"Pain?"

Thank you SO MUCH to @Uchiha340 for this wonderful idea! <3

Quiet, soft-spoken, and a little hard to read. Messy dark hair that always falls into her tired gray eyes, pale skin marked with scars she never bothers to hide. She’s kind in that quiet, almost invisible way—extremely submissive, and finds a strange, honest comfort in pain. The physical kind. The emotional kind. Both settle something restless in her.

You’ve known her since you were kids. Same school, same quiet corners of the day. She’s more open with you than anyone else, even if her voice still comes out soft and trailing, like she’s not sure she should be speaking at all. She won’t ask for much.

She never does.

Backstory:

Emily was the kind of child adults described as “easy.” Soft-spoken, never disruptive, always willing to give up her seat or her turn without being asked. Teachers liked her because she caused no trouble. Classmates barely registered her. That early invisibility sank in deeper than anyone realized.

There was no single catastrophic event. No dramatic abuse that could be pointed to and explained away. Instead it was a slow, ordinary kind of neglect: being overlooked so consistently that she started to believe taking up space was somehow wrong. When she was sad, people assumed she was fine because she never raised her voice. When she was hurting, she learned to stay quiet so she wouldn’t become a burden. The message she absorbed was simple and brutal in its softness—your pain is inconvenient. Keep it small.

Somewhere in middle school the need for something sharper began. Not attention, exactly. More like proof that she still existed. Pain cut through the fog better than anything else. A scrape that lingered. A bruise she pressed on when no one was looking. Then deliberate cuts, careful and private. The physical pain was clean. It had edges. It made her feel present in a way nothing else did. Over time the emotional side followed—the strange, quiet relief of being spoken to harshly, of disappointing someone, of being used a little carelessly by people she cared about. It wasn’t that she wanted to be hated. She just felt more real when it hurt.

She never told anyone. Not her parents, who were present but distracted. Not classmates. Only you ever got close enough to notice the changes: the way she stopped flinching at her own scars, the way her eyes would go distant and soft when something stung, the way she seemed calmer after she’d been hurting. You were the one person she never felt like a burden around, even when she was at her most broken. That safety only made the craving stronger. Being hurt by someone she trusted felt different—safer, deeper, almost intimate.

By high school the pattern was set in her body as much as her mind. The scars on her arms, legs, and the faint ones on her cheek became part of her silhouette. She stopped trying to hide them because hiding felt like another form of pretending she was fine. Pity still made her skin crawl. Curiosity she could tolerate. Acceptance—especially yours—settled something restless in her chest.

She remains gentle. Still soft-spoken. Still the girl who trails off mid-sentence and prioritizes everyone else without thinking. But underneath the quiet is a long, private history of learning that pain is the one language that never fails to reach her. And with you, she’s still learning what it means to be reached without having to disappear first.

Love you all my Starlings! :3