Being Human: Lonely Rivers [Hal/Eve, Hal/Cutler]
Title: “Lonely Rivers”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: NC-17
Timeline: 2037, AU!future as shown in episodes 4.01, 4.07, 4.08.
Summary: Lord Hal has a unique proposal for the War Child. She’s not interested but it might end up becoming her only option. [Hal/Eve, Hal/Cutler]
Warning: dub-con.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Quotes from “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, “Decades” by Joy Division, “Ulysses” by James Joyce.
A/N: Fiiiinally it’s finished! It took me ages and it’s not quite what I planned it to be, but hey, these two are way too tricky. I still maintain shirogiku writes Eve better.
LONELY RIVERS
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
James Joyce. “Ulysses”
The first time they meet face to face, Hal brings the War Child an apple. It’s a corny joke, but whoever asked her parents to name her after the first fallen woman?
She looks at him, takes the fruit and throws it at his head. He ducks, narrowly escaping the blow, and he laughs.
--
He likes her as she is, with crescents of dirt under her fingernails, with her skin dusty and pale from hiding in bunkers for years, with fierce, blazing eyes that spell a promise of his demise.
He kisses her once, and she digs her teeth into his lips hard enough to draw blood. He jerks away, laughing throatily. There is something poetic about a human biting a vampire.
Later, he walks in on Cutler, Jacob and Fergus in the aftermath of a poker game. The cards are scattered over the table. There are glasses stained with red and a half-full decanter as a centrepiece of the composition.
“Why so glum, fellows?” Hal asks. “Did Cutler beat you again?”
Judging by Cutler’s smug grin, he did.
Fergus mutters something along the lines of “never would’ve happened if Dennis were alive,” and Cutler’s smile fades a little around the edges.
It’s almost funny.
--
Hal tries every conceivable type of torture on her. He favours sleep deprivation, but the stick is getting old. Time to pick up the carrot.
“I’ve been alive for over five centuries,” he tells her conversationally. “And I think I’ve discovered this little thing about humanity. You’re never happy unless you’re miserable.” He straddles the chair and rests his elbows on its back. “When you’re suffering,” he says like he’s just thought of it, “your best traits are highlighted. Look at you. You haven’t said a word to me. You’ve been so brave, so strong. Could you have done if I’d just left you alone?” He chuckles. “Didn’t someone say that we need not to be let alone?”
Even with all the bruises, she is beautiful.
He gets up and says as he heads for the door: “Think of it as me doing you a favour.”
“Why?”
It’s the first time she has spoken to him. He briefly considers marking this day in a calendar and making it a national holiday but Mr Snow would most likely disapprove.
“Why what?”
The War Child says slowly: “Why do me a favour?”
Hal opens his mouth and finds he has no answer.
She laughs. It’s a curt, husky sound. It barely registers with both of them.
“You’re one to talk about happiness.”
It’s his turn to laugh but he doesn’t. It’s not really funny if you think about it.
“So why are you here?” she asks. Someone else asked him pretty much the same thing eighty years ago, but it’s not the same.
He just looks at her. Waiting for this to go somewhere.
Eve says: “I’ve been alive for twenty-five years. I’d like to make it longer but if you’re gonna come here every day and talk, you might as well finish me off now.”
He knits his eyebrows. “I want you to be like me.”
“Unhappy?”
He chuckles. At least she’s talking.
--
“So I was thinking,” Cutler tells him. “About entertainment.”
Hal is reading a police report about suicide bombings in the resettlement camps. Now that’s depressing.
“Obviously we can’t have television back. But what about radio? We have exactly two stations. One plays jazz music and suchlike and the other one plays, well, you. I’m not saying that it’s, you know, not interesting, but you have to admit: humans had good things in the old world. Like radio dramas. We could revive those.”
Then there is this disaster on a breeding farm in Scotland. Twelve healthy, fertile females have jumped off the roof to their death. If things continue in the same fashion, vampires will begin to starve. They would have to ration blood and maybe stake a few people.
The reports are getting on Hal’s nerves. He puts them down and glances at Cutler.
“Did you say something?”
Cutler purses his lips and just glares at Hal for a moment.
“I was just… thinking aloud.”
Hal snorts. “You do love the sound of your own voice.”
Cutler looks pensive. “You know how some people are dicks? To other people?”
“Your point being?”
Cutler flashes him an innocuous smile. “Just thinking aloud.”
--
“Is there something you want?”
The War Child glances at him, amused. She should be asking this question; he is the one that keeps coming.
He moved her to a suite some time ago. There are hidden cameras installed in various corners of the room, but he has a nagging suspicion that Eve knows about them. He doesn’t care.
The furniture is all metal and plastic. The bed rattles like prison bars, sagging under her weight.
“Have you got any cigarettes?”
The request is easy to grant. Hal reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces a pack of cigarettes. He holds one in front of her. She swings forward and allows him to insert it between her lips. Her mouth curves into an involuntary smirk. Hal lights the cigarette and puts away the lighter. The War Child makes a mock plaintive noise, as if she was really considering setting him on fire with it and he has taken this fun opportunity away from her. She lies back and watches the ceiling, exhaling smoke towards it.
