TW: Violence, murder, transphobia, misgendering, child abuse, slavery, starvation, more murder. Stockholm syndrome, self-hate / low self esteem. I may have missed some so please just be careful reading through this.

I. You're five years old with long blond hair and your parents keep calling you pretty and telling you to do a little bit more. The jobs are small but then they're big — scrubbing the pans, reaching the top of the closet. Your mom puts bows in your hair and you tear them out. Your dad gets mad at you later.

II. You tell them you're a boy and there are bruises on your wrists after that; you've shouted yourself hoarse. You're ten years old and you don't know what's wrong with you, but you start getting angry and so do they. Everyone is angry, there are always more bruises. You put your anger into scrubbing the kitchen counters until you wear through the finish.

III. It's been a few years and the fight has died down. You keep your hair tied up off of your neck and spend your nights repeating what you said all those years ago: I'm a boy I'm a boy I'm a boy. The news talks about the end of the world and how it's reaching this area, finally. You're not rich but you're lucky, because the power doesn't die until you're twelve. The lights flicker and the fan turns off. The rest of the summer is hell.

IV. You're fourteen when you finally snap. There's blood all over your hands and the kitchen knife and the bag you'd packed in a panic just moments before. A hand hard around your wrist had ended up being the final straw; you hadn't expected it to be so messy. You're shaking when you wash your hands off in the rainwater that pours down the streets on the way to the sewers. You cut off your hair with a bloody kitchen knife.

V. They meet you in the hayloft and toss you an apple. They grin with crooked teeth, looking deranged and wild with dirty faces and tangled hair. You're sorta like Wendy, but you're not a girl. You're not a girl, and you're not anyone's mother. Still, you make them wash their hair and they teach you how to cook a lot of different things with apples. The orchard is nice and you forget about the kitchen knife in your backpack.

VI. He kisses you in the haystack a few years later and you're confused and warm all over — the hay bites into your skin and it ends up in your hair. Nothing feels the way you thought it would. That, after all, is the way of the world. But he keeps kissing you. You're not sure if you'll ever learn.

VII. Nothing ever ends right, and that, you learned. You spent a few years with campfires and their arms around your shoulders, their songs in the air. The laughter was warm and fearless. Contagious. It ended all too soon, with bullets and blood and bones. Bones. You met him with blood on your face and on his hands, with bullets in your friends' heads and the long, deep punctures of his gauntlet in their chests. A few of them, still breathing, are dragged off. You don't ask where. You bared your teeth and he had this way of laughing about it. That night ends with a collar.

VIII. You starve for a almost a week, and he seems more than content to let you. When you're hungry enough to behave, he keeps himself cruel. Just for a while. You learn what pain is, but you also learn real gratitude. You're grateful. You listen to him. You bite back sometimes, just to feel the harshness of his touch or the spikes he drives home with his words, but soon enough you learn that he can twist you any way he wants. Eventually, all it takes is a certain tone and you're shivering, trying not to curl yourself into him and ask for forgiveness and mean it.

IX. For a while, you feel normal. Content. Though you had always wanted more, searched for more, your dreams were no longer about escape. You were safe like this, and with trust came some measure of freedom. People whispered. You are a toy, a plaything, something that would eventually be thrown away. But days dragged on and on and you stayed. The whispers became suspicious things.

X. Someone that smells like dirt and alcohol and rotting meat puts his hands on your waist and he wasn't alive much longer. You find the possessiveness comforting. You hate yourself for that. You hate that your throat goes dry when he looks at you.

XI. You hate yourself; you're not sure when you'll stop or how long it's been. You don't remember how old you are anymore.