TITLE: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

AUTHOR: gidgetgirl

RATING: PG

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was always curious as to Eve's past, whether or not she was really a demon, and how exactly she came to be the liason. Enter pastfic. It's AU from any explanation of Eve's past or the senior partners' existence that occured during season five, a large portion of which I still have not seen. Enjoy!

Her name was Eve. Not E or Evie or baby or honey or sweetheart. Sometimes her name was you. Sometimes it was nothing at all.

She hated being nothing at all, hated the way they could stare through her, hated the human weakness that ran in her blood. Daddy (Sir, she reminded herself, she was supposed to call him 'sir') had told her about the blood. Weak blood. Thin blood, hardly worth the money he spent to keep his brothersfrom sacrificing her to the death goddess of the day.

Only the fact that his blood ran in her veins kept him from letting them near her with their knives, their claws. His blood, immortal blood, lawyer blood, was her only saving grace, her only redeeming quality. Her mother, Sir had explained carefully, had been a mortal, a whore, and below his station. She'd had the gall to get pregnant and been foolish enough to think that she could blackmail him.

Eve's mother had been too stupid to know that a senior partner at Wolfram and Hart had thousands of dimensions in which to hide bodies.

Eve wasn't that stupid. She wasn't that mortal. She wasn't that weak. She was, she swore every morning, her father's daughter, and one day, he would be proud of her. She would serve the company, serve her father (Sir! Why was it so hard to call him sir?). She would do everything in her power to make them see her and say her name the way it was meant to be said. She would be the first woman: the temptress, the victim. He (Sir) would love her, and then and only then, she would crush him, the serpent beneath her heels

"Ugly little thing, isn't she?"

She hated her father's parties, hated when he ordered her to attend almost as much as shehated when he bid her to hide her ugly mortal-looking face from the other's whose power rivalled his own.

She hated his friends and colleaguesand their children almost as much as she hated her uncles.

She hated Wolfram and Hart.

"What thing?" The woman glanced quizzically around the room and aimed the question at the man who had just spoken. "What ugly little thing?"

"That." The man,a junior partner who was feeling quite proud of his own accomplishments,gestured towards the little girl. Her blonde hair had been combed brutally and meticulously straight, and she was dressed well enough, he supposed, but the child absolutely emoted humanness, a quality that even the human among them had shed long ago.

Eve smiled at the man.She may have been ugly, and she may have been mortal, but she had one thing that he did not. He was a junior partner. She was the child (ugly, mortal, stupid child) of a senior partner.

"Hello," she said, keeping her voice light and cheerful. She didn't narrow her eyesat the horrible man, didn't show any external signs of the small joy she felt inside as she introduced himself. "I'm Eve Hart." She paused and clarified the man's worst fears. "Eve Wolfram Hart."

Even Sir couldn't take the last name away from her. She came from the Wolf, the Ram, the Hart: her father and his brothers.

"Oh," the junior partnersqueaked, and his fear was evident on his face. Somewhere inside, Eve felt a twinge of guilt, but she was trapped: trapped in this dimension, trapped by her own mortal and divine blood, trappedby the man who owned and controlled and pampered and berated her.

Summoning herself to her fullheight, Eve delivered another charming smile even as her stomach churned and churned at the thought of whather... what Sir would do to this man if she but asked it. She was a stupid mortal, a useless child (never baby, never sweetheart), but she had everything that money could buy, everything that power could kill. A Hart, even a half-blood Hart who the others had wanted to sacrifice at birth and every year since, could not be seen with less. It just wasn't done.

"Er... well... I..." thejunior partnerstuttered. He'd had too much wine, felt too confident that he was on his way to great things, and now, he was as good as dead. But who could have expected him to know that the dirty little human half-blood was a Hart?

Eve imagined herself seeing his thoughts, and for a moment, she thought about squashing him under her heel. She decided against it. He wasn't the serpent. She wasn't yet Eve. She would allowthe man to live, even though Daddy-Father-Sir (serpent!) would have commended her for the kill.

"How old are you, sweetheart?" the woman asked, artfully trying to save her own hide.

Sweetheart. Eve took the word like a punch to the stomach. Not here, not now. Not from someone who wasn't her father.

Ugly. Stupid. Mortal. Hart.

The words rang in her head, and Eve looked the woman straight in the eye. "Nine," she said. "I'm Eve Wolfram Hart,and I'm nine."

"I'm sorry, Miss Hart..." the man stumbled across the apology, and Eve, in a small fit of cruelty, allowed him to continue to believe that his death was forthcoming. After listening to his apology, she smiled beautifully back at him, imagining the temptress she would one day become.

"I don't want to die," the man whispered finally.

"Well," Eve said in a voice that rang with false cheer, her thoughts on hermortal mother. "Life's a bitch then, isn't it?"

And with that, Eve (not baby, not sweetheart), walked toward the corner and stood in the shadows, where she'd been told over and over she belonged,thinking and plotting and imagining the feel of the serpent under her feet and longing for the day that someone would love her, just her.

She was Eve, she told herself over and over again, and her day would come.