Hal lowers himself on the bed and stretches alongside Eve, their elbows brushing. She could put some distance between them; the bed is narrow, but not that restricting.
He takes a pull on her cigarette.
“Bugger, I can’t even have a decent smoke,” she complains. “Without sharing it with you.”
“I have to share it with you,” he counters. “Supplies are scarce.”
“Whose fault is that?”
--
Cutler keeps Hal’s secrets, dripping with venom. Sometimes Hal catches him looking, much in the same way Hal looks at the camera feeds from the War Child’s room. Things seldom go beyond looks these days, mostly because it amuses Hal to try Cutler’s patience. Cutler won’t say no if Hal throws him a bone; he seems to be physically incapable of refusing Hal.
“So,” Cutler says, “humans keep killing themselves.” By now, it seems, everybody has realized the importance of the War Child as a symbol. Perhaps it’s all they ever saw in her. “The future looks grim for us.”
The future always looks grim. Hal unbuckles his belt and gives Cutler the look. Cutler raises his eyebrows, possibly searching the dusty corners of himself for the shriveled remnants of his pride and not finding any. Hal places his hand on Cutler’s shoulder and nudges him down on his knees. Cutler’s only defense is an irritated “one of these days” look, but he fails at scalding and settles for lukewarm, which is not nearly as effective.
He takes his time coaxing Hal to pleasure. He’s as diligent about it as he is about his PR work, as if any of it still means something.
“Jacob is throwing a party,” he tells Hal afterwards. The back of his neck feels hot, almost feverish. Sweat beads up over his upper lip. He wants Hal to say something, to talk to him about anything, but obviously Hal’s superb “portrayal of the trauma and degeneration” would go down the drain if they have a real conversation. Cutler glances at the monitors. Hal would always rather talk at someone.
Hal communicates his messages via looks. There goes the customary post-sex “why are you still here” look. Except there was no sex, and Cutler positions himself on Hal’s table, hungry, dissatisfied and determined. It earns him a warning look that robs him of his needless breath. What the fucking hell does she have that he doesn’t?
Hal is just sitting there in his revolving chair even though he hates revolving chairs for being unpredictable little buggers. The world is going in circles. Jacob is always throwing a party. Fergus is always killing someone for sport. Cutler is always waiting. Hal is… just there. Watching the world from garish posters and elevated tribunes for awe-inspiring world leaders™.
Cutler contemplates driving a letter opener into his neck just to make Hal snap out of it. That might be fatal, but at least Hal will be there to lick off the blood. But Hal smiles at him, and Cutler is beguiled yet again and every other Broadway b-word that pertains to the situation. He knows Hal is smiling at him because the way he is sitting, he blocks the monitors from Hal’s view. For all he knows, Goldilocks could have smothered herself with a pillow already.
Hal gets up, fitting between Cutler’s spread legs smoothly, and dips his head for a bite.
--
He tells her he wants her to know what she is missing. He grips her chin, forces her mouth open and nudges the glass between her lips. Her teeth clatter against the rim. She winces as he makes her tilt her head up and pours the dark-red liquid inside.
She wheezes, trembling in shock and disgust. Her eyes are wide and stormy. He would like to pick her response apart, thread by thread, unweaving fear from hate, anger from contempt, pain from curiosity.
He releases her. She slumps on the bed with a choked, wet sob.
“Beetroot juice,” he says.
She spits in his face, spraying the skin red. He laughs. He imagines pinning her to the mattress and taking her without her permission. Such pesky formalities. He would tear a bleeding gash on her skin and force her to taste her own blood in his mouth.
But the game has rules.
She looks at him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes, and he wants her.
--
She sports a discoloured bruise on the right side of her face, a souvenir from her latest escape attempt. Her feistiness pleases Hal, but he would rather she stopped ruining her own good looks. Beauty is such a superficial concept; hers, if anything, goes much further than skin-deep, but if she has to bear anything, let it be scars. Bruises are so hackneyed.
He offers her a cigarette. She takes it and points at her face.
“I walked into a door.” She makes an unfunny reference to the days before domestic abuse spilled out into the streets and became international.
She puts out the cigarette halfway through. Seems like an awful waste.
He presses her into the wall, and she lets him. She arches up against him, and he feels the repulsion in her warring with lust, primitive and volatile. Hers is the original tale of the Red Riding Hood, all about blood and appetite.
“I want you to want it,” he says.
“You? Or this?” She bites him with her weak human teeth without breaking the flesh.
Hal slips his hand into her trousers and slides a finger inside. Eve shudders and makes a ragged sound that goes straight through him. He plunges deeper into the welcoming damp heat, probing, exploring, wanting to elicit more sounds. He adds another finger. She rises and falls wantonly; her hand clenches around him, returning the favour. The cadence of her breathing is sharp and deafening in his ear, but not nearly loud enough to drown out the thundering of her blood.
He leans in to kiss her. She inclines her head and he misses, goes down to brush his lips against her neck automatically, and she chants in a small, barely audible voice:
“Come on. Come on.”
His eyes are black and empty. He pulls away and takes a few staggering, forced steps back. She looks at him with febrile eyes, the roots of her hair moist with sweat, her skin glistening, dark stains scattered over her shirt.
