Mad Ghost of War
Ketti:New story! Let me warn you, this one's going to be a bit different than my usual ones. For one thing it's going to have less of a day-to-day feel to it, more like month-to-month. You'll see why! I don't plan on this one being too terribly long, but I still hope y'all like it. *heart*
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Seras Andromeda Victoria, cheerful six year old, teacher's pet, and beloved angel of her apartment complex, was having a nap.
Naps are a good thing for kids, and especially for the parents who take the chance to relax. William and Selene Victoria were doing just that on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, enjoying a small drink while watching the romantic comedy Selene insisted on renting. So imagine their surprise when their little girl started screaming bloody murder and calling for them in sobs. "Mummy, Mummy!"
They both jumped to their feet and rushed down the hall to find their daughter curled in the fetal position, blankets a tangled mess as she screamed and sobbed. Before they could even step foot in the door, she went still. Alarmed, Selene jumped into her daughter's room and scooped the little girl up, "William! She's not breathing! Call an ambulance!" She screamed as she lay her baby down and plugged her nose, breathing into her daughter's mouth like she was taught, slender hands moving to the child's flat chest to press down on her ribs, trying to force her to breathe again.
William Victoria, a veteran police officer, nodded and high tailed it to the phone, calling in the emergency before returning to Seras' room to find Selene sobbing as she continued the chest compressions. Seras was turning blue in the face and he knelt down to breathe for her while his wife fought to keep her alive.
Just as the paramedics burst into the house, the tiny blonde gave a weak gasping cough and both parents cried with relief as her little chest moved on its own. "Thank god," Selene whimpered, nearly fainting from relief as she watched her precious baby be loaded into a stretcher and carted off, Will pulling her to her feet so that they could follow by car.
Seras was in a coma for three days and none of the doctors could figure out why. When she woke it was to a screaming fit as she sobbed that her parents were dead. Selene had been getting lunch at the cafeteria at that moment, and the nurse on duty had to send out a call for her. When she arrived, having run the whole way, panting and out of breath she found her daughter an inconsolable mess of tears. "Seras, baby!" She cried, approaching the girl, but it was if the six year old couldn't hear her, she just continued to scream that she wanted her mummy back.
"I'm here, love, I'm here! Shhh, shh," Selene crooned as she got within arm's reach of her baby girl, only to jump in surprise as the child turned wild eyes on her, that looked more animal than human. Seras snarled and lashed out, little fingernails raking lines across her mother's extended arm. Then, as if the incident had never happened, she burst into renewed tears and started to scream her lungs out.
Selene stared at her daughter, hurt and confused. What was wrong with her little girl?! She tried again to approach her, but the tiny six year old became like a beast possessed and bit her hard enough to taste blood as Selene Victoria wrapped her arms around the struggling cherub turned demon.
"Do something!" Selene cried to the nurse who was standing there like a stupid limp, and the woman jumped into action, grabbing a syringe from a nearby drawer and plunging it into Seras' arm. The wild thing that stared at her from her angel's eyes went limp and those enraged blue gems were concealed by fluttering eyelids.
Selene sobbed and cradled the comatose form of her little Seras to her chest. "What's wrong with her? What's wrong with my baby?"
Over the course of the next week Seras was in and out of what the nurses called 'fits', but her parents could only watch in mounting horror as their daughter rejected them, even as she screamed that she wanted them back.
"Back from where?" Selene moaned as she wept over her sedated child, William stood in the doorway stone faced, his brother Alpheus joining him a moment later. "Selene," Alpheus began, voice kind, "It was the coma, the doctors told you as much. Some wires got crossed in her brain."
Selene glared at them both, as if blaming them for her daughter's condition, and Alpheus' expression turned hard like his brother's, "Face it, Selene, the girl needs help. Therapy. I know of a lovely place out in the country, I've given donations there before and they'd be sure to treat little Seras carefully. She's broken, Selene, and needs professional help to put the pieces back together."
"Get out!" Selene screamed, tears running down her face, "Both of you!" She sobbed as she held her daughter to her chest, stroking the little girl's hair and murmuring soothing nothings into her ears.
William broke down into his own tears once the door closed and Alpheus embraced him, trying to console his brother.
It was inevitable. Seras broke her mother's wrists in one of her fits, and that was the final straw. The little girl was sent to Saint Sandru's Recovering Home for Troubled Young Persons to undergo intensive mental therapy. The doctors and patients preferred to call the place Sanctuary for short.
The six year old woke up in a new uncomfortable bed, surrounded by new blank walls, and she started to cry silently. Where am I? I want my Mummy…
Her tummy hurt, and she curled into a pitiful ball of sadness as she waited for someone to come bring her some food. What felt like hours, but could surely have been no more than one, passed before an orderly peeked into the room to find the patient awake. The kindly woman smiled, brushing her silver streaked chestnut locks back from her cheek as she tapped the door in warning before opening it. Seras gave her a hollow look before whimpering, "My tummy hurts."
The nice lady clucked her tongue sympathetically and hugged the girl who huddled into the warm embrace, sniffling. "Can you walk, luv?"
Seras tried, but her tummy hurt so much that she nearly fell over. Tsking at the sorry state the little girl was in, the nurse picked her up and balanced her on one side hip. Seras held on tightly, little face solemn as she was carried down the hall to the cafeteria. "What would you like, luv?"
Seras pointed to the desserts, the tapioca pudding in particular and the lady chuckled before nodding and grabbing a banana. Sitting her little charge down, she sliced the banana with the plastic spoon and stirred some of the pieces in before handing Seras the cup with a smile. "You can call me Auntie Jubi, luv. I'll be taking care of you, don't you worry." Rustling the little tyke's blonde locks, she watched as the eager child devoured her dessert. Such a shame the pretty child was here as a patient, Dee thought to herself, the girl was a little angel. But looks could be deceiving, she knew that first hand from working with the troubled children that frequented the halls, and she made it her business not to enter the ward for the teenagers and young adults. She had one too many scars from former patients turning violent to wish to go back there.
