A/N: I couldn't stay in 2nd person… I couldn't stand writing it and it was more off-putting than I like. So I'm returning to 3rd person story writing. I may return to it for the more disturbing aspects because 2nd person writing disturbs me greatly. Apologies to both actresses if they ever read this because they neither they nor their characters deserve this abuse.

For Darcehole, who asked for some background... may it be a decent one. And thank you sshow101 for reviewing. I tried to keep this less disturbing than the first chapter. Although I may redo it in 2nd person because could you imagine listening to Cat's thoughts as this is happening? *panic and flail*

Disclaimer: I don't own Victorious, thank god.

The Beginning

"For something to have a middle or an end it first must begin. Some things begin too soon, and some things should never begin at all."

Cat had never been what one would label normal. As a baby she rarely cried, as a three year old she had rarely smiled, and as a five year old she had taken apart piece by piece her pet cat. It had looked at her with trust and she had observed its habits. She had just wanted to see how the cat had worked. Interestingly enough, the cat she had mutilated had been blamed on her brother as one of the multitude of things that were wrong with him. When he was scolded for it, she had understood what her parents were explaining to him. And she never did it again.

That is, without cleaning up afterwards.

It had been enjoyable, taking the living things and understanding how they worked piece by piece. She began messing with her father's work station when her brother kept her parents occupied, taking apart different types of machines and putting them back together. She had tried doing that with a bird once… it didn't work. There was something missing, something she couldn't quite figure out. Perhaps they weren't complicated enough.

By the age of seven, Cat knew she was different. She began to observe how the other children her age interacted and began to copy them. Eventually, she could react like a normal person would in a given situation. Through observations she had detected patterns not only in appropriate responses but also how people were treated. One day she realized that peoples emotions that could be easily manipulated. Cat had gone home that day with a genuine smile on her face. She had found another game to play.

She knew that most people followed a group and it would be noticed if they had suddenly changed. Cat had made a mistake early on when she had cut open a puppy and the mother had gone looking for it for several days afterwards. She had done it once with an abandoned kitten and no one had been the wiser. So she chose a girl, age five, three years younger than her.

The girl had come from a happy family, and couldn't deal with what was going on. She didn't make it past three months, the girl that is, Cat couldn't even be bother to remember her name, had suffered from a breakdown and was still in an asylum where no one believed a word she had said. It had been an interesting experiment but a failure in Cat's eyes. It was time to try again.

This one died. He had lasted longer than the other one. He came from a home with a drunken abusive father and no mother and it had been easy to get him to care and trust her. She had enjoyed his attention. He had wanted to badly to make her happy and she enjoyed that power she had over him. It had been his tenth birthday so she was over at his house to celebrate. She had managed to get him so angry that he had lashed out at his father when he had come home. It had led to his subsequent death and his father in remorse had killed himself in the next room even as she laughed. She had pretended not to have ever been at the house the next day. And despite the entertainment value she had gotten out of it, she chalked that one up as a failure.

This time instead of deciding on a replacement right away, she looked over the mistakes she had made with the last two, took her time choosing this time, did her research, and by the time she was ten she had found what she thought was the perfect specimen. She had made friends with everyone in the class but had settled on the girl with dark hair that sat in the corner reading by herself in the corner where their classmates ignored her. The one who stuttered when she spoke, and refused to look anywhere but the ground when she did. She was the one Cat decided, and she would take her time, make her perfect, make her want only to please her. She'd commit this girl's name to memory.

Jadelyn. Cat's face twisted into a grin. She'd call her Jade.