trans_9 | An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

She thought her life would be different by now, but she's a prisoner again. Voluntary, she guesses, which makes it a little bit different than the first time. At least she can blink on her own this time. Not that she's using her body to do much good.

Ironically, she almost always looked better when she was a more total prisoner. Without her makeup and hair clips and changes of clothes to arrange herself into some approximation of health, without even a mirror to confirm her suspicions, she looks a wreck. Dark circles line her reddened eyes; her hair is unbrushed and falls in tangled clumps over her face; chapped, bloodied lips and fingernails bitten down to the flesh speak to her uneasy transition back into captivity.

Eva's given up all attempts to look 'okay'. She ripped a man's face open with her bare fingers. She's been a long road away from 'okay' for a while now, but she spent too long mistaking her anger and stubbornness for strength and resilience to recognize it. She's wised up now.

She really wants a drink right now. Instead she has some books - selected poems by Pablo Neruda and an anthology of poetry by women poets in the Andes - and a pillow and blanket. She's curled up on the cot with the former book in her hand, but drifting in and out of sleep. Her breath comes lazy and heavy as she alternately reads, dreams, and watches the door to the brig with heavy-lidded eyes, looking for nothing.

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"I don't need you to advocate to him for me," she says, suddenly sharp. Her voice is keen and quick, like if she doesn't take responsibility for herself now she never will. Like a decision she only has a second to commit to before she changes her mind. "I got myself into this situation, in all meanings of that phrase. My report to the Captain. My bad decisions. My temper, my hands. Me."

And Christ, that hurts her to say. To have had all these decision, all these things she could have and should have done differently, and to have no one to blame them for but herself. To not be the one having things done to her, but doing them. The attacker instead of the victim, the villain instead of the sainted damsel in distress.

It would be so much easier if she could blame someone else. At this moment, she's not sure she'd say no to having a Yeerk to blame. She almost wants to tell Daniel that this is what they made her, but that, too, is the coward's way out. Her destiny wasn't set in stone when she was captured, but she's the architect behind the life she's designed in the wake.

She stares for a good long moment before shrinking back again. She's ashamed of herself, hollow and sick inside, and Daniel's gaze is too much a task to meet for too long. It's like staring into the sun.

"I don't know what to tell you, Daniel. I don't...I don't entirely know. I know I was hoping...and then I didn't. And then I went ahead and did it anyway, so what the hell. I don't have an answer for you." She doesn't know how to explain how hungry she'd been for that sort of bloodshed, how much it scared her, how she had balanced that rage and vindictiveness with that utter horror at herself.

But the cultist's life, his body, had been forfeit to her the instant he attacked innocents, and there was that starving part of her that saw nothing but the most glorious and tempting of punching bags. She turned the cultist into some vessel to pour all that burning hate and pain into, thinking in some way it would bring her release, and when it brought only more hate and pain, she didn't know what to do. Didn't know what to make of it.

For one horrifying moment, she'd been the only thing in the room that mattered. Not the cultist, not Daniel staring in shock. After years of being an afterthought, after the years of recovery training herself not to be a footnote in her own life, she'd made something about her. And it still hadn't felt good.

"I didn't plan. But I looked for an opening," she confesses.

Edited 2011-09-06 02:49 (UTC)

Daniel absorbed everything she said quietly, watching her eyes even when she looked away. 'This situation'. Funny how you could compress everything into two words, as if she'd gotten a parking ticket. Just another miracle of the English language, understatement, and Eva trying to distance herself from her own actions. Did she even regret hurting that man now? Or did she regret that she'd given in, or that now she had to answer to her son?

Didn't plan to, but she'd sure taken the opportunity when it came. So she'd essentially used him in the process, but Daniel kept the hurt and betrayal to himself and buried it under everything else. This wasn't about him.

Now that they didn't have a battle going on around them, Daniel had plenty of time to think back on what happened. He'd been going over it ever since Eva left that closet and he'd put something over the dead body and sat waiting with it. Everything Eva had said to the man, the way she'd practically paced behind him like a trapped animal while Daniel tried to talk to the man. It wasn't like you could question someone and get anything that quickly, and it was like Eva was counting on going down like that. She hadn't give him any time.

"Eva," he said. "You shot the man in cold blood where it would hurt the most, even before he got to you. Between the two of us, we had him pinned." You would have strangled him before that too, he thought. He couldn't believe the man's ranting had gotten to her. It wasn't just a spur of the moment act. Something had been going on long before he'd opened his mouth.