Seras finished every last bite, and even ate the remaining banana, sucking it up like a vacuum before looking around curiously, the cafeteria was empty. Auntie Jubi escorted her to the play room and Seras smiled to see other kids there, though most were older than her.
She made fast friends with a quiet blonde who wore glasses, and the two were soon building a grand structure of legos. The multi colored castle grew and grew until they ran out of the colored blocks. Seras reached out to rearrange some of the blocks, to form four turrets at each corner, and the other child, whom she was told to call Jezzy, clapped her hands in delight.
As it turned out, Seras and Jezzy were both in first grade, and they were taught together in the little classroom between therapy sessions.
After a few months of quiet behavior – though they could not get to the root of the problem to fix it, no matter how many times they tried to dissect Seras' story of how her parents were murdered despite them still being very much alive – they noticed Seras talking to herself, to children that didn't exist. When asked, Seras calmly replied that they were her friends from the orphanage, and that she defended them from bullies, so they liked her.
First grade became second, and third, and still Seras could not accept that her parents were alive – though at this point they had separated – and when confronted about it, she'd throw violent tantrums, and claim not to remember them the next morning. It was this violent streak that kept her in Sanctuary.
The little blonde got perfect scores on all of her tests, and it was clear she couldn't be cheating with their watchful eyes during exam time. She was a model student, a model patient, a little angel. But there was still something Wrong with her.
There was more than one occasion that the little girl had to be pulled out of fist fights, if she saw any child taking another's toy, she got overly protective and violent.
Third grade turned to fourth, and fifth, and the doctors were absolutely baffled. They tried a trial period of sending her to public school but it failed horribly when some poor sot teased her and the sweet little pre-teen became a raging monster. She'd broken the boy's arm, and the teachers that broke it up swore she was trying to kill him.
Seras blossomed into a lovely young lady with perfect manners and constant grins, despite her – apparently untreatable – condition. It was clear, despite the many attempts to reintegrate her back into society like many of her friends, Seras was too unstable. Even the medications they used didn't work, they only left her a drooling zombie.
When Seras was fifteen she was moved into the young adult's ward, and she cried as she hugged her Auntie Jubi goodbye. "Will you come visit me?" She begged, and her long time friend gave her a smile and patted her cheek, "I'll try, luv. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll make plenty of new friends in there, too."
It turns out that she didn't/ She hid it well, but being surrounded by the vicious teenagers only made her condition worse. She started to talk less and less, though her grades never slipped, and none of the orderlies ever caught signs of any fights. There wasn't a scratch on her, but she was deteriorating.
Eighteen loomed ahead of her, and her family never visited, though her mother wrote to her under the guise of an aunt, and it seemed like there was no hope for the girl. She couldn't be released into the public, something terrible would happen, either to herself or the unfortunate soul that triggered her.
So she became a permanent resident.
One day, about four months after her eighteenth birthday, Seras was seen wandering the halls with two plushies in her arms, and one of her shoes in her belt. The plushies were a cinnamon brown cat - and Seras had added a paper police hat and badge with a matching gun belt around it's furry waist – that she called Simon and a white wolf – with matching accessories – that she named Eddie. She went everywhere with them, talking about police work and chattering about how she'd make her father proud by being an officer just like him. A few weeks later she added a pair of paper chains to her velt, like handcuffs, and she started slinking around the halls and peeking around corners before entering a room.
She explained, during one of her monthly sessions, that she was an officer in training and that Eddie and Simon were her senior partners, teaching her the ropes. She hadn't booked anyone yet, but she was still optimistic about her future as a police woman.
Everything was relatively normal from there, until one fateful day; June 14th, 1999, Seras wakes everyone in the ward screaming bloody murder.
One of the night shift orderlies, a stern man with a no nonsense attitude, rushes into the room just as Seras barrels past him, her dolls forgotten on the floor with their heads torn off. Seras lead them all on a merry chase as she shrieked some nonsense about zombies, and she wove drunkenly around invisible obstacles until she stopped dead and stared blankly into space for a moment. A group of staff was surrounding her when she flung herself into a corner and whimpers, holding her arms out in front of her. "Eddie? Simon?"
She jerked her head to the side, and then crumpled in on herself, clutching her stomach as if struck.
Alarmed, one of the female nurses approached, hand at her side with a tranquilizer to banish whatever nightmare the girl was living.
Seras, as if seeing her, pressed herself back into the wall and shrieked like a banshee, "Don't rape me!"
Then everything went silent as the girl seized up and her eyes rolled into her head. She began to froth at the mouth as she collapsed and convulsed on the floor, the nurse dropped the syringe and jumped the distance to hold her down as she shouted for reinforcements.
Seras went deathly still then, and even her breathing stopped. Cursing, the staff rushed her to the hospital section of the psychiatric ward as they tried to get her chest moving with life again.
She slipped into a coma for three days, and the doctors fretted about history repeating itself. What would happen to the girl this time? What delusion would she fall into?
Only time would tell, they agreed as they kept her on life support.
Seras Victoria, age nineteen, a permanent resident of Sanctuary, police officer in training in her head, twitched as her mind woke slowly.
Lids fluttering, she hissed in pain at the brightness and raised a hand to cover her face, wincing when the movement tugged the IV in her wrist. Looking around her blankly, she frowned and licked her lips to wet them before speaking a single word; "Master?"