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The Handler never saw herself as a bad person. Her actions were calculated and ruthless, certainly, but she wasn’t bad . She certainly wasn’t evil. And if she was, well, The Handler wasn’t always like this.
Her story started with a young girl named Elvira.
Elvira was three years old, not quite four, and she was happy. She had two loving parents and attended a daycare run from a woman’s house with several other children. The other kids were quite fond of her, and she was well liked by the woman who ran the daycare. She was also well liked by the woman’s sons.
The woman, her name doesn’t matter at this point, it’s long forgotten and buried with any other unfortunate memories of that place, had two sons. The younger was sweet, sixteen and gentle. He kept hermit crabs, let Elvira hold them, always had a smile waiting for her when she cried. She liked him. The older son, on the other hand.
He was eighteen and, well, he was nice enough. But he had a side no one else saw. He was never mean, never cruel, but he did things.
The memories never left her mind, how he’d make his way to her cot during nap time, how his fingers lingered all over her, tracing patterns over her skin with cold touches. They even went to far as to invade her a few times. She didn’t understand what was happening. All Elvira knew was that she was young and scared and he shouldn’t be touching her like that .
She told her parents. They told the police. She remembered sitting on their beat up green sofa, squished between her mother and father, relaying her story to the officer. He laughed. She cried. They never pressed charges.
Her father left the following year. He didn’t really leave, but he did move out. She still saw him, but it was different. He was different. He wasn’t the same man she once knew. He was meaner, less patient. She was afraid of him.
Elvira had always had issues with noise, her father knew that. He didn’t seem to care. He yelled when he was mad. When he deemed her in need of punishment, he spanked her, hard . It hurt. She cried. She did her best not to anger him.
The divorce was finalized when she was seven. It was no surprise at that point, but it was another nail in young Elvira’s proverbial coffin even so. She lost a part of herself in that divorce, the second piece of her she’d lost. Her downward spiral began not long after.
Elvira grew up without many friends, not real friends. Everyone liked her well enough, but never enough to get close.
She was twelve when the depression hit. Her wrist became her canvas, carving thin pale lines into skin as she fell further and further into despair. She didn’t know why she did it at first, couldn’t tell anyone if they’d noticed, but she figured it out soon enough.
It was the control . Elvira’s experiences had left her with problems, no surprises there, problems with power, problems with control, with abandonment, with people . She had a problem with unpredictability.
She never learned to drive. It was the same reason, the other drivers, the lack of control. The control moved her, drove her to everything. It pushed her to starve herself, to learn the subtle art of manipulation, the excel in school. The more she pushed herself, the more in control she felt. But the problem of others remained.
Free will was such a pesky little thing.
The idea struck when she was nineteen. The train ride home from her place of work had been particularly bad, a man pressed up against her, crowded into her space, grinding against her back. The past bubbled up and Elvira stood there, frozen by her memory. The man left eventually, but the feeling remained.
Free will. The unpredictability of man. It was just another problem, but how could she solve it?
Time travel.
She began running equations, her mind spinning with numbers and variables. She took over the basement of her childhood home, painted it all with chalkboard paint, covered the walls and floors and sometimes even ceiling in charts and diagrams, probabilities, dates, times.
On February 7, 2019, she cracked the code.
Time flew by after that, or didn’t now that she had all of it at her fingertips, and Elvira was soon caught up in the swirl of a new company, a new profession. She was in control . She could handle whatever the world threw at her and it would all end up the same. What would be would be.
Somewhere along the way, what was left of Elvira was lost. The Handler remained of course, able to justify her own struggles and pain under the idea that it was meant to happen. Were she never to have gone through such atrocities as a child, she would never have made it were she was. It was all supposed to happen. The Commission was supposed to happen. The ends justify the means.
She was never bad, never evil . No, The Handler, Elvira , was once young and brilliant and oh so afraid. All she was now was in control.