Hello! I know, I know, Bananun is horrible. But is it really? I think it might actually be pretty genius. This may be a long one, but I hope you decide to stick it out, if only to see Sister Mary Eunice get super miffed and try her hardest to impress the intrepid Miss Winters. My heart breaks every time I think of all the abuse poor Lana suffers, and I feel like she deserves a break, even if it's only in fanfictionland. All standard disclaimers apply. Nothing is mine; it all belongs to Mr. Murphy et al. Rated M for language at this point. Reviews are the stars in my sky.


The real reason that Lana had shied away from writing fiction had to do with an inability to buy in. Wendy had asked her about it once, strong jaw dripping with moonlit shadows as they lay in bed. Lana's response was predictably rational: there was too much reality to tell without involving imagination. The real skill in her craft was taking the facts of life and molding them into a narrative. Fiction was nice, but fiction was to journalism what stories about geese were to a Pulitzer, and she wasn't interested in second tier story-telling. She didn't want to admit to her lover that she had a hard time with unreality. It seemed like something that would be unattractive. When other children had listened rapt to the adventures of Dick and Jane, she had been scrutinizing her teacher's expression, intonation, and clothing, searching for clues about her life away from the classroom. A snoop, someone had called her. A snoop, but not a poet. Creative, but not inventive. The script-writer but never the composer.

Lana's ability to become an observer had saved her in Briarcliff. Scraps of paper occupied her hands and mental drafts of her expose swept through her thoughts long enough to dull the day to day horrors. Her cell at night was a bullpen of dissociative coping. If she could file away the events of the morning, she could make it through the afternoon. If she could organize her thoughts about conversion therapy, she could anchor herself in the strength of her own beliefs.

"Say it out loud." A voice commanded in the darkness.

Lana's head snapped up and her hands trembled in horror as the shadowy silhouette of Sister Mary Eunice lolled at the bars of her door. She hoped the volatile nun was speaking to someone down the hall. She wasn't.

"I have a particular fondness for poetry, especially the naughty kind. Say it out loud."

"I'm not a poet, sister. I'm a journalist." Lana's overworked adrenal glands managed a burst of productivity, and she felt her already grimy body squeeze out a fresh coat of sweat.

"A journalist tells the facts, Miss Winters. I want to hear what it feels like, and I'm looking for something a little more nuanced than a scream." She paused and breathed out harshly. "Don't make me come in there." Keys jangled at the door and Lana began speaking as quickly as she could.

"It was torture. Burning. Scalding. My mind, intangible and separate from my grey matter, was somehow brought down to Earth for the sole purpose of clipping its wings."

"Excellent." Breathed the shadow. "Tell me more."

Tears collected in Lana's eyes. Her last refuge was being disassembled. Her thoughts were no longer her own. "The softness of my former life is humbling. My drapes, my front door, the mailbox, colors, pine cones, even the hot metal of a car engine seem friendly now. The bread in the bakery has more of a future than we do. The fact that I call us, the inmates, a 'we' is a failure. It's all a failure." She began to weep quietly as the silver needles of Mary Eunice's interrogation raked through the carefully compartmentalized memories she had locked away in order to survive. They fluttered in and out of her subconscious at an alarming rate: The scrape of leather restraints, the smell of her own body, Wendy's bad jokes, the stray cat who yowled on the corner fence down the street.

"Delightful." The nun praised with a giggle. "Delightful. Tell me more about the girl." She paused. "Wendy." She practically purred her name.

Lana snapped into focus, the miasma of misery settling instantly. "No."

"No?"

"No. You've twisted the knife enough for tonight."

"I think you need a soundtrack for your pain, Lana Banana. You'd have quite the movie."

"I can only guess what the song would be if it were up to you, sister."

Mary Eunice's pale fingers wrapped around the grate and her lips were suddenly visible, backlit and burgundy. "Sister Jude was an innovator when it came to petty torture. I admire her technique, but it's a dead end. It kills creativity. I like to think of myself as a director, not a zookeeper."

"Is that right?" Lana glued herself together with anger and rose from the bed to approach the other woman. "I thought you imagined yourself to be the star."

The nun's shoulders raised slightly, "I'm whatever I want to be. And I don't need your mouth to broadcast your thoughts. I'll do it myself." She squinted through the door at Lana's fuming, shadowy silhouette and spouted a narrative. "Under other circumstances, her face would have been beautiful, but the dissonance between her words and her features was jarring, singular, unappealing." Her eyes widened. "Lana, you don't think I'm attractive?"

"Fuck you." Lana spat, balling her hands into fists. "I don't know what you are, but get out of my head."

"Too late. I've found my new favorite game."

Lana fumed, all vulnerability replaced with rage.

Mary Eunice let out a delighted laugh which served to ignite the howls of the other prisoners. Their screams and questions rose and fell against the cement as she spoke, "I had convinced myself that I knew who the enemy was, that the men and women who trapped and tortured me were suffering from a combination of misinformation, religious fervor, ignorance, and personality disorders. I know I was wrong. I know I have always been wrong. There is something evil here, and it doesn't stem from any Earthly power." Her face pressed against the bars with the enthusiasm of a child, an expression that Lana remembered from her first few encounters with the pale, blonde, sister. "Lana, this is genius. I had no idea there was so much going on up there!" Her blue eyes were wide with excitement. 'Keep going, my dear. You're very good. And don't worry about editing. I want the rawest prose you can muster. Give it to me raw, Lana." She purred.

"Fuck you." Lana repeated, completely unnerved by the twitchy joy that sparked across her adversary's face.

The coyote yelps of the other inmates swelled with Mary Eunice's grin and she turned abruptly, letting out a mocking shriek before bringing a nightstick down to rattle across the bars of the cell across the hall. "You're all a bunch of animals!" she cried. Her face appeared again in Lana's window, menacing and severe. "I'll be listening, Miss Winters."

Lana didn't realize that she was holding her breath until she heard the echoes of Mary Eunice's retreating footsteps swallowed up by the screaming. She couldn't sleep. She had known the walls had ears, but she hadn't been prepared for this. The scratchy sheets stuck to her oily skin and she began to re-sort her thoughts, calming herself with the familiar ritual. She asked herself what Wendy would have done, and remembered her lover's positivity with fondness. She could almost hear her voice: What was the one thing that went well today? It asked. She sorted through her day, searching for a little gleam of hope, anything that could help her get through the night and into tomorrow.

Today, she thought, for the first time in my life, I was called a poet. She dropped the thought into a little box in her mind and admired it. It looked good, like a little golden chain. A poet. A poet. A poet. The thought stayed with her, tucked away next to her other dreams: the Pulitzer, her freedom, the knowledge that somewhere there would be justice. She had never been one for making up stories, but the supernatural abilities and radical transformation of Sister Mary Eunice had her filling in an awful lot of blanks, and for the first time since her admission to Briarcliff, she was able to keep herself distracted by a puzzle that she didn't have the first clue how to solve.