He and his sister lived with their grandparents since he was a year and three months old, and his sister was three months old. Their parents were drug addicts and their dad, Rick, was an alcoholic on top of that, they spent more money getting high than they did on their kids and as a result, they had to give their kids over to the only family that could take them. Rick's biological mom and his step dad stepped up and took the babies, and he began a life that was full of abuse, neglect, and sickness, while his sister was encouraged to hurt him and he was punished for defending hinself. Nova's body couldn't process and digest meat for some reason, and it made him throw up every single time he ate it. When he brought it up with his grandma, Shirley, she told him that was impossible and he needed to stop lying just to make them waste money and food. He pleaded and begged not to eat it but he was forced to every day, no matter what kind of meat it was, he always got sick. On top of that, he was forced to eat past getting full, so he threw up anyway. Shirley threatened to shove the food down his throat if he didn't eat every bite on his plate, she always piled more on, and a few times she carried out the threat.

He threw up and got punished for making a mess and being gross at the dinner table. At night, the threat of death at his sister's hand prevented him from sleeping and when the few nights he did get sleep, he had nightmares. The only time he slept was when his body just couldn't take anymore and he passed out from exhaustion, or when he was sick. During the day, Shirley filled his head with ideas of a God that Nova didn't believe in. He tried to follow the rules anyway, so he wouldn't be punished, but it never stopped and he was losing his mind. He didn't have friends at school, the students were separated into three categories; those who hurt him, those who didn't hurt him, and those he had no interaction with, usually because they were older and in other classes. There was one girl who called him a friend and was nice to him, but she stopped being around him. They used to be inseparable but one day, she stopped being his friend and chose to hang around the boy who bullied Nova the most. The betrayal hurt him in a way he never felt before and he swore to never let it happen again. Shirley told him to get used to it because any friend he made would abandon him.

At first glance, anyone would have thought he had a terrible case of social anxiety with the way he jumped and flinched at every little noise and movement, he felt like he couldn't take it anymore. In middle school, he began self-harming after he read about someone killing themself by cutting their wrists. He figured 'why not' and spent a decent amount of time looking for something sharp. He'd considered suicide when he was a kid, knowing his life wouldn't get better, but the logical part of his brain looked at everything around him and could picture almost each scenario in which he would survive, but get extremely sick or damaged. He didn't want to survive, so he put that thought aside, giving up on the search for something to take his life with until sixth grade. He failed, the blade wasn't nearly sharp enough and he didn't apply enough force to bleed out. Over the course of the school year, he continued cutting himself as a way of dealing with the stress around him, he wore sleeves and pants to keep the injuries hidden but at home, he wore short sleeves. His mom saw for the first time, and scoffed.

He turned to other things as a coping mechanism and made cutting himself a last resort, he began to write anything that floated into his head. Sometimes he wrote a story, sometimes it was a poem, other times it was just individual words that he thought of. It helped until Natasha took it away, she took it all away. Whenever she noticed he was happy while doing something, it was taken from him. If that wasn't bad enough, her boyfriends treated him terribly as well. The first one made Nova freeze on the spot before they even went into the building they were going to an event at. He could pinpoint exactly where the danger was coming from and was paralyzed with sheer terror. He said he wanted to go home and would go by himself if he had to, Natasha physically pushed him inside. On the skating floor, Natasha and her soon-to-be boyfriend met and talked but B, the boyfriend, had his eyes glued to Nova. Over the course of about a week and a half, Nova's fears only grew around the man and he felt abandoned as his mom simply told him to stop ruining her relationship.

Nova had gotten a gift card to a store for Christmas and B offered to drive them. Nova told him he didn't want to go with him and would wait until the holidays were over when the buses ran again, but as usual, Natasha shut him down and thanked B for the gracious offer. Nova needed new shoes for school and made that his first destination, telling B to go in a different aisle and pick out something he wanted. His polite way of telling B to go somewhere else. Once he was out of sight, Nova directly told Natasha that red flags were waving inside his head and something was wrong with B, Natasha was having none of it and moved to slap him but lowered her arm at the last second. On the way home, Natasha needed cigarettes so B stopped at a local market for her. Nova outright begged his mother not to leave him alone with B, all politeness out the window in a last attempt of being saved. Natasha slammed the door in his face and he slunk down, avoiding the gaze in the mirror and ignoring the questions B asked him.