She wanted him to kill her. She was hoping he would lose control like he so often does, rumour has it, and drain her dry before it even occurs to him to pour his blood down her throat.
His eyes bleed back to their natural colour. He retracts his fangs and compresses his lips.
She yells at him. Quite an impressive string of obscenities for a young girl; she could rival Fergus. But then, girls are no longer what they used to be and she was never an ordinary girl to begin with.
--
“Fuck off,” she tells him coolly. “I’m not your blow-up doll.”
He grabs her by the shoulders. He is not sure what he is about to do next. Sometimes she drives him up the wall. Sometimes he thinks he’s had it up to here with her - her everything, from the way she looks at him to the way he looks at her.
She kicks him in the shin and pushes him away and throws a plate at him. It’s disposable plastic; that’s a bit naïve for her. Hal twists her arms behind her back. She struggles and it inflames him even more.
“What, you want me to be willing?” she laughs. “Talk about dreaming big.”
She manages to free one hand and slaps him on the face, leaving a scratch across his cheek. He catches her wrist and brings her fingers up to his mouth, gently kissing them one by one. Eve holds her breath. The fight hasn’t quite gone out of her, but there is deep-seated curiosity in her. She won’t make the mistake of saying yes in lassitude and disappointment; she needs nobler reasons.
Hal sucks her index finger into his mouth, stroking the pad with his tongue. He grazes the callous skin with his fang, drawing a drop of blood. A soft sigh eases its way out of Eve’s throat. Perhaps she expects herself to fall into an enchanted sleep like the princess that pricks her hand on a spindle. She has her castle of briars at her disposal. She has her prince kneeling at her bed.
It’s a never-ending dark fairytale with the two of them. He cuts this chapter short by leaving. It’s what she wants, or thinks she wants, and he’s generous enough to let her have it. For now.
--
Cutler leans over the table, the end of his tie brushing Hal’s paperwork. Decrees, orders and verdicts. Hal coils his fingers around the distracting piece of clothing and tugs at it, forcing Cutler closer.
“You’re trying too hard, Nick.” It’s only ‘Nick’ when his mind is in the game.
“I could say the same about you.”
Cutler’s breath ghosts over the shell of Hal’s ear. It’s too easy.
“Last time you took a shine to a prisoner, you ended up running away for fifty-five years.”
Hal turns to look at him. Laughter arises and gets stuck in his throat.
“There’s nowhere to run anymore,” he says.
--
The guards tell him she refuses to eat. A hunger strike is not part of his plans. He orders to force-feed her.
He brings her a plateful of sliced peaches next time he visits. It’s been a few days; work has kept him from play. Eve accepts the peaches with proud aloofness. They carry no mockery of the apples. She eats them greedily as soon as he is out of the room. He watches her via the not so well hidden camera feed. Juice dribbles down her chin as her teeth tear into the soft flesh of the fruit.
She looks up, right into the camera, and gives it a finger. Hal chuckles.
--
He finds her reading. Ulysses; Regus must have brought it. She is wearing one of the light summer dresses Hal sent her, having grown tired of seeing her in domestic grey and resistance khaki.
The dress is faded grassy green, with a pleated skirt that reaches just below her knees. Hal fixes his gaze on her strong, slender ankles. She keeps them crossed. Maybe she is afraid he will try something. He wonders if she fully understands what power she holds over him.
He takes a seat at the foot of her bed. He watches her read; the margins are dotted with his pencilled observations and he knows she is reading them too. Perhaps she finds them more interesting than the text. Her lips look red as if she has been biting them.
“Do you like the book?” he asks.
She shifts and stands up on her knees on the bed. The skirt ripples, pooling between her legs.
“No,” she says, and gets off the bed.
--
Fergus seems concerned. He brings Hal a girl that looks nothing like Eve. Hal bends her over the table and takes her from behind, unwilling to look at her. He thinks of Eve when he kills her.
--
“A man of genius makes no mistakes,” she quotes at him. “His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
She must think it’s the way he sees himself. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn’t know.
“I had a friend,” she says. “More like an uncle really. His name was Tom. You killed him.”
“I killed a lot of people.”
“He was a werewolf.”
“And a lot of lycos too.”
Her fingers constrict around the book. She must be deliberating whether or not she should toss it at him. It’s getting old, and she doesn’t do it.
“Why?”
He considers lying. “I had a friend, too. His name was Leo. He died.”
“A lot of people die,” she parries, successfully imitating his ostentatious nonchalance. “It’s all they seem to do these days.”
“He was a werewolf.”
She blinks. He can tell she doesn’t want to believe him, but he smiles when he lies. He is not smiling now.
“Is this a fucking game to you?” she spits.
The answer is both god, yes and hell, no, but he gives her neither.
He takes the book out of her hands and gives her a clue. “History,” Hal says, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
He looks at her, trying to read her like a book, but the letters are all jumbled up and vary in size and don’t make up coherent words.