Daniel didn't understand it. He didn't even like shooting in self-defense, but there was a difference between self-defense, a shot or two and the enemy was dead, as quickly and mercifully as possible, and intentionally hurting someone, drawing out another living being's misery. It hadn't even been an interrogation then. It was something else. "Why did you do it?"

"I shot him because I needed to incapacitate him. I didn't shoot him in the wrist and knee to cause pain, I shot him there because he was a threat until those points were neutralized. We could have pinned him, but he very easily could have been armed and you only gave him a superficial injury. All he'd need to detonate a bomb on himself would be one hand for one second. I wasn't going to take risks with your safety or the civilians'."

And in that, she feels totally justified. It's what came after that was clearly over the line.

She doesn't have an answer for that. Not one she can explain to Daniel, anyway. Not one that would justify what she did, using Daniel to get to her jollies off inflicting pain, dragging him into it.

Maybe she should tell him about dragging herself across the pier back at the Yeerk pool, risking her own son's life to squish the slug that had stolen her. Or about breaking Iniss' nose with a book and how satisfying it was to lord power over one of them, for once. Or about securing dynamite so her son and his friends could kill thousands of people in the downtown. What does Daniel really know about war, anyway?

"I couldn't help myself," she murmurs, then more fiercely, "no. I didn't want to help myself. That brainwashed degenerate and his kind blew up families and children to make a point to us, so no, I didn't want to help myself. I wanted him to hurt."

It made her mad when he didn't hurt.

"I looked at him and I didn't see him, Daniel, I saw, I saw a voluntary host, I saw someone who'd give their body and soul and loved ones and the safety of strangers in exchange for some temporary peace of mind, and I just didn't care if I hurt him."

She swallows hard. "And I didn't care if I hurt you, either. And...that was vile of me. All of it. Vile of whatever's left of me."

If you looked at it in cold, hard, tactical terms, sure, it made sense to systemically take limbs out, like pulling wings off an insect, but Daniel wasn't ready to accept it. He couldn't believe he was listening her rationalize why violence first was the perfect answer. If only he could believe her completely when she said everyone else's safety was important, but he remembered how she was earlier, more concerned with nearly suffocating the man and then the lack of recording than everything else.

"He was down already!" Daniel's voice raised before he controlled it. "It wouldn't have taken much to tie him or knock him out. We both know that. When I got there, you weren't interested in questioning him, were you? That was only because I told you we needed him alive."

These men and women had killed innocents. He wasn't arguing it and he'd never condone it. But that didn't mean Stacy's crew turned into them just to fight these guys. Daniel couldn't pretend that they were automatons. It was like slaughtering and torturing humans that actually worshiped the Goa'uld. They were just as much slaves as the Jaffa, only they didn't realize it or they gloried in it. In some cultures, Daniel was sure they'd fight to the death for their gods. Willing to go any extreme for their faith. If Eva had her way, he supposed she'd lump them all in a group and what was it he heard before, 'kill them all, let God sort them out'? Actually it was more likely originally, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, but some things never went out of humanity's unconscious-

Daniel pushed himself away from the bars. He wanted to understand, at least try to make some sense of how pointless this was, but was finding this was the one language he couldn't piece together.

"You're troubled," he agreed. He didn't say 'vile'. Not vile, but Daniel didn't know what to think of her anymore."You need help. Not a jail cell."

Edited 2011-09-06 06:13 (UTC)

Eva looks like he reached through the bars and slapped her with those words. For a moment, her eyes narrow as if she's been insulted, but really, who is she to argue? Of course she's troubled. If her current appearance didn't speak to that, the fact that she willingly, enthusiastically mutilated another living person with her bare hands should.

"I don't need help," she snarls, backing up to the corner of her cot. "I need to stay away from those sorts of situations, but I'm not going to be helped by some overqualified dream analyzer sitting me down in a corner and telling me what to think. What I can think is the only thing I have left."

And even that's warped. They left her with nothing. They stole her face, her life, her place, her family, and at the end of the day what she has left is a broken family, a body that feels like someone else's discarded clothing, and a mind that doesn't work right anymore.

And Daniel, so like Peter, is there to tell her she needs help like this untouchable angel of reason from on high. She wants none of it. She wants none of their pity. They'll shuffle her off in a corner because she's an unpleasant reality, leave her to do all the work on some shrink's couch, ignore the problem, ignore it even more than she ignores it.

Deep down, she knows she's being paranoid and irrational. She just doesn't care. The implication she needs help makes her want to reach through the bars and slap Daniel, no matter how much she knows it's the truth.

