NEW Little Girl Nevermore 1/1

Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2002

DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Sure, just keep my name and headers.
RATING: PG.
CATEGORIES/KEYWORDS: Angst, Eve, Sally Kendrick.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: Eve. Pre-XF and missing scene.
SUMMARY: Eve Seven repeats a cycle that came before her. Written for the Harem Obscure Woman 500 word challenge.
DEDICATION: To Harriet Harris, who played the adult Eves, and recently won a well-deserved Tony. She'll probably never see this, but Harriet, you rock.
MORE FIC: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com.
AWARDS/ELIGIBILITY: Spooky 2002 eligible.

1.

She's not my little girl any more.

Oh, she still has the promise she had in the compound. The streak of light where her sisters had only darkness. But now I see shadows creeping in. Not enough to block the light, but enough to dim its glow.

I raised her to scorn ambition. To do no harm. Altruism above gain. That was the ethic I gave her. It was her protection from what she was. My atonement for making her that way.

I see too late my errors. My pride in her, leading me to misjudge myself, and her. Ambition would have led her to the highest echelons of the corporate world. Perhaps to political office. It would never have led her to medicine. Altruism led her to that.

And now we come full circle. She is a compassionate woman. A compassionate doctor. She does compassionate work. She is kind to the grieving couples who come to her door. She assures them that science can heal them. That it can take their uncooperative cells, make a few adjustments, and give them their perfect baby.

But I see the eagerness in her eyes when she speaks of it. I see her dreams of greater things. Babies without disease. Brighter babies. Stronger babies. I see myself so many years before her. She has the knowledge. And in the cells of her body she carries the means.

Will she manage it? Or will she learn, as we did, that Nature abhors perfection? That She takes the perfect and makes it random and volatile, just to prove She can?

2.

She's not my little girl any more.

I have watched Teena with pride. Cindy too, but Teena more. She amused me, the way she flaunted her brilliance and turned it on those she considered beneath her. I took it for spirit. I see now that it was malice. Her brilliance twisting back on her, distorting her and the way she saw her world.

I was stupid - so stupid. I looked on her with fondness, saw the familiarity of my sisters within her. I saw the joy I had once taken in my own kind. Neither then nor now did I see the signs that were all too clear to my father. The warnings that led him to take me away.

My father. I wish he were here to guide me. He warned me of this. I didn't listen. I thought him stupid. He was one of the brightest men of his time, and I loved him. But he wasn't as bright as me.

I see now that he was better, though, and that is why he saved me. If he could do it, then so can I. Teena and Cindy are further gone than I was, but they can be fixed. I believe that.

I will not allow this evil to be unleashed upon the world.

Nature abhors corruption. She takes decay and breaks it down, and from it the living grow stronger. We see it in plants, and sometimes we see it in people, too. She takes what is fractured and makes it whole, just to prove She can.

My father didn't give up. And neither will I.

END

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Well, I went a little bit over. It's 535, to be exact. Think of it as a 500 with a side of fries.

I've always been fascinated by Sally Kendrick and by her adoptive father, the genetic engineer on the Litchfield Project who took her away and shielded her. She struck me in her brief moments as a tragic figure - deeply misguided and probably driven to making the Eves out of loneliness, having been reared in communal consciousness and been forced to flee it for her own survival. It would have been so easy for her to walk away when Teena and Cindy turned bad. To dismiss them as not her problem, as Cindy's birth mother did at the end of the episode. Instead, she tried to protect them, and protect the world from them, and she died for her altruism. That's the kind of mixed-up context I was trying to capture here.