--
The only time she is in his quarters he is playing Chopin’s Prelude No. 19, the one they call Heartfelt Happiness. She is looking at his fingers flitting over the keys like she has never seen anything more fascinating in her life. Water drips from her hair; she was out in the garden when it started raining. He allows her supervised walks now, even though she has already staked two guards and tried to escape once.
He switches to Raindrop, basking in its structured oppressiveness. Eve’s eyes widen a fraction. It is pelting down outside, and heavy drops spring from beneath the keys like splashes of sound, potent and lugubrious. She seems both too fresh and too seasoned for her quarter of a century. He has lived twenty-two of her total lifespans and he still cannot understand her.
He lifts her off her feet and holds her under the hips. Her head is slightly above his and she looks down on him as she wraps her legs around his waist, their bodies pressed against each other. Her wet skin exudes the faint aroma of rain, dust and the scent of devastation mixed with the honeyed floral smell. She cups the back of his head and pulls him into a long, hard kiss. Hal places her on top of the piano and resumes his position on the stool and picks up from where he left off. Eve’s legs are spread apart and dangling over the edge on each side of him. As the music swells, Hal leans closer and plants a chaste kiss on her knee. She lies back, propped up on her elbows, gazing at him down the length of her body. He doesn’t stop playing, trailing kisses up her thigh until it becomes impossible to maintain the melody. He pulls her closer, fingers digging into her hips. She rests her heels on the keyboard and the keys make loud, mismatched noises. Hal dips his head between her legs and strokes her with his tongue. She rewards him with a grudging moan and tries to pretend she doesn’t have a swarm of butterflies in her stomach. But hey, five hundred years of practice: these things have a tell.
The room is awash with silence. Every drip-drop sound that is born here or seeps in from the outside, be it the accidental rumbling of the keys or Eve’s barely restrained moans or the regular raps of rain on the window, feels like a puzzle piece falling into place, draining away into the silence and completing it.
He pulls her off of the piano, bringing her in a harsh jerk against his body. She straddles him and winds her arms around his neck. She settles into the rhythm, holding on to him like a sunshine-bright girl of the world formerly known as human would. The sounds she makes accumulate inside him, an exquisite form of aural torture.
“Brave girl,” he whispers to her afterwards. “Saving the world from the big bad vampire dictator. What would mummy think of your methods?”
“You and I are not finished, Lord Hal.”
“No,” he says. There will have to be some changes. “I don’t think we ever will be.”
--
Cutler watches the feed from the War Child’s room, and the images settle like dust on his retina. She is not alone in the room; he can tell by the way she moves, by the way her body sways as if encircled in somebody’s embrace. Part of him is glad she still registers on camera; it means Hal isn’t done with her yet. Cutler fears what might happen when her image disappears.
He pays her a visit later, when she is alone. She flashes him a passing look of smug superiority, which makes him want to strangle her. He draws closer as one might hesitantly approach a wild animal, caged but no less dangerous. Eve takes a ragged breath. Every muscle in her body tenses.
“So now he’s sharing me with his flunkies?”
The slap is loud and heavy and it hurts Cutler’s hand more than it does her cheek. She may be used to it, but he had never hit a woman before, not unless Hal told him to and never in such a trite manner.
“I am not a flunky,” he says through clenched teeth.
She doesn’t afford him the satisfaction of seeing fear on her face.
“Our father,” she spits, “who art in heaven…”
The words clang in his ears, their pitch rising almost to the point of ultrasound. It’s not painful so much as extremely disorienting. She couldn’t manage painful if she tried, lacking the conviction of a true believer.
“Shut up!” Cutler shouts. His eyes are flashing black.
“Hallowed be thy name,” she goes on mercilessly. “Thy kingdom come…” There is little chance she might forget the words.
He bellows: “Shut up!” and grasps a fistful of her hair. They struggle; he pins her to the bed by (what he will never admit to being) a stroke of luck. Her face buried in the pillow, the words come out muffled but they still rattle around his head, noisome and blinding. He pulls his belt out of the loops and binds her hands and crams his tie into her mouth. She gags and glares at him with such defiance that he almost begins to understand why the struggle turns Hal on so much.
“You are making this extremely difficult,” he tells her. She’s not sorry.
Cutler forces her on her feet and drags her out of the room. He made sure the cameras would be off. It’s incredibly taxing to make an unwilling person walk; more trouble than it’s worth, almost but not quite.
He takes her all the way through the staff rooms. Outside, twilight slowly transitions into darkness. He whispers:
“I’m going to take the gag out now. Kindly stop praying, will you?”
She nods, not without hesitation. He releases her and gives her a nudge towards the unwelcoming night that cloaks the street behind the mansion. Haughty contempt wars with suspicion and honest surprise on Eve’s face. She takes a few steps and asks:
“Why are you helping me?”
“I’m not,” he says, and thinks: I’m helping me. But even he knows when to hold his tongue and not reference an outdated vampire action flick.
The soles of her shoes don’t make a sound as she runs into the night.
--
“I heard your last escape attempt was successful,” Hal notes. “Did you have help?”
The War Child tosses him an apple. As the original story goes, it’s the woman that seduces the man.
“Why did you come back?”
“I heard that the War Child saves the world by dying for it,” she says, and bares her jugular. “Go ahead. Let’s fulfill a prophecy.”
