Death in the Shell

If you ever need me, I'll be there, little one.

Those were the final words Eve heard in her head as she began to wake up from her grief induced nap. It had not been twelve hours since Whitney and Tibble asked for her badge due to her being suspected in the murder of Officer Ellen Bowers. It had left her very traumatized to the point where she let out a good cry on her husband Roarke due to the realization that her job was in danger, no thanks in part to a corrupt cop who kept fucking up her investigation all because that cop had some sort of ax to grind with Eve over some false conspiracies.

They knew Eve's firing of that officer was procedure but they also knew that the way she fired her was a little out of hand due to her threatening physical harm against Bowers before her death. So they had to suspend her to avoid scandal by showing favoritism. Nobody in Eve's circle agreed with that suspension, not even her husband Roarke, who was up half the night deciphering Officer Bowers' doings right up until her death.

"Roarke," Eve whispered to herself. A year of being married to one of the most powerful man, on or off planet, was spending time trying to help clear her name of any wrongdoing. She imagined that he was talking to his attorneys about what options were available to get her job back.

But the flashback of what really happened after killing her father, of how she was raised and trained by Motoko Kusanagi of the Ghost Organization, actually made her contemplate if getting back her badge was even worth it. Throughout the investigation into the murder of sidewalk sleepers in New York, her mind began to wonder if the conspiracy was a lot more global than she thought.

If you ever need me, I'll be there, little one.

Eve heard those words in her head again, always sounding the same as if she were back to the days when after a day of training with the Ghost Organization, Motoko would tuck little Eve Dallas to bed and whispered those words before she went to sleep.

"Well Motoko," Eve whispered to herself again. "Perhaps your little one might really need you this time."

"You've slept long enough, Eve. You can't go on hiding in here."

Eve didn't notice that her husband Roarke was in the sitting area, sipping coffee and watching her. Briefly her mind flashed back to last night and how Roarke told her that Mavis Freestone was in the mansion and didn't want to leave until Eve was ready to talk to her.

"Is Mavis still here?" Eve asked

"As a matter of fact, she is," Roarke replied with some surprise that Eve remembered last night.

But that surprise was nothing compared to Eve suddenly shooting up out of their bed as if she were late for school.

"I need her out of here, Roarke. Now."

That stopped him just short of filling up her coffee while topping off his own.

"What?"

"There's something that I need to tell you, Roarke." Eve said not noticing that her cop eyes were starting to return. "What I'm about to tell you is something that only you need to hear, we can't let Mavis know, nor can we let Feeney, Mira, Peabody or McNab know. Not one single friend of ours is to be allowed in on this secret."

It gave Roarke such a huge jolt to hear his own wife plead with him to actually send one of her best friends away from the mansion. But for Eve to give him reasons why she needed Mavis gone, told him that it was definitely a serious secret.

"I'll just let Mavis know that you're going to have a meeting with one of my lawyers and that you can't be disturbed. We'll meet in my office."

"No Roarke, not your office and not my office either. What I'm about to tell you requires no electronics whatsoever, I don't want some hacker finding a way to hack your systems while I tell you my secret."

This shocked Roarke again, Eve knew that he had improved security on his mansion ever since the recent incidents with Liam Calhoun and Jaime Lingstrom had happened in the past year. 'So why does this conversation need no electronics?' Roarke asked himself, but maybe he'll get an answer from Eve in the one room he knows where there were no electronics whatsoever.

"We'll meet in the library then."

Eve nodded and nothing more was needed to be said as she picked up her bathrobe to take a shower.

***

It didn't take Eve long to finish her shower and dry off in the drying tube. She also was quick in dressing up in a fresh pair of clothes, the clothes may not have been what Roarke would've preferred seeing her in, but that wasn't important to her. What was important was her letting him know that there may be a way for her to get back into the case that she was so rudely dragged out of.

So when she walked into the wide expanse of the mansion library, Roarke had already ordered the shades closed, lights off and cameras disconnected and found him sitting on the couch with nothing but two lamps already lit on the table. Just those two lamps already gave the room the illusion that Eve and Roarke were about to sit down around a campfire.

"I lied to you about something, Roarke."

"About what?"

Eve knew that the next words out of her mouth were going to be like a dam about to burst, "About my foster care history."

"Excuse me?"

"I wasn't raised in foster care, Roarke, I was raised by a cyborg who was the leader of a secret agency sanctioned by the United Nations."

"A cyborg?"

Eve nodded "Does the name Motoko Kusanagi ring a bell for you, Roarke?"

Then realization hit him, "The Puppet Master, The Laughing Man, The Individual Eleven...that Motoko Kusanagi?"

Eve nodded again. "She was the one who found me in the alleyway in Dallas, Roarke, she was the one who saved me."

It was a good thing Roarke was sitting down on the couch in the library, he did however need a drink so he reached for the coffee cup on the table. "How long were you under her care?"

"Ten years," Eve held up a finger to silence Roarke's next question. "She was kind to me, Roarke. All of them were kind."

"All of them?"

"Motoko, Batou, Saito and Ishikawa. They raised and trained me into the cop you see now."

She began to tell Roarke of how Motoko found her curled up in a box in the Dallas alleyway, how it was Motoko who took Eve to the hospital and stayed with her throughout the three day coma. Eve told him of how gentle Motoko was when she wept out her grief, as if she were being comforted by an angel. Eve shared with Roarke every single detail of what happened in the hospital, all the way to Motoko giving Eve her name and her offering of training.

Motoko didn't kid Eve about the training being tough, but the training was always done with positive encouragement and great rewards, money and chocolate being the main rewards. She had great teachers to accompany that training; her favorites being Batou, Ishikawa and Saito. The only downside to her training was they wanted her to have cybernetic enhancements to her brain so she could communicate with her teachers with just her brain. But after talking with Motoko, it was decided that cybernetics would not be required, the main argument being that Eve still wanted to be human and she wanted to be a cop with the NYPSD, it was a decision that Motoko fully supported.

"But the reason I never told anyone, Roarke, not even you," Eve said at the tail end of her story. "The foster care thing was just cover. It wasn't like anyone was going to believe me if I told them the truth, but I owed Motoko that much, I didn't want to compromise her safety or mine. You think I got enemies when it comes to being a cop, mine are nothing compared to Motoko's enemies, there's no telling what would happen if they knew that I was raised by her."

She gave Roarke some room to absorb on what she just poured to him. So far Roarke was thinking about how this revelation was possibly making him see Eve in a different light. It took ten long minutes of him looking at the woman who he called his wife, the woman who just opened up a serious secret to him, a secret she shared with no one.

"Why are you telling me this now, Eve?" he finally asked.

"Because there might be a way where I can get back into this case, Roarke, but I need her help."

Roarke nodded and slowly got up from the chair and to Eve's surprise offered his hand to hers.

"Do you have a way to contact her?"

Eve's eyes went bright as she accepted her husband's hand. "As a matter of fact I do."