Title: Inside, Outside
Author: Alexandra Bruderlin
Fandom: Dark Angel
Characters: Eva; Jondy.
Prompt: Insides; Outsides
Word Count: 618
Rating: PG – M. Rather graphic and gruesome.
Summary: Inside Manticore, they don't understand why this haunts them… and they have never been told this is wrong
Author's Notes: Couldn't come up with a creative title, but I'm happy with this piece. Written for fanfic100 at livejournal, using prompts from the table.
I. Insides
The tests are something that haunted them from infancy through to adulthood. The blades, the needles, the pliers, the tubes… inside Manticore, they don't understand why this haunts them; their DNA dulls the pain and they have never been told this is wrong. When Jack falls, Max sees him opened up, sees him stain the coats of the doctors scarlet and can smell the heavy, metallic scent of blood in the air.
It's Eva whose mission goes wrong, and little X5-378 is rendered to a corpse on the lino in front of Eva. 378 is a patchwork of burns and blistering, blood and raw skin, her eyes open and congealing. Tiny rib bones have pierced her flesh. And Eva's face is grey with horror. She wants to explain that the charges were faulty and blame should not be placed upon her. It is Jondy and Zane's fault for not checking them properly.
But Zane is shaking with the horror of seeing their sister's corpse on the grey lino, and Jondy is already in the infirmary, raw skin and burn blisters and blood. And Eva was in charge; in control. But she wasn't, and she will face the consequences; she sees that in every line on Colonel Lydecker's face.
Lydecker stands the twelve year old girl next to the operating table, 378 spread eagled before her. The doctors and scientists crowd around with their tools, like vultures on a hot day.
Eva swallows hard, and as they peel the skin back from 378's corpse, she realises after eleven years, she is finally seeing inside of Manticore. And she wants to scream for the horror she has always known but hasn't been able to name until today.
II. Outsides
"Hold still."
The tattoo needle drills into her skin, purple and scarlet ink sliding underneath her skin. Jondy holds her arm out like she's some sort of princess, with a casualness the tattoo artist finds almost disturbing. She taps at the old cell phone in her other hand, sending messages.
The tattoo artist shakes his head and continues his work. The girl before him is unlike his usual customers and just like them. Her hair is badly dyed black, and her face lined heavily with make up. Her clothes are tight and worn, like every other teenage girl's in these times. But there's a hard look in her eyes that makes her the first girl, the first teenager, he wouldn't like to meet in a dark alley.
Her requests are detailed but simple. She pays in cash pulled from one of her combat boots and slinks away from the shop, and he shakes his head.
She inspects his work in the light from a neon sign in the street. For every scar that didn't heal, she has a tattoo; she can cheapen the body they gave her, the body that tax dollars paid for. Bullet wound, there are words wrapped around one wrist. A butterfly where her neck and shoulder meet for the fractured tibia she had when she was seven. She has blue stars on both hips (the thick scar that runs down her back) and a slinky black cat silhouette on her back for the burns that killed her sister.
Desecrate the temple, she smiles, and pulls a cigarette out of her pocket, lighting it up, and walks the street, trying to think of the art that will depict her whole existence as a raw wound from Manticore – turn her pain into art, into markings. The cigarette won't kill her, the alcohol won't compromise her, the STDs won't infect her. She's her own personal graffiti, and she wears her tattoos like the battle wounds they really are.