Keeper of My Peace
Copyright© 2025 by Danielle
Chapter 2: The Incubation
The door clicked shut. The sound was not of a lock engaging, but of a seal being set. She was in. The door clicked shut. The sound was not of a lock engaging, but of a seal being set. She was in. I had not dragged her; she had walked. The victory was absolute, and yet, it tasted of cold, still water.
The incubation began.
Her world shrank to the dimensions of that room, the schedule I dictated, and the sound of my voice. We became her sun and moon, her waking and sleeping.
06:00: Wake-up. Not by an alarm, but by Chloe flipping the harsh overhead light on and off. A brutal, wordless command. On the first morning, Violet was slow to rise. Chloe did not speak. She simply picked up the carafe of water from the bedside table and poured it over Violet’s head. The gasp was satisfyingly sharp, a crack in the morning silence. It did not happen again.
06:15 - 07:00: Conditioning. A silent run with Chloe along the pre-dawn paths. It was not for fitness; it was a lesson in obedience through exhaustion, a daily reminder that her body was no longer her own.
07:00 - 07:30: Morning Briefing. In my suite. She would stand while I sat, sipping my coffee. I outlined her schedule, her objectives, and the flaws in her previous day’s performance. She was to listen, absorb, and nod. Her first spoken word to me on Monday was a raspy, “Yes, Bethany.” The sound was a key turning in a lock.
07:30 - 08:00: Observation. Breakfast in the main dining room, at a small table in the corner. She was to watch the social ballet of the sisterhood—the laughter, the alliances, the subtle plays for dominance—but was forbidden from participating. She was a specter at the feast, studying a life she was denied.
09:00 - 12:00: Doctrine. Sasha’s domain. Violet’s original coursework was replaced. She now reads annotated texts on social dominance, Machiavelli, and the architecture of power. She wrote essays on the weakness of empathy and the fragility of the individual will. Her own thoughts were being systematically erased and overwritten with ours.
12:00 - 12:30: Sustenance. A protein shake and plain chicken breast, delivered to her room. No taste. Only fuel for the machine we were building.
12:30 - 15:00: Comportment. Chloe’s theater of pain. Violet was taught to walk, sit, and gesture like us. She was forced to hold stressful, painful poses to “burn out” her old, hesitant body language. One afternoon, Chloe made her hold a low lunge until her legs trembled violently and she collapsed. “Again,” was the only instruction. She got up and did it.
15:00 - 18:00: Servitude. Menial tasks for the house—polishing silver, organizing closets—under the watchful eye of a rotating senior sister. This reinforced her place at the bottom of our hierarchy. A misplaced fork earned her a night without dinner.
18:00 - 19:00: Observation. Dinner. Silence in the corner.
19:00 - 21:00: Debrief. The crucible. This was held in my suite. She was required to kneel on the hard floor while I sat in my armchair. She would recount her day, analyzing her own actions through the lens of our doctrine.
“I felt pain during the lunge,” she stated on Wednesday, her voice a flat monotone. “The pain was a signal of my body’s weakness. I thanked Chloe for revealing it to me.”
I felt a thrill so potent it was almost erotic. The programming was taking place. We were not just breaking her; we were rebuilding her with our own hands.
For a week, this was her existence. The stubborn core of her seemed to dissolve. The analytical light in her eyes was replaced by a hollow, efficient attentiveness. She started to anticipate our commands. She began to parrot my phrases with a chilling lack of inflection.
But then, the reflections began.
During a Thursday debrief, she described another sister’s social maneuvering as “straining against the natural hierarchy, like a current fighting the tide.”
It was a metaphor I had not taught her. It was elegant, sharp.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked, my voice soft.
She looked up, her expression blank. “I did not hear it, Bethany. I observed it.”
A spark of independent thought. A weed in our sterilized soil. I praised her, but a knot of unease tightened in my stomach.
The most unsettling event occurred on Friday night. Bored, I pulled up the live camera feed on my tablet. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, perfectly still. Then, slowly, she lifted her head and looked directly into the camera lens. It was not a glance. It was a gaze. Her face was a mask, but her eyes held a deep, unnerving cognizance. It was the look a sculptor might get from a statue that had just winked.
She held the gaze for ten full seconds, then slowly, deliberately, she smiled. It wasn’t a smile of joy or madness. It was a smile of ... recognition. Then she bowed her head, the perfect subject once more.
My blood ran cold.
The yield was complete. The reconstruction was underway. But I was no longer sure if we were building a new Violet, or if we were merely providing a quiet, controlled environment for something else—something that had been waiting in the dark behind her eyes all along—to fully awaken. The stripped and barren soil was not barren at all. Something was growing, and we had been watering it with every action.
