Summary: Eve Seven repeats a cycle that came before her. Pre-XF and missing scene. Written for the Harem Obscure Woman 500 word challenge.

NEW Little Girl Nevermore 1/1
Deslea R. Judd
deslea@deslea.com
Copyright 2002


DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Sure, just keep my name and headers.
RATING: PG.
CATEGORIES/KEYWORDS: Angst. Post-ep (well, pre-ep).
Sally Kendrick.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: Eve.
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 only 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 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.

They can be fixed. I believe that.

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

END


Author's Note: Well, I went a little bit over. It's
540, 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 Teena's birth mother did at the
end of the episode. Instead, she tried to protect
them and the world from them, and she died for her
altruism. That's the kind of mixed-up context I was
trying to capture here.