At home, Nova stormed up the stairs and hid in his room, crying himself to sleep. The next time he interacted with B wasn't for almost a solid week, then he and Natasha were invited to visit B at his apartment. Nova begged his mom to let him stay home and he was ignored. They had to take a long bus ride to an unfamiliar place, packed with buildings. There were no trees around at all and Nova felt more and more uncomfortable as the ride went on, trees lined almost every spot available near his own home. At B's apartment, a kid's show was playing on TV and Nova instantly felt dread pool in his stomach. He knew adults could watch kids' shows too, but for some reason, this confirmed Nova's fears. He didn't know how much time passed before the adults wanted to smoke, so they all went down to the garage because smoking wasn't allowed within twenty or thirty feet of the building. Nova hid behind his mother, who was a good four feet away from B, and B tried to reach behind Natasha to grab him, and he ducked every time. The adults laughed and Nova felt tears well up in his eyes as Natasha sidestepped and let B grab him. He told the man to let him go, that he didn't want to be touched, but Natasha told him to be quiet and let B have fun with him.

Nova had his hair in a ponytail, he loved it that way, and suddenly regretted it. B grabbed his ponytail and yanked hard, forcing Nova's back to arch in a painful way, and B took the opportunity to reach down to grasp and squeeze Nova's ass cheek. He shrieked and thrashed around in the vice tight grip, not fully believing that he was being laughed at and mocked for the situation. Ten minutes later Nova and Natasha were on a bus ride home and, not wanting it to be public, he told his mom he had something to tell her once they got home. Once they got inside and the door was locked shut, Nova turned to his mother who had a worried look on her face. He told her what happened and was shocked that Natasha flat out called him a liar, saying she saw what happened and he should have let B do what he wants. Nova was confused for many reasons; his mom often spoke about her own molestation incident and he didn't call her a liar for it, he wondered why she would say it to him.

He was eleven at the time and it was not ok to touch a minor in that manner, and it happened in front of Natasha's eyes. He went to bed with a deep pain in his heart and burning in his eyes from all the tears. He was happy to come home from school a full week later to find Natasha moping on the couch and he instantly knew B was gone. He couldn't contain his happiness and Natasha scolded him for being happy about a breakup and that he shouldn't have interefered with the relationship. Natasha didn't apologize for not believing her child or letting the inappropriate touch happen, but Nova could overlook that. All he cared about was that B was out of his life, but the next boyfriend, I'll call him M, was no better, if not worse. M had slapped Nova several times, shouted at him, threw things at him, even threatened his life at one point, and made him terrified to come home. Nova spent every waking minute he could away from home, his mom doing nothing to stop the actions, laughing at him for being afraid. M would start an argument and Nova would argue, Natasha would pick Nova up from the chair he would be seated in and push him all the way to his room before throwing him in his room like a bag of trash.

Nova wept in pain, in fear, and internal agony. On top of that, his alcoholic dad came to visit far too often. He got grabby with Nova as well but it didn't get nearly as close to his intimate places as B did, but he still moved Nova's body in almost inappropriate positions, hurt him and worsened his shoulder injury, smacked him against the wall and was blatantly homophobic. He stopped leaving his room when Rick came over. It was that summer that Natasha broke up with M, but he didn't feel as happy as he should have. Nova found himself addicted to pain, craving it in every form, and his self-harming soon became out of control. Nobody cared about him and left him to his own self-destruction, and he'd never been happier. Between his mother verbally abusing him, neglecting his pain, and encouraging him to do inappropriate things, his father, his school peers, and the boyfriends he had that didn't treat him well, Nova was at his absolute wit's end. He remained alive only for the sake of his cats, refusing to leave them in the hands of his mother.

High school came around and he was a freshman, he could barely go to school due to his anxiety at the large group of people swarming in and out of the building and his mom said he couldn't have anxiety because he was thirteen and had never been hurt enough to get anxiety. He fought through his nerves everyday until he couldn't take it and stopped going altogether. He went to the public library and wrote all day. More stories, more poems, more pain. As punishment for skipping almost the entire semester, Natasha grounded him for a week and threatened to take away all he cared about, including the cat she didn't already kick out, if he didn't boost his grades in the last three months left of school. Nova never worked so hard in his life and shocked all of his teachers with his persistence and dedication, his grades improving so quickly and greatly, Natasha contacted his teachers, believing he'd hacked the grading system to manually change his grades. She'd seen his mountains of homework and the sweat and tears he poured into getting it all done, yet she didn't believe it was real. The next year, he was registered at a military school that was far away from home and in the middle of nowhere, as further punishment for skipping school and to ensure he couldn't skip this one.

