Warning: This story is going to be as realistic as possible, which means graphic depictions of violence and what is legally categorized as abuse, and much more. The events are all heavily based on true experiences, as I do not know how to write about things I've never experienced well. With that said, do not expect a happy ending or fully in-character characters, as anime is fiction.

Disclaimer: I do not hold any rights to Yuri On Ice!


Let me tell you a story.

There were two girls who once lived in the countryside of China. One girl lived there with her grandparents, due back to America when her parents remembered her again. She could go to school and run freely in the fields and tried to make her parents proud, to pay attention somehow, to not be forgotten with trying her hardest at almost everything she did.

The other lived with her father, who loved to drink more than his family. She went to school before, but then her father kept her in the basement, saying that school was for boys. So she lived there, waiting, every day, counting the stars and birds and maggots from the cracks in the concrete.

These two girls were best friends.

Every day, the girl would run back from school as fast a possible and sneak into the other girl's basement, because that was where her best friend lived. She brought canteens of water she refilled in the school well and her packed lunch for school. She brought stray figurines, gossip of the town, strips of cloth, and her homework.

Knowledge is power, the girl in the basement whispered. Knowledge is power, so learn until you can run away from here, and keep on learning so nobody can ever cage you.

The girl in the basement knew this now, because she was ignorant and trusting, and that was how she was caged.

Knowledge is power, the girl who lived with her grandparents whispered back, so let me teach you what I learned today so when you are reborn you will always be free.

And the girls smiled, knowing that the girl in the basement had a higher rebirth when she dies, because when the girl who lived with her grandparents pays respect to the images of Buddha each morning in the incensed ante-room for the both of them, she feels the surety of it.

This is reality. Where there are no heroes, or villains: only people.

In reality, children grow up praying to dying gods.

And in reality, this other girl perished slowly of infection, still shackled tightly with iron-cast chains through her achilles and between her cartilage-soft ulna and radius in that putrid basement cellar, hung out from the ceiling for her father to drunkenly slish-slosh in through the layer of congealed blood and piss and excrement to whip and beat and scream at her. And continued to, even after she died, not noticing the stench of death through the red of his rage until the body tore in half.

And a month and a half later, the girl who lived with her grandparents returned to America.


That girl- the girl who boarded the plane- is me. I told you this story because I want you to understand, dear reader, that from now onward, this is not going to be pretty. It's not going to be happily-ever-after, or with adrenaline-filled adventure, or even with a resolution.

It's going to be about me. And that is all I can promise.


I lived a normal life. I had a family, pets, went to school. And then, when I was in the summer to start my second year of middle school, I killed myself.

It's a rite of passage- suicide. The want to escape builds up within you until it is your best choice- that, or of suffering the drag of the days for the rest of your life. It's the point where you realize the true realities of life, and from this hopelessness, the selfish desire to end everything.

Through this, you are an adult.

Of course, not everyone does it. Not everyone is a coward like me, unwilling to endure my pampered first-world life another day. Not everyone breaks, like my oldest brother, because he was the one who raised two younger siblings while juggling school and taking care of the house and protecting us from the fickleness of parents. And not everyone is like my second brother, who was three and too young to know that a seven foot drop would not kill him, but too scared of anyone finding out to try again.

Not everyone takes that last, selfish step.

(But those that do are forever adults, their wispy childhoods blown away into the screaming chasm that is the world.)

Before we begin, let me tell you four more things.

This is what I love: beauty, truth, power.

This is what I hate: stupidity, violence, myself.

This is what I am: twelve, desperate, tired.

This is what I became: nothing.

From these four things, it is easy to see how I grew up in my second life.


Please leave a review on your way out. Constructive criticism is welcome.

This is my first fanfiction.