Wildflowers // Yellowjackets

Wildflowers

A/N So this was already on ao3 but i thought I'd post it on here too, fair warning, it's going to get heavy at times, I'll try to put warnings on the top of chapters but don't push yourself to read.

I'm using writing this as a way to deal/work out things for myself. If that's not how you work or you find it at all triggering, please don't continue and look after yourself.

For this one (it's short, an intro not a full chapter), TWs: allusions to child abuse, mention of blood.

The day Natalie Scatorccio turned seven she believed she was cursed.

She knew she was cursed.

At first she thought she must have done something wrong, something to justify the shitty hand life had chosen to deal to her time and time again. Perhaps in another's eyes she had done things, small things, mistakes like all children make. Though those were mistakes most children aren't beaten bloody for as punishment.

Natalie couldn't quite understand how someone who loved her and made her and kept her could choose to hurt her just as much as her own father did. How he could look her in the eye as she cried and not feel sorry, not say sorry, not love her quite enough to matter.

So what could she be if not cursed?

*****

When Natalie Scatorccio was ten she decided to run.

She ran anywhere and everywhere. Away, no matter what. To escape, to be silent and to be numb, to sit in tall grass and hide from a person who, likely, wouldn't have cared enough to try to find her anyway.

She plucked daisies and poppies and violets from meadows and twirled them between finger and thumb. To carry home, pressed between old pages, a habit developed to stay sane more than anything else. To force herself to remember moments she buried too deeply to be seen. A measure of her suffering, her fear. And yet of rare moments of peace.

By the time Natalie was twelve she measured her whole life in Wildflowers.

*****

On her first day of high school she had no friends. No hope. Just a deep quiet occasionally shattered by the screams of one of the two people on earth that was supposed to love her unconditionally.

But love was pain and blood and tears. Love was a lie told from the people meant to protect you.

Love was an excuse.

When Natalie Scatorccio turned fourteen she vowed she would never love.

On July 1st, 1995, she broke her promise.