Author: ChickWithMonkey
Website: Next Door
Disclaimer: Zoe and Aeryn belong to other people. No money is being made out of this story.
Rating: PG, 'cause I'm boring, boring, boring
Recipient: Sorlk Lewis
Pairing: Zoe/Aeryn
Notes: Five Things format, 'cause this way I only have to have 200 words five times. I'm lazy like that. The assignment was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Feel free to play Spot the Universe: two are given, two are a bit harder, and one is totally obscure.
1. Runaway
Zoe grew up in a creche with eleven other dark-skinned, curly-haired girls. At the age of four, the girls were taken from their dormitory and put into a school with a few hundred other children of all colors and sizes. It was not until their third year of school that the rate of attrition in the school was such that it could no longer be easily explained by their teachers. Zoe kept her head down and her test scores up, not tempted to attract attention with either too outstanding or too poor a performance. She made few friends and did her best to ignore the infrequent but harshly punished escape attempts by her peers, and carefully felt no curiosity about her future.
Then the apocalypse came, the fences went down, and Zoe decided that discretion was a virtue, and threw in her lot with the remaining escapees. Seventy children made a run for it that night, including fifteen of Zoe's sisters. When dawn came, there were barely a dozen left, and Zoe the only of her family. Too numb and grim to cry, she stopped just short of swearing vengeance on their murderers, and set off instead to find a life for herself, far away from the institute.
She found it in the form of waitress by day and crime-fighter by night, having nearly been mugged too many times in the rubble-filled streets of old Los Angeles for her conscience to let her stand back and watch while others were attacked. She knew that her strength, stamina, and reflexes were higher than anyone could explain for a girl her size and apparent shape, but she had also been extensively trained and could fight as many as a dozen street toughs at once. She made friends and found an apartment, moving in with a girl whose sister Zoe had saved from a spank-addict looking for his next high. Zoe and Aeryn's two-bedroom apartment soon had a guest room, and Aeryn bought a bigger mattress and Zoe took the morning shift at the diner so she could be home when Aeryn got off work.
It was ten years before Zoe's childhood came to find her, or more accurately her creche-sister Max. Max and Zoe spent hours exchanging stories and memories, and tears for those they had lost. Smiling slightly, Aeryn reached out a long-fingered hand to grip the back of Zoe's neck, rubbing her thumb across the series of short, parallel lines tattooed on the dark skin. She knew Zoe would do whatever Max asked of her, even if it meant rejoining the battle she'd left years before.
2. Mercenary
Zoe grew up in a creche with eleven other dark-skinned, curly-haired girls. They were well looked-after and given only the best food and clothing, and let out to play every day, and every night their creche-mother sat a girl on her lap and told them all the most wonderful fairy tale about twelve princesses whose mum and da had left them to battle evil, but would come to get them and take them away home any day now. And the best part about the fairy tale was that it was true, the girls were princesses and their mother and father, the King and Queen, were going to come for them as soon as they could, and Zoe and her sisters spent much time every day talking about their parents, their handsome father and brave mother, and how life would just be wonderful when they were home together again.
But as the girls grew older, their creche-mother grew careless, or tired, and said more than perhaps she should have. Not all of the sisters noticed, but Zoe and a few others, like her sister Cleo, had done more reading at the comconsole than playing outside, and they knew the words their caretaker used, and they realized that there was no king, no queen, no kingdom. Zoe was a clone, a body for transplant, and as soon as someone had need of her, her caretakers would scoop her brain out of her body and put another brain inside of it, and then someone else would be walking around in her body, using it as though it were theirs, and Zoe would be dead.
Zoe and Cleo knew better than to try and convince their sisters of their fate. The other girls trusted wholeheartedly the story of their parents and would never believe otherwise. Not knowing how soon they would be harvested, or how many of them would be needed and now many disposed of as unnecessary spare parts, the two agreed they would have to chance an escape. They might be too valuable to damage, after all; no one would buy a clone with plasma burns or needler scars. After a few more weeks of intensive research, and a lot of extrapolation from carefully worded articles on the general comconsoles the girls were allowed to access, Zoe and Cleo formed a tentative escape plan and put it into motion.
Through an intricate combination of lies, bribery, assault, thievery, and one extremely fortunate case of food poisoning, the sisters found themselves on a jumpship heading away from the planet that had held them captive. They perused the ship's library avidly, learning all they could from the newsfeeds and encyclopedia programs. They heard nothing at all of two escaped clones, though they realized any news would be suppressed so that no one would hear of House Bharaputra's momentary weakness. They had landed on Escobar, cautiously hopeful, when Zoe literally ran into a uniformed soldier who seemed to be unarmed but was without a doubt present for the sole purpose of confronting the sisters.
Far from wrestling them to the ground or pulling a concealed stunner out of an ankle holster, the woman merely grinned. "Captain Aeryn Sun, Dendarii Free Mercenaries," the woman introduced herself, her gray and white uniform like an angel's robe to the lost and tired girls. "My boss has seen your work, and he'd like to offer you a job."
3. Tech
Zoe grew up in a creche with eleven other dark-skinned, curly-haired girls. She was the fifth oldest, with new sisters being decanted every two months, and the older girls were expected to help the younger. They learned quickly, emerging with the bodies of adolescent humans, but newborns naturally lacked the life experience they would need in the outside world. When the youngest girl had been introduced to the dormitory and was blinking her large eyes wonderingly, the eldest was taken to her assigned position, based on the aptitude tests they were given at regular intervals. Zoe held her breath and waited for her turn.