The bus arrived at seven thirty am and dropped them off at almost five pm. Nova learned quickly that he would not be able to stay there if he cared about hsi mental health. Being yelled at all day, every day, surrounded by many people who'd bullied him in the past, people who belonged in jail and not a school, and being so far away from any kind of stress relief was making his brain fizz out and short circuit. He continued writing poems, and they became so dark they frightened those who read them. He hardly opened his mouth, to talk or eat, he never stepped a toe out of line, and made extra sure he had everything he needed during the day so he wouldn't need to bother other students if he forgot something. Over the course of the next three and a half months, his PTSD was triggered every single day and he was forced to endure his harshest panic attacks with such a stoic expression, nobody even noticed how hard he was trembling. He tried to talk to Natasha about it all but as she always did, she simply called him a liar and told him to grow up. December came around and Christmas vacation was going to be in the last two weeks of the month.

During the first week they still had at school, Nova was a nervous wreck and everyone could see it clear as day, his peers became increasingly insulting toward him, treating him as the welcome mat the wiped their feet on. That thursday, he wrote his darkest poem yet and nobody knew that he meant every single word; he was going to kill himself. It shook its readers to its core. He wrote it, then asked the student to his left (I won't name them) if everything was spelled correctly, as his hands were trembling with fear and he was sure he'd smudged every other word. Reading it brought tears to her eyes and she asked if she could show the teacher, to which he nodded. The teacher and that student had a somewhat parent-child bond, the teacher read it and Nova could feel his teacher's chest tighten with fear, amazement, praise and something the teacher could relate to. He complimented the work and the three students around him read over his shoulder and gave equal praise.

Soon enough, the entire class had read it and Nova was crying into his sleeves at the praise. He'd never heard those words before and couldn't believe it. As the day went on, he could feel the tension building and when he got home, Natasha had already gone to bed; she developed an additction to pot so he wasn't surprised to find her asleep. The next morning, he was struggling to get everything in order, anxiety and depression weighing heavily on his heart and mind, and he moved as fast as his muscles would let him. Natasha knocked on the door as he slipped on the other boot and asked, for what must have been the hundredth time, what bothered him so much about the school. She did that often, asking what was wrong, then denying it or telling Nova to suck it up when she got her answer. Nova told her he was sick of her asking since she didn't take his complaints seriously, and her response had him breaking down in tears.

"Unless there's a male teacher making you sick his dick, it doesn't matter. Get dressed and get on the bus." He lost all respect for his mother when she didn't take his complaint about M seriously, but this still hurt and confirmed that she truly didn't care. All day, he struggled to hide his panic attacks, and made a mental promise that if his mom were to make christmas break difficult, he would kill himself. At the end of the day, he barely managed to dry his tears and shove down his fears when he was asked to retrieve two students from a different location; to bring them back for the day's closing ceremony. On his way down, two students joked about his gender and his purpose, making crude comments about the way he looked and what they wanted to do to him. He wasn't out as transgender at the school, he didn't have time to worry about things like that, but it was still offensive. He had enough, he bolted to the bathroom and sobbed against his shirt as he used the toilet. When he heard someone come in, he forced tears back with a threat of harm, the only way he could calm down in an instant, and flushed the toilet.

As he washed his hands, the girl who came in noticed the large cuts, and large amount, all over his arms. She asked about them and he wouldn't answer, her tone was gentle but he couldn't being himself to speak or he might start crying again. He only gave a nod or a shake of the head as an answer and she let it go. As expected, his mom treated him terribly during the wkeend and he decided to end his life earlier than planned. That night at midnight, he swallowed a handful and a half of pills and went to bed with a smile on his face. He woke up three hours later and ran to the toilet, vomiting all that he'd ingested, and he went to bed crying. His heart had never hurt so much, his family considered him a failure in all things and it seemed like he couldn't even fail at dying. Surviving his sister's attempts on his life multiple times and unable to kill himself properly, he had never felt so lost. At night, he liked to leave the house and take long walks in the cold, in the snow, the rain, and the frozen without outer protection of any kind. It hurt just enough to calm his chaotic mind and tonight would be no different, but this time, he would have someone to share the cold with.