ABOUT KARVA

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TRIGGER WARNING: references to assault of a minor, mentions of abortion, attempted suicide, racist npcs, the whole shibang. this is literally a massive train wreck and i'm so sorry

just down the street from your hotel,[break]
i stay at home with my disease

His funeral is in the fall, and through it all, you stand hard as a stone. A testament to your strength, perhaps, bred in bone and unleashed for the world to see even at such a tender, young age. That's what your mother says to the others in the aftermath, anyway. Manipulate and redirect. It's better they think you strong than unfeeling so early in life, for even with an ending so similar, one is a “blessing” and the other a “curse”. What child, after all, feels nothing at the loss of their beloved father?[break][break]

You don't remember him. Not really. There's a silhouette of a man where you believe he must have been, a whisper of words too quiet to make out, too nondescript to pinpoint on any one person. There are always stories of how he would hold you in his arms or bounce you on his knee or curl up around you like a fortress of stone to keep out night terrors of gargantuan spiders and bullies with ten thousand arms – but they're words, not images. He's an idea to you, not a person. You cannot love the idea of someone. You cannot miss them when they're gone.[break][break]

Your mother's spindly uncle tries to console you. (What is there to console when you do not grieve?) “Your old man went down fighting. You should be proud of him.”[break][break]

Hatred infects their eyes as they speak of them, tan-skinned, thousands of miles away, victims, too, of the Gulf War, but not to your mourning family. Understanding, as with most things, fails you, but you nod your head because you're a “smart” girl, “good” girl, and maybe, someday, you'll take up his place and fight for your country and your "freedom".[break][break]

(But you can't love an idea of a human. And you can't hate the idea of a monster who has never done you any harm.)[break][break]

ain't this disposition familiar, darling?[break]
well, all monkeys do what they see

A well-behaved child is achieved through very simple criteria. It's easy, once you understand the formula. Simply:[break][break]

Smile with mother, but never without. Thank her for her kindness, but never beg for more. (Your father brought in money through his work, his spoils of war. You don't ask for more because there is nothing to afford more; you want as every child does, but you hold your tongue still, and they wrongly think you selfless for it.)[break][break]

Work harder than all of your peers, in school, in chores, in life. Two adults, one living, one dead, brought you the greatest gift of all, and as their spawn, you must pay them back with every ounce of your effort for bringing you to life. (Perhaps it's not duty, however, but necessity. Has Mother the strength to cook your meals, wash your clothes? Maybe she did, back in those days when Father was more than the hollow space at your table, in your home. These days, you think it takes all she has to look you in the eye.)[break][break]

Speak only when spoken to. Say nothing that would wound your late father's pride, nothing that would draw unnecessary attention, nothing that does not improve on silence.[break][break]

The last of these is the most important. It must be, for it is the one you are reminded of the most. Never kiss and tell, the other children chant to each other on the playground, skin blotted purple, skirts pulled up high, hickies on necks, all imitations of the world outside the schoolyard. They're always in such a hurry to grow up – I want to be a doctor, I want to be an actor, I want to be someone – and they think they know everything about the adult world, the ins and the outs, that they'd meld right in if only they stood just five inches taller. They don't, of course. You've seen it with your own eyes: what alcohol does to a man, the primal urges of the human race. Willing or not, you've been dragged into it, and it has swallowed you whole.[break][break]

He touches you first when you are only twelve. A child – a child, tight-lipped, never wishing to be a nuisance. There is reverence in the way his hands (twice the size of your own, enough to engulf, enough to devour) glide across first the skin of your arms, then of that which he reveals, inch by inch, from beneath your prettiest Sunday dress. Untouched by age. By war. You hadn't thought twice in following him, because he was your father's best friend, strongest ally, right-hand man; what would your “old man” think if he saw the both of you now?[break][break]

“So you can cry after all.”[break][break]

