever again.

The remaining hours between then and their landing on the next world remain crystal clear in Zoe’s mind even after the war and all she’d seen on Serenity. More water from the tiny sink in one of the common privies than was prudent in space was needed to wash the red out of her skin and hair. Panicked scrubbing with a few filthy slivers of soap and even more panicked stillness listening at the door for other passengers. A stolen shirt and pants. Another six hours of trembling wakefulness in the cargo hold amongst the dozens of others huddled and waiting, one indistinguishable from the next, during the last ship-day before they docked. She was on a solid earth again before the rest of the makeshift crew would’ve found their captain’s body. She’s not sure anyone even cared to. Being the Captain doesn’t automatically mean your crew cares if you live or die.

The Independents didn’t care either about what you used to be or how many names you had.

She joined up as soon as she could find a recruitment station in order to get herself killed efficiently and viciously and painfully end as many Alliance lives as possible before that. Rage can fuel a body for a remarkably long time. She rose up again into the Black for only the second time in her life with her new platoon 24 hours after she touched down. Mal was her Sergeant.

Zoe knew he would never tell anyone on Serenity why he wouldn’t work for slavers.