Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, just my OC, and I am not making any sort of profit whatsoever from this, except the enjoyment I get out of writing and getting favs, reviews, and story alerts.
Thank you all so much for reading this. I hope I don't let everyone down. This chapter is basically just a bit of background on Snowflake's life.
Snowflake was, in nature, a very tactile person. For anyone else, it wouldn't have been a problem, but she was isolated from her peers and foster parents physically and mentally, and pleasant contact with other people was just as rare as seeing someone ride a goat in the thick of downtown traffic.
To escape her miserable every day existence, she'd create paper snowflakes. There was something comforting in the snip of the scissors and the way the paper felt, and the moment when she unfolded the paper to reveal a work of art made her heart pound in excitement. When she looked at the finished design, she felt a rush of satisfaction and contentment that nothing else could bring her.
She kept her snowflakes, paper, and scissors in an antique box that one of her ancestors, a Greek craftsman, had made some hundreds of years ago. Her mother had given it to her, and it was now her most prized possession, as well as being a family heirloom. It had been made with great care, and although the wood had been rubbed smooth and some of the gold leaf and paint worn away from the carvings, it was still as beautiful as it had been when it was made. That heirloom was the one thing she kept with her all the time, either in her well-padded knapsack when she went out, or below a loose floorboard under her bed when she was at the house.
The carvings were a mix of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Arabic designs, and featured the figures of some of her ancestors. The main figures were those of two lovers, a simple Greek potter and the daughter of a rich Egyptian merchant, who had been forbidden to meet by their families. As the story went, they fled the city and married, only to have soldiers chase and kill the potter and drag the woman back to her family. She died soon after giving birth to their son, who grew to become a craftsman like his father. He was the one to carve the box Snowflake treasured, as a way to remember his parents.
Snowflake loved the story, and when her mother was alive, she'd demanded it be told every night before she went to bed.
Now, as she sat on her bed, carefully cutting out a paper snowflake, she made a wish that she, too, would find someone to love like that—without the tragedy. Or any kind of love, really.
And then she heard the door slam. Her head shot up as angry voices came from downstairs, and she realized, with an ever increasing sense of dread, that her foster parents were back.