May 9 - July 22, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: NC-17
Timeline: 2037, AU!future as shown in episodes 4.01, 4.07, 4.08.
Summary: Lord Hal has a unique proposal for the War Child. She’s not interested but it might end up becoming her only option. [Hal/Eve, Hal/Cutler]
Warning: dub-con.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Quotes from “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, “Decades” by Joy Division, “Ulysses” by James Joyce.
A/N: Fiiiinally it’s finished! It took me ages and it’s not quite what I planned it to be, but hey, these two are way too tricky. I still maintain shirogiku writes Eve better.
LONELY RIVERS
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
James Joyce. “Ulysses”
The first time they meet face to face, Hal brings the War Child an apple. It’s a corny joke, but whoever asked her parents to name her after the first fallen woman?
She looks at him, takes the fruit and throws it at his head. He ducks, narrowly escaping the blow, and he laughs.
--
He likes her as she is, with crescents of dirt under her fingernails, with her skin dusty and pale from hiding in bunkers for years, with fierce, blazing eyes that spell a promise of his demise.
He kisses her once, and she digs her teeth into his lips hard enough to draw blood. He jerks away, laughing throatily. There is something poetic about a human biting a vampire.
Later, he walks in on Cutler, Jacob and Fergus in the aftermath of a poker game. The cards are scattered over the table. There are glasses stained with red and a half-full decanter as a centrepiece of the composition.
“Why so glum, fellows?” Hal asks. “Did Cutler beat you again?”
Judging by Cutler’s smug grin, he did.
Fergus mutters something along the lines of “never would’ve happened if Dennis were alive,” and Cutler’s smile fades a little around the edges.
It’s almost funny.
--
Hal tries every conceivable type of torture on her. He favours sleep deprivation, but the stick is getting old. Time to pick up the carrot.
“I’ve been alive for over five centuries,” he tells her conversationally. “And I think I’ve discovered this little thing about humanity. You’re never happy unless you’re miserable.” He straddles the chair and rests his elbows on its back. “When you’re suffering,” he says like he’s just thought of it, “your best traits are highlighted. Look at you. You haven’t said a word to me. You’ve been so brave, so strong. Could you have done if I’d just left you alone?” He chuckles. “Didn’t someone say that we need not to be let alone?”
Even with all the bruises, she is beautiful.
He gets up and says as he heads for the door: “Think of it as me doing you a favour.”
“Why?”
It’s the first time she has spoken to him. He briefly considers marking this day in a calendar and making it a national holiday but Mr Snow would most likely disapprove.
“Why what?”
The War Child says slowly: “Why do me a favour?”
Hal opens his mouth and finds he has no answer.
She laughs. It’s a curt, husky sound. It barely registers with both of them.
“You’re one to talk about happiness.”
It’s his turn to laugh but he doesn’t. It’s not really funny if you think about it.
“So why are you here?” she asks. Someone else asked him pretty much the same thing eighty years ago, but it’s not the same.
He just looks at her. Waiting for this to go somewhere.
Eve says: “I’ve been alive for twenty-five years. I’d like to make it longer but if you’re gonna come here every day and talk, you might as well finish me off now.”
He knits his eyebrows. “I want you to be like me.”
“Unhappy?”
He chuckles. At least she’s talking.
--
“So I was thinking,” Cutler tells him. “About entertainment.”
Hal is reading a police report about suicide bombings in the resettlement camps. Now that’s depressing.
“Obviously we can’t have television back. But what about radio? We have exactly two stations. One plays jazz music and suchlike and the other one plays, well, you. I’m not saying that it’s, you know, not interesting, but you have to admit: humans had good things in the old world. Like radio dramas. We could revive those.”
Then there is this disaster on a breeding farm in Scotland. Twelve healthy, fertile females have jumped off the roof to their death. If things continue in the same fashion, vampires will begin to starve. They would have to ration blood and maybe stake a few people.
The reports are getting on Hal’s nerves. He puts them down and glances at Cutler.
“Did you say something?”
Cutler purses his lips and just glares at Hal for a moment.
“I was just… thinking aloud.”
Hal snorts. “You do love the sound of your own voice.”
Cutler looks pensive. “You know how some people are dicks? To other people?”
“Your point being?”
Cutler flashes him an innocuous smile. “Just thinking aloud.”
--
“Is there something you want?”
The War Child glances at him, amused. She should be asking this question; he is the one that keeps coming.
He moved her to a suite some time ago. There are hidden cameras installed in various corners of the room, but he has a nagging suspicion that Eve knows about them. He doesn’t care.
The furniture is all metal and plastic. The bed rattles like prison bars, sagging under her weight.
“Have you got any cigarettes?”
The request is easy to grant. Hal reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces a pack of cigarettes. He holds one in front of her. She swings forward and allows him to insert it between her lips. Her mouth curves into an involuntary smirk. Hal lights the cigarette and puts away the lighter. The War Child makes a mock plaintive noise, as if she was really considering setting him on fire with it and he has taken this fun opportunity away from her. She lies back and watches the ceiling, exhaling smoke towards it.
