Zola Lamenski's mother was a drunk. Such a drunk that every morning when Zola woke up, she would never really know wether her mother would still actually be breathing or not.
Zola had been given her name by her father, William Lamenski. Zola meaning 'calm' in Xhosa. Her father had only given her that name for one reason, he was doing everything he could to prevent her from turning out like her mother. He was a very spiritual man in secret, and he really believed that her name was her foundation.
However, he soon forgot all about his daughter and his son, and became the first person to leave thanks to Zola's mother.
After William had left the family, Dorothy decided to change her surname. Fair, Zola had thought; that was until she realised she wasn't actually changing it to anything. She was now just Dorothy and would get extremely angry whenever Zola or Joe would refer to themselves as a Lemenski.
Despite the anger that Zola felt towards her father at the time for leaving them, she still loved him and wanted to keep her surname, so she did (in private.)
Zola had always loved her mother, but over the years, the clear lack of care Zola's mother Dorothy had for her began to creep through. It was real painful for Zola. She did just about everything for her mother, to get swore at and beat every night in return.
In result of this, Zola's older brother Joe then left home when she was only 10. She had always loved her brother, every single night when things got bad with their mother, Joe was always right by her side, protecting her and taking as many blows as he could instead of Zola taking them. As Joe was 5 years older than her, he always believed that it was his job to do anything he could to protect his little sister.
However, it soon got too much for Joe to, so he left.
Like any normal person dealing with this type of grief, she wanted to stay in bed for a few days, console in the people she loved, but she couldn't. She had to earn the money and she now barely had anyone she felt she could turn too, let alone the time to do so.
She had spent her life after her brother leaving up to her fourteenth birthday caring for her mother, keeping on top of the house, earning a good enough wage to feed her mother but barely herself. This meant dropping out of school for a couple of years to work and treat her mother, just so her and her mother could survive.
However, just after Zola had turned 14, when all hope felt lost, a man returned into her life and saved her.
Tommy Shelby.
Thomas had always had a soft spot for Zola and Joe. He had known them as children before he left for the war, but it was afterwards that he really began to bond again with them.
Despite his hectic lifestyle, and living with trauma himself, courtesy of the war, he couldn't deny the love and sympathy he felt for Zola, so he and Pol made the decision to take her in.
John, Arthur and all of the women warmed up to the girl almost instantly.
However, there was one Shelby that she already knew especially well.
Finn Shelby.
On the particularly bad nights after Joe had left, Finn would be there at her doorstep, helping her climb out of the top window of the house and onto the ground, attempting to keep her as injury-free as possible, which was pretty difficult when your sliding down a pipe against a two story house.
Since then the pair had been well and truly inseparable.
It started from running through the dirty streets of small heath together, causing trouble, nicking pastries, catching and chasing each other as they laughed their heads off.
However as the pair got older, their actions grew with their age. They began sneaking out at night now, stealing the Shelby families spirits and taking them to a back alley and getting drunk into the dawn.
Their love for each other was of course mutually beneficial. They were each other's strongest friendship, they never cared about stereotypes, or what others thought.
But were they both too young to realise that their love maybe had more depth than they thought, and that they both completely saved eachother?