Lips pressed to tear-stained cheeks. Your sobs are silent; your body is numb. You pinky promise not to tell a soul – for your mother, your poor, poor mother, how would she handle the news? – and he leaves you, broken like a discarded doll in the spare room.[break][break]

you've got an attitude of[break]
everything i've ever wanted

You count the days – then the weeks – then the months – then the years.[break][break]

Maybe he'll tire of you, you think helplessly. Maybe the mental scars he leaves in his wake will bubble on your skin, and he'll see the battlefield carved across the canvas of your back and remember his world, remember his place, stop yearning for a country that does not fight tooth and nail for every battle it can choose and the pristine children it would breed. Sometimes, you speak of the atrocities, praying that reality will snap back to him just long enough for him to tear himself away. There's always something marring his body, seeming to multiply like rabbits, each one a mark that sketches him ever closer to his grave.[break][break]

“Did it hurt?” you whisper, hoarse, fingers pressed to an old gouge, no long red or raw, but absolutely real.[break][break]

“Didn't feel a thing,” he deigns to reply.[break][break]

I wish you did, you want to say, scream. I wish the shrapnel would've split you in two.[break][break]

But you don't. The way the world views you both is decidedly very warped: you, iron-willed, unshakable, and the man who tells you he “loves” you, a brother-in-arms, a hero, a saint. In reality, you're nothing but a scared little girl – and only good men die young in the field.[break][break]

Summer nights pass to fall, and something in you changes. You've been playing a part for so long (dutiful daughter, stoic and unbothered, innocent and untouched) that the line between visage and act begins to blur. No longer is Karva the Lionheart a character you find yourself slipping into; she becomes your skin, and you wear her to bed at night just as you wake up in her, animatronic machine in faux fur of an animal in the morning. And in these same days, something else changes beneath that skin, right to your core: a sickness in the morning, a lump in your stomach, double lines on a pregnancy test you bought with shaking hands and the entirety of your allowance at a convenience store. You're only fourteen years old.[break][break]

It's better your mother doesn't know, and for once, you are grateful for her characteristic ignorance. If she'd asked, you would have had to construct a lie. Curiosity killed the cat, sullied the lion, shattered the image of a perfect little daughter who always did as she was told. The reality: two years spent in that awful, awful room. Even if you told the truth, who would believe you now?[break][break]

You'll kill it, you think, this leech you've contracted from a man you wish would rot, before any other can dare to question or doubt – and yet you hesitate, just for a moment, and that single moment proves to be your undoing. Where would you go? Who would help you? Would it hurt? ...What would it be like to be a mother?[break][break]

(You go back to the room – you struggle through it alone – it hurts, so much, so much, you think death has come for you before the father, and it's all just so unfair –[break][break]

(And you hold her in your arms for the first time, brush crimson-soaked blonde hair from a face contorted in sobs, and think that maybe, just maybe, it's possible to love the idea of a person after all.)[break][break]

You never tell him of his daughter, just as you never tell the others of all the things he does to you in this room that has become the setting of all your nightmares. Most certainly, he would take her from you. Worse, still, he could take her from the world in its entirety. Perhaps he would run out of use for you if he knew, mark you as damaged, throw you away. If it is to protect the little girl you keep hidden away from the rest of humanity, however, you will sit in that room in silence and take it as you have a hundred times before. You can forget it all, forget him when you sit at her bedside.[break][break]

In a perfect world, you would have been able to keep her. Cherish her. Lead her hand-in-hand into the future.[break][break]

The tears you did not cry for your father spill in a torrent, then, when you're forced to leave her behind.[break][break]

i've got an attitude of need[break]
so help me stay awake, i'm falling -

Winter nights bleed into spring mornings, and he finally, finally, tires of you.[break][break]