Hal lowers himself on the bed and stretches alongside Eve, their elbows brushing. She could put some distance between them; the bed is narrow, but not that restricting.
He takes a pull on her cigarette.
“Bugger, I can’t even have a decent smoke,” she complains. “Without sharing it with you.”
“I have to share it with you,” he counters. “Supplies are scarce.”
“Whose fault is that?”
--
Cutler keeps Hal’s secrets, dripping with venom. Sometimes Hal catches him looking, much in the same way Hal looks at the camera feeds from the War Child’s room. Things seldom go beyond looks these days, mostly because it amuses Hal to try Cutler’s patience. Cutler won’t say no if Hal throws him a bone; he seems to be physically incapable of refusing Hal.
“So,” Cutler says, “humans keep killing themselves.” By now, it seems, everybody has realized the importance of the War Child as a symbol. Perhaps it’s all they ever saw in her. “The future looks grim for us.”
The future always looks grim. Hal unbuckles his belt and gives Cutler the look. Cutler raises his eyebrows, possibly searching the dusty corners of himself for the shriveled remnants of his pride and not finding any. Hal places his hand on Cutler’s shoulder and nudges him down on his knees. Cutler’s only defense is an irritated “one of these days” look, but he fails at scalding and settles for lukewarm, which is not nearly as effective.
He takes his time coaxing Hal to pleasure. He’s as diligent about it as he is about his PR work, as if any of it still means something.
“Jacob is throwing a party,” he tells Hal afterwards. The back of his neck feels hot, almost feverish. Sweat beads up over his upper lip. He wants Hal to say something, to talk to him about anything, but obviously Hal’s superb “portrayal of the trauma and degeneration” would go down the drain if they have a real conversation. Cutler glances at the monitors. Hal would always rather talk at someone.
Hal communicates his messages via looks. There goes the customary post-sex “why are you still here” look. Except there was no sex, and Cutler positions himself on Hal’s table, hungry, dissatisfied and determined. It earns him a warning look that robs him of his needless breath. What the fucking hell does she have that he doesn’t?
Hal is just sitting there in his revolving chair even though he hates revolving chairs for being unpredictable little buggers. The world is going in circles. Jacob is always throwing a party. Fergus is always killing someone for sport. Cutler is always waiting. Hal is… just there. Watching the world from garish posters and elevated tribunes for awe-inspiring world leaders™.
Cutler contemplates driving a letter opener into his neck just to make Hal snap out of it. That might be fatal, but at least Hal will be there to lick off the blood. But Hal smiles at him, and Cutler is beguiled yet again and every other Broadway b-word that pertains to the situation. He knows Hal is smiling at him because the way he is sitting, he blocks the monitors from Hal’s view. For all he knows, Goldilocks could have smothered herself with a pillow already.
Hal gets up, fitting between Cutler’s spread legs smoothly, and dips his head for a bite.
--
He tells her he wants her to know what she is missing. He grips her chin, forces her mouth open and nudges the glass between her lips. Her teeth clatter against the rim. She winces as he makes her tilt her head up and pours the dark-red liquid inside.
She wheezes, trembling in shock and disgust. Her eyes are wide and stormy. He would like to pick her response apart, thread by thread, unweaving fear from hate, anger from contempt, pain from curiosity.
He releases her. She slumps on the bed with a choked, wet sob.
“Beetroot juice,” he says.
She spits in his face, spraying the skin red. He laughs. He imagines pinning her to the mattress and taking her without her permission. Such pesky formalities. He would tear a bleeding gash on her skin and force her to taste her own blood in his mouth.
But the game has rules.
She looks at him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes, and he wants her.
--
She sports a discoloured bruise on the right side of her face, a souvenir from her latest escape attempt. Her feistiness pleases Hal, but he would rather she stopped ruining her own good looks. Beauty is such a superficial concept; hers, if anything, goes much further than skin-deep, but if she has to bear anything, let it be scars. Bruises are so hackneyed.
He offers her a cigarette. She takes it and points at her face.
“I walked into a door.” She makes an unfunny reference to the days before domestic abuse spilled out into the streets and became international.
She puts out the cigarette halfway through. Seems like an awful waste.
He presses her into the wall, and she lets him. She arches up against him, and he feels the repulsion in her warring with lust, primitive and volatile. Hers is the original tale of the Red Riding Hood, all about blood and appetite.
“I want you to want it,” he says.
“You? Or this?” She bites him with her weak human teeth without breaking the flesh.
Hal slips his hand into her trousers and slides a finger inside. Eve shudders and makes a ragged sound that goes straight through him. He plunges deeper into the welcoming damp heat, probing, exploring, wanting to elicit more sounds. He adds another finger. She rises and falls wantonly; her hand clenches around him, returning the favour. The cadence of her breathing is sharp and deafening in his ear, but not nearly loud enough to drown out the thundering of her blood.
He leans in to kiss her. She inclines her head and he misses, goes down to brush his lips against her neck automatically, and she chants in a small, barely audible voice:
“Come on. Come on.”
His eyes are black and empty. He pulls away and takes a few staggering, forced steps back. She looks at him with febrile eyes, the roots of her hair moist with sweat, her skin glistening, dark stains scattered over her shirt.
