Author: Kay Tee maybeshedoes@yahoo.com
Distribution: Take it, but tell me where so I can visit.
Rated: R, for sexual explicitness, thoughts on slavery, and the usual swears.
Category: Series
Original Character Warning
Spoilers: 'What's My Line 1,' but they're very minor.
Disclaimer: In my dreams I'm Joss, but during the day I have to face the cold hard truth-- I'm a hack who steals characters. But I'm not giving them back! Or I am, just don't sue me, all I have are speeding tickets and student loans. And I'd like to apologize to MacDonald's right now.
Summary: Spike can't take care of Druscilla all by himself, so he gets himself a slave to help. Eve is all wet and contemplative.
Author's notes: I don't know where to get transcripts of the episodes, so I'm doing my best with what I remember from the show. Don't hurt me.
More notes: I'm reading The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. It's about Vietnam, and it's kinda getting into my head. This whole chapter's a way of getting that out of my system.
***
Eve was standing outside because it was raining. It was dark, and she was smoking a cigarette that was getting wet and would probably fall apart before she was done with it. She was standing outside in the rain because it was wet, and it reminded her of home, and she was allowed to be outside. She didn't say anything, didn't think either. The rain smelled different-- more metallic, and less old than the Maine rain, the rain in Maine that she used to know.
This was the kind of mood Eve was in. So she was standing outside in the rain, getting wet for chrissakes, and it was all good, and it was all bad. And she was rhyming in her head.
Eve was not a rain person. She never made much of a fuss over it either way, and she had never owned an umbrella, though she'd always wanted one. At first she was too young. And then her mother told her she was old enough to buy one for herself, but she was just a teenager and she was too poor. And now she was a slave who was grateful to be allowed to go outside in the rain at all.
She didn't frown when her cigarette fell apart, just turned toward the wall so she could light another one. It was raining, just like it did all the time back home, but it wasn't like that kind of rain at all.
Eve tried not to think about home very much. Some things were easier to forget than others. She never thought about her ambitions-- she had been almost certain that she would be a failure in life, and being a slave meant at least that she was something. Not a checkout girl, or waitress, but a something.
She didn't think about her pretty little sister who always tried to make peace.
She didn't think about her brother, who farted too much, and cracked good jokes, and was probably just now getting old enough to shave.
She thought about her mom a lot. She wondered how the old lady was doing, if she was all right, and if she'd pinned down that temper yet. Eve's mother never hit her brother or sister. She said that it was just Eve who brought out her bad temper, and Eve accepted that. Except, of course, her mom never called her 'Eve,' because that was not her name.
Eve didn't think about having a real name.
She didn't think about pine trees and forests, and walking to the lake with her boyfriend to dip their toes in, and hold hands, and behave like couples did in Doris Day movies. After sitting there like good little teenagers for about five minutes, Eve and her boyfriend would strip down and have unprotected sex in the lake with all the ducks and turtles and dragonflies as witnesses.
One day an old man in a rowboat drifted by. He was fishing, and he pulled his line in so he wouldn't snag them. Eve's boyfriend got very nervous, and blushed profusely. But the fisherman in his rowboat resolutely looked away, pretending he didn't notice, and Eve and her boyfriend continued having sex.
Eve thought about her two best friends, Sara and Julia, who didn't like her boyfriend.
Sara O'Connor was a Catholic School Girl, and an unrepentant slut. She taught Eve all the things she knew about sex, and had been Eve's first kiss. Sara took Eve out to get drunk her first time, and Eve had slept with a boy whose last name she would never know. When her boyfriend found out, he forbidden Eve to ever see Sara again, but Eve ignored him. Sara also introduced Eve to cigarettes-- so she could learn to inhale before they smoked pot.
Julia was Eve's other best friend, and she very rarely got along with Sara. When Julia said that Sara was a slut, she made it sound like that was a bad thing. Julia's full name was Julia Roberts. People made jokes about it all the time, but they were never funny. Julia listened to country music, and wanted to be an English teacher, and fall in love. She and Eve would read books together and discuss them.
