Chapter Text
You were 18 when you came out to your parents. They kicked you out—as you had expected—and, while you were glad to leave, you realized that not as many of your friends as you thought really meant it when they said you and your cat could stay with them. With the help of one of your closest friends, you eventually found a cheap apartment in a medium-sized city with a few friends not too far away. You even got a boyfriend and found a job working for an advertising company. Life was... Life was okay. You weren't complaining. It was better than living with your complicated and crazy family. That was about a year before it happened.
It was a week before you turned 19 when your cat died. He was 15, your first and only pet. He'd been having joint problems, and you did your best to buy him medicine, but he was so old. You came home one day to find him on the floor by your bed, a little blood coming from his mouth. He couldn't move his back legs. Your friend drove you both to the vet, and it turned out that he broke his back. You didn't have the money to help him, and the vet said he was probably too old to bother with it. You had to put him down. He was one of the last things you had of your life before, no matter how fucked up it was, and you had a hard time coming to terms with that. Your boyfriend couldn't see why you were "having such a tantrum over some stupid cat." You broke up with him. That was a few weeks before it happened.
You had just received your hard copy driver's license when it happened. You were passing a tv store and the news was blowing up with the appearance of monsters around some mountain. You were astounded! Monsters that had been living right under our noses for hundreds of years! You had always loved sci-fi and fantasy stuff, so this was like a dream come true for you! You blabbered on about what this could mean for everyone for weeks—the exchange of cultures, the way we could advance each other!
But then the government started trying to control the monsters. They started testing on them. You caught wind of kidnappings and heard talk about lie detectors. Then, around your 20th birthday, the government released monster collars, a way to command the monsters so they "wouldn't hurt anyone and no one could hurt them." 3 of your 4 friends sounded as if they liked the idea, but you could already see where this was leading. Pets at best, slaves at worst—that's all they would become. Your friends said you were overreacting, you said to look at history. How many times it's happened before. How much it still happens. They stopped hanging out with you, kept saying they were too busy or something. Later you found out that one of them already had a monster of their own. You stopped talking to them.
You kept voting against the increasing enslavement of monsters, but it seemed there were too many people who just wanted that kind of thing. It made you sick. They were bought and sold like property to different owners, doing anything from hard or unskilled labor to the illegal prostitution that everyone turned a blind eye to because they weren't human. You even had to make an add for a business yelling about their new monster waitstaff. You almost quit, but you needed the money.
A week after your 22nd birthday, your last good friend—the one who had been there with you since you were both 13, who saw how crazy your family was, who was there for you when you had nowhere else to go, took you and your cat to the vet, punched your ex-boyfriend in the nose, and supported you when all your other friends started openly supporting slavery —got a fucking slave. She said it wasn't all that bad and that she wanted to show you that, so she got this bunny to help her around her house. She was looking forward to having some extra help around since her boyfriend never did anything. You wrote your name and phone number on a Post-it and handed it to the bunny woman and then walked out of her house without another word, ignoring your friend and the leftover cake on the counter.
That evening, you found yourself at a bar, wasting a good half of your paycheck on alcohol. Fuck, you may have told yourself that you would never drink or smoke after seeing what happened to your dad, but it felt so good to just not have to think for a few minutes, and that guy in the corner with who said something to you about selling joints looked more appealing by the minute.
You don't remember what happened after thinking that, just the relief of your mind being fully blank for the first time in years.