Frustrated, Daniel huffed out a silent snort of air through his nose. Of course it was that simple. Why didn't anyone ever think of that in the entire human history? He pressed closer to the bars again, unwilling to let her try to fade into her corner of the cell. He wasn't ready to call it quits and give up on her. He thought he'd seen some good in her, and once he was convinced it was there, Daniel had a hard time letting go.

"Okay. What are your options?" Daniel pushed. He was never very good at keep out signs. "Stay in a jail cell for the rest of your life? Bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away? What happens if there's another combat situation, and the fight gets brought here?"

He doesn't need to tell her that anything else could happen. It was a big ship after all and a big universe- a big multi-verse, and the only thing you could predict was the fact that you couldn't predict anything. Did she prefer to martyr herself to the brig? Maybe she did. Maybe she was trying to punish herself, but apparently she'd forgotten about her son.

Edited 2011-09-06 07:18 (UTC)

She hasn't forgotten Marco at all. It's fortunate Daniel doesn't mention that, because if she can't stand the affront to her sanity, mentioning Marco would send her off the handle.

And as much as she knows her son will be scared and ashamed of what she did, she also knows he'll know the strength it took to take responsibility and surrender herself to captivity. And he'll know that she's a little better than she was five years ago, when she was first freed, when even being caught in traffic felt like such a trap she'd lash out and break windows. Right now, this is the last good example she feels she can set.

"This is a temporary stay in the brig. Two weeks, maximum, depending on how we figure time works here." She bites her lip until blood pools at her teeth. "And I don't know what happens after that."

She can plan to take herself out of combat situations, but despite her trigger temper she knows she's generally more of an asset than a liability. Staying away would be hard for her. She can give herself a goal, like coordinating and protecting younger members. Maybe she'll do that.

But she doesn't appreciate Daniel's attempts to rehabilitate her, as if she's a project to be worked on. A delicate excavation of damaged debris to find that good that must lurk beneath the surface. She knows she's good. She also knows, now in crystal clarity, that she's twisted and violent and unwell. It occurs to her that maybe Daniel needs to hold onto her good more for his sake than just for hers. Maybe he needs to convince himself his first impressions of her weren't all wrong, or that if she, the brutal basketcase shell of a host can be recovered, his wife can. Or maybe none of that matters.

Two weeks was a long time to stay in one room. Not a life sentence by any means, but still, long enough to be uncomfortable. It wasn't that long to deal with what happened. If Eva was actually going to confront it and not avoid it instead, which generally sounded like the plan she was going for. Daniel never understood why that made a good plan. Avoiding the problem didn't mean it was gone or that it was going to go away. There was a difference between "Oops, I picked at my dry lips" and "Oops, I deliberately tortured someone for no reason".

Daniel winced as she bit her lip. Even from here, he could see blood staining her teeth.

"Stop." Daniel added belatedly, changing it from a demand: "Please."

The last time he'd told her that, and he'd been more polite about it then, she'd whirled at him, but things were different from that shore leave. They weren't exactly strangers anymore. Daniel was past the point where he was going to shut up if she told him to anyway.

Didn't know what happens next or didn't want to think that far ahead? They couldn't possibly account for every single situation that might come up. Eva had no problems turning someone into a living punching bag, and Daniel was almost certain this wasn't going to be the last of it if they just left it. He had to get her to understand it. "Ignoring this isn't going to make this all go away. You know that, right?"

Edited 2011-09-06 08:55 (UTC)

Avoidance - it's a trait she's passed down to her child. And while it's never made the problem go away, sometimes it's made it tolerable. Facing herself is hard, and while Eva's never been a coward there are also plenty of things she keeps to the periphery of her vision, with the promise to herself that she'll deal with it later, or if it ever gets worse.

For once, she does exactly what Daniel tells her, with no argument or reluctance. She dabs the blood off her chin with the corner of her blanket.

"What would you have me do? I'm already seeing Dr. Samson on a regular basis - do you think if I bump it to twice a week that's actually going to change anything? Do you think I would stay this way if I knew some way out of it? I have a child to take care of, I have a husband who'll come back any moment, I have duties on this ship. I have plenty of reason to need to have my head on right, so it's not for lack of effort that I'm like this!"

This was dangerous. While Daniel didn't mind listening and giving personal advice, as long as people took it with a grain of salt (Daniel didn't think he was exactly a shining example of successful relationships. Or sanity, if you got General Hammond and Jack on a bad day), Eva wasn't exactly the average person. She was coming close to how she was in the library, where she'd crumbled and tried to make him into a surrogate controller. Close, but not quite. Not yet at least.

