Name Opinion [Wanderer]

Name Opinion -- seventeen -- agender -- Wanderer [Six]

content note*

You are:

hand out catching metal measured steps drifting impact a violent shiver—

You were.

(You are.)



You aren't a shell. Someone wanted you to be, once—someone carved out your thoughts and shoved orders into the space they left and made sure that blood was the only warmth you knew to reach for—but you're learning to build a different picture, stitched together with facts that no one wanted to teach you. You are a person who likes strawberries for their sweetness; you are a person who likes sweetness. You are a person who feels comforted by routine errands and covers your ears when you hear metal clash. You are a person with soft eyes who cried a little the first time you cut your hair, not because you liked long hair but because you were never allowed to have it before and you wish you liked it.

You are a person. You are a person. You are a person.



You used to regret running, because at least before, you knew what to expect from your days. Placeholders know how to behave. Placeholders do not have to guard their own backs outside of training, or figure out where their next meal is coming from. If you had known it would be like this, you sometimes think, you wouldn't have done it—but you don't know that. You are sure about so little. And you are, after all, a person who—you are a—

You like sweetness. You didn't like hurting people.



Strangers don't want to hurt you, either. This is not the first surprise, but it is the first one that you hold to your heart, where it fits less like a surprise and more like a truth you had forgotten: anyone can be dangerous, but if you flinch, most people will back away. Not always kindly—you know, now, that I don't know is the wrong answer to What's wrong with you?; you have yet to figure out the right answer—but not always unkindly, either. Sometimes they apologize, even when words fail and you can't explain what went wrong, even when words don't fail but you still can't explain because you don't know; sometimes they act like nothing happened at all, and you're never sure whether that's courtesy or discomfort, but you decide to appreciate it all the same.

Sometimes it's not so much a flinch away as an aborted flinch toward, which always hits you hardest. You didn't like hurting people. You don't want to hurt people. You know, intimately, how to hurt people. Once in a while you reach out for a loaf of bread and feel the muscles you would need to catch the baker's wrist and drag him over the counter, or you see a child and envision in excruciating detail how their skull would cave in, until you shove that thought down somewhere cold and dark and entirely too familiar so you can drift through as much of the day as you have to until you find somewhere to let it out again in the shape of tiny sobs. You close your eyes against the web of shallow scars on your arms, too bright against your warm brown skin, only to open them against the images you need to remember never happened. You fold into yourself and gasp and run the heels of your hands across your folded knees until your skin doesn't feel right anymore, and then you hold your own hands to stop yourself from doing anything else, because you don't like hurting people and despite all evidence to the contrary, you are—you are—



"Can you put strawberries in bread?" you ask, looking up from a loaf labeled lemon blueberry bread. You haven't tried blueberries, and you know you don't like lemon, but you've seen other things in bread: seeds, sometimes, and walnuts and almonds and all types of spices you haven't tried because they drive the cost too high. If bread can have fruit, too, then surely it can have the good fruit.

The baker starts. Later, you realize that's because you never actually spoke to him before this, only pointed to your requests and nodded your gratitude as you set money on the counter, and the way you shape your vowels marks you as something other than what he expected. In the moment, you are too focused on the answer—yes, he says; your heart sings—to wonder about it, and then too busy chewing your lip as you consider the price, lower than the ones on the tags for the pretty cakes in the window but much higher than the cost of your usual simple loaf.

Even later, on mornings when you cry because the world looks too vast and unfamiliar for getting out of bed to feel possible, you cling to this moment as evidence that you know how to want things. You never really considered whether you wanted to escape, you simply did it, and then for a long time every step was driven not by desire but by necessity; no one could punish you if no one could catch you. Building a life is different, and you're tired of the cascade of choices and choices and choices. You would let yourself be hurt, if only life could be easy again—except that once you stood in a bakery and imagined bread with pieces of strawberry, and let yourself plan for a future where you could have it.



"I'm Zola. What's your name?" asks one of the first people you speak to on the other side, with an outstretched hand you don't trust and an open smile you trust a little more.

"My—name?" you say, floundering because of course you have one of those, but something tells you that you shouldn't use it anymore.

Before you can pull yourself together enough to make one up, Zola laughs a little. "Name? Seriously?"

"Seriously?" you echo, blinking—and then make the fastest decision of your life, because keeping the memory of a friendly laugh sounds better than keeping anything the people who wanted to remake you came up with. "Yeah, just... just Name."

(Sometimes, lying awake at night or wandering aimlessly through your new District, you wish you had chosen something that sounded less like another placeholder. You never come up with anything that sounds better, though, and you don't like to dwell on wondering whether that's because none of the names you mull over feel like you, or because you will never feel like a name.)



Most strangers do not want to hurt you. Some might. Some simply want to avoid hurting you less than they want to go without whatever money they think they can take from you.

You learned the necessity of money the hard way. You want to avoid hurting them less than you want to go hungry again, too, and your remember how to do—be—what you were created to do (be).

After the fight you don't sob but you do throw up, and then you rub your hands over your knees until they don't feel like your hands at all, which somehow does nothing to chase away the sting of impact. You walk home with feet that don't feel like yours either, and you curl up on top of your sheets, and you lose track of how many hours pass before you move again.



"You waiting for my opinion, or what?" your about-to-be-landlord says. "Just write your name."

Signing your name will not make this contract official. She cannot take legal action against a person who does not exist in this District, and you have practice escaping pursuers, if it comes to that. Your name means nothing.

You see no reason to bring this to her attention. Name Opinion, you set down in careful blue-inked script, and if you don't feel anything in particular looking at it, at least it was your choice.



The best days are like this:

You have not found a job in a while, but you have enough money tucked away for that not to matter—even enough to buy some strawberries without endangering your right to stay in the little room you've finally started to think of as home. You take them to the square and savor them one by one in a sunny patch of grass as the comforting noise of people, ever-present but demanding nothing, drifts around you. You say nothing, but you feel enough like part of something that for an afternoon you forget to worry about how you still don't understand the shape of yourself.

An unattended child pauses to look at you. She doesn't ask anything, but after a moment of deliberation you hold out a strawberry, and you do not even have to suppress a flinch as she smiles and takes it. You hope, as she wanders away humming to herself, that she never forgets that people can trust each other.

(It does not surprise you to include yourself in that thought. On days like this, person feels less like an action you have to learn how to imitate, and more like something you have simply always been.)

You run a hand absently through the grass, tiny repetitive motions you make for no particular reason except that doing so feels nice. A subtle, sweet smell rises from the place you disturb; a year ago you didn't know what made that scent, but now it tells you that if you bothered to look you could find clovers. You could pick one and spin it between your fingers, a delicate little thing that you have the power to kill but never hurt.

Instead, you turn your face into the sun, to treasure the warmth while you can.




*content note: the paragraph that begins "Sometimes it's not so much..." includes violent intrusive thoughts and a blink-and-you-miss-it mention of self-harm; the bio as a whole deals regularly with depersonalization stemming from institutional child abuse, most acutely in that same paragraph and in the section reading "Most strangers[...] move again."


me: I should make an actual Career at some point
me two days later, writing another ex-Career: ...... this is fine

Type: Null/Silvally character for Pokemon shenanigans, by which I mean this started out as a Silvally bio and then I remembered that Null needs high friendship to evolve and spent 1600 words making myself sad about that. (the backdrop of Panem does not make the Aether Foundation less :hk:, alas.)

lemon is good, actually!!