Chapter 2: I am a rock
A
winters day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing
from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent
shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
Once upon a time she'd been a police officer, and they'd called her kitten. She hadn't liked the nickname, but she hadn't been able to shake it either. She'd object, the squad would laugh, and they continued to call her Kitten, explaining that it was because she was so cute. The name had lasted until the day they had all died in Cheddar.
Perhaps if any of them had known about her past, they wouldn't have called her that. Or maybe they would have anyway. After all, even kittens have claws hidden away in their softly padded paws.
No, Seras decided. If the guys had ever found out about her being orphaned, and the circumstances around her being in that situation, they wouldn't have called her Kitten. They would have called her Loony, or something like that instead, maybe Butch if she had been lucky.
I've
built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may
penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes
pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I
am an island.
In the orphanage, there wasn't much in the way of nicknames that weren't descriptive of the child in some way. Seras could remember there being Big Billy, Greasy Jenkins, Pigtail Harriet, Tall Jan, Jonny Freckles, lost of other kids as well. She hadn't interacted much. She'd been dubbed Sad Queen Victoria – a reference to the Queen Victoria, who had spent her life in mourning for her husband.
If nothing else was said in favour of that orphanage, it gave the kids a good education while they were there. The food hadn't killed them either, and the beds were warm enough in the nights.
Seras had been allowed to shut herself off from the other children though. All she knew of socialising, she knew from watching those around her, rather than trying it for herself.
Don't
talk of love,
But I've heard the words before;
Its sleeping in
my memory.
I wont disturb the slumber of feelings that have
died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I
am an island.
When the couples came, Seras had tried to be nice, like the other children, but she hadn't been able to do any better than merely polite, and when they found out about her parents, and what she had done, any spark of interest was quickly snuffed out. No one wanted to adopt a child that could be problematic. Certainly not a violent child, however innocent looking she might be.
Who knew if next time, she would kill someone who merely looked like the one who had murdered her parents? Or worse, if there was no reason at all. How could anybody bear to raise a child who had killed a man with a fork?
Seras had stayed at the orphanage until the age of consent, when she had been told to find a job and an apartment for herself and leave the orphanage. She would have to make it on her own in the world. With a little help from the orphanage staff, she had an apartment and a job at a local supermarket within the week.
I
have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my
armour,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one
and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
She had seen the ad in the paper one day. The police academy was accepting applicants. She had immediately thought of her father. In a heartbeat she went to enrol. Once her application had been accepted the drilling had begun. Morals, ethics, law, correct practices and ways to approach witnesses and suspects. How to fire a gun. How to know when it was better to not use said gun.
What to do and what not to do was who she had become with the police training. The stricture forbade any deviance from what was deemed correct behaviours. Then she had become a vampire, and she had to drink blood. A problem morally and ethically as she had been drilled, a deviant behaviour that was not to be tolerated. It was wrong, bad, not normal.
How could she be a vampire if she was being reminded of who she was as a police woman? A woman who didn't deviate, who didn't cry, who suffered through being called Kitten all the time. A woman who clicked her heals together and saluted properly. A woman who cleaned a standard officer's piece in a minute flat. A woman who had hunted down a man who had drained the blood from a village, and had seen her whole squad die there because of the deviant one.
And
a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.
Could her master not see that she needed to be called by her own name by somebody after all these years? That as long as he called her Police Girl she would be reminded of when she walked in the sun and ate shepherds pie. That was a time when, if she heard about someone getting their kicks drinking blood, she would have volunteered to be on the squad to hunt them down and kill the sicko.