...I see. So it didn't change who you resulted in, just your memory of that instance.
[ the whole idea has him looking curious, emotions turned contemplative. but before that gets much further i will give you a memshare before i set up a muppet audience, it's w6 so you can just have the heroin backstory woah fog time
cw: child abuse, slavery, drugs Fighting back is easy, at first.
You still remember freedom—nights by a fire with your older sister, shelling roasted chestnuts, burning your fingertips when they get too hot. Having to throw out a batch of medicine because you used the wrong ratio of ingredients, and being scolded gently by your parents as they teach you how to properly grind the herbs and not pour in too much reagent.
So when it comes to your masters, you don't spare your venom. You hate them, and you tell them so. They beat you, of course, but there is a little pride in smearing the blood off your lip and not folding immediately. Your life, as devastated as it was, still doesn't feel so impossibly distant. Maybe you can hold out long enough until someone comes and pummels all the evil people here and saves you—maybe you can be strong enough to last.
It's only after your owners discover that you're worth more than the average, skinny little urchin that you realize a few fundamental truths: one, they treated you like nothing, because you were nothing. Now that they can squeeze value out of you, they bear down harder.
And two, you watch another slave die, and know they really will kill you if you don't give in.
Surviving, then, takes tremendous effort. You favor whatever side they don't beat that day, and you huddle with your cellmates for warmth when you have them. You patch up the bloody ruts in your skin yourself where they've taken to hurting you. You mix your own antidotes when they poison what food you do get, even if the pain and panic make it hard to do anything but curl up on the ground and shake. Sometimes all you can do is wait it out, and they toe your side to see you flinch, and you realize they think it's funny.
And what's baffling is—despite it all, you can't bring yourself to give up and die. No matter how much pain it is, how humiliating and hopeless these days are, you always end up struggling to live. Because dying—it's scarier? Somehow, death is always scarier. You miss your sister, you're clutching the legacy of a dead clan, and you're a child, you are terrified to die thinking that this is all you'll get, that being someone else's property is all you amount to now. There must be more to it. There was, once.
But the pain wins eventually, in other ways. It becomes a fight just to survive, to avoid hurt, and you make concessions: as the years pass, you stop letting yourself remember your family. You quit dreaming of rescue, and instead wonder idly—maybe life would've been easier, if you'd been bought by someone else? You forget the shape of freedom. You settle. You don't give your masters any lip, you don't bother blocking a hit because it'll be returned twice as badly; eventually, you hand them the things they want. The secrets your clan so closely guarded: you reveal them in little pieces in the lab that they make for you, where you can mix up concoctions to your heart's content. You use all that forbidden knowledge and eventually manufacture a drug so sweet and so addictive that it floods the criminal underbelly, makes it swollen with activity, fills treatment centers with withdrawal patients too poor to afford their next dose, taints lives all across the skies, and—most crucially—turns your masters into very, very rich men.
And then they treat you kindly.
You get a bed, instead of a cell. Your wounds have time to heal over into ropes of scars. They give you expensive clothes and call you an officer in their ranks, they let you travel for research because they know you won't run out of your cage even if they extend the bars. They laugh and smack your back as though they're your old friends—they praise the way they raised you. They accept you as one of their own without ever quite relinquishing you as their property.
It repulses you. Your surface is still, but it makes everything inside you churn and retch. You hate them and their kindness from your very core, extending through all your matter, stretching through your nerve endings—the entirety of your existence is dedicated to rage and fury and sorrow. You hate ████ for doing this to you. You hate the whole premise of the world for allowing this to happen, for deciding that some people can be turned into instruments and others get to live blissfully unaware. You hate that children can be traded off and no one seems to care where they go. You hate living, you hate how you've sold your clan's dignity, you hate yourself, you hate yourself, your hate extends beyond boundary and limit and it still doesn't make an ounce of difference, it doesn't make a single sound. Because you finally, finally have a shred of freedom, a life you've protected and scraped for, and yet you don't feel safe or happy and probably never will.
It's here, surrounded by creature comforts and guilt, that you wonder why, if this is life, you were ever so scared to die. ]
no subject
...I see. So it didn't change who you resulted in, just your memory of that instance.
