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The light had returned. Bit by bit.
Pieces of her soul, fragmented and sewn into the fabric of the universe once more. Alighting the sickened stars. Igniting their fading flames.
It was as if every ounce of her own being had eroded, sealed in a jar and tossed into the sky. A trail following the Hail Mary, dimming with the distance that took their fragile crew away.
Leaving her isolated. Consequences nipping at her heels.
Eva didn't keel over. It wasn't in her nature, nor in the plans.
There was still work to be done. Governments to be answered.
The years passed themselves, as they always would. She was sealed away, the beating stick for every string pulled. Those strings now tied her in place, keeping her still for all the emotions of those she had saved.
She took it all silently. Offering her wrists to the whips.
It was all as expected, after all.
So when the silence wrapped her up at night, why did it start to sting? Slowly beginning at her heels; the faintest prick of emotion. It slithered up her ankle, then shot up her spine. A tremor she couldn't undo, choking her up into asphyxiation.
Doubled over, Eva almost felt the ludicrous idea her cell had been gassed. A poison to eradicate the devil herself, as so many proudly claimed.
People needed a place to point. A person for their finger to land at. A target to boldly proclaim is the issue, and how locking them up would thereby solve all the atrocities.
Sweep away a nice pile of rubbish into the tidy tray, to be safely disposed of.
Yet as the darkened cell blurred, Eva was left with the reality of her situation.
It wasn't poisoned gas.
She had barely entertained the idea for even a second, ejected it as fast as they had injected Dr Grace.
No.
Now was her comeuppance, a repercussion no secret service, no law enforcement could ever enact. It was a biological alarm, that had been placed on snooze a year, a month, a week, a day too much. One that clawed up her throat and screamed and howled to be let out, a force that seared her eyes until they felt they were on fire.
Eva sucked in a shaky breath, clutching the rim of her barebones bed.
It seemed she had run out of dismisses.
Her body was cashing in its cheque, and brute forcing her to pay its debt.
So bit by bit, Eva dropped the fight. Surrendering to the motions and turbulence of everything exploding. Her body cracked there in the darkened cell, her breath fogging what little air was lit by the lights of the intense systems keeping track of its prisoners.
It was as if the sun was reawakening in full force within her, its rays splitting every cell of her open.
They cried out in anguish as she screwed her eyes shut, subconsciously rocking bacl and forth on ber feet that her plsstered to the ground below the bed.
When she was young, she had held an obsession for leopard seals.
It was the first thing to jump to the forefront of her mind. One of the many small onstances she had snoozed those broiling emotions. The first thing that appeared in her conscience as she watched the man weep for Antarctica.
It was an obsession borne of an interest in the history of taxidermy. Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville specifically paved the path, his descriptions to others when he had first come across one.
They were viewed as cold-hearted killers. An apex predator, slayer of all that was soft and tender.
Yet Eva was fascinated by them.
Streamlined, powerful, and elegant in their own right. Misunderstood was a word she often brought up, polishing the word up as she flashed it in people's faces. They were creatures too, just doing what they needed to survive.
Many often denied their own right to be innocent. She tried to remind them how cute their pups were, how devoted their parents were.
There had been one study that had shown a mother to care and nurture her already deceased pup for twenty days afters it had passed.
Yet people only ever saw their sharpened teeth.
It was the thought she had snoozed, and strangely the one to lead the charge out of her subconscious and into the haunting darkness. Waving a white flag that this was it; there was nowhere else to run.
No meetings to hide behind, not deadlines to meet, no scientists to hunt.
She was alone.
And she was free.
It wracked her body, her own humanity. Stripped her withered soul down until it was bloody and raw; blood drying beneath still scratching nails. Clenching teeth and bile threatening to capsise her sanity and leave her at the depths of the ocean she had been travelling over.
Despite it all, it tasted so deliciously sweet.
Like a warm sticky date during a heavy snow storm. The texture gooey, heat travelling through your body and reminding you it was still there. You were still in it; a body though imperfect, still so imperfectly human.
Eva wept there in that cell, each precisely constructed wall sliding down to the ground.
So when she saw the light return, years after escaping that cell, she finally smiled.
Her sould was expended.
Scattered into stardust.
So that the light could return.