Rose stood up on shaking legs, wishing for bed, wishing for cocoa, wishing for her Huntsnanny. But she was too old for the Huntsnanny now, Master said. Master said that since Rose was ten now, a big kid, he could finally start training her so that she could be part of the elite group that was always by his side. When Master had told her of this before, Rose had dreamt of it in a starry-eyed way - she was going to be important!

Now, Rose rapidly wiped at her face, knowing what Master would say if he saw tears in her eyes. She wasn't allowed to show weakness. He had made sure to tell her that much.

Rose gripped her staff in her little hands, wishing she was bigger. The weapon was so heavy and it took all of her energy to even hold it. But she wasn't here to just hold it. She had to fight back. She had to fight back and win.

"Ready?" Master asked.

Rose nodded because that's what was expected of her but she wasn't ready at all. She ran at the Huntsmaster, the words offense and defense bouncing around in her brain. He shouted at her about her stance and form as he rushed right back at her. Rose grit her teeth and tried to get the staff into his stomach but the Huntsmaster got it away from her in one easy movement. In quick succession, he bruised her ribs and her shoulders and drew blood from her forearms when Rose had begged for surrender.

Master threw the staff down and Rose let herself collapse to the training ground floor. Her knees weren't going to work anymore.

"Huntsgirl," Master said, "tomorrow you will do better."

"I will," Rose whispered, but she wasn't sure he heard her as he walked away.

Rose sniffled, ashamed that tears slipped out. She rubbed at her face, not caring if she got blood on her cheeks. Nothing mattered because she was a failure. Master told her that she had to be strong, that she had to be better, and she wasn't. She wasn't enough and Rose desperately wanted to be enough, because she wanted him to love her. She wanted him to tousle her hair and tell her he was proud.

Rose had seen parents do it, at school. She wasn't allowed to talk about what her home really was like so when she was at school, she called Master her father, and when the teacher needed to talk to her parents, the teacher called Master her father too. He wasn't her father - she had asked him, once, when she was little. But he was the closest thing she had and it wasn't close at all.

Rose pushed herself up from the training ground floor, her thoughts making her sad. Master said her parents were dead and that was why he took care of her. It was something Rose accepted but in times like this, when the present hurt so bad, she would daydream otherwise. It made sitting down with the first aid kit more bearable if she was thinking about her bloody arms.

Travel with me, if you will, all the way back to the year 2005. I was a 14-year-old kid whose parents had just gone through a nasty divorce and whose life as she knew it was falling apart around her. I found myself clinging desperately onto the things that gave me joy and comfort: my shows, books, and movies. I wouldn’t know it then, but this is where my journey as a fangirl truly would begin.

For some reason, I was really into the Disney Channel original show American Dragon: Jake Long. Other than Harry Potter, it was my first hyper-fixation. I didn’t care that I was a teenager and that it probably wasn’t “cool” to enjoy this show as much as I did. It made me happy, so I devoured it. But I soon found myself frustrated with it, as all fans of media inevitably do. Why couldn’t Jake and Rose get together the way I wanted them to? Why wasn’t there more of the main character getting beat up and captured in the show? (Little did I know, I was already a whumper at a young age, even though I had no clue what whump was.)

And that’s how I discovered fan-fiction. Yeah, I’d had no idea it was even a thing, but I found a site (I can’t even remember what it was called, but I would be shocked if it was still around today) that allowed you to write and upload your own stories. I learned about fan-fiction from it. And I wrote this story, a very simple piece where Jake and Rose find out each other’s secrets. I posted it on whatever website I’d found, but then...

But then...

I found it. The Holy Grail of the mid-2000s fan culture. Fanfiction.net. I posted my story there, got my first positive review, and was hooked. And I’ve been writing fan-fic ever since, for a variety of fandoms.

Rose knew, in the back of her head, what this was. She had sat through her Health Education classes like everyone else and had gotten top marks, as she always did. But, on the day she went to pee and found blood in her underwear, she felt her body go cold. Blood was never a good thing. She had learnt that blood meant pain and she sat on the toilet seat and waited for her body to convulse or something. She knew it was going to hurt but she'd never been told exactly how.

The pain didn't come in that moment and she had to hurry into the changing room to get ready for her weapons training class with the Huntsmaster.

She was late. She was never late. It shouldn't have surprised her, then, when Huntsmaster knocked on the changing room door.

"Huntsgirl, are you all right?"

Rose wanted to rely on him. She wanted to tell him that she was going through something she only intellectually understood and that her emotions were raging inside her chest. She wanted to ask to go to Infirmary so that she could sneak off to find her old Hunts-nanny, who had been the only person to ever touch her with kindness. She wanted to reach out to Huntsmaster and pretend he was her father, who wouldn't know what to do but would take her off to her mother to be taken care of. She wanted to have somewhere to go, in moments of fear.

But, she didn't have that, and Rose came back to herself with a vengeance. She wasn't allowed fear. She had to make this weakness a strength. She had no parents and she was too old for Hunts-nannies.

She was on her own.

"I'm coming, Huntsmaster."