trans_9 | 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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"Jails never have been." She sighs and scrapes her teeth over her lip. She wonders if, given his line of work, he ever saw the inside of a jail. She can't imagine he'd like it, with how at home he is in the sky. He doesn't seem the type to feel comfortable without room to move and breathe.

"Did I ever tell you I once punched out a police officer over a parking ticket?"

"While there are several worlds' worth of difference between an improvised facelift and a sucker punch, and cops can be the worst kind of bastards sometimes, clearly this isn't a new thing with you."

It wasn't like he was going to come right out and say she had anger issues, because that wasn't helpful and people got defensive. But he could politely suggest as much. It was also none of his business to ask whether she was working on it, but the question hung there silently.

"Not at all. I mostly throw things and hit things with baseball bats in the Sensoriums. Practice sharpshooting, that sort of thing."

But being surrounded by the teenagers that live with her has mostly kept her temper under wraps. She can be angry around her close friends, around Peter, but not around her son or his fellow child soldiers. Maybe busting into someone's nasal cavity was just the outburst of something she'd been penting up.

"But honestly, I don't know what else I can do about it."

"I don't know, I'm not a shrink," Wash said. "When I get mad, I spend a few hours shut up in my bunk. That's when we don't have enough fuel to go on a joyride, but I can't remember last time we had that. Maybe you need space - not space here, it's not exactly private here. Maybe you need space away from people for a while. Hell if you need a place to stay for a while, you can take one of Serenity's spare bunks. Although that's not exactly private... and Mal's awake now so he'd have to posture about you being on his ship for a while... on second thought maybe that's not a great idea."

He just didn't like seeing her like this - she didn't seem to care that she looked terrible, and she didn't really seem to care that whatever it was she was dealing with wasn't getting better. There had to be a change of tactic she could try.

"The offer's tempting, but at some point my son's going to start worrying about when I'm coming home."

She smiles a bit weakly, but it grows stronger and into a cheeky grin. Wash may not know the best way to make her feel as if she's worth investing her own energy into, but he does lift her mood a little.

"You know, I haven't met this Mal, though. Maybe I should slot up a coffee break in my schedule. I've heard so many great things it's hard to believe the man will live up to the legend."

"I don't know if I'd call him legendary," Wash said. His expression changed into something between panic and amusement and he added quickly, "Actually please don't ever call him that anywhere near earshot. And definitely don't tell him I've been talking about him."

He sighed, thinking back to Marco's reaction on the omnicomms. "I'm... not really going to tell you how to be a mom because I've been avoiding being a dad for a few years now, but you might want to put yourself together a little before Marco gets down here. He wasn't taking it very well on the comms." He paused. "Part of that was probably half the stuff they were saying on the comms..."

She grins and winks. "Don't worry. If I let on that I know about his dark history as a captain wed to misplaced machismo, I'll blame it on Kaylee."

She tugs at a tangle in her hair. "I can't guarantee I'll find it in me to clean myself up. God knows he's seen me at much worse than this. But at least I can take the weight of him worrying about Stepfather Kang off his mind."

Wash looked pained. "Eva," he said, "you need to take care of yourself. Sitting in the brig for a few days because you need to do some soul-searching is one thing, but..."

He trailed off. He was scolding her like she was a member of his crew, and even though they'd served together he still wasn't quite sure where he stood with her. He couldn't give her orders, certainly.

"I'm just worried," he finished.

A chill seems to fall over her expression. "And I appreciate the concern, but I can take care of myself, Wash. I'm not starving myself in here. I'll find ways to make myself useful after I'm released."

It stings, feeling pitied. She knows she should be glad to be worried about, that she has friends, but she feels as if he's chipped at the little scraps of her pride that remain.

His face fell immediately. "That's not what I'm saying - don't take it like that," he said. "None of us asked to be here, none of us want to be here, and you don't have to make yourself useful. If you don't want, that is."

Pity was not what this was. This was concern. Eva was a friend, at least, Wash thought she was. And even though he wasn't a terribly religious man, he still knew that some things weren't good for the soul, and one of them was being in a cage.

"If I don't make myself useful, then what good am I? Just squatting in a body someone else could be putting to better projects, could be working harder, could be enjoying..." She presses her lips together and shakes her head, letting lanks of messy hair swing over her eyes.

"It's a nice thought, Pájaro, but it doesn't mean much." She smiles just a little, faintly. "But thank you for it anyway."

An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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