His "love" has hardened you in ways irreparable; your skin no longer infant soft to the touch, your reactions to his hands on your body no longer small and frightened and encouraging. Perhaps he finally thinks of you as little more than a mannequin propped up in the shadows by the time he's had his fill. Twenty-one - an adult beneath the crushing eyes of the law, able to sip freely of wine and beer, and with nine years of bending over backward for corruption incarnate for no reason other than the virtue of silence - and you think yourself no better than a mannequin. There is no more youth for him to lust after, to chase. He's sucked it all and then some from your unwilling frame.[break][break]

"It's been fun," he says with all the whimsy and air of a friend departing for the east and promising to think of you the whole while - and then he's gone, just like that, leaving you broken and empty and numb.[break][break]

You should be happy.[break][break]

(No, you should be livid.)[break][break]

Instead, you don't feel much of anything at all.[break][break]

asleep in perfect blue buildings[break]
beside the green apple seas

A good daughter does not worry her mother, particularly one who grows steadily more manic with each raising and setting of the sun. A good daughter does not beg for more than can be given for her, and a good daughter does not need support once she has finally come of age. She breaks no rules, says no evil, does no wrong. You are a good daughter. You must be. (It's all you have left.)[break][break]

You do not tell her, of course, that you sleep in your car in Walmart parking lots, and you do not tell her that you can't even remember the sensation of a full stomach. It is nearly impossible for you to hold a job (customers mistake you for rude, co-workers murmur when you lash out at physical content, you will not step foot in a storage room of any sort for any reason), assuming you are capable of securing an interview or, heaven forbid, an actual position at all. No one has any use for a broken doll past its prime. In order to survive, you scrape together what you can from those who would entertain an unwanted toy before, once more, tossing it to oblivion.[break][break]

Yet, you are ready; you are fine. Heart of iron, bones of steel.[break][break]

(No, you're not. You're not, you're not, you're not. You are on fire, heat melting iron and steel into nothing until you're little more than a molten puddle in the dirt. Silence is golden, but you see him again with a little girl at his side, and all you can see is yourself: twelve years old, innocent and trusting. You were fine to suffer for others, but you will not watch him wreck and ruin again.)[break][break]

No one sees you suffer, and so it never happens. If a tree collapses beneath the weight of the world amidst an empty forest with no one to bare witness, did it ever really fall? Did you ever really fall? How can you choose your eggshell words to communicate to your mother some thirteen years late that humanity failed you and you were too frightened to combat it with words? It matters not which ones you pick, nor does it matter how you string them up for her, pretty words for an ugly, ugly man. "Don't talk that way about him," she snaps at you with the same vehemence as she would have if you'd slapped her open-palmed outright. "He meant the world to your father.[break][break]

"I thought you were better behaved than this."[break][break]

Judgement weighs a dead man's trust against the profanities of a woman better seen than heard, and in her eyes, the choice is clear.[break][break]

The two of you don't talk very much after that.[break][break]

i wanna get me a little oblivion[break]
try to keep myself away from me

Spoken like a mantra is a tale that deafens itself piece by piece in your ears the more it is told and the more it is neglected by those who fail to listen. Your story is vivid and dense, decorated with dates and places and during the Christmas gathering, you know the one, when your brother broke his ankle and no one was around to see him pull me away, but the more the others paint it as a fairy tail, a desperate ploy for attention and sympathy for a girl who cannot self sustain, the more hollow it rings. One by one, members of your family turn their heads from you, some before you've even the chance to open your mouth. By the time you have officially made your attempt press charges, the neighborhood has already reached their personal verdict. Karva the Lionheart – Karva the Harlot.[break][break]

Arthur is the only one to believe your tale. Credit, maybe, to a lack of prior knowledge and “heroic” bias; credit, maybe, to tears rarely seen that pull themselves from you when you tell him and no one else of the child you have missed for a decade and more. Regardless of reason, he listens, even when those you should have been able to trust most would not. He listens. He's the only one who will.[break][break]

Together, you wage war against a titan: aim for the throat, strike him down before he can harm another soul. You, the victim. Arthur, your defender. He finds you a lawyer who will translate your words of stone into a monologue made soft and fleshy and moving, a veritable assassin in law who has won a thousand cases before, felled a hundred monsters before, moved the hearts of jurors more stalwart than these, and yet -[break][break]

