Karma

Victim 22

I swirled the liquid that was in the glass I had a little before putting the cool surface to my lips and drinking the last of it. I was sat in a chair opposite Devan who looked as distressed as I felt. One thing with Devan was that he didn't hide his emotions. They were out on table like last nights dinner.

"So tell me, Devan. Did you know that I actually had some form of twisted emotions when I was Karma and that each and every Karma still has emotions or did you find out when you too slammed someone's face in with your bare hands?" I asked him, my voice too sweet.

His eyes dropped to the table and he mumbled something in a different language before looking back at me. "Listen Chas-"

"Don't you dare give me some bullshit," I placed my glass on the table and crossed my arms across my chest.

He held his hands up in surrender. "I won't, pinky swear."

"I'm listening," I said, raising an eyebrow.

A tattooed hand ran through his hair and he sighed, taking a sip from his glass and then leaning forwards so that he was resting on his elbows. "When you came here, you were completely and utterly destroyed. You had walked the depths of nothing for four years straight before someone found you. You had seen things that no ten year old should've seen. We should've found you sooner, but you were too small to be seen in our rader. You see, kids usually get redirected straight to me, but you weren't. You were just there - floating.

And when we did find you, you were mumbling about how happiness was dead and that destruction was true and I had no fucking idea what you were talking about, okay? And so I looked into your past. You poor kid." He chuckled darkly under his breath, shaking his head. "You were dead in your eyes. Dead. I mean, you were dead theoretically, but to us you were alive. If your soul was alive, then you are. We tried to recover you and get you ready to go up there, but you just wouldn't shake the look. The look in your eyes only disappeared when you fought someone."

He smiled sadly at me. "And so we trained you up. You became the best fighter we had. You could defeat three of our guards at once, blindfolded. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Like, I was fucking gobsmacked. And so I did the only reasonable thing I thought I could - I gave you the darkness. I injected you with revenge and that revenge took over you and your body. You became the Karma you are today."

I frowned. "That doesn't explain a fucking thing. Why the heck couldn't I feel things when I was supposed to feel everything?"

He sighed again. "The darkness fills you with revenge. Revenge was your main emotion, but you still had all the others. I never took them. And so when you saw Axel the revenge started to slowly seep away - it still is seeping away - and so your emotions started to become more prominent. It took a month to train you, Chasity. I took a month to change you. And after you had changed, there was nothing else we could do. You were too young to leave and yet too far into stay. And so we kind of put you back into nothingness. You stayed there for three years before we let you leave.

And when you left, you convinced yourself you felt nothing, even though you were smiling. I could see in your eyes that you were happy and I could feel that you were happy and yet, due to my fucking idiot brain, you thought you felt nothing, when you still felt everything except from pain and the cold. I am so fucking sorry, you must believe that."

"So you lied to me about me getting emotions back? I had them anyway, I just didn't feel them until I met Axel?"

"Oui."

A low whistled came from my lips.

The amount of information he'd just given me wasn't really processing in my head. It was the most someone had talked about my life before Karma and that was the only thing I could think of. The only thing I needed at the moment.