Kevin looked around, dazed. He felt like he was coming up from under water. How did he get into his living room? The last thing he remembered was riding the bus from Boston to Philly after a visit with Her.
Still adjusting to the feeling of being in his body, he was startled by the presence of a young, dark-haired girl. "Who are you?" he asked.
"Casey," she replied, her tone gentle but her eyes wary.
"How did you get in here?" He would lose his job if his boss knew he was letting teenage girls traipse around the service corridors. This had to have been Dennis or Hedwig's doing.
"I… live here," the girl responded.
Kevin felt a sense of dread wash over him. How long had he been gone this time? Weeks? Months? The girl standing in front of him made the latter seem likely. "How long?" he asked.
"A year and a half, give or take," Casey answered.
A year and a half? Someone else had been living his life for over eighteen months? "What day is it?" Kevin asked, dreading the answer.
"Maybe we should sit," Casey dodged, and the dread turned to ice in Kevin's stomach.
Freezing on the spot, Kevin insisted, "What day is it?"
"It's August 4th," Casey hesitated before finishing, "2018."
Kevin covered his mouth and choked back a sob as the weight of her words set in. He had lost nearly four years of his life. He let Casey guide him over to the couch, where he hunched over with his head in his hands. He took several deep breaths, letting them out slowly as Dr. Fletcher had taught him.
Once he was sure he could speak without his voice breaking, he asked, "How do we know each other?"
Casey sat down next to him, closer than he expected. She began raising her arm as if to place it on his back, but then dropped it.
"I'm Dennis's girlfriend," she said, reaching for a cup of tea on the end table and offering it to him.
He took it, grateful for something to hold onto. He took a tentative sip, discovering it was at the perfect temperature. He knew then that Dennis had been the one to prepare for this meeting. Out of all of the alters inhabiting Kevin's head, he would never have thought that Dennis would be the one to find someone. He knew Dennis's type was jailbait, and the girl sitting next to him looked concerningly young. Kevin had to mentally prepare himself for the answer he would likely receive before he asked, "How old are you?"
"Eighteen," the girl answered.
Kevin let out a sigh. Not only was the girl half his age, but the relationship had begun before she was legal. His first instinct was to try and clean up the mess his alters had made in his absence, but he realized the girl sitting next to him likely knew far more about his life today than he did. Assess the situation, he thought to himself.
"How did you and Dennis meet?" he asked.
"It's a long, complicated story," Casey began, a hint of a smile playing on her face. Kevin waited patiently for her to continue.
"He sort of… abducted me in a parking lot."
Kevin shot up, sloshing tea everywhere, and began pacing the small room. He knew it was too good to be true, someone caring for any of them. Stockholm Syndrome, that's what this was. "We have to get you out of here. We have to call the police," Kevin rapid-fired. His voice broke into a sob as he finished, "I should be locked up," tears now streaming down his face.
Casey stood, quickly closing the distance between them. Placing a hand on each of his upper arms, she began, in a calm, but insistent voice, "Hey. Everything's okay. I'm okay…"
"How can you say that?" he interrupted through tears. "I'm a monster. You have to get out of here."
"Kevin, breathe. You are not a monster. Neither is Dennis. Please, sit. Hear me out." Casey directed him back to his seat.
Kevin took more deep breaths, focusing his attention on the feeling of the now-nearly-empty cup in his hands as he fought off the rising panic. He could not afford to dissociate right now. Who knew how long it would be next time? He slowly sat back down, hunching over his tea.
"Dennis probably saved my life," Casey began, and Kevin looked up at her, confused. "Patricia talked him into abducting these two girls from my class, something about 'the impure' and 'the ones who haven't suffered,'" she said in a low, mocking tone.
Her words were doing nothing to ease his fear.
"But they were in a group of three, and as fate would have it, I decided to walk home alone that day," Casey continued, placing a hand on Kevin's shoulder when he started to get up again.
"He brought me down here, locked me in a room. He and Patricia kept going on about the Beast and how I was supposed to be an offering," she continued, staring at her own cup as she remembered. "Then I met Hedwig. He's a cool kid," she said, smiling over at Kevin. "No personal boundaries, though. He walked in on me in the bathtub one day, and I guess he told Dennis about my scars. He and Patricia decided I was 'pure', whatever that means, and Dennis agreed to let me go. Thing is, I didn't want to leave. Anywhere was better than home. He agreed to let me stay until my eighteenth birthday, and by then I had other reasons for not leaving."
"So, are people still looking for you?" he asked, setting his empty cup down and gripping the sofa cushion next to his thighs.
"No. I dealt with that months ago. I have a restraining order against my uncle, but I think it's more to protect him from Dennis now."
Slowly, Kevin's panic was ebbing. The girl was not a prisoner. She had been to the police since coming here. She was staying of her own free will, and had somehow formed a relationship with the prickliest of his alters. Loosening his death-grip on the upholstery, Kevin leaned into the back of the couch. Fear was quickly being replaced by exhaustion, and he wanted more than anything to curl up in his bed and not worry about his situation any more until morning. He looked around for a clock, and, not seeing one, inquired the time.
"It's getting late. We should head to bed," Casey replied. "Or, umm… I could sleep in Hedwig's room."
Kevin had forgotten for a moment that Casey lived here. He had never shared a bed with anyone. The room he remembered only had a single bed, and he wasn't looking forward to seeing his bedroom changed to something unrecognizable. "No, I'll take Hedwig's room," he said, tiredly.
"If you're sure," Casey replied, getting up and heading toward his-their-room. She turned around once she reached the doorway, facing him to ask, "See you in the morning?"
"I dunno, at this rate it could be another ten years before they give me the light again," he said, trying to use a joke to cover his genuine fear. The grief over the nearly four years of his life he had lost threatened to overwhelm him, but the young woman in front of him didn't need to see that.
As he crawled into Hedwig's bed, Kevin demanded an explanation from the 22 other people living in his head.
"We had to protect you Kev. You were a mess," Barry supplied.
"I was riding a bus!" Kevin argued. "What could you possibly have needed to protect me from?"
"Kevin, we know," Jade said sadly. Her words sending a jolt through him, Kevin tried very hard not to think about the shotgun he had hidden in the living room cabinet. He didn't know how much they knew, but he wasn't about to admit to anything they might use to justify shutting him out of the light again.
"It's gone, Kev. Casey found it when we were moving her in," Dennis supplied, softening his usually stern tone.
"Why now?" Kevin asked, angry. "Why let me have the light after all this time? You guys seem so intent on keeping me locked in my head forever."
"We had to make it safe for you. Casey, she's like us. She doesn't have DID, but she gets us. This life we have with her, we're safe now," Dennis replied.
Reassured that falling asleep would not mean giving up the light for good, Kevin drifted off, daring to hope that he might be happy in this life his alters had built.