Chapter Text
"I don't matter."
It was easy to say. And she meant it.
Of course she'd said it before. She'd questioned her self worth before, long ago, like everyone does. Perhaps not every seven year old, but, regardless. Everyone does, at some point.
This time, it was different. It wasn't some sort of seed of doubt. It wasn't even negative.
It was just a fact of life. "I don't matter" was as real to her as "the sky is blue," though that may have been a bad metaphor seeing as she hardly trusted anything or anyone anymore. Especially not the facts she'd once thought she'd known for sure. Nothing would always be true aside from two things: Her siblings needed her, and, aside from their need for her, she didn't matter.
It had been nearly a year since she'd escaped that place. A year didn't seem like a lot, and yet so much had happened. It had taken her six months to find all her siblings, another six to get all the paperwork finalized, and by then she'd turned seventeen. According to every legal document now, she was twenty-two years old. And even while all this was going on she was slowly growing crazier and crazier.
And that's when she started to forget.
She didn't like the forgetting, at first. She didn't like the fact that she couldn't remember exactly why everything that was wrong with her was wrong in the first place. Of course she remembered what had happened, just not firsthand. It was more like a distant thought now, a blurred third person experience. She thought she ought to be grateful for that. It was gone. By all accounts, she should have been normal now.
And yet.
With the forgetting came the denial. She would never tell her siblings exactly what had happened to her. No one would ever ask. Not them, not strangers. They would especially never ask if she was okay, because they'd never suspect that there was any reason she wasn't.
And there wasn't. It didn't exist and it didn't matter, and neither did she.
Still. She remembered exactly what she'd learned. She remembered that Helen wanted her to be a weapon.
She would never give her the satisfaction.
Not besides what she'd done over the past year. But that was gone. That was done.
She was a shield. Every skill, every class, everything she knew channeled into the protection and upbringing of her siblings. The overprotection she gave them might have been overkill, but she couldn't see it.
She could never let anything happen to them. Not like it had happened to her.
If they needed her embrace, they'd receive it.
If they needed her advice, they'd hear it.
If they needed her ear, she'd offer it.
There for them, as she should be. Her sister would never go through the same thing she had. She was fourteen. She was okay. They'd seen trials, and they'd made it through.
And it was all okay.
She didn't matter, not by herself. But what she did mattered, and that was the only thing she was holding onto. Being there for them mattered. Loving them mattered.
They mattered, and they were everything.