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Every time they asked, Nikki always said the same thing.
No, I don’t remember anything. I woke up and there was blood everywhere, and I was so terrified I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know exactly what I’d done until I looked around.
Two of those four things were true.
She kept to herself, kept her head down, because it was easy, and more importantly, because it let her exist somewhere that wasn’t inside of herself. It had worked, sometimes, back when she’d had nothing to do but watch and scream and scream and scream, but most times everything had been so suffocating and she’d been so afraid of being snuffed out completely that she hadn’t wanted to bother with disconnecting herself.
But now her body was hers. It did what she told it to do. It cried when she wanted to cry, which was often, though it was less and less now that the pain was gradually becoming more numb across weeks. It did not walk backwards, and it was not smeared with blood, and it had her real face again, and it had more goals and ambitions in life than the one single purpose it’d clung to with vicious loyalty.
She should have been happy about it. At the very least, she supposed, she wasn’t quite suffering anymore. Wasn’t it what she’d been begging it for? Freedom? Wasn’t that the one thing she’d held tight to as her sole comfort, the idea that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel?
But Nikki did not want to feel much of anything anymore. It would have been so much easier to get through this if only she let it drift by. She may have preferred the lily-white hospital walls and the bleach of fluorescent lights to cold concrete and barbed-wire fences, but it was, importantly, still a prison all the same. Even if they wanted her to think otherwise. Maybe, she thought, she could hold out until she had visitation privileges. Seeing her parents would only make her feel ashamed, but she needed it. Desperately.
The psychologists still treated her as though they thought she was guilty; one of the first things they’d decided to ask her when they brought her in was, do you regret it?
And oh, did she. Wasn’t that a question? The guilt for Ian and Sarah, no matter how much she’d once hated them (and maybe even still hated them) too for not noticing, was always there; the guilt for not having been able to stop herself. It still ate away at her in pieces to watch them die over and over again every night in her sleep.
But with Bear…Nikki was caught somewhere in between different things: guilt for watching him die— watching a man she’d thought of as a friend (Jesus Christ), once, die in her arms; anger he hadn’t suffered nearly as much as she’d suffered; relief that he had gone and died in the end anyways; jealousy that she hadn’t even gotten to be the one who really did it. They all blamed her for it anyways, even though they knew he’d done it to himself; if only she’d gotten to throttle him with her own senses and her own hands until he went cold and blue instead of him going out easily, the fucking coward.
The nightmares were often, and she always seemed to remember them; they were the same sorts of things, herself trapped in limbo, staring out at the world, unable to move a finger no matter how hard she strained. The darkness ate away at her, static filling her ears. There wasn’t a noise she could make that wasn’t a wail, and even that bounced off the walls and came right back to her.
She woke from them screaming and shivering more often than not; it would sometimes get bad enough that they’d have to sedate her or strap her to the bed or manhandle her to the bathroom when the chunks of vomit came spilling out all over her thin bedclothes. But then she’d remember she could scream, at least, and sometimes it brought her a little relief. Sometimes it brought her none at all. Sometimes she was even certain she’d been whispering kill me kill me kill me please before she’d woken, though she couldn’t really be sure; the way the nurses looked at her with pity was at least somewhat of an indication, though.
But she did not scream and thrash when she wasn’t trapped in the memories; she stayed still and she stayed quiet and she tried, very, very hard, to be good. Maybe then they’d stop looking at her like she was a ticking time bomb. It wasn't much in the way of hope.
They let her write, at least, which she considered to be a small mercy; it was supervised, and all they let her use were prison pens, but it was better than nothing. And she had all the time in the world now.
She wrote anything that came flowing out of her, stories and journal entries and the deranged ramblings of a madwoman; she tried to hold herself back a little, just to avoid as much conflict with the orderlies as was possible, but it was very difficult not to create something grotesque when that was all that tormented you, day in and day out. Women in sensual lingerie and bloodied faces they did not own; breasts touched with clammy, diseased fingers in unbidden intercourse; hearts bursting from chests; eyes devoid of their occupant; a half-shell of a girl lying broken and bruised inside a prison cell the shape of the human brain.
Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they thought she was strange. Much as she tried to stay passive and avoid contact, it might have even backfired on her— they looked at her and all they ever saw was the jealous, borderline bitch who killed her friends and made her boyfriend overdose. The psychologists would pull her in for questioning with her stories in their hands; they’d say we’re going to increase your dosage, Nikki, and these things you’re fantasizing about aren’t normal, Nikki. She wished she could tell them that she wasn’t fantasizing at all, that she’d felt all of it, all of the black corrosive evil bleeding into her mind and suffocating her, burying itself in her womb, but she said nothing because she doubted they’d believe her anyways. Why would they?
Would they?
She didn’t know. But something encouraged her to try. There was one moment where— somehow, for some reason— she thought part of it needed to come out, one way or another. It had already eaten away at so much of her to keep it inside, filling her to bursting with its ugliness, and thus it came seeping out, little by little.
It took some difficulty to say it out loud. She’d never done it before, even for as long as she’d known it was true— which was from the moment it happened. And it did terrify her to wonder how they’d treat her if she was honest about it. But she had to tell someone.
“He raped me,” she said to one of the psychologists, one day, after a long stretch of unbearable silence. Her voice somehow stayed steady; there was some small degree of satisfaction in being so blunt about it. “He fucked me while I was…um, what was the word? Dissociating. I wasn’t in control of my body, and he knew it, but he kept going anyway.”
It was all true, technically. Just not quite the way she would phrase it in the privacy of her own mind.
The psychologist frowned and tilted her head. She was pale, and white-blonde, and Nikki did not entirely trust her, but she had very little choice in the matter.
“Was this a regular occurrence,” she said carefully, “the rape? Did he abuse you in other ways?”
Nikki swallowed. “It didn’t happen often, no,” she said. “There was…emotional abuse, I think. He…I begged him to get me some help, and he shook his head and told me no, made it seem like I was blaming him and he was being hurt for it. He didn’t want me to get better, or really be me again, ‘cause…because then he wouldn’t have been able to control me anymore.”
It was too late now to try and convince anyone Bear had coerced her into the murders; closer to the truth, sure, but she hadn’t made the argument in court and now she probably never could. The story had long since settled, and this was what she was now. But she could allow herself a few glimmers of an opening sometimes.
The psychologist scrawled a few notes down and nodded very deliberately, lips pressed primly together. “Thank you for telling me, Nikki,” she said evenly, and that was all.
Nikki wasn’t stupid. She knew it was more about keeping her docile than it was about helping her. It felt good, very good, to have been able to tell someone, but at the same time she began to worry if everyone was calling her a slut or a whore the moment she left the room. And it was not entirely unfounded, either.
Once, when they’d probably thought she wasn’t listening, she had seen a few of the nurses loitering in the hall, talking indistinctly between themselves.
“It’s hard, sometimes,” one of them said, “to imagine that such a sweet thing could do something so awful.”
“That’s why she’s here,” another said, “and not in prison. Too fucked-up and sick. Maybe she’s lying to you. Maybe she could just get worse again. Who knows?”
“If you ask me,” a third voice said, “I don’t think she’s really crazy. I mean, she doesn’t act like a schizo.”
“I don’t know,” said the second again. “Have you heard her screaming at night? I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to kill herself yet, honestly.”
Nikki did not listen in anymore after that.
She had already grown tired of bearing witness to a world that hated her.