It's Not Easy Being Green
Remember how, way back in the early days of Star Trek: Voyager fandom, Megan and Jenny Delaney from Stellar Cartography were branded the sluts of the ship for daring to enjoy sex? Right, so I'm having flashbacks. Only this time, it's Gaila who's being called names in the blogsphere for, well... enjoying casual sex as much as James T Kirk does. And
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She spends her earliest years on a farm. She is fed and watered and in turn, she feeds and waters the other livestock and tends crops and it's not until she's much older that she understands the irony. It's not until she's older that she understands what irony is. It's not until she's two years past the onset of puberty that she acquires a name, of sorts, but none of this is anything but normal for her and her kind. She is what she is. She doesn't question it. She also doesn't fly or shit rainbows. Why would she? It would never occur to her.
She is what she is.
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One of her earliest memories is one of the other girls weeping in the toilets, trying desperately to rip out the hairs that are growing between her legs and under her arms. But the girl has been working the root crops for the last few weeks and her fingernails are worn down to nubs and she can't gain purchase on the downy little hairs.
She who will one day choose to be called Gaila doesn't really understand why her friend is so terrified of the hairs, but she has fingernails and teeth and if they are that bad, if they bring things that are that bad, she will rip them out for her friend. Gaila is a girl who is quiet and listens hard to all the things the other girls whisper. They talk of sleeping on their stomachs to slow the swelling in their chests. They talk of the ones who get taken away and never come back.
Gaila likes her life. She wants to stay here. She likes to feed the cows. She likes it when it gets warm and she's barefoot in the sunshine pushing holes in the dark dirt with her fingers, and counting out the seeds. She likes the way the sprouts that erupt in the springtime are sometimes the exact same color as her fingers. She loves brushing her fingers over the sprouts and watching them grow a little more each day.
She doesn't like the games that the guards play at night, but they're not always so bad. And she's better at being quiet than most of the girls.
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It doesn't matter what you do. Hair grows, breasts grow, and one morning you wake up with bloody sheets and that's it. No more cows. No more strawberries and wheat and corn to peel the silk off of and make silly wigs from.
You belong in a new place now. You belong to a new person now. You learn to dance. You learn how to keep the perfect smile on your face no matter what. They don't like it when you cry, except for when they do. And the girl who will one day choose to be called Gaila learns how to do that as easily as smiling. It's funny, she thinks, how so many of them will take tears when it seems like they're looking for blood. A few tears and the right noises and they quit their looking. They don't want pain so much as the evidence of pain. It only takes her a couple times to get that, and after that, she learns the right noises.
Even better is when she learns that some of them want pain, and how to spot those ones and keep them so pleased they keep coming back. Giving pain is much easier than faking pain, and it has the added bonus of lessening the time you spend with those whose favorite game is to smash their toys. It is better to find the ones who prefer the toys with sharp teeth. It is smarter to find the ones who - in the quiet, secret, whispered bed games in the darkest night like to play at *being* toys. It is smarter to play with those toys until they are almost but not quite broken.
*They* make the keepers happy. They come back with sparkling gifts and silly promises and they make it so you get the good food and to sleep in so that when they return you can break them all over again all night long. Gaila gets it pretty quickly.
Gaila knows she is a toy. She knows, from keeping her mouth shut and listening, that she is a good toy. She would like to be a better toy in hopes that one day, she is something other than a toy. No one has ever told her that this is possible, but somehow, she knows deep down that it is. It must be.
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But I was under the impression (and granted, I got this off a site a few weeks ago) that, according to canon, Orion women are slave girls in name only, and that in fact they use the pheromones their bodies produce to gradually take control of their "masters". And that they preserve the fiction of the "Orion slave girl" in order to keep this a secret.
(I realize that canon was shot out of a howitzer in the movie, but I don't see how changing Kirk's past would change an unrelated planet's society.)
Sincerely, Allaine
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