Julia was beautiful, perfect, and sometimes Eve thought she could almost smell her, dig through her friend's perfume and absorb the actual scent of Julia.
The problem with Julia was that she tried too hard to cultivate a persona. She sprayed vanilla perfume everywhere she went, so people would always associate the smell with her. And it worked; whenever Eve smelled vanilla, she thought of Julia, and how badly she wanted to have her own signature scent. Julia had a headful of bleached blonde curls, and spent every morning putting her hair up in butterfly clips. When Eve got her license, she would drive her friend to school every day, and watch out of the corner of her eye as Julia carefully pulled little blonde tendrils out of their clips, trying to make it look like she had just thrown her hair up. Julia always said that Eve should bleach her hair too. It was blonde, but it could be blonder. At least, that's what Julia always said.
Eve didn't think about her hair, or her face, or herself. She hadn't looked in a mirror since she had been that other person. She had no idea what she looked like now; she didn't want to know.
Eve didn't think about school. She'd loved the place, even when she wasn't doing well. She got all A's and D's. These grades weren't divided by subject; in her two years at public high, Eve had gotten an A in every subject. She had gotten a D in every subject as well. Her mother always told her that she was never going to amount to anything if she didn't set her priorities straight. Her mom always said that the only school that would take Eve was MacDonald's School of Management. It was an old joke that Eve's mom used too much.
Eve sometimes thought about being beautiful. Her boyfriend told her that she was beautiful in the rain. He said that her hair got curly and wet and gorgeous. He was glad that Eve didn't have an umbrella, but she still wanted one.
It was raining that night, and Eve's hair was wet because she was out in the rain, and she didn't feel very beautiful at all. She felt smelly, because every day she wore the same jeans, and the same underwear, and the same shirt that she'd pried off a dead kid. She always washed her clothes at night, and had a shower-- or sometimes a bath, if she was bruised. But she never felt clean.
***
One thing Eve had always liked about the rain were the puddles, warm puddles that she used to slosh through in her bare feet in the morning after it had rained. She had always loved to walk around in her bare feet. Of course, it was more fun back when she could go home and pick from half a dozen pairs of shoes after she was clean.
Eve's boyfriend liked her to wear shoes. He said that her feet turned brown when she didn't wear them, and it was gross. Eve thought her feet were beautiful.
His feet were bony, and there was a thin strip of hair from his big toe to his ankle that he shaved sometimes in the summer because he said it looked weird.
Eve thought about her bed. She had slept on a cot for years, and then one day her mother just decided to buy Eve a real bed. It was the most comfortable thing Eve had ever touched. There was a simple iron frame, and a real mattress, and a boxspring underneath. The bed was an early seventeenth birthday present, and it was Eve's for four months until she became a slave.
***
Standing out in the rain, Eve mostly just stared at the brick wall across the alley. Inside there were twelve or so vampires-- none of them liked the rain-- and one, called Druscilla, was withering away. Spike was in there too, pacing and screaming because Dalton couldn't decipher a simple Latin text.
Eve was glad that she was allowed to be out in the rain and away from that temper. Spike was starting to get desperate and hysterical, because it would kill him if Druscilla died.
Eve had broken the rules and seduced Spike, trying to comfort him. He didn't punish her for the blowjob; instead he let her go out in the rain. Whenever he saw her, he sent her away. He wanted to concentrate on Druscilla, which was good, because once she was dust Spike would be too. He loved her so much that Eve was sure he would just spontaneously combust once she died.
Eve thought about what would happen if her master and mistress died. If she could avoid getting eaten by the minions-- and she thought she could, just because they were so used to not eating her-- Eve would go home.
She would go home, and her brother, Jack, would still be funny. He would probably fart less, and shave, and be interested in girls. Or boys. But he wouldn't be a kid anymore.
