(no subject)
For those of you keeping up with Steampunk-ernatural (19 days to go!) here's a few random vignettes starring Evie, who is bugging me silly since realising that she's allowed back out of the box fairly soon.
For those of you who aren't, the campaign notes can be found here if you're interested.
Fandom: Deadlands, Steampunk-ernatural campaign
Character: Evelyn Joanna Harvelle Tallow
Warnings: Cussin' and het!sex
Description: Snapshots from the life of Mrs. E. Tallow
1847, Chicago
Evelyn Joanna Harvelle enters the world screaming, a shrivelled crimson prune with a lone front tooth and a shock of red hair. Her mother wraps her in an old shirt and pronounces her trouble, and her father laughs as he locks everything back up and fetches the stepladder, grateful both his girls survived the night.
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1851, Chicago
“Poppa, look!”
William Harvelle is a patient man. It's one of the reasons he's carving a name for himself in the fledgling Pinkerton Agency. He does, however, have his limits. Finding out that his four year old has succeeded in taking all the individual cogs out of his not-inexpensive pocketwatch because she wants to see how it works, for example...
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1855, Maryland
“E-v-i-e. Love Kate. There you go, sugar.”
Later the two detectives - patient, dedicated family man William and the brilliant, dynamic Kate Warne, darling of the Agency - will laugh about this with the rest of the team, and William's daughter will blush, and someone will drop a too-large stetson onto her head and hoist her high and make magnificent drunken speeches about the next generation of detectives.
Evelyn sleeps with the autograph under her pillow until she starts at the Academy herself.
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1863, Salem
“It's a shit gun, Harvelle -”
“You're a shit shot, Tallow.” Evie snatches the piece back, slides it almost reverentially into the holster at her hip. It's hard to stay righteously indignant around Anthony, especially when he smiles like that, but she tries.
“- and who's 'William'? Should I be jealous?”
It's even harder when he wraps his arms around her, and soon she's laughing loud enough to forget what they were talking about and ignore the silent accusation the engraving levies at her every time she draws the ageing Peacemaker.
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1870, Denver
It's stranger than she expected, being in the same state - in the same bed - as her husband, relearning the way they slot together, marvelling at the interplay between her curves and his angles. His fingers are longer than she remembers, striped with papercuts from constant, clumsy card-shuffling, and the songs they rip from her are an old woman's wailing ballads, are notes torn from a battered three-stringed guitar by a wandering gypsy with fire in his eyes and a demon curled around his heart.
They don't talk about before (before he was a good fit for 'Probability Manipulation 101', before she failed at convincing Shelby she was a technician and not a field agent), only about afterwards, making plans for once Evelyn turns thirty. They wander across the hazy landscape of 'sometime' and 'maybe'; sometimes they buy a strip of land outside some nowhere town like Derry's Ford where Evie makes guns from scrap metal. Sometimes they hit the road, and find some no-name dive where she hustles poker and he dazzles everyone with card tricks. Sometimes they don't go anywhere but linger on in the smoke and the noise and the weird ghost-rock glow, thumbing their noses at the Agency.
Denver is not Sacramento, but she thinks she might be able to make it work.
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1877, Cliffside
Jacob is not her usual lay. Evie likes her men pretty. Refined. Clean. She can count the people she's slept with on one hand (okay, two, but she was young once and not always a widow, and damn good at her job). But power has always been her aphrodisiac of choice and she can feel her armour thickening as Jacob, and through Jacob Malcom, and through Malcom Rudepar, add her colours to their banners, their bodies to her human shield.
She opens to him, and they crash together like shipwreck survivors struggling to stay afloat. He is not gentle; more than once he brushes against an old war wound and she hisses and digs her nails in deeper.
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??? - Year 1, The Hunting Grounds
Samuel Forge enters the world like a whisper, big brown eyes staring up at his mother's tear-streaked face as if asking what on earth she's so afraid of. This is the face of the Apocalypse Evie thinks, and laughs herself hoarse, manic laughter that only stops when Malcom shambles into view.
She watched him die, and yet she always knew he'd be back. Bastard always was too damn stubborn to lay down easy. Thank God. “Sammy” she says, and those impossibly big eyes seem rich with an understanding she knows can't be there yet, “say hello to your uncle...”