Work Text:
Every morning, Adaine will look in the mirror and say to herself, “I love you.”
It will take a long time before she sees the results of her work. She will claw and scrape and climb in order to reach this summit; the summit of believing this statement to be true.
It will start slowly. At first, Adaine will look in the mirror, not taking this exercise seriously, and she will think, ‘I love you,’ to herself, in her head, because Jawbone had instructed her to do so. It will be such a passing thought that it will almost be an accident. But it will not be an accident, because Jawbone, as a rule, is always right, and because in spite of her embarrassment, she will have so much trust in him that his words will reign victorious. Sometimes, she will have to think it in someone else’s voice, because loving herself will be too much. She will think it in Jawbone’s voice, in Aelwyn’s voice, in one of the Bad Kid’s voices. Very rarely, she will imagine her mother’s and her father’s voices. These days will be the worst, because she will have to acknowledge that the words are a lie.
Then, she will graduate to saying it out loud. Adaine will never say it very loud. She will never in her life boast about how much she loves herself, because this fact will always be tenuous. Be she will say it. Sometimes, it will be hard. Sometimes, she will skip saying it, and feel bad. She will still think, then, because she must acknowledge it in order to skip it. She will never forget to do it, though sometimes she will get close.
Eventually, skipping it will seem like an oddity. It will be ludicrous to not start her day by telling herself, “I love you.” At this point, she will still not fully believe it. By this point, she’ll be well into adulthood, and she will have moved multiple times from her days at Jawbone’s home. She will visit him, and this will remind her that he loves her, as he will say it multiple times, somewhat overbearingly.
And then, when she is once again alone in the room that used to be hers, she will feel the sun against her skin as she lays on the bottom bunk. She will think to herself, ‘I love you.’
And she will briefly think, ‘I do. I really do.’ And from that point onward, it will no longer be a lie.
She will still struggle. She will sometimes feel that she doesn’t fully mean it when tells herself, ‘I love you.’ She will sometimes resent her adoptive father for making her say this phrase, because she will say it to herself when she’s having a panic attack, when she has a horrible vision, when she witnesses and remembers terrible things. And in those moments, she will not want to love herself. But she will, and not wanting to will not change this, and Adaine will be better for it.
One day, Adaine will love herself. This will happen as it has been told. But it will not happen because it has been told this way; it will happen, in spite of her best efforts, because Adaine is easy to love.