And yet -[break][break]

Not guilty.[break][break]

There is nothing in the English language you can pull together to describe how it is you feel when you hear the verdict, and never before has the castle of stone built to become your visage felt more bone-deep than it does when the gavel bangs and the crowd evaporates between wooden pews and patchwork sunlight. He smiles at you as you pantomime movement down the steps – the same smile he's given you a thousand times in secret, warm at the lips but cold, cold, cold in the eyes. His wife doesn't look your way. His daughter stands too close to his side. (Does she know, better than every cruel-eyed adult on these same steps, that you spoke the truth? Does she know what it feels like to be bent over and broken in two over and over and over again? You could have saved her if she did – if she ever would. But you didn't.)[break][break]

You don't realize you've been followed out of the court and through the city until you're leaping off the pier into oblivion, and Arthur is calling your name and grabbing your arm to retrieve you back into reality.[break][break]

Together, you end up in the water, anyway, taffy-tongued and waterlogged, but you swim back to shore with him instead of letting the ocean carry you off to a salt water grave.[break][break]

i've got bones beneath my skin[break]
there's skeletons in every man's house

Miraculously, even in the shadow of a failure you could not forgive yourself for or forget regardless of how hard you may have tried, things get better. The smell of flowers becomes as much a beacon in your life as the nostalgic scent of your mother's cooking or the familiar, well-trodden path out through the woods when you're taken on as a humble florist with no starting knowledge of how to care for plants or the stories they can tell by simply existing. You're able to move from car to apartment (Arthur throws you a 'house warming party', but you aren't sure it can be called that when there are only the two of you there). Meals are humble, but consistent. Your family never quite feels like your family again – but then, you're not missing out on much there.[break][break]

Pages torn from your calendars one by one. Wounds still red just begin to scab over. The television airs its regularly schedules tragedies, and your breath comes out shutter stocked.[break][break]

Headlines broken into pieces in the latest hours of the evening: war veteran and local politician and found in his kitchen by his wife flashing in strobe across screen and the surface of your eyes. It's enough to tear a war cry from the vile. Retribution. Today, however, too, you are the spitting image of the tin man.[break][break]

Without laughter – without tears – without anger. You flick the television off with little more than a shuddering breath and bid Seattle good night.[break][break]

beneath the dust and love[break]
and sweat that hangs on everybody[break]
there's a dead man trying to get out

In the end, it is as simple as this: The law failed you and all of the little girls scattered across the city the day that jury decided on its verdict.[break][break]

Doctor X did not.[break][break]

By all means, you should not have found your way to his doorstep, a little lion woman with a gaze that could kill and hands that could not. You've never dabbled in criminal acts before. Even when your howling belly cried for it, you'd refused to do so much as swipe an extra meal from the 7-11s nearby. How, oh how do you find yourself crawling through a den of evil, then, stopped only in the eye of the storm where righteousness bathes itself in blood?[break][break]

(Although – maybe it wasn't you who found your way here at all. Maybe it was him all along, having heard your story and knowing your grief when even you could not feel it. Maybe it was him all along, pulling you in, closer, closer, until even you, Karva the Lionheart, Karva the Pacifist could no longer deny his siren call.)[break][break]

“I've never held a gun before,” you tell him when presented with the firearm. When he instructs you what to do with it, you think sickly of the day you lusted for the ocean's black depths and the dead man who may as well have pushed you headfirst into the waters of the Pacific. You think of Arthur, too: how he'd stopped you then, but how he could not stop you now. If the chamber decides it is your time to go, then who are you to complain? He may very well be happier without you.[break][break]

“You won't have to again after this,” the Good Doctor X replies easily. His smile is anesthesia before an amputation, and you let it guide you, you and the rest of America beyond, to peace.[break][break]

“Let us begin.”

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