An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

[makeherblue]

First the library, now the brig.

Eva certainly knows how to get into trouble!

The Doctor pops in sooner rather than later. Given she's somehow tossed herself in jail, he thinks she probably has more pressing matters than her shoes. Make that shoe. He hasn't quite found her other one and now probably isn't the time to say that the man-eating library is still on the loose somewhere in the TARDIS and he hasn't tracked it down yet. The only thing he's certain is it's in hiding, so it's safe(ish) in the TARDIs. Probably not safe enough to go hunting for Eva's other shoe, he thinks, and anyway, the shoe isn't really the important thing, is it?

Eva's shoe in hand, the Doctor tracks her down to the brig, materializing on the other side of the bars. He peers at them with interest, then at the human on the other side, as if seeing her for the first time and it's all really incidental there's a prisoner in here.

"Thought you'd give the brig a go?"

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

Of all the unexpected gifts Eva's been brought here lately - and that includes Goliath's books - the most unexpected would have to be that damn shoe.

"Oh, Doc, what am I only going to do with only one shoe? Display it in my home as sculpture?" she asks, getting out of bed and straightening up her shirt and matted hair to look marginally less disheveled. Not that she knows if the Doctor would notice; he might find her current state of bedragglediness quaint, for all she knows.

Still, she reaches through the bars to take the shoe. At the very least, it's hers. She might as well keep things that are hers - books, shoes, bodies. Friends. She's allowed to own things, after all. "You know, I just thought this looked like the most charming vacation spot. Elegant in its simplicity, although I take it you're not horribly keen on minimalism."

[makeherblue]

The Doctor almost points out that Eva Salazar, one shoe is still loads better than none at all.

Also that a shoe sculpture might be just what her little dingy cell could use to brighten it up.

"Really? I was about to say it's rather...lacking. Very lacking," the Doctor swings around on his heel to get another good look of the brig. He meant what he said. Rubbish. Not quite as boring as the Everything Forest back on the TARDIS, but close to getting there and it makes him nervous on an instinctive level standing here.

And just like that, the Doctor suddenly wheels about toward Eva and comes right up to the bars, just short of actually pressing his face to them. He studies her for a brief nanosecond, head cocked slightly to the side, almost bird-like, and then switches gears without any warning.

"I can't imagine what you could have done to end up here." It's not judgement in his voice. There is, however, a slight undertone of surprise, as if he didn't see this one coming and he's trying to do that sniffing and snooping thing of his.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"That's why I brought books. You know what they say about books and being able to transport you to exotic locations." She gestures to the neat stack of books by her cot. "I have some beauties in there. I think there might still be a book of poetry I have to return to you, when the libraries are done trying to eat people alive."

She matches his stare with her own, the usual way she looks at him when he's trying to dissemble her with his mind: challenging, a little defiant. But unlike the last time she matched curiosity with boldness, some of the confidence is gone, and her eyes dart over his face for a moment before meeting and keeping his gaze.

"Oh, you probably can. Just rest assured that it wasn't pretty."

[makeherblue]

"Keep it," the Doctor waves the poetry book away. "So! Right then, prison. Jail thing. I like to think they're interchangeable."

He finally looks away from Eva, gazing up at the bars, almost like he's looking for any weak points or particularly friendly rats -- odds are he's had far more experience than is healthy getting tossed into prisons and then somehow, impossibly, finding ways out of them. There's probably a story and a few fibs in there plus some healthy embellishments. The Doctor's eyes travel down the bars, the light of the brig casting his face in sharp shadows.

"How?"

The question's sudden. He wants to believe the best of Eva -- in fact, he thinks he knows she's one of the better humans - but everyone can make mistakes. Bad judgments. Things they'll regret. Still, the Doctor would rather know than be left in the dark and part of that is probably that need to know that's driven him to take up, say, knitting, repair, and evasive maneuvers in vacuum, among other things.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Crimes against good taste," she says dryly, then more seriously. "I got violent. I suspect you already figured that out about me, my temper, but it crossed a line this time."

From the way the Doctor's looked at her gun before, she doesn't expect that he's all that fond of violence, although maybe it's just something about the weapon itself. Either way, she doubts he'll be much impressed by her techniques, brutal and messy as they are.