Three weeks later, Zoe was taken to the USS Valiant, a deep-space battle cruiser with a full complement of military personnel and a tech-to-pilot ratio of 3 to 1. She was given a bunk in a tiny room with only four other inhabitants, which she thought unbearably lonely. She was sat in front of a console showing a series of ship schematics and told to memorize all she could in the next twelve hours. She was finished in six.
Zoe's bunkmates were a rowdy bunch, and she quickly discovered that she'd been placed there because no one would voluntarily live with them. They didn't bother to ask why she'd been transferred, nor why she was a tech with no training or military service, or to engage her in conversation beyond the occasional, "You going to eat that?" Zoe missed her sisters more each day, and buried herself in her work until she fell into bed exhausted each night. After almost a year of this empty existence, someone noticed Zoe's dedication and flawless work, and promoted her to a higher level of tech, giving her a new bunk with roommates who were as incurious as the first, but at least not belligerent.
The only person in the new room who bothered to ask her name was a pale, strong-featured girl with heavy dark hair who had a broad accent and a wide grin. She introduced herself as Aeryn, and bragged about her piloting skills, saying that she'd been bumped back to tech because of too many infractions but was working on getting her stripes back. She'd been flying since before she could walk, she claimed, and the military was in her blood and bones. Aeryn's smile was infectious, Zoe decided. She had learned little from her new life, but it seemed that clones were somewhat degraded by a certain percentage of the population. She hoped Aeryn wouldn't learn that Zoe was a Tank, or that she wouldn't care if she did.
4. Companion
Zoe grew up in a creche with eleven other dark-skinned, curly-haired girls. Zoe was ten when she was selected as an Acolyte, which everyone said was the highest honor for a genetic orphan such as herself, having been one of many results of an experiment in one of the more reputable cloning labs in the Core. Zoe went to live on Aurora, not in the largest Temple, but not in the smallest either. Those who aspired to the largest temple were sometimes considered overly ambitious, as though they loved their riches more than they loved serving the Goddess those riches were meant to glorify. Zoe learned these things at the knee of the High Priestess, who soon took the beautiful Acolyte as a favored body servant and groomed her for a formal Petition as soon as she was of age.
After six years in the Temple, Zoe's devotion to her worship of the Goddess was equal only to her adoration of the High Priestess, and she performed her Petition and was accepted to the Academy with a grace that surprised no one but impressed them all. Her Apprenticeship was suitably full of high test scores and glowing performance reviews, but Zoe had none of the haughtiness that sometimes overtook outstanding Apprentices. She was known for her gentle smile and fierce concentration, each of which should have detracted from the other, but did not. After four years of the Academy and a short but brilliant Journeyman trial, Zoe was granted all rights and privileges of a full Companion. At this time, she would have had ahead of her a full, honorable, and glamorous career, if not for her first words after the ribbons were placed around her waist and her retinas scanned into the database.
She said, "I wish to serve women only."
It was of course any Companion's prerogative to choose her clients, and there were several who spent the early, busier parts of their careers with men and gradually selected more women as they neared retirement, but very few Companions declared a gender preference, and only a handful of them refused to serve men. Such a pronouncement by one who had yet to take a client was not only unprecedented but also unprofessional, and at that moment Zoe fell out of favor among the Priestesses. The life she might have had as High Priestess in a Temple of her own was in an instant gone, and Zoe knew it, and she didn't care.
Despite her declaration, Zoe did not lack clients, and she did indeed spend the early part of her career in a whirlwind of glamour and society. If the balls to which she was invited or the parties she attended were not quite the highest quality, she did not care, for her clients were powerful and graceful, and were delighted to have such a jewel on their arms. After only three years, she was offered, and accepted, a position as personal Companion with one of her biggest clients, Aeryn Sun, a wealthy arms dealer, and Zoe vanished into domestic obscurity. The Temple Priestesses and Guild Elders shook their heads over such a waste, and her old mentor the High Priestess smiled wistfully, but Zoe ignored it all.
5. Soldier
Zoe grew up in a creche with eleven other dark-skinned, curly-haired girls. By sixteen she was piloting full-sized Prowlers, and at eighteen she was inducted into Icarian Company, Pleisar Regiment. She was on the mission that included extracting a Pilot from a Leviathan, and she had a brief but emotionally uncomfortable affair with the tech in charge of installing the new Pilot. Zoe didn't comprehend all of what he said to her, but she knew that some of it was wrong, so she alerted the authorities. When the soldiers came to take him away, he was half-naked and shouting at her proudly, "I knew you were special, Zoe. You can be more."
She had the misfortune to be captured and imprisoned by a handful of fugitives on another Leviathan, and took great pleasure in beating up the first person she saw when she woke up. Events led to other events, as they often do, and she found herself exiled by her Captain to live with these creatures on this ship, no longer a Peacekeeper. She alternated between anger and despair, being attacked by aliens wishing to breed and her own people wishing to kill them all, and felt herself slip slowly away until life was endured rather than lived. Having been introduced to living for a few brief shining moments, this bare endurance was unbearable.
On a small planet on the farthest reaches of the Uncharted Territories, John returned to Moya with another passenger in tow, a solemn-faced woman who called herself human and mourned the loss of her ship and crew. Her husband was among those missing, she admitted, but she held little hope for their survival after their encounter with the quantum singularity that must have destroyed the ship. With no better way to search for them and no other allies in this part of the galaxy, Aeryn joined Moya's crew and Zoe found herself drawn to the quiet woman. They would look for John's wormhole, and Aeryn's Serenity, and D'Argo's son, and maps to Zhaan's and Rygel's planets, but for now, Zoe and Aeryn would look for peace in each other.