[ the whole idea has him looking curious, emotions turned contemplative. but before that gets much further i will give you a memshare before i set up a muppet audience, it's w6 so you can just have the heroin backstory woah fog time
cw: child abuse, slavery, drugs
Fighting back is easy, at first.
You still remember freedom—nights by a fire with your older sister, shelling roasted chestnuts, burning your fingertips when they get too hot. Having to throw out a batch of medicine because you used the wrong ratio of ingredients, and being scolded gently by your parents as they teach you how to properly grind the herbs and not pour in too much reagent.
So when it comes to your masters, you don't spare your venom. You hate them, and you tell them so. They beat you, of course, but there is a little pride in smearing the blood off your lip and not folding immediately. Your life, as devastated as it was, still doesn't feel so impossibly distant. Maybe you can hold out long enough until someone comes and pummels all the evil people here and saves you—maybe you can be strong enough to last.
It's only after your owners discover that you're worth more than the average, skinny little urchin that you realize a few fundamental truths: one, they treated you like nothing, because you were nothing. Now that they can squeeze value out of you, they bear down harder.
And two, you watch another slave die, and know they really will kill you if you don't give in.
Surviving, then, takes tremendous effort. You favor whatever side they don't beat that day, and you huddle with your cellmates for warmth when you have them. You patch up the bloody ruts in your skin yourself where they've taken to hurting you. You mix your own antidotes when they poison what food you do get, even if the pain and panic make it hard to do anything but curl up on the ground and shake. Sometimes all you can do is wait it out, and they toe your side to see you flinch, and you realize they think it's funny.
And what's baffling is—despite it all, you can't bring yourself to give up and die. No matter how much pain it is, how humiliating and hopeless these days are, you always end up struggling to live. Because dying—it's scarier? Somehow, death is always scarier. You miss your sister, you're clutching the legacy of a dead clan, and you're a child, you are terrified to die thinking that this is all you'll get, that being someone else's property is all you amount to now. There must be more to it. There was, once.
But the pain wins eventually, in other ways. It becomes a fight just to survive, to avoid hurt, and you make concessions: as the years pass, you stop letting yourself remember your family. You quit dreaming of rescue, and instead wonder idly—maybe life would've been easier, if you'd been bought by someone else? You forget the shape of freedom. You settle. You don't give your masters any lip, you don't bother blocking a hit because it'll be returned twice as badly; eventually, you hand them the things they want. The secrets your clan so closely guarded: you reveal them in little pieces in the lab that they make for you, where you can mix up concoctions to your heart's content. You use all that forbidden knowledge and eventually manufacture a drug so sweet and so addictive that it floods the criminal underbelly, makes it swollen with activity, fills treatment centers with withdrawal patients too poor to afford their next dose, taints lives all across the skies, and—most crucially—turns your masters into very, very rich men.
And then they treat you kindly.
You get a bed, instead of a cell. Your wounds have time to heal over into ropes of scars. They give you expensive clothes and call you an officer in their ranks, they let you travel for research because they know you won't run out of your cage even if they extend the bars. They laugh and smack your back as though they're your old friends—they praise the way they raised you. They accept you as one of their own without ever quite relinquishing you as their property.
It repulses you. Your surface is still, but it makes everything inside you churn and retch. You hate them and their kindness from your very core, extending through all your matter, stretching through your nerve endings—the entirety of your existence is dedicated to rage and fury and sorrow. You hate ████ for doing this to you. You hate the whole premise of the world for allowing this to happen, for deciding that some people can be turned into instruments and others get to live blissfully unaware. You hate that children can be traded off and no one seems to care where they go. You hate living, you hate how you've sold your clan's dignity, you hate yourself, you hate yourself, your hate extends beyond boundary and limit and it still doesn't make an ounce of difference, it doesn't make a single sound. Because you finally, finally have a shred of freedom, a life you've protected and scraped for, and yet you don't feel safe or happy and probably never will.
It's here, surrounded by creature comforts and guilt, that you wonder why, if this is life, you were ever so scared to die. ]