She wanted him to kill her. She was hoping he would lose control like he so often does, rumour has it, and drain her dry before it even occurs to him to pour his blood down her throat.
His eyes bleed back to their natural colour. He retracts his fangs and compresses his lips.
She yells at him. Quite an impressive string of obscenities for a young girl; she could rival Fergus. But then, girls are no longer what they used to be and she was never an ordinary girl to begin with.
--
“Fuck off,” she tells him coolly. “I’m not your blow-up doll.”
He grabs her by the shoulders. He is not sure what he is about to do next. Sometimes she drives him up the wall. Sometimes he thinks he’s had it up to here with her - her everything, from the way she looks at him to the way he looks at her.
She kicks him in the shin and pushes him away and throws a plate at him. It’s disposable plastic; that’s a bit naïve for her. Hal twists her arms behind her back. She struggles and it inflames him even more.
“What, you want me to be willing?” she laughs. “Talk about dreaming big.”
She manages to free one hand and slaps him on the face, leaving a scratch across his cheek. He catches her wrist and brings her fingers up to his mouth, gently kissing them one by one. Eve holds her breath. The fight hasn’t quite gone out of her, but there is deep-seated curiosity in her. She won’t make the mistake of saying yes in lassitude and disappointment; she needs nobler reasons.
Hal sucks her index finger into his mouth, stroking the pad with his tongue. He grazes the callous skin with his fang, drawing a drop of blood. A soft sigh eases its way out of Eve’s throat. Perhaps she expects herself to fall into an enchanted sleep like the princess that pricks her hand on a spindle. She has her castle of briars at her disposal. She has her prince kneeling at her bed.
It’s a never-ending dark fairytale with the two of them. He cuts this chapter short by leaving. It’s what she wants, or thinks she wants, and he’s generous enough to let her have it. For now.
--
Cutler leans over the table, the end of his tie brushing Hal’s paperwork. Decrees, orders and verdicts. Hal coils his fingers around the distracting piece of clothing and tugs at it, forcing Cutler closer.
“You’re trying too hard, Nick.” It’s only ‘Nick’ when his mind is in the game.
“I could say the same about you.”
Cutler’s breath ghosts over the shell of Hal’s ear. It’s too easy.
“Last time you took a shine to a prisoner, you ended up running away for fifty-five years.”
Hal turns to look at him. Laughter arises and gets stuck in his throat.
“There’s nowhere to run anymore,” he says.
--
The guards tell him she refuses to eat. A hunger strike is not part of his plans. He orders to force-feed her.
He brings her a plateful of sliced peaches next time he visits. It’s been a few days; work has kept him from play. Eve accepts the peaches with proud aloofness. They carry no mockery of the apples. She eats them greedily as soon as he is out of the room. He watches her via the not so well hidden camera feed. Juice dribbles down her chin as her teeth tear into the soft flesh of the fruit.
She looks up, right into the camera, and gives it a finger. Hal chuckles.
--
He finds her reading. Ulysses; Regus must have brought it. She is wearing one of the light summer dresses Hal sent her, having grown tired of seeing her in domestic grey and resistance khaki.
The dress is faded grassy green, with a pleated skirt that reaches just below her knees. Hal fixes his gaze on her strong, slender ankles. She keeps them crossed. Maybe she is afraid he will try something. He wonders if she fully understands what power she holds over him.
He takes a seat at the foot of her bed. He watches her read; the margins are dotted with his pencilled observations and he knows she is reading them too. Perhaps she finds them more interesting than the text. Her lips look red as if she has been biting them.
“Do you like the book?” he asks.
She shifts and stands up on her knees on the bed. The skirt ripples, pooling between her legs.
“No,” she says, and gets off the bed.
--
Fergus seems concerned. He brings Hal a girl that looks nothing like Eve. Hal bends her over the table and takes her from behind, unwilling to look at her. He thinks of Eve when he kills her.
--
“A man of genius makes no mistakes,” she quotes at him. “His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
She must think it’s the way he sees himself. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn’t know.
“I had a friend,” she says. “More like an uncle really. His name was Tom. You killed him.”
“I killed a lot of people.”
“He was a werewolf.”
“And a lot of lycos too.”
Her fingers constrict around the book. She must be deliberating whether or not she should toss it at him. It’s getting old, and she doesn’t do it.
“Why?”
He considers lying. “I had a friend, too. His name was Leo. He died.”
“A lot of people die,” she parries, successfully imitating his ostentatious nonchalance. “It’s all they seem to do these days.”
“He was a werewolf.”
She blinks. He can tell she doesn’t want to believe him, but he smiles when he lies. He is not smiling now.
“Is this a fucking game to you?” she spits.
The answer is both god, yes and hell, no, but he gives her neither.
He takes the book out of her hands and gives her a clue. “History,” Hal says, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
He looks at her, trying to read her like a book, but the letters are all jumbled up and vary in size and don’t make up coherent words.
--
The only time she is in his quarters he is playing Chopin’s Prelude No. 19, the one they call Heartfelt Happiness. She is looking at his fingers flitting over the keys like she has never seen anything more fascinating in her life. Water drips from her hair; she was out in the garden when it started raining. He allows her supervised walks now, even though she has already staked two guards and tried to escape once.
