"With them, you are but numbers. With me, you shall have a name."

The tall man talking was unlike any psychiatrist I had ever seen, and trust me when I tell you that I had seen my fair share of quacks over the past seven years. For once, he wasn't wearing a suit and tie like all the previous psychiatrists did to show superiority. He didn't try to pull off some highfalutin British accent on us either.

One by one we went forward. He murmured a word to each, and touched our foreheads as if in blessing.

1101. 1102. 1103. Me.

As I took three nonchalant steps forward, the people around backed away hastily. I smirked. Being the FBI, CIA and Mossad's Most Wanted certainly has its own perks.

The Kenyan stared at me even as I met his gaze with my own, defiant and unflinching. I had gone through enough rehabilitation programs to know that I was a complete lost cause. Who cares? I was more than happy to stay that way. Left alone, not messed with. Once in a while some cocky fool decides to challenge me. I was already serving life sentence. What difference would a couple more deaths make?

My new name seemed to take forever. Just as I started to tap my feet in impatience, he finally spoke.

"Thayu," he said. "Your name shall be Thayu."

I shrugged, indifferent. Thayu could join Devil's Protege, The Butcher and even Cheesy Fingers. Just another name in my colorful and illustrious criminal career.

***********************

He shuddered. Beneath half-closed eyelids, his pupils rolled wildly, maniacally. His blankets were twisted around him as he trashed and flailed.

With an inhumane, anguished cry, his eyes flew open.

Slowly he sat up, heart racing. His shirt was plastered to his clammy skin. With trembling fingers he drank a gulp of water from a smooth, light plastic cup.

Another nightmare. They were always the same. Faces of the dead, with their sibilant whispers and outstretched hands, plaguing his dreams in their quest for revenge. And he would plead, and said he was sorry, but they would latch onto him, dragging him down into eternal abyss, all the while hissing you did this, you did this to me you did this......

He rolled over and tried to sleep.

***********************

If there was one thing that I had to give the psychiatrist credit for, it would be his persistence. He remained doggedly determined, involving me in all kinds of activities no matter how much I ignored his attempts at interaction. I would be aloof, cold and distant; he would make me participate and voice out opinions. Some even say that he was going through all my records and files, doing research on my life pre-prison.

I stayed unruffled and calm. Not a single hint of emotion.

Besides, after 245 murders, 19 attempted ones, 18 trials and 21 cases involving international security, what else could possibly faze me?

***********************

Baby blue eyes. Silky blonde hair. A rosy little mouth. Skin fair and white. Dressed in a light blue uniform, with cute black polished shoes. Running eagerly to her mother.

Then the bomb exploded and it tore away her limbs and casted her piercing screams into the sky and ripped apart her pristine uniform -

He snapped awake.

A metallic, copper taste lingered in his mouth. Through the dim bars of the window, moonlight filtered in to shine on his bloody fist. He had gnawed the skin away in his sleep.

That night he did not sleep.

***********************

"Thayu, you have a visitor."

I arched an eyebrow. I had no living relatives - I had killed them all myself. My friends, like me, were all in maximum security prison.

So who could this be?

"Wait here." The Kenyan left me in a bare room lit starkly by that one, single light bulb. I fiddled idly with the toothpick I had pilfered from the cafeteria, thinking up the fourteen different ways it could become a lethal weapon in my hands. Of course, I didn't mean to harm anyone with it, and the officers who were watching right now would immediately come to remove it - we were never allowed to have anything the slightest bit sharp. Old habits just die hard, I guessed.

Just as I was trying to invent Idea Number Fifteen, the door opened. I looked up, ready to hand my new plaything to whichever pompous, self-important officer that had entered -

I inhaled, a sharp short breath.

She was just sitting there, in her wheelchair. Half her face was misshapen, and both legs ended in queer uneven stumps. Still her baby blue eyes shone with clarity like how I had first saw them on a certain summer midday.

She was the reason for my imprisonment. The bomb was intended to destroy only five shops, a clear message to the government by the rebels who had hired me. I had designed it a little too well, and it produced a much, much bigger explosion, tearing apart the entire street.

29 people had died that day, including her mother.

When I saw her there, screaming in pure horror and boiling agony, something happened within me. Was it compassion, pity? I dared not say. Cruel mercenaries like me were not supposed to have any.

Either way, I had leapt forward, pulling her out of the destruction and carnage. I had stared in sick revulsion at the gory lumps of her flesh. My handiwork.

She ended up in the hospital and I ended up in jail. A choice I had never regretted.

Now I looked at her, at her maimed form, at the beauty I had destroyed.

"I'm sorry," I whispered. A teardrop rolled down my cheek - the cheek of a hardened criminal. "I'm sorry."

Her face contorted, her lips moved with much difficulty as she tried to form coherent words.

"I forgive......you."

***********************

"Oh look! It's a baby boy!"

"Aw, he's so cute!"

I held my sleeping son fondly in my arms. Lying in the hospital bed just beside me my wife smiled weakly. Gently I planted a kiss on her forehead.

Three years had passed. I completed my rehabilitation program and moved into a small town, specially built for reformed criminals like me. There I met my wife, settled down and begin a new life. Today I was an honest laborer.

I was still kept under constant tight surveillance. Guards were posted outside our doors every night - whether for our safety or for theirs was hard to say.

Some things hadn't changed much. But some things had.

For instance, I was now allowed to have toothpicks.

"What shall you name him?" someone asked.

I looked down at the newborn, at his most adorable face. I smiled.

"Thayu. That will be his name."

A few murmurs. "What language is that?"

"Kikuyu," I replied. "A language from Kenya.

"It means peace."