Vicious Memories

Chapter 85 - Eva

54 Months Ago

Liam and The Doctor met Eva on the top platform of the command center. She regarded them coldly, ignoring the fact that her eyes were probably still red-rimmed, her cheeks still puffy.

"What now?" Liam asked.

He didn't know what the call had been about. Eva had told only The Doctor before fleeing back to her room.

Rage coiled through her limbs, melting into something colder, more determined. It made the image of Liam shrink just a bit. He was no longer sharply intelligent, no longer intimidating, no longer a force that could stand in her way. He was just a man, now. And he was no match for her.

I'll see this through, Eva told herself again. I'll never let sentiment get in my way - not anymore, not when I have seen the darker, uglier side of it. Horrible people didn't need redemption, they needed to be fixed, controlled.

"Thank you for meeting me," she said quietly, without inflection. On a screen to their left people in dark camoflage scurried through the jungle, climbing up and down trees. A different view showed a beach where a huge ship lay at an angle on the sand. "There's been a change. I'll be going into the trial with The Doctor."

Liam's eyebrows shot up into his hairline. "Excuse me?"

She regarded the two men before her impassively. One was a kindred spirit, for now, one of the few people left in the world who brought her anything resembling joy. The other was a man she would bend to her will.

"You heard what I said. You'll remain here and watch over things from the control room."

"That's not what we agreed on. You're to remain behind."

"Not anymore. I'm going in."

"I don't think so."

"I don't give a damn what you think. Fall in line or get the fuck off of my project."

She hadn't meant to, but her voice had tailed up at the end, echoing off the metal walls of the large room. Everyone in the command center fell silent. She felt their nervous eyes turn up to watch her.

"This isn't your decision to make," Liam said.

"Oh? Is that so. And whose decision do you think it is?"

"Mine, obviously. The director and I are in charge of this project. We've been in charge since you took our funding and signed it over to the government. The resolution of these experiments could save us billions in lost manpower. If you think that we're going to let you get in the way of—"

"So that's where you went wrong." Eva didn't even have to raise her voice to cut through his words. The entire room could sense how serious she was, and they hung onto her every syllable. "You think that you're integral to the project. You're nothing. A piece of garbage, and not even a charming one at that. You yourself just said how important this project is. So how about this? Either I go into the trial with The Doctor, or I walk."

Liam opened his mouth to yell at her, then caught himself as he thought through her words.

"See? You may not be charming, but you aren't as stupid as you look." Eva gestured at herself, then at The Doctor. "The two of us are irreplaceable. We leave and you have nothing. But you? You're just a dime-a-dozen lackey who asserts power by talking big and trying to intimidate everyone around you. So here's what's going to happen. Either you shut the hell up and agree to run the project from the compound, or I call the director and tell him I won't work another second here until he sends us your replacement. I would do the latter regardless, but it would be too much of a pain in the ass to train the new guy while we're preparing to begin the trial."

Eva shoved them in her pockets as the silence in the room pressed against her skin. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. They just looked up at Liam, waiting to see how the pieces would fall into place.

Liam's cloudy eyes cut through the air between them with as much hate as she'd seen in another human being. Any sense she'd had that he could be comfortable in any situation vanished - his shoulders were tensed up around his neck, a vein standing out on his forehead as he contemplated just how outmatched he was. Eva calmly counted the seconds until the hate faded from his face, transforming into a resignation that gave her more pleasure than she would have cared to admit.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

The Doctor looked at her sadly, knowing how much pain she was currently in. But the thing was - The Doctor was wrong. The pain he had seen earlier was gone. All that was left was an empty sense of loss with a jagged core at its center.

"Nothing," she said calmly. "I've just realized how important this project really is."

"I'm happy to be on the ground with you," The Doctor said, giving her a tentative smile. "But are you sure you're up for it? It's going to be a long ordeal, and I don't just mean physically."

"I'm prepared for it. Are you?"

"Of course," he said. "Liam and I were actually just discussing a couple of the particulars when you called. The serum is programmed to leave the subjects with memory of their own first names, so we thought it would be easier if we used ours, too."

Eva considered this for a moment. "No. It's better for us to distance ourselves from them as much as possible. We should choose new ones."

"Fine with me. My go to has always been Edgar. It's as good a name as any. What about yours?"

Memories of a smiling face and soft, compassionate eyes floated through Eva's mind. She thought about her friend - about how much she had meant, how much she would miss her, how her life would never be fully whole ever again. Beverly had been the only person in her life who had seen her at her worst, who had helped her return to her best. She pulled at her carefully woven braid, fingering the edge of it for a moment, finding comfort in the way it let her assert control over her appearance the same way she asserted control over everything else.

"Beverly, I think," she said, and saw The Doctor's eyes flash in recognition. After a second he nodded in approval. He had liked her, as had everyone else in the world.

"I thought she didn't like being called by her full name," he ventured.

"No, she didn't," Eva said, smiling sweetly. "Call me Bev."