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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"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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

Edited 2011-09-15 09:20 (UTC)

"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.

An Unexploded Shell Inside a Cell [Open]

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