Helena | District 10 | 17 | Tatiana Maslany [TW]

Helena never knew her mother—or her father, for that matter, but she never thought about him much, anyway. Her mother, though, she did wonder about—though she quickly learned not to pester the workers at the orphanage with questions. They were overworked and underpaid and the orphanage was crowded. They also, Helena quickly learned, had little patience for children.

The women who ran the orphanage were firm believers in spare the rod, spoil the child, and they used both corporal punishment and confinement—-liberally and extensively—to control the children in their care, from the oldest among them down to the babies taking their first tentative steps. Those too young to walk were left in their cribs, to cry or not as they pleased, and rarely dealt with, except for feedings and diaper changes, but even they often found themselves on the receiving end of someone’s temper if they were difficult, and most learned early to be still and quiet, at least when the sisters were in the room.

The orphanage was in one of the more run down areas of District 10, and the staff there were all women. They referred to themselves as sisters, and followed a cobbled together version of various old rules for convents one of their founders had uncovered long ago. They taught the children what they knew of the Bible and it’s teachings, and the saints and all the rest, with the understanding that it was all to be kept secret. When the inspectors came by—which they did so infrequently that some children spent their lives there and only saw them once or twice—the orphanage was, by all appearances, a shabby but smoothly running completely secular institution. All the children knew what would happen if they let anything slip that would suggest otherwise.

Helena lived there til she was twelve years old, though by then she spent more time in the orphanage cellar than she did outside of it. An unusual baby, she had grown into a peculiar toddler and an even odder child. She was mostly silent, only really speaking to a companion nobody but her could see or hear. When she did speak to anyone else, she repeated herself—or them. She was small and plain, and seemed to take no notice of the temperature, preferring to wear the same few dresses again and again, no matter if they were suited to the weather or not. She was equally particular about her food. If it's texture was not either puréed like custard or mousse, or as tough as tanned leather, she struggled to eat it. She was equally contrary--so the sisters said--about taste, and insisted on food being spicy or salty or sweet, and would turn her nose up at the bland, simple fare she was offered. Many nights spent hungry--and many more spent sleeping on her stomach--passed before she would eat anything, no matter the taste or texture.

A similar battle was fought over her clothes. She resisted giving up the few dresses she’d taken a liking to, and would squirm away from hairbrushes, stockings, wool garments, or anything with high collars, seams, or a snug fit. She preferred loose dresses, or shirts layered one on top another in the winter, and soft, light fabrics like silk. The only heavy material she would tolerate was fur, and her favorite fabric was suede. She insisted on going about barefoot because of the seams in stockings, and more often than not went about without shoes as well--because wearing them without stockings just gave her blisters.

The sisters said she was obstinate, disobedient, willful and wicked, and they set about breaking her will. It took time--and more whippings than she could count--but at last she learned to swallow her discomfort and wear the clothes she was given.

She was unusual in other ways, too. She rarely looked people in the eye--though she sometimes would look at them in the face--and when she did remember, she stared with an intensity that could be frightening. She rarely spoke as well--half because her habit of plain speaking was punished as insolence, and half because once she’d cycled through her repertoire of stock phrases, she was at a loss. If someone else could carry the conversation she managed alright, but for the most part, after a scripted exchange of pleasantries, she fell silent. Facial expressions and body language meant next to nothing to her, though she taught herself to puzzle out the most common ones. Still, she was mostly guessing, and often wrong.

She was easily overwhelmed by the world around her. It was too bright. It was too loud. It was too full of people moving and talking and wanting things of her.

She was untidy and disorganized, often losing everyday items. She would forget instructions, forget chores, forget rules. She slipped into the sisters’ offices and hid beneath their desks, spying on them and sneaking forbidden sweets. One such escapade got her dunked, head first, into a solution of ammonia and peroxide, then shut up in the cellar for her trouble. Helena decided she liked the shock of blonde hair the punishment had left her with, and so she kept it.

The consequences of these struggles was more punishment. Her ears were boxed for her refusal to look at people when they spoke to her. Her mouth was scrubbed with pungent soap when she was insolent. She was whipped and shut up in the coal cellar when, overcome by sights or sounds or her emotions, she threw herself to the floor, pounded her fists and howled. The day she went after one of the nuns and tried to gouge out her eyes, Helena became a permanent resident of the cellar.

A few days after her twelfth birthday, a man came to the orphanage and took Helena away. He called himself Tomas and the woman who lived with them sometimes Maggie. He told Helena that she was special, that she was chosen for a mission, that she was pure and holy like an angel—but one that avenged rather than brought tidings, that slew abominations rather than comforted. He spent the next several years teaching her—she learned to assemble and disassemble weapons, to hurt with her hands as well as a knife or a gun. She learned to be still and silent like a mouse—and deadly as a snake. Sometimes, when he was pleased with her, Tomas even called her a little mouse. When he wasn’t, he called her other things—things she quickly learned not to repeat back, except to herself inside her own head. Tomas, Helena realized within days of meeting him, was bigger than the nuns, stronger than the nuns, and he was not afraid of her, as they were toward the end. The beatings he gave her left her with scars.

Worse, in Helena’s mind, was the cage, an enormous metal dog crate he shut her up in, usually after a punishment, but sometimes just because he was tired of your foolishness. Helena hated the cage more than the beatings Tomas gave her—and so she often found herself locked up there. Tomas said she had to learn but sometimes, Helena wondered if he’d simply grown tired of her at last. She knew better than to ask him that out loud of course, but the thought kept her up nights, regardless.

After a punishment, Tomas made her atone—not with the buckle of a belt, as he did, but with a razor blade. Helena had hurt herself since she was small, biting or scratching herself during a meltdown, or cutting into her skin to make the tangle of guilt and sadness and wrongness go away for a while. The sharp sting of her own teeth or nails or a bit of pilfered glass made everything quiet in her head, at least for a time, made her feel as if she’d truly done penance for whatever she’d done wrong, and so it was easy enough for Tomas, once he’d caught her doing it, to teach her to be more intentional about it. Helena began carving feathered wings into her back, to remind herself that she was meant to be an angel.

When she was fifteen, she began hunting down the others—the science devils Tomas told her about, the abominations who wore her face. She killed one, then two, then three. On the third kill, she got caught—though thry never found out about the other two, and ended up deciding it was a robbery gone bad—and the resemblance was simply not spoken about. She wound up in the Detention Center where she stayed for seven months. She was young and stupid and sloppy and she got herself caught. When Tomas finally fetched her home—well, she never spoke about what happened afterwards. The neighbors all noticed that the odd girl who lived in the old ramshackle house didn’t stir from it for two weeks, but only a few asked, and they were told that Helena was ill, and was recovering, and that was that. Soon enough she was outside again, curled up in the chest high grass of the back yard, mumbling to her tattered Barbie dolls, and nobody thought anymore about it.

Just after her sixteenth birthday, she resumed the hunt once more, and has remained on her mission ever since.