Linda would be the age Eve had been when she became a slave. And when Eve went home, she wouldn't know what to do with her life. She would sit in the house and watch Linda grow older than her. Eve figured that her mom would just frown, and say that she had been able to keep her temper controlled while Eve was gone, and she didn't want Eve to do anything to mess that up.
Julia would be engaged, and more beautiful than ever. She would be at college to learn how to be an English teacher. Eve would visit and listen to Julia tell stories about her college life, and her fiancé. Eve would never tell about being a slave.
Sara would be at college too, partying and generally having a good time. When Eve visited her, she would end up explaining the whole thing about being a slave. And Sara would say that it didn't sound so bad, as long as Eve got laid on a regular basis. Eve would try to explain that it wasn't real sex, but Sara wouldn't understand, because she'd never had real sex.
Eve would visit her boyfriend too. She was his first everything, but other girls had to figure out that he was sweet and beautiful eventually. He would have a girlfriend, or maybe girlfriends, and when Eve visited, they'd be there, keeping an eye on their boyfriend. That was all okay, because Eve had never been able to love him, not the way he deserved.
People who used to know her would ask about the scars on her face, and she would wave her hand vaguely and say that she got scratched once by a lady with very long fingernails.
Eve didn't think about freedom too much. She thought about slavery the way they taught it in school: a whole plantation of people crowded together, surviving together. And at night the master might climb into a young girl's bed, and there was nothing she could do about it, but she certainly wasn't supposed to start seeing the master as an older brother she should take care of.
Eve thought about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. She wondered how all those people knew that they were going to be okay once they found freedom. How did they know they weren't going to miss the master's family?
Eve didn't think about her home. It was actually the best part of being free: not really being free. Eve belonged to the land; the earth and the trees and the lake near her house where she and her boyfriend used to have sex until one day an old man in a row boat floated by, and after that her boyfriend wouldn't have sex in the lake anymore.
It was silly to belong to the land. Eve's great-grandfather came over from Italy and went straight into a factory. From there he went into a picket line, becoming famous for organizing everyone he worked with, and getting better wages. Eve's mom used to tell stories about living in the city where everybody loved her because of who her grandfather was. Eve had never met her great-grandfather, but she knew he didn't belong to the land.
She stared at her cigarette, being sure not to turn it so that only the top got wet, and there wasn't too much structural damage. Inside the warehouse, she could hear the sound of Spike yelling at Dalton, and she was glad she was out in the rain.
She was in that kind of mood.
Eve wondered what she'd say when they (whoever 'they' were wasn't important) asked where she'd been for the last two and a half years. Would she tell them she was a slave? Would she explain that vampires were real, and you should look out for them because they might eat you or keep you as a slave for a few years?
Would she tell them that she'd killed two people?
The more Eve thought-- or didn't think-- about going home to her family, the more she knew she would never do it. Spike could come outside right now, announce that Eve was free, give her a plane ticket and two and a half years worth of wages, and Eve would never go home.
She couldn't go there and be that girl. She was Eve now. She lived with vampires, and they beat her sometimes, but that was okay. She slept on the floor near their bed, or out in the hall if they were already asleep when she came home from her free time. She snuck out and went to visit their enemy because he was the only other person-type that she could relate to.
She loved Spike and she loved Druscilla. They were her family, though they were going to kill her someday.
Eve tapped her cigarette and the whole cherry fell out. She pouted down at the stub; it was too long to be done, but too short to relight. She pulled out her dwindling pack and turned toward the wall to light another.
It was raining in southern California, and Eve was getting wet.
She wasn't really a whiner-- she never thought that she had anything to whine about. The same rule went for self-pity.
