Opening Author's Notes: This one is a more serious story touching on a heavy potentially triggering topics, so read the warnings carefully before reading.

CW implied child sexual abuse (nothing explicit/fade to black only), grooming (in the actual sense of the word-wherein an adult approaches a child to gain their trust, gradually erode their boundaries, with the end goal of shaping them into an ideal victim they can easily take advantage of sexually), and the resulting touch aversion and dissociative amnesia.
This was written for a roleplaying prompt, viewing a memory from Trip's perspective-so, I wrote it in second-person, a first for me.


Most of your tutors and mentors are very stuffy and boring, they don't really smile or talk to you. They just guide and correct you and it's terribly boring.

This one's different! He's friendly and smiles a lot and always gives you plenty of praise. Not just for how fast you learn and how well you copy his moves, but he also likes your hair and how you carry yourself. Sometimes, you secretly think it'd be much nicer to have this tutor for a father, because then, every day would be much more fun! But, that's not very nice to say (your poor dad!) and besides, you're too shy to say something like that anyway…

You're promised a present, but it's in the other room, the one he's borrowing, why don't you come along with him while he gets it? Excited to know what it is, you follow along! He's pretty friendly, so he often walks while holding your shoulder or hand. You don't get to hold hands much with your family, so you always liked it! Sometimes, he'll even pick you up and toss you and tickle you—you don't really like that so much, but you can't really talk if you're laughing so much it hurts. You're usually too shy to say anything about it afterwards too, but you like spending time with him.

It's a little bit different, this time, though, because he shuts the door behind him, while you're still looking for the present.

"I'll give it to you in a second," he said with a smile. "First, let's take some pictures."

You throw the gift away the very same night. You don't really remember why you can't stand the sight of it. You feel sick, dirty, nauseous. You feel numb, like your whole body's fallen asleep and the pins and needles won't go away. You feel them all over again when anyone touches your skin.

You always run from this tutor (the worst was when no one else was around and you got tired of running…), your family calls you difficult, spoiled, and inconsistent. You get another tutor who isn't so friendly, boring like the rest.

Nobody asks why you suddenly can't drink milk without getting sick. You don't really remember either, just that it suddenly tastes "dirty."

Closing Author's Notes: This is the one part of my backstory for Trip that I did not include in Mirrors For Princes, quite ironically, given that that story began as an expansion of a piece of writingabouthis CSA trauma which I wrote in response to a (different) roleplaying prompt years ago, before it transformed into a story that never directly references this topic at all-so, if that story ever felt a little bit incomplete, this sort of thing was the missing puzzle piece. If you read this, please leave a review, relatively few people review fanfiction nowadays, and it means the world to us writers, even if it's just a few words.