"I'm not saying it's lack of effort," Daniel corrected. "I'm saying you're trying to avoid the issue. It's like treating all the symptoms but not going after the problem," He winced, realizing it wasn't the greatest analogy because he wasn't that kind of doctor. "What I'm trying to say is that the problem's still there. It's going to be there when you get out of this cell. Maybe it's time for a new approach or something."

Eva acted like quantity, not quality, was enough to do the trick. Like she was filling a quota. Daniel didn't know how Dr. Samson did things, but if things weren't working, why keep hammering at it the same way? Maybe it was time for a new approach, a new angle. The problem was Daniel didn't know what that angle was, and he certainly wasn't qualified to have control of someone's mental health.

"I'm well aware of the problem, Dr. Jackson. I was stolen, raped and enslaved for seven years. I'm pretty sure that's what's causing all the symptoms." She's curt. She wraps her arms around herself, as if cradling that tentative little body as close as she can to herself. "And it's going to remain the problem no matter what I do, whether I'm in this cell or not."

She doesn't think Daniel knows. Why would he? He's an archaeologist. It's so easy to stand at the outside and say that there's a problem, but to actually fix it? It's like a Gordian knot you can't take a knife to.

So why would she look to him now to tell her what to do, except that she doesn't know what to tell herself? The last time she took charge of a situation, she made bad calls, bloody calls, and now she's here. That was part of why she was so easily incensed by the cultist. She'd wanted to assert that she was in total control of the situation and he kept denying her that one thing, and she lost control of it all.

"You don't know what to do with me, Daniel. No one does. No one ever did back home, either. We shuffled the hosts off into asylums and therapy groups and special schools for the children and cut their funding as soon as we thought they'd be fine. Set time tables for them to get jobs and have psychological evaluations. But never once did anyone know what to do with us."

Daniel fell silent. It didn't take much for Eva to neatly put everything on the line, and he knew it wasn't as easy as telling yourself to confront that source. The attack on the cultist was a violent, explosive symptom (or maybe an outbreak, that sounded more appropriate) of another problem, which was only a symptom of the heart of the matter. Something Daniel couldn't even begin to guess how it felt like.

He watched her wordlessly. His fingers restlessly drummed out a two-beat rhythm in fours against the bar as his brain raced, trying to see some way to help. She was right. He didn't know what to do with her. Daniel wasn't sure what to do with most of the people he worked with, and that was on a good day.

"No, I don't," Daniel had to admit. He was more at home in his office or some ruin or tomb, dirty, arms deep in bones, artifacts, tagging and cataloging, surrounding himself with dead civilizations or trying to form relations with newly discovered ones.

He didn't know if he could call her a friend anymore. Not that friendships came easy to him in the first place. Acquaintances, those were a piece of cake. People you might say "hi" to, discuss a new theory about Tlaxcallan warfare or this Badari figurine that just got unearthed. People you didn't talk to outside of the hallway or work. Friends were harder. Daniel was never much of a social butterfly.

Whatever Eva was, or had been, to him, Daniel didn't know if he'd ever fully feel at ease around her again. Even if she was troubled, she still tortured someone and enjoyed it, even used him to get to the guy. But she did need help. Daniel didn't need to be friends with someone to want to help. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up on you."

Even if Eva sounded like she didn't see the point after the cell.

Edited 2011-09-07 06:57 (UTC)

"Oh, good. If I have Saint Daniel on my side I'm sure I'll be in perfect shape in no time," she says, then looks deeply apologetic and mortified that she said it out loud. Sometimes she still forgets that other people can hear her. "Sorry. Being in a cage has made me edgy. I know you're trying to help."

She would have called him a friend. She liked to think that she was worthy of such friends, normal people from the real world, or at least, as normal as anyone who speaks at least ten dead languages is. Like she didn't have to surround herself with warriors and survivors and the deeply-damaged to find an easy balance.

But if anything, now she can only see the gulf between her and Daniel. Between his idealism and belief in human good, and her history of violence so extensive that torture and imprisonment feel more normal to her than the alternative. And she knows she can never get to the other side again.

He should have been her friend. She doesn't know what he is now. What she's made of their relationship.

"I'm sorry. For all of it." The library, the pancakes, the sound of cartilage collapsing under her fingers. "They attacked us in our home and I wanted to...I'm sorry."

Daniel's mouth pursed but he held his tongue. He didn't need to point out she was in this "cage" in the first place, because, one, she'd reported herself before he could, and two, she was in there because she'd done something so incredibly wrong and brutal that Daniel still had a hard time wrapping his head around it. He'd never have considered her capable of such violence if he hadn't seen it happen right in front of him.