The smile was a ghost in the machine. A glitch. I told myself it was the last spasm of the old Violet, the final spark of a dying star being swallowed by the black hole we had created. The programming needed to go deeper. We had controlled her body, her environment, her schedule. Now, we had to strangle the last remnant of her internal voice and replace it with our own echo.
The method was language. We would not just give her new things to say; we would annihilate her capacity for original thought.
I started with her vocabulary. Certain words were excised. “Want” was replaced with “require as per my development.” “Feel” was replaced with “assess.” “I think” became “The doctrine suggests.” Using a forbidden word meant a swift, sharp correction from Chloe—a pinch on the soft skin of her inner arm, a sudden tug on her hair. Her language became stilted, technical, devoid of personal sentiment. She spoke like a poorly translated manual.
Next, we targeted her memory.
“You cried during your first run with Chloe,” I stated one night as she knelt.
She blinked, her brow furrowing slightly. “I ... I do not recall that.”
“Your memory is flawed,” I said coolly. “The trauma of the restructuring has caused gaps. You cried. You were weak. Now, you are stronger. Do you understand?”
Her own mind was being framed as an unreliable narrator.
“Yes, Bethany,” she whispered. “I was weak.”
We rewrote her motivations. “You came to us because you were desperate for structure,” I told her. “You were lost in your own mind, a chaotic mess of anxieties. You begged for this clarity.”
She listened, her head bowed. “I was chaotic,” she repeated, the words tasting foreign on her tongue. “I begged for clarity.”
The most powerful tool was mirrored speech. I gave her a mantra, a passage from one of our curated texts on the emptiness of the individual self. She was to recite it for one hour each afternoon, facing a mirror in her room.
I watched on the camera feed. Her gaze, once distant, was now fixed intently on her own reflection. The words—”The ‘I’ is a phantom, a collection of borrowed desires and unexamined impulses...”—were no longer just sounds. She was hypnotizing her own reflection. The hollow monotone was gone, replaced by a low, fervent conviction. She was preaching the gospel of her own annihilation to the only congregation she had left: herself.
The effect was breathtaking. When she spoke to us now, it was with the placid certainty of a zealot. Her eyes held a reflection of my own will.
The final test came on a rainy Tuesday. I brought her to the student union, to the very spot where it had all begun.
“Describe what happened here, from your new perspective,” I commanded.
She looked at the chair, her expression serene. “This is where my salvation began,” she said, her voice clear and unwavering. “You initiated the necessary demolition of the false construct known as Violet. I was hiding here. You exposed me. I am grateful.”
It was the ultimate victory. I had taken her voice not by cutting out her tongue, but by reaching into her mind and severing the connection between her thoughts and her sense of self. Her inner monologue was now just a recording of my own. The canvas was not just primed; it was painted over in a single, uniform color. My color.
I should have felt triumphant. I had won. I had achieved total psychological dominance.
But as I dismissed her, watching her walk away with a gait that was now more a copy of my own than her old, hesitant shuffle, a cold hollowness opened inside me. The chase was over. The puzzle was solved. The frustrating, enigmatic lock was picked, and there was nothing inside but my own reflection.
The victory was absolute, and it was ashes.
The “New Violet” was a marvel of behavioral engineering. She spoke only in doctrine, moved with curated grace, and her eyes held the placid stillness of a frozen lake. The work was done. And I was drowning in the silence.
The frustration I had felt toward her defiance was a vibrant, living thing. This ... this void was a tomb. I found myself provoking her during debriefs, searching for a crack.
“Your old life,” I pressed one evening. “The one with the books, the quiet. Do you miss it?”
She didn’t even blink. “That was a pre-conscious state. A collection of inputs without a central processor. I do not miss the static.”
“And your family? The distant academics?”
“They provided genetic material and an environment of neglect, which was the necessary precondition for my re-forging. I am grateful for their utility.”
The answers were perfect. They were dead. The echo was so perfect it had become a parody.
The final test came on a Friday, a mirror of the one that had started it all. I led her back to the student union. The rain lashed the windows in a frantic, familiar percussion.
“Kneel,” I commanded.
She did, without hesitation, her hands resting on her thighs, her gaze fixed on a point somewhere beyond me.
“This is where it began,” I said, my voice tight. “This is where you were nothing. Look at it.”
She turned her head and observed the chair as if it were a specimen. “Yes. The site of genesis.”
A cold fury, sharp and desperate, rose in me. I needed a reaction. A flinch. A tremor. Anything.
I leaned down, my face inches from hers, my voice a low, vicious whisper. “You were pathetic. You were a little mouse, trembling in your ugly clothes. I saw the terror in your eyes. I smelled it on you.”
I waited for the programmed response, the placid agreement.
It did not come.
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