Title: Princess
Fandom: Department Q: The Absent One
Rating: M
Length: 544
Content notes: Violent imagery, violence, and vulgar language
Author notes: This is based on a film that is based on a novel (of the same name) written by, Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Summary: Character study of Kristen “Kimmie” Marie Lassen. There is one thing she regrets, and it sits like a rock in the pit of her stomach.


She’d never felt like she belonged before Ditlev and Ulrik took an interest in her. They’d made a whore, and a killer of her, though. Tore her apart from the inside out. Made her drink and bathe in the blood of their victims.

She’d enjoyed it, at first. Beating someone. Making them bleed, and beg, and cry, was a better high than any drug could ever give her.

And when Ditlev called her, Princess, she'd felt like she could reach out to the moon and touch it. She'd do anything just to hear him call her that. To hear him say, 'I love you.'

It got old, much faster than she'd thought it would. There was a time -- kicking this old motherfucker's gut over and over again, watching him spit blood out through reddened teeth clenched tight with pain -- when she'd thought that the high would never end. That she'd never want it to end.

She's done unspeakable things. Things that, if she was a different person, if she was normal, and not fucked up in the head, and heart, she would regret. She doesn’t. She’s not normal.

And she's seen things that she'll never be able to forget. Her mind won't let her; it holds onto the macabre, and the blood and gore, replays it in her head over and over again, until some days, along with the ghost of Ditlev's youth that haunts her, all she can see is Thomas and Marie in that cabin on the night that everything changed.

Their ghosts plague her, too. Marie screaming and begging, being stripped, and held down while a masked man, high on something, kept plunging that knife into her brother's chest over and over again, not stopping until long after he'd killed him. It must have been terrifying for her to watch her brother killed in that way.

Kimmie will never forget the sound of it. It's etched in her mind. A constant reminder of what she'd lost that night. Blood will never look the same.

She doubts that she has a conscience. If she did, then those memories that haunt her would be about the terror in Marie’s eyes, the look of defeat in Thomas’ just before the knife was plunged into his heart for the first time. Instead, all she can think about is what happened afterward, how Ditlev and Ulrik beat her. How that beating killed her unborn baby. The twins were a harbinger of death, and as awful as that night was, she can’t bring herself to feel anything other than hatred for them.

There's only one thing she regrets. One thing that she wishes she could turn back time to fix, and it sits like a rock in the pit of her stomach, a daily reminder of what she'd lost when Ditlev first set eyes on her that fateful day in the cafeteria. When he'd first called her, Princess.

It's not the loss of her child that she regrets most, though that loss haunts her more than anything. It's that she'd ever loved Ditlev in the first place, and that, even after everything that he's done, the dead child she carries around in her satchel, and wishes that she could carry in her arms...she still loves him.