- and the nice woman on the video screen helps her understand what happened, and why.  And it's still horrible and it still hurts to think about and it still makes her cry - but it's a little not-as-bad.  The bad feelings inside her chest a little better.

She enters the girl's room in a wetsuit and a helmet with lights inside it pointed at her face, and she can't see for the glare but at least the girl, at least fifty-three, can see her face.

"I can only be in here for five minutes at a time," she says, "and then I have to take a break.  But I can talk to you on the screen the whole time, and I can come back in as soon as my break is over, every single time until you feel better, okay?"

"It's not safe because of me," she says.

"Not because of you," Doctor Charlotte says firmly.  "It's like - it's like a witch put a curse on you.  It's sad and scary and awful, and it's okay to feel sad or angry or awful about it, and we don't know if there's anything we can do about it.  But it's not your fault."

"I know," she says dully.

Charlotte sighs, a sympathetic sigh.  "I can't give you a nice long hug like you deserve, but I've got three and a half minutes left on my timer, and I can hug you for as much of that time as you want, okay?"

"Okay."

Hug.

Hug.  Three-and-a-half-minute hug.

She cries, a lot.  She talks, a lot.  She smiles, occasionally, more and more.

She grows up, inevitably.

Charlotte asks her if she has, or wants, a real name.

She doesn't mind Fifty-Three so much.  Her parents gave her a name, but she doesn't remember it.  (Her mom shot herself, not long after she was Contained, and her dad stopped coming.)  Not all her memories from before Charlotte are bad ones, and she was named Fifty-Three in those.

But she might like a normal name.

"Can I be named Charlotte?  After you."

"I'd be honored," she smiles.

Grin.  "First name Charlotte, middle name Fifty-Three."

"If that's what you want."

"It is."

She continues growing up, as children do.  Her curse doesn't grow with her - it affects humans older than three, not humans older than her.

As she grows, she learns more about the Foundation.

Someone named O5-1/963-2 has been instituting a lot of reforms - better treatment of sapient skips, increasing institutional transparency, phasing out something called D-class personnel in favor of something else called DELTA/AGENT designees and DELTA/NONPATIENT objects.  She, O5-1/963-2, has been around for years, although not always by that rank - she's the one responsible for introducing Charlotte 53 to Charlotte Eschenheimer.  She reads internal press releases - "...lurid tales and hazing rituals involving security footage of legendary skips like 035 and 106 fostering a culture of paranoia and dehumanization."  She think about men in wetsuits and blindfolds cutting into her skin.  She thinks about SCP-682 and acid hoses.

"I don't remember anything from before the Foundation took me," she says to Dr. Eschenheimer one session.

"Would you like to hear about your family?" Dr. Eschenheimer asks.  "There's probably some information somewhere in Foundation records."

"That's not what I mean," she says.  "Maybe, someday.  But that's not what I mean."

She waits, and listens.

"I feel - "

"Was it a good thing, that you found me?"

"I'm trying hard to make it one," she says.  "But I think you have to decide that."

She shakes her head, rubs her face under her eyes.

"I want it to be.  I think - "

"I said I didn't remember anything but I think, - "

"I was so scared when, when my parents started trying to kill me, I was scared of what they were doing and of what happened to them - "

She looks up at the ceiling, her breath quivers.

"And these people came - " her voice is not quite steady, "and they tried to kill me too, and it happened to them too - "

"and I thought that was going to be forever - "

"but they put me here, and they gave me things, and they told me some of what was going on, and the blindfolds were scary at first but - but it was like there were grownups again - "

She stops, and blows her nose.