He switches to Raindrop, basking in its structured oppressiveness. Eve’s eyes widen a fraction. It is pelting down outside, and heavy drops spring from beneath the keys like splashes of sound, potent and lugubrious. She seems both too fresh and too seasoned for her quarter of a century. He has lived twenty-two of her total lifespans and he still cannot understand her.
He lifts her off her feet and holds her under the hips. Her head is slightly above his and she looks down on him as she wraps her legs around his waist, their bodies pressed against each other. Her wet skin exudes the faint aroma of rain, dust and the scent of devastation mixed with the honeyed floral smell. She cups the back of his head and pulls him into a long, hard kiss. Hal places her on top of the piano and resumes his position on the stool and picks up from where he left off. Eve’s legs are spread apart and dangling over the edge on each side of him. As the music swells, Hal leans closer and plants a chaste kiss on her knee. She lies back, propped up on her elbows, gazing at him down the length of her body. He doesn’t stop playing, trailing kisses up her thigh until it becomes impossible to maintain the melody. He pulls her closer, fingers digging into her hips. She rests her heels on the keyboard and the keys make loud, mismatched noises. Hal dips his head between her legs and strokes her with his tongue. She rewards him with a grudging moan and tries to pretend she doesn’t have a swarm of butterflies in her stomach. But hey, five hundred years of practice: these things have a tell.
The room is awash with silence. Every drip-drop sound that is born here or seeps in from the outside, be it the accidental rumbling of the keys or Eve’s barely restrained moans or the regular raps of rain on the window, feels like a puzzle piece falling into place, draining away into the silence and completing it.
He pulls her off of the piano, bringing her in a harsh jerk against his body. She straddles him and winds her arms around his neck. She settles into the rhythm, holding on to him like a sunshine-bright girl of the world formerly known as human would. The sounds she makes accumulate inside him, an exquisite form of aural torture.
“Brave girl,” he whispers to her afterwards. “Saving the world from the big bad vampire dictator. What would mummy think of your methods?”
“You and I are not finished, Lord Hal.”
“No,” he says. There will have to be some changes. “I don’t think we ever will be.”
--
Cutler watches the feed from the War Child’s room, and the images settle like dust on his retina. She is not alone in the room; he can tell by the way she moves, by the way her body sways as if encircled in somebody’s embrace. Part of him is glad she still registers on camera; it means Hal isn’t done with her yet. Cutler fears what might happen when her image disappears.
He pays her a visit later, when she is alone. She flashes him a passing look of smug superiority, which makes him want to strangle her. He draws closer as one might hesitantly approach a wild animal, caged but no less dangerous. Eve takes a ragged breath. Every muscle in her body tenses.
“So now he’s sharing me with his flunkies?”
The slap is loud and heavy and it hurts Cutler’s hand more than it does her cheek. She may be used to it, but he had never hit a woman before, not unless Hal told him to and never in such a trite manner.
“I am not a flunky,” he says through clenched teeth.
She doesn’t afford him the satisfaction of seeing fear on her face.
“Our father,” she spits, “who art in heaven…”
The words clang in his ears, their pitch rising almost to the point of ultrasound. It’s not painful so much as extremely disorienting. She couldn’t manage painful if she tried, lacking the conviction of a true believer.
“Shut up!” Cutler shouts. His eyes are flashing black.
“Hallowed be thy name,” she goes on mercilessly. “Thy kingdom come…” There is little chance she might forget the words.
He bellows: “Shut up!” and grasps a fistful of her hair. They struggle; he pins her to the bed by (what he will never admit to being) a stroke of luck. Her face buried in the pillow, the words come out muffled but they still rattle around his head, noisome and blinding. He pulls his belt out of the loops and binds her hands and crams his tie into her mouth. She gags and glares at him with such defiance that he almost begins to understand why the struggle turns Hal on so much.
“You are making this extremely difficult,” he tells her. She’s not sorry.
Cutler forces her on her feet and drags her out of the room. He made sure the cameras would be off. It’s incredibly taxing to make an unwilling person walk; more trouble than it’s worth, almost but not quite.
He takes her all the way through the staff rooms. Outside, twilight slowly transitions into darkness. He whispers:
“I’m going to take the gag out now. Kindly stop praying, will you?”
She nods, not without hesitation. He releases her and gives her a nudge towards the unwelcoming night that cloaks the street behind the mansion. Haughty contempt wars with suspicion and honest surprise on Eve’s face. She takes a few steps and asks:
“Why are you helping me?”
“I’m not,” he says, and thinks: I’m helping me. But even he knows when to hold his tongue and not reference an outdated vampire action flick.
The soles of her shoes don’t make a sound as she runs into the night.
--
“I heard your last escape attempt was successful,” Hal notes. “Did you have help?”
The War Child tosses him an apple. As the original story goes, it’s the woman that seduces the man.
“Why did you come back?”
“I heard that the War Child saves the world by dying for it,” she says, and bares her jugular. “Go ahead. Let’s fulfill a prophecy.”
May 9 - July 22, 2012