Some part of her does want to impress him, and she hates him for that. She hates him for seeking the approval of an alien yet again, that somehow he's conned her into thinking humans aren't quite as smart or worthy of determining goodness as their observers.

[makeherblue]

Granted, he's only seen her get...violent against a man-eating library and in her defense, he thinks anyone would get tetchy after an experience like that.

He has to wonder exactly how far she crossed this line.

"Ah," he says, in one of those massive Doctor understatements. He can suspect loads of things but the thing is, he'd really rather not think the worst of Eva. "When?"

Not that when really matters but it's just short of asking what she did and while he likes to think he's much more of an expert on humans than, say, the Master, he also can't predict Eva. She's surprised him a few times, after all. The Doctor casts about for something so he could sit down, getting tired of pacing, and finds that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of chairs. Or those funny flesh blobs like in the Obs Deck he's so fond of. Remind him to drag one out from the TARDIS and actually, come to think of it, he's not even sure how long Eva's going to be in the brig. Clearly escaping isn't her highest priority, judging by the way he's seen her looking around at the bars.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"During the attack on the ship." She stops herself from making an excuse - 'tensions were high', 'it was a combat situation', anything of that nature. That's cowardly of her.

She notices him looking for a place to sit and sits down on the floor next to the bars. Not something she'd usually do, but she's in a jail, and stubbornly waiting for a chair won't do anyone any good. She gestures for him to sit down next to her, nothing but the bars between them.

As much as she hates a prison, she actually imagines it would be harder for him, for an extended period of time, at least. He doesn't like to be unstimulated while she just hated being caged.

[makeherblue]

After a moment, the Doctor decides to follow suit and sit across from her at the bars - his idea of "sitting" is a bit odd to watch, like a giraffe folding those gangly legs of his for a drink of water and looking like a minor miracle that he makes it down in one piece. It's oddly graceful in its own way.

The Doctor adjusts the knees of his trousers. Picks at them. Gives up. "Ohm? But no, I imagine you wouldn't get the brig of something against the Ohm. Big bad cross bugs, the Ohm."

At least from his experience. All rather determined to take down the ship by any means necessary. So not the Ohm, then. Something else.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Cultist. One of the terrorists who attacked the refugees we were shepherding to safety." A funny way to put it, shepherding. In a way, she still feels responsible for what happened, as if it were her duty not only to guide those scared people but to defend them from attack. The cultists attacking wasn't just an offense to basic morality, but to her and her responsibility to others.

She watches as he sits, remembering again how deceptively far from human he is. It's easy to forget sometimes, so painfully obvious other times.

"So no, not Ohm. Human, at least if you can qualify as such without a soul." She still feels guiltier over dragging Daniel into it than she does the act itself.

[makeherblue]

It's just a little bit of the picture, the Doctor trying to sort it out. He's seen what humans can do to other humans in the heat of the moment. Terrible things. Beautiful things. Sometimes both at once, where it tends to get cagey, and from the way Eva talks about it that curt tone of hers, he thinks it's a far cry from beautiful. It's also already done. It's not as simple as popping back in time and giving a few gentle, thoughtful nudges, after all.

"I thought I heard something about cultists," the Doctor says, his tone deceptively neutral. "So you and another human and things got messy, in a manner of speaking."

He says "messy" almost like it's a delicate word, his head tilted slightly to the side as he searches Eva's face past the bars.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Yes. 'Messy'." Her face betrays nothing, but her voice gets detached and clinical as she thinks back on the way she broke another human's face on her hands. The way she still has dried blood and tissue under her nails, so deep down it's painful and difficult to dig out. "'Conduct unbecoming of an officer'."

She laces her fingers up and folds her hands, fingers shaking ever so slightly. "I don't believe a full report exists anywhere, although from the sounds of it rumor might get out. So soon enough I'll have my crazed Yeerk victim status back. Yay me."

She'll never live her past down, but it occurs to her that if she did a better job ignoring it people could at least set it aside, like they did when she first arrived on the ship, before she announced her host status to everyone aboard. She just assumes everyone's seen it now.