HELENA: She was just one of a few, unfit for family. Horse glue.

It's easy to forget that Helena's, loosely speaking, a professional. Sunken eyes, frazzled hair and all, she's at first glance a very bizarre sort of creature. There's something very primitive about her down to her core, from how she eats to how she sits; it's almost converging on childlike. She has a taste for sweets (rewards of some sort, perhaps, an "I have done well" to a poorly constructed idea of 'good' versus 'bad') and a light and curious touch to everything that she does, but that's not to so soon forget she's made up of equal parts sugar and spice.

Helena wasn't necessarily raised a soldier but that's what she was carved into, crafted like a blade under the hands of Tomas and Maggie Chen after she was whisked away from her home in Ukraine at twelve. Maggie had a hand in creating these abominations, and while it's unbeknownst to Helena what changed her mind on the moral nuances of human cloning, it certainly had a hand in doing a number on her. Her and Tomas played a fun game called gaslighting. It was ingrained within her that she was the original of the clones, the "light" to their otherwise wretched natures, and she was systematically constructed into an assassin, adept in the likes of casing her sister targets and then killing them with her weapon of choice.

Her own psychological ailments played no help in the matter. There's definitely something... off about the girl, a few crucial pieces missing. The least that can be mentioned includes her lack of moral center and her disregard for empathetic reasoning. While her sister speaks of the difficulty in killing a person she can identify with on such a biological level, Helena kills her clones ruthlessly, showing no remorse for the "sheep" she has brought to proper pasture, nor much to the troublesome meddlers who might stand in her way. But not the meddling kids. If there's one flaw in that remorselessness, it's Helena's well-meaning demeanor towards children, a love that she doesn't quite understand and has so rarely been given the opportunity to truly know where to begin to express.

Well, until Sarah bloody Manning came along.

Helena has absolutely no idea that she's a twin - and neither does Sarah when they first meet - but she does feel a magnetism to Sarah, immediate upon discovering she's merely portraying Elizabeth Childs. She becomes a woman possessed, infatuated with this new breed of emotion she finds herself actually feeling for another person. Rather than kill Sarah, she gets to know her - she sifts through her life and gleans what information she can (bouncing on her bed, eating her food, sniffing her boyfriend's clothes, whatever it takes). Rather than kill Sarah, she becomes obsessed with the idea that they have a "connection" that won't allow them to kill each other, asking Sarah if she "feels it" too, only perpetuated by the fact that Sarah lets her go free even when injured - at gunpoint - under the nose of a cop. Rather than kill Sarah? She asks her out to lunch.

With this new attraction comes a whole new seed of doubt sown by Sarah, not necessarily in her mission but in what she's come to understand her whole life: Is she the original or is she not? It's a wavering subject, one on which she waxes and wanes on her uncertainty, generally depending on what Tomas tells her. What Tomas says, she listens to, for the most part. He feeds her, he bathes her, he cares for her, and he's also the one pressing the razor into her hand for her own messy breed of flagellation, penance. They're her angel wings, and she rejoices in the moment she's allowed to cut herself open again. It's her equivalent to love, so far as she's concerned, and all of it makes the Sarah situation a confounding one.

Despite everything, Helena keeps as capable as she can, much as she was trained. She understands humanity on a level enough to barter her way into many a situation - and it's not just the killing, it's grand theft motorbike and stealing her way into nightclubs without being caught, it's imitating her clone well enough to implicate a murder confession. Rudimentary self surgery. She maneuvers people like she would a hit, and all of it is just a game for her to tease and prod and play with. The world should work around her charade, and it's not really naivete but inexperience that leads that charge, maybe that same childishness as aforementioned. She's not suave, she lacks finesse (almost animalistic in her own movements), and she really does play her life almost like a game, with strict rules that she thinks she understands, that she thinks people are meant to follow.

Sheep, you see. She's just the wolf in their clothing.