An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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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'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."

[hi_there_aliens]

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.

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"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."

[hi_there_aliens]

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?"

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"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.

[hi_there_aliens]

"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?

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"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."