Kasdaye/Poor Little Crazy Girl

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

A preliminary psych evaluation, paid for by the state. They’re going for an insanity defense. Her attorney thinks it’s a lock. No one who talks to her for more than five minutes could possibly fail to see exactly how insane she is.

The psychiatrist doesn’t ask the cuffs be taken off of her. She tried to knife a hero in the back; the cuffs won’t ever come off again. He’s been told the black color of her hair is natural. She gets it from an Italian family line. Like her eyes. They’re brown. There are no circles. She has no trouble sleeping, not here, not anywhere. When she’s tired, she sleeps.

He lights a cigarette, not because he smokes but because he knows she does. He holds it out to her. She leans forward and the guards tense, but she just takes a drag and leans back, exhaling. She doesn’t thank him. She saw. She wanted. She took. His part of the process was incidental.

He turns on a tape recorder and doesn’t ask if she minds. If she minds, she simply won’t talk. This is their third session. He doesn’t know what’s in her head, but he knows what isn’t.

“So, Amy. How do you feel?”

She was five and trapped in a car, crammed against a tree. In the front seat, her father was dead and her mother was moaning. Sometimes she was crying. Sometimes she screamed. Now she was moaning. Amy squirmed into the front seat. Her mother screamed. She didn’t stop screaming. Amy’s hand slipped in a puddle of blood on the cupholder between the front seats. She fell, hit her chin, she cried. Her mother kept screaming. Shh, mommy. Shh. Don’t cry. Don’t scream. Shh. She put her hand over her mother’s mouth. Blood flowed from her mother’s nose onto her small hand. Her mother was too broken to thrash much. She stopped screaming first, then stopped moving.

She was ten and living with her grandparents. They didn’t take her to the counselor’s office anymore. They thought he was too permissive. Post-traumatic stress disorder, he had said. Possessed, her grandmother said. They took her to priests. They took her to pastors. They took her to faith healers and tent revivals and self-appointed reverends. The last one told them the girl had no soul. Her soul had passed in the car wreck, and the fallen angel Kasdaye now inhabited the girl’s body. Kasdaye, the angel of demonic blood rites, he who had taught abortion to mankind. Kasdaye could only be driven out through the mortification of the flesh. They called her Kasdaye while they beat her. Pain was interesting. Pain could not be escaped in silence or by disappearing into herself. Pain could find her anywhere. Pain could control her. Pain became her master, and she loved it.

She was seventeen and having difficulty in high school. Her grandfather still whipped her for her poor attendance and poorer grades, but his belt could no longer inflict a pain that could drag her from herself. She was aware that other people clustered together in groups, but she didn’t. She wasn’t aware of wanting to, or of not comprehending why they did. They simply did. She simply did not. She wore different clothes, skirts and shirts and sweaters that didn’t fit. Her hair was lank and straight. She understood other people did things differently. It didn’t seem important. Then a boy offered her a cigarette. Someone offered to give her something. That seemed important. She took the cigarette. Inhaling burned at first, and that was new. She kept trying. It was a trick she mastered. The boy walked her home, talked to her, gave her another cigarette, and lifted her skirt. He pushed her down. These things happened.

She was twenty-one. She had a knife. It was a good knife. It went where it was told, and she had money. She didn’t like it when people screamed. She didn’t like blood. They had money. She saw the money. She wanted money. She took the money. It was easier to kill people than to argue with them over it, or fight them for it. She had learned to kill from behind, because it was easier. Money brought other things; cigarettes, liquor, food, a place to stay. Sometimes men would give her money for sex. If she wasn’t in the mood to kill for it, she agreed. Sometimes she would kill them after if they didn’t give her enough money. Sometimes they would hurt her. She let those men live. It wasn’t easy to bring Pain to her, and she missed it. She liked the men who could make Pain remember her.

She was twenty-five. She was in Paragon City, because when she killed too many people in one place, they called police in. She had to move, and that was annoying. This was a big city and there were many killers. She could get what she wanted here. Then she saw a hero, her first. He looked like Power. She saw Power. She wanted Power. She tried to take Power. She followed him. Her knife was a good knife. She didn’t understand why it had failed, only that it had. He turned, and there was Pain in brilliant excoriating fire and choking ash. She did not have something she wanted, and she gained a new master: Hunger.

Then there was a prison. Then there were cold walls and handcuffs and no more Pain, only Hunger. There were questions that could not reach her, screams that could not touch her. Then one man came, and he brought her cigarettes. By the third visit, she knew he would have cigarettes. She would have killed him and taken them, if her hands weren’t cuffed. The guards would have beaten her, and there would have been Pain. But he gave her what she wanted. He gave her the cigarette. And her hands were cuffed. She didn’t kill him.

“I’m fine.”