I won't promise you'll like me. Just because I said I hated Self Inserts doesn't mean I don't like writing them myself. Now read it and tell me I'm a Mary Sue. Give it a chance.

I'm going to write this story with two promises to myself: Lose those 20 pounds you've gained by the end of the semester and get the hell back into swimming. You've had your year-long break, now quit making excuses.


Anne poked irritably at the chubby pudge ringing her white-skinned waist, the incriminating flab that caused her pants to fit tighter and now prevented her from wearing some of her clothes. Little red squeeze lines betrayed the area formerly held in by the line of her jeans, but were now covered by looser pajama bottoms.

The extra weight wasn't very apparent to anyone but Anne, especially given that she was still thinner than many of the people around her, but it made a large impression on her.

Since she had quit exercising on a regular basis, she had gained a ridiculous amount of baggage. She was fat, as much as her friends tried to convince her otherwise. She disliked it, it made her face round and pudgy-looking.

"I really need to exercise," she mumbled, glaring at her dimmed image in the mirror, and then squeezed the skin between her fingers, her eyes narrowing. Realizing, again, that staring at it was pointless and only made her feel worse, she turned away and went back to her desk; her dorm room was tiny, it didn't take more than a few steps and she was sitting in front of her laptop again: Her word processor was open and she was trying to work on her essay for her history class. It wasn't coming along well.

It was an open topic and one she knew fairly well: Nazis—or much more specifically Himmler, but she was terrified of saying something that would earn her a harsh academic rebuttal. She had inadvertently managed to prompt her professor into assigning her this when she had asked a rather specific question about the relationship of the SS in terms of Germany's nationalism in the Third Reich after class three days ago.

As a result she was asked to write a research paper about Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, which actually didn't disturb her on a moral level one bit: In fact it intrigued and excited her, to no end, because it gave her an excuse to prioritize the reading of a book on Nazi occultism and another on the SS in general.

But, she was still wrangling with the fact that she had to tell people what she was doing, and why—people tended to give very polarized reactions. Either they stared at her like she was some kind of freak and changed the subject, or laughed it off as another one of Anne's multiple eccentricities. A few would sit and listen to her, totally ambivalent and understanding of Anne's purely academic interest.

But back to the paper—she was trying to avoid it simply because she was afraid of what she might say. She was terrified of having to sit in her professor's office and listen to him tear it to pieces. There was a high chance of it; he said he would hand it to another professor—one who was an expert in, of all things—Nazis.

The thought made her blood chill to the bone, though at the time Professor Langley had given this to her she had only nodded—rather lightheaded and frozen stiff with fear of even the idea—and asked when he would like to have it in. He gave her two weeks.

So it was a double edged opportunity: She had not been able to shake the subconscious impatience to begin work on it, because of this fascination—and she had begun, obviously; Anne realized quickly that she would have to do this right the first time, and that it wouldn't stand for her usual procrastination. By by another token, there was also the subconscious guilt and shame of even having this interest in the first place, and that dragged her down.

Glancing nervously at the few typed words, she decided that no academic juices were flowing at the moment and so flicked her finger along the touch pad of her laptop, and clicked on the Firefox tab on the taskbar.

The gray-green image of DeviantART's forums appeared and she lurked absently for a few minutes, her eyes roving along the thread titles and finding nothing riveting that she hadn't already replied to.

That option exhausted, she looked through her cache of pictures, and when she quickly exhausted that option she glanced at the clock at the bottom-right of the screen: 12:06 AM.

Anne sighed: She still had Japanese and German to study before she went to sleep, since those classes were tomorrow, and she had again wasted her evening piddling around uselessly. Her GPA was going to take a back-breaking dive if she didn't get her act together.

Still, Anne was naturally intelligent: She was quite competent despite her shortcomings, efficient, and took tests extremely well. She was good at guessing what the teacher was aiming for her to get out of a lesson, but she ran into pitfalls when she had no directive and clearly stated goal. This was evident in her grade in her honors Humanities course: There was no doubt that Anne was in love with the subject, but her professor was anything but specific in terms of laying out what he wanted, and then graded ridiculously.

That she doggedly remained in that class despite the high rate of drops was testament to her rigid lack of an ability to simply throw in the towel without having been without-a-doubt backed into a corner with a gun to her head. She would not get an F for the semester—Anne was too smart for that, but she would also not get an A.

Anne decided that she would work on her Himmler paper again tomorrow night. Anne's roommate, Carrie, had already gone to sleep—that was rather early, actually, but she'd been tired.

Fuck Japanese and German. I'll pay for it later. It's already midnight.

With an inaudible groan she realized that this was the same excuse she had used with herself two days ago and then promptly bombed her German quiz.

Didn't I say I wasn't going to do that anymore?

Still unwilling to set her nose to the grindstone, Anne checked the DevART forums once again and posted twice under a topic in the complaints forum, in typical style: Bitter, harsh, and generally sarcastic.

Eventually she brought herself to look through her Japanese, which was the first class of the day; she promised herself she would study German before stepping foot in that classroom tomorrow.

By the time she went to bed it was 1:30 AM, with very little done. This was normal, and on her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she talked with a friend of hers who was studying for an Arabic test the next morning.

"Good luck," Anne said, as she went back into her dorm room, shut down her laptop, and crawled under her covers, putting her cell phone next to her head on the pillow, as a second alarm clock; Anne didn't always wake up for the clock that sat beside her lofted¹ bed on top of the shelves.


(¹) Lofted Bed: A bed that's been lifted up like a bunk bed without a second bed beneath it; in Anne's dorm room case it's up against the wall, and the head of the bed is against the far wall, along the same side of the room, next to the bed are shelves, on top of which things like Anne's lamp, her clock, and the books which she couldn't fit on her shelves go. If this isn't clear enough, I'll draw a picture.

Boring? Is she too Mary Sue-y? It's only the first chapter, so give it a little time. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this...?

Okay, to clear stuff up: Anne is in college, she lives in a dorm. She is taking two different languages at the same time. Any more questions?

Like I said, I don't know what impressions you may have gotten, this fic will get pretty dark and twisted. Just wait for it...