On the First Day, Part III

The sun rose.

It shone in through a window, throwing the latticed silhouette of the steel mesh that enclosed it onto the opposite wall. On the bed sat a young woman. Her knees were tucked up under her chin as she watching the golden square of light slide slowly down the bland wallpaper. The warm tone of the light made her think of melting butter. As she imagined the dawn that was blooming somewhere outside her room, it also filled her with a strange sense of hope.

To all the world concerned, the girl's name was Catherine Farris. As far as Catherine was concerned, all the world could crawl in a hole and die.

Jeanette, the woman who claimed to be her mother was a cold-hearted bitch who disgusted her. She had regretted the hurt in Mr. Farris' eyes when she'd spat in his face that he wasn't her father, but the regret didn't make the words any less true. She knew it was all a lie. She was beginning to remember things. She was remembering that "father" should be a man with eyes like steel that had a special way of softening just for her, and "mother" should be a woman full of understanding and patience, love and faith. She felt there was a place in her heart for "brother", and it sat cold and empty, hollow. She thought she remembered freckles.

No one believed her, of course. In the beginning, the images—the memories—had been so scattered and fragmented that she hadn't believed them either. Jeanette had thrown money at her problems like she always did and sent her broken daughter to a shrink. They'd used big, fancy words like "dissociation" and "delusion" that really just amounted to thinking she was insane. But as time wore on, and the fragments piled up, holes began to fill, and she realized they were wrong. They had to be wrong.

All her insistence and begging, her pleading for someone to listen hadn't helped her case, of course. It had only landed her here.

At first that had been the worst thing imaginable. The life she was slowly coming to reclaim from beneath the lie that had been painted over the top of it, it was out there somewhere. They were out there, her family. Her real family... Perhaps they were looking for her. Perhaps they only waited for her to find them. She could do nothing from within the hospital, the doctors made certain to monitor her closely. She'd felt the cage closing slowly around her. Eventually, she'd grown tired of it. She'd grown tired of arguing and not being believed. Eventually she decided that if she could convince the staff and her family and friends from her false life that she was getting better, maybe they would let her go… She could be free of this place, and perhaps then she could truly begin her search.

Then, two days ago, she'd remembered something else…

She wasn't quite so eager to be let out of the hospital anymore. And, of course, now the doctors wanted to know why.

It was still very early in the morning when a soft knock was heard and the door swung open slowly. Though, Catherine had not slept in two days, so the timing didn't really matter. The visit was not wholly unexpected, though the visitor seemed a bit out of place... Dr. Roper normally came in at the beginning of the night shift, so it was rather unusual to see him in just after dawn. She wondered briefly if they'd switched his hours, and who with. Oddly, she couldn't seem to remember which of the staff worked days.

"Good morning, Cathy." Dr. Roper greeted, a touch awkwardly. "Ms. Daley tells me you're still not sleeping. Would you tell me what's wrong?"

"You know what's wrong." She kept her eyes on the wall. She'd learned not to make eye-contact with him. He was a surprisingly shifty one. When she was being difficult, they always sent Dr. Roper. Something about him just put her off her guard. Maybe it was the goofy moustache—or those silly looking, owlish glasses of his.

"I haven't been given the full report on it," he said, dragging a chair away from the wall so that he could sit eye-to-eye with her. "They've told me you've added another element to the mythology of your delusion. An antagonistic figure. A man who is trying to hurt you."

Catherine snorted. She was fairly certain that they'd started to believe this whole issue was some kind of bizarre rape trauma. She'd stopped caring what he or anyone else thought about it.

"Tell me about him."

"He's not a man." She supplied, almost bored. Fussing with a loose string in the white bottoms of her hospital clothes, she slowly worried it into a small hole. "He wants me dead."

She glanced at Dr. Roper briefly, seeing the formation of a frown, barely visible under the thick whiskers on his upper lip.

"Catherine," Though his voice was kept professionally even, the use of her full name betrayed his concern. "If this man hurt you, we can help. We can stop him. Do you know his name?"

She felt sorry for him, honestly. He wanted to help. But there were some things a person couldn't be saved from.

"He's not a man," she repeated, "He's a monster."

Catherine met Dr. Roper's gaze steadily. "And his name is Sylar."