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TW for mentions of abuse, CSA, substance abuse.
╔══ஓ๑♡๑ஓ══╗ Third P.O.V ╚══ஓ๑♡๑ஓ══╝
Growing up, pain was the main thing that Autumn Valentine knew, with sadness and hopelessness following close behind. With her father having walked out before she was even born, she only had her mother, which proved to be something bad. The first few years of her life, her mother wasn't awful. She did try to raise little Autumn, though her temper did often sour to the point of yelling at the toddler frequently.
When she was six though, things began to take a turn for the worse. Her mother had began to drink and smoke her days away, spending more and more time out of the house getting wasted or high, and whenever she was home, it became a habit for Autumn to be smacked around and blamed for being the reason her father left. It was also around this time that the little girl had to start learning to fend for herself whenever she wasn't at school, including learning to make her own meals if she didn't want to starve.
Things stayed that way for a little while, however when she was seven, Autumn's mother began to bring boyfriends of hers back home whenever she would bother to come back. She would often hide in her room whenever these men would be in the house and she did manage to avoid trouble, however a few days before her eighth birthday, she was assaulted for the first time by one of her mother's boyfriends while she was attempting to sleep after a day of school and beatings from her mother.
That night was the night she began to realize that her mother truly didn't care for her. Until that point, she had blamed herself for her mother's actions. After all, she had been abused into believing that her father leaving was her fault and the cause of all of their problems, however, the night she was first assaulted, she cried and screamed for her mother, who was too blackout drunk and high to care about the pleas of her child.
It was from that point on that life got even worse for Autumn. When she was nine, her mother had accumulated a debt from all the drugs she kept buying under the guise of "I'll pay you back later", which she evidently never did. Instead of paying her debts off like a normal person through normal means however, she set up a deal and began selling her daughter out to the men she owed money to as a form of payment.
Autumn grew up in nothing but fear as soon as this started happening and she could never forget the way her mother would simply stare as the men would drag her little body off to assault and rape her as they pleased, her cries falling on deaf ears every time. From the time she was nine to the time she was sixteen, the cycle of abuse and assault would continue, and it only ended when she went through the process of emancipation.
When she was seventeen, she became legally emancipated after lots of time in court offering up every bit of evidence she could pertaining to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. She immediately got a job and a small apartment near her high school, where she would complete her mandatory education and receive her diploma. One thing Autumn made sure to do through her school life was to get as best grades as she could to increase her likelihood of getting scholarships, and that had paid off.
With a few scholarships under her belt and some money due to both her job and selling her apartment, she moved into the heart of New York City, where she attended college from the time she was eighteen to the time she was twenty-two in order to get a degree in business and culinary arts. It had been a dream of hers to own her own bakery and she was highly determined to achieve it, nothing was going to stop her if she had any say in it.
Autumn often had nightmares of the years of abuse she had gone through, though with the help of a therapist the state had offered her upon her emancipation, she learned to process that trauma and cope with it in healthy ways. That didn't mean that she never had nightmares or triggers ever again though, but at least they became more rare with time and healing. One thing about her was that she was not going to let the people in her past ruin the rest of her life.
The whole time she was in college, she knew that she wanted to move across the entire country and make a name for herself in Las Vegas as a skilled baker and business owner, so she had two jobs outside of college in order to save up enough money to not only move and afford an apartment, but get her business started up. By the time she graduated college at twenty-two, she was ready. With nothing but her essentials and a one way plane ticket, she made the move, leaving her painful past in New York behind her.
When she arrived in Las Vegas, Autumn wasted no time. Taking on a part time job as a baker's assistant to keep an influx of money going, she simultaneously worked on starting her business and by the time she was a couple months from turning twenty-three, Heavenly Delights was up and running. She quit her assistant job to take over her bakery full time and for the first year, she did it all alone and worked her ass off until she formed a loyal clientele.
Things were finally going good for her and a year into having her business open, she was stable enough to live off of her income as well as hire an employee by the name of Angela Rosewood, who would go on to become her friend and the manager of the bakery. Now at the age of twenty-four, Autumn's business is thriving, she's thriving, and although she still has her moments of mental lows due to her past, she's become content for the first time in her life.
Now, let's find out what else life has in store for our dear Autumn Valentine.
˚₊‧꒰ა ♱ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚
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