But sometimes Eve's fingers would get that itch that she'd always indulged before she became a slave. That writing itch. The fingers didn't care if they wrote at a computer, or on paper, or at a goddamned typewriter; they just needed to move. And as soon as Eve began to write, her mind would click in, and her whole upper body would be working together as a solid circuit of electricity. Once Eve got a rhythm going, her feet and legs would start to move, desperate to join the circuit. Her whole body was built for the storytelling, and now she hated to do it.
The only people (-types) who ever wanted to hear her stories were Druscilla and Angel. Dru wanted to hear fairy tales that were already written somewhere. Eve could improvise and add, but the story still wasn't real, wasn't hers.
Angel just wanted to hear the truth. He wanted to know about the women Eve had killed, and the boy she hadn't loved, and what her favorite color was.
Eve smiled sadly. She missed dark green. It seemed as if there wasn't a true dark green in the whole of Sunnydale. The best she could do was pretend. At night the regular greens almost looked dark, but it was all pretend.
Going to Angel's apartment and cooking real food, that was pretend. She was acting human, but it was all fake and she knew it. Eve was something else. A slave who knew no other slaves. It wasn't a good thing to be.
This was all the pretending she was allowed to do. Her mind was full of wonderful stories that nobody wanted to hear, and that she would never get to write. But there was still a little pretending in her life.
***
At the moment, Spike was feeling weird around her because she had seduced him, and then he had cried in her arms. He was feeling so weird that he let her go out alone at night in the rain. Free time. She didn't go far, knowing he might change his mind, or want something, and the more bothered he was by not knowing her whereabouts, the harsher the beating was going to be.
Eve knew that she would be beaten anyway, for making Spike cry, or letting him cry, or seeing him cry. That was okay with her, because the crying made him feel better. The beating would make him feel better too.
The slave sighed and smoked her cigarette and stood out in the rain. Her old boyfriend didn't like the rain at all, but he liked for her to be in it because he said her hair was beautiful when it rained.
He said that a person could only get so wet, and then there was no point in having an umbrella anyway.
***
The Sunnydale rain seemed wrong somehow. When the weather was all the same every day, Eve could sometimes pretend that she wasn't living real life. She could let her mind drift into that movieland where the weather was always perfect for the scene.
This whole gig with Spike and Dru, it was just an act, not real, and the weather was proof. Eve had never been to a place where it didn't rain for months and months. The people here didn't even know how to drive in the rain; there had been at least three accidents since she had come outside that night. Maybe it was all one accident, just growing. Eve couldn't tell for sure, but there were definite crunching car sounds coming from the center of town.
Eve wondered what would happen if it snowed in Sunnydale. But that would never happen.
The rain was wrong because it was proof this was the real world. When she was being a human being, that was pretend. Being a slave was all that was real.
She finished her third cigarette-- got all the way to the end without incident-- and stood out in the rain for a while longer.
It was nice, really. It would be perfect if she had an umbrella: little plopping noises where the rain hit over her head, heavy tributaries pouring off her shelter, inches from her face, but she would be all dry. Well, no. Her feet would be wet, and her legs too, probably. But her hair would be dry. And that was nice, because Eve liked her hair to be dry. She liked it pulled back into a tight ponytail-- completely out of the way.
There had been no shouting from the warehouse for a while, which either meant that Dalton had finally translated the text, or Spike had killed him.
Eve thought about going in and being a punching bag for a while. It didn't sound like a bad plan.
So she pushed open the door and went into the warehouse. She was all wet from the rain because she didn't have an umbrella, and would probably not live long enough to get one.
Eve headed down to her bedroom. Just as she was about to walk in, Spike walked out. "She's asleep..." He started, and then stared at Eve, who was all wet and dripping like a lost dog. She felt gross and just wanted to go get her towel so she could have a bath.
"Cor, luv, you look bloody fantastic. Beautiful." Spike ran his hand over Eve's head. "Your hair looks really nice like this. You should go stand in the rain more often."
Eve didn't smile or move. She just let Spike pet her, and tell her things she'd heard before, but not from him.