Smelling Blood

(a theory)

I've had a theory formulating in my head about Barbara for some time. The theory actually applies to others as well, but Barbara is the best example. I couldn't figure out why, or even what it was for quite a while - it was unspoken, etheral even, that kind of dreamy semi-conscious sense that you're on the verge of some inner revelation, but trying to mentally grab it would cause it to disperse like smoke between your fingers. Time - and some recent conversations - have finally allowed that smoke to condense into something real. An idea. A theory of one of the driving aspects of her personality.
Barbara senses blood.
All predators have this instinct to some degree. It's the ability to sense the location of a fresh wound, or an old injury whose scars hamper functioning. Lions can use this to sense which antelope to go after; snakes wait to see the effect of their venom before moving in to finish the job; even humans, upon realizing where an enemy is tired, hurt, or injured, will instinctively strike there, like a boxer that keys on an opening cut above an opponent's eye. It is the ability to sense weakness. Some of the greatest predators have this sense attuned to amazing degrees.
Barbara is one of these. She is like a shark, which is able to sense one drop of blood in a square mile of water. Or to be more accurate, she's like a wolf - upon finding a deer in the woods, it is immediately able to sense that the deer has injured it's right leg. The wolf won't rush in to the kill. Instead, it will circle the quivering deer, formulating the best way to handle the weakness. It can smell the blood trickling down the deer's leg. It can see how the injury goes across the taut muscle, interfering with its ability to provide power to a leap or sprint. It can sense the deer's weakness. The wolf can plan its attack to take the most advantage of that weakness.
Barbara is much like that. Only she doesn't sense physical blood.
She senses a soul's blood.
Barbara has the innate ability to sense internal injury - emotional, spiritual. Personal. She senses old issues, fresh losses. She senses lost loves, lost opportunities, lost hope. She senses old scars, half-healed wounds, small cuts hiding larger problems. She senses blood.
This is even more impressive considering that most people hide their internal wounds far more than their external ones. If you slice your arm cleaning gutters and end up requiring stitches, you show your injury to your family and friends, discuss how it happened in all the gory details, and proudly show the scar years later in casual conversation. But if you're hurt by a friend that you trusted, you hide the wound, not letting anyone near it. You don't tell your acquaintances or talk about it in a casual manner. And when people talk about the trust close friends have for each other, you smile and agree, doing your best to hide the fact that the conversation is like scrubbing salted sandpaper over a skinned knee. And the worse the wound, the more people tend to hide it. Consciously or not, they compensate, they shield it out of view, they try and forget - while the wound slowly drips, untreated, or is merely half-healed, to be broken open again easily the first time something accidentally brushes against it.
Barbara can sense that.
Maybe it's the unconscious signs of an injury; the inflection of a voice, the odd change of subject, the stare that doesn't quite meet eye-to-eye. But I like to think it's something internal, unspoken, that predatorial sense of weakness. A place she can attack.
But she doesn't.

That might be the greatest reason I couldn't put words to it until now - the fact that the ability was so obviously powerful, so easily lent to attack - and she uses it in the opposite way from its intention. Sensing an injury, Barbara handles it with the utmost care, moving around the injury, delicately handling anything that could open it, and even cleaning up a bit of the dried blood around it. This when she could just as easily rip it yawningly open.
Other people have a sense of this ability. Luke, of all people, has a touch of it. So does Julie. Margaret has more than a touch, sort of an unhoned version. But Barbara's is razor-sharp, and piercing; sometimes I suspect she's the closest thing to an empath this world has. She could do it with any of her friends, her acquaintances, her lovers. It really doesn't take long for her to notice that you are limping, emotionally.
But how does she know? How does she sense that its there?

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to see that through her eyes, like the boy in the Sixth Sense - whether, when sitting in a room during a social gathering, Barbara sees people smiling, laughing, talking, all the while with blood stains on their thigh, on their chest, dripping freshly from their cheek. No one seeing any of it except her.

The first book in the Sword of Truth series, Wizard's First Rule, has a group of women called "Mord-Sith" who are basically torturers of magicians. Their ranks are select, special, and only women. The girls chosen to be Mord-Sith are handpicked at age 12, and are chosen for being the sweetest, kindest, and most gentle girls in the land. The next six-to-ten years are reserved for torturing these girls, turning them into torturers themselves. "The greatest cruelty comes from the greatest empathy," is, I believe, a quote straight from the book. Somehow, this idea sort of fits. I can see Barbara being chosen to be Mord-Sith.
It's a terrifying thing to have deep conversations with someone who you know holds this kind of power, that they know - without you divulging it yourself - the location and depth of your most bitter injuries. What would Barbara be like if she decided to use that power just for her own benefit?
Or for evil? The amount of damage she could do - purely out of spite - makes me nervous, and I'm amazed to the extent it does. One wouldn't think something like this would cause worry. But then, most people haven't had injuries out of their past dragged out of the bottom of the swamp of their emotional core, events or choices or history that is raw and painful and wants to be left alone. The ability is so unbelievable in its potency that it must be experienced to appreciate its capacity for damage. How easy to win a battle when you know all the weak points of your opponent! How easy to inflict damage when you attack wounds that have never really healed! Anyone who doubts the power of this ability has but to have your worst moments re-lived before you. It's shocking.
Maybe it's Barbara's own boundless empathy for injury that allows her to sense hurt, in sort of a backwards "she's able to sense wounds because she's the least likely to inflict them" kind of way.
The fact remains, though, that she can smell blood. It's a terrifying ability.
"Great art", Susan Sontag writes, "has the capacity to make us nervous." I believe that applies to people as well.

No one goes through life without scars. No one goes through life without wounds. And I am nervous that she can see all of mine.