Title: Most Days

Summary: Most days she doesn’t remember and has no need to forgive.

Prompt: What did they do you and could you forgive them?

Rating: PG-13

A/N: There is no series basis for this. There is no canon mention of this. There is just me wondering why Zoe never talked about her parents and theorizing that even in this “advanced” age there has to be some of racism that still exists.

 

 

 

 

Most days it doesn’t bother her, what her parents did, the way they cut her out of their life so completely. Today isn’t one of those days. She’s sitting on the bridge looking out at the way the rain sluices down the view port glass. She and Wash are fighting and it’s an old fight. She wants kids, he doesn’t. She knows it has more to do with the life they lead then anything else. She always thinks about her parents when they fight about this because she knows that one day they won’t be fighting about this. One day they’ll be parents and their children will know only the Washburne set of grandparents.

 

 

She reaches out, racing a raindrop down the glass with her fingertip and leans her forehead against the coolness. Anger from years past boils up like bile in her throat and she chokes it down. It is as hot and bitter as it was two years ago. Her parents aren’t dead, at least not in the normal sense of the word. They might as well be as far as she is concerned.

 

They disowned her and insulted Wash. They could accept that their alliance raised, talented, beautiful daughter wanted to fight for the Browncoats. They could accept that she would choose a life on a ship, taking orders from a no account Hundan like Malcolm Reynolds but they couldn’t accept that their only daughter was going to marry a white boy.  It was supposed to be good news, a happy homecoming. Instead, it had turned into a fight that had left Zoë, strong warrior woman that she was, in tears.

 

Wash had handled it with his usual aplomb, getting angry that they’d upset Zoë, but shrugging off the slight against himself.

 

“Bao Bei, it doesn’t matter. I got you. That makes up for angry parents and pretty much everything else the ‘verse can throw at me.” He grinned at her, tweaked one of her curls and kissed her softly, somehow making all that anger slip away for a little while.

 

Most days it doesn’t matter anymore. Most days she thinks she’s forgotten if not forgive. But when they fight about the children she knows they’ll one day have, she remembers the cold tone of her parent’s voices, the sting of her mother’s hand against her cheek when Zoë called her a racist si san ba.

 

She knows that ultimately her parents are the ones missing out on knowing Wash, on knowing the beautiful baby with her hair and his eyes that they’ll one day have but that doesn’t bleed away the anger or mend the scars. She’ll never forget and she’s not sure she can ever forgive.

 

 

Translations

 

Hundan=bastard

Si san ba=bitch