He could accept the apology but he also didn't see what good it did. It didn't make things right between them. At the end of the day, Eva had flipped out and tortured a man, and the man was dead. There were underlying issues, things Daniel had seen or figured out since XaXing, but he'd honestly believed she started to move forward. Not that it would ever come to this.

Some part of Daniel wanted to try again, the part that took knocks and kept on going, and he was willing to give it a shot until she continued. At least she didn't finish her sentence. Daniel knew where it was going even if she stopped herself. She might be saying she was sorry, but she still tried to justify why it was perfectly okay to go after the man the way she did. Some part of her didn't think she was in the wrong.

There was only so far Daniel could get pushed and Eva quickly found it. Disappointed and frustrated, he only shook his head at the aborted excuse. He didn't take the peace offering. "I meant what I said. Two weeks. Think about it?"

"I don't know what you want me to consider." If it's that she needs help, she doesn't know what sort of help Daniel thinks would do any good, and she trusts he's smart enough to know that just going through the motions will do nothing but humiliate and demoralize her. "If you can give me an answer for that, then you have my word."

Not that her word must be much good to him now, she realizes. She may not have lied to him but she certainly misled him when getting the cultist alone. It's that misdirection she regrets more than the act of violence. Using people to accomplish her goals. She should be better than that. That's Yeerk behavior.

She realizes something.

"You think I'm here to martyr myself, don't you?" There's something icy and hurt in her voice. If being called crazy (in lighter terms) made her feel slapped than this is something else entirely, some awful miscalculation of her character that suddenly makes her feel so much more separated from Daniel than by just cell bars or experience.

She's here because there's no way to make amends with a dead man. She's here because she knew it was inevitable and wanted to go in on her own terms - even if that only meant ending up in a cell faster. And she's here because she knows that owning your actions is not only the example you set for your child, but the single greatest obstacle to recovery for hosts. But to punish herself and put her suffering on display, like it's a badge of honor to be admired by the public?

No. Never.

"You're making it sound like you don't think there's any options after time's up here, so 'why bother?'. Just sessions with Doctor Samson, and you don't seem to think they're doing anything." Daniel tried to clarify. "I'm asking to reconsider that line of thinking."

Removing his glasses for a moment, Daniel rubbed at his eyes. He wished he had some answers for her. He really did. But he didn't even begin to know how to approach the urge to lash out or inflict pain on someone like she did, not when the concept was so foreign to him that he had a hard time imagining it from anyone else. Naive, maybe. Probably. It wasn't like the universe was always a friendly place. The Goa'uld and some Jaffa got their kicks out of doing what Eva did. So did some humans back on Earth.

More than ever, Daniel wished Jack was here. Not that he thought Jack would exactly open up per say, but he'd been in a very dark place before, back when he'd been ready to take his one way ticket to Abydos with a nuclear bomb under an arm. That and he had those years in Black Ops that he refused to talk about. He must have seen so many things, so many people. Jack would know what to say. The Colonel might not be entirely sensitive or comfortable spilling his guts, but the man had a talent for not letting anyone have the space or peace and quiet to drag themselves down.

Daniel put his glasses back on. He blinked at her, baffled. "No. That's not what I'm thinking at all." What was the point? It wasn't like you wanted to broadcast you tortured someone, especially if you had a son. Daniel couldn't imagine her spilling it all over the omnicomms, and Daniel certainly hadn't. Who else knew she was in here?

Edited 2011-09-09 10:05 (UTC)

"If you have an option you can think of, I'd love to hear it. I mean that honestly. It's not as if I haven't tried to be normal and alright and not crazy, Daniel, so give me a sensible alternative and I'll try it."

She's looking at him the same way she did that day in the library. She's looking for him to direct her, make a decision for her, because the decisions she's made can't possibly hold up to scrutiny. How is she supposed to make choices in her life when the past has proven that they're the wrong ones? They got her infested and reinfested, and it was bad enough that that was happening to her, but her choices have inflicted pain on others too.

And it occurs to her that Daniel was much different than her even before Stacy, even before the war. There's something about him that's inherently sweet-natured, while she knows that somehow, there's something in her that has always been sadistic. Something that was spiteful, that liked power even in small scenarios. The ability to make a threat and back it up. She was like that even as a child. Maybe it's been in her all along.

Then again, she can't see herself ripping someone's face off fifteen years ago. But she can't really see herself that far back anyway. Her life as it is now started twelve years ago, and everything before that is a dim tale with other people who share her same name.

"Good. Because I'm not. I've spent the last five years of my life avoiding that."

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An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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