Ella's story

If there was one rule Ella obeyed, it was getting the best out of everything, including herself.

Her mother had given birth to her but, clearly not able to take care of her at the time, had left her in a primitive crib in a park known for **** abusers. Luckily for her none of the **** abusers found her in the morning crying her lungs out. A man walking his dog early in the morning in the park had , called the police and from there she was unceremoniously dropped into the foster care system. First in a hospital, but then moved into a shelter for abandoned female children, aging zero to just under eighteen.

Her first six years went without a hitch. Not really actually. Even as a baby she was proven to become a difficult child. Perhaps it was an attachment disorder, or a genetic behavioral disorder from her dear mummy, or the **** her fucked up mummy had used while being pregnant. She couldn’t tell, but luckily for her, she had no defects. Not in her brain, not in her body. She was perfectly healthy. No thanks to her mummy but even as a fetus in the womb she had decided to get the best out of it. And she had succeeded.

She very much wanted to succeed. But she was also very realistic about her odds. Perhaps as a ten-year old kid, she had struggled with it, but as a teen she was very determined to succeed and be realistic at the same time.

The problem was the others around her. In the shelter she was raised amongst peers, but also in the midst of rebelling teenage girls, each with their own motivations to get the best out of everything and everyone. There was a constant struggle to get attention. To get more love. To get more pleasure. To relief stress in all ways possible.

No. Not that. Not anything remotely sexual. She had too much energy, her caretakers said. She needed too much attention as a child, she couldn’t get in the shelter, with twenty other fierce competitors. It was better if she were moved to a real family, wanting to shelter a child for some time, until she grew out of it. Not that she had anything to say about it.

So after a decade of trying to keep up with her, her caretakers had enough of it, and she was dropped in a family they hoped to be able to care for her. Being a ten year old, fresh from the shelter survival training, raging behavioral disorders, the family could not. But at least they tried. For a year, until the bloody woman that was supposed to behave as a real mother for her, got unexpectedly pregnant, and gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Her bloody husband, clearly fed up with her antics after a year, decided to convince his wife, it would be best to take care of their own son instead of her.

She didn’t feel really bad about it. They were assholes anyway, with their constant rulemaking and trying desperately to control her. Which they failed in. And it seemed they had found a fresh victim for their authoritarian regime, not spoilt by any past that could get into the way. What she did feel bad about was losing her freedom. She had come and gone into the house, having fun with her peers and older girls. In the shelter, there was no such freedom. It was not a half-way house. Or home. The bloody hags of the catholic nunnery were the caretakers, and found it best to keep their pupils or potential nuns locked up as much as possible to make sure they wouldn’t get into trouble.

Girls had come and gone in that year. It was like a dovecote. With the ferociousness of doves. Anyone who thinks doves are loving creatures is clearly out of his mind or just plain stupid. New girls dropped in with new pasts, the same ones they all had in some form or another. Having tasted of freedom, it would not prove to be easy to live in that hellhole of a nunnery.

She managed to get thirteen. And just like in the movie ‘thirteen’ she was starting to experiment. With boys, with ****, but not with ****. She didn’t want to end up like her dear mummy. Who was probably dead by now. Boys were a new challenge. But boys proved to be easy to get around her finger. After a while of cooing, she left them behind. She didn’t want anything to do with them. Nor with girls for that matter, as she had cooed them too. Her hormones may have been razing through her body, changing her, but she ordered herself not to be bothered by it. And she listened to herself. She probably listened only to herself. And she was good at it. To anyone else, she was decidedly not.

But the excess of energy was indeed a problem. Many girls chose for athletics to get rid of the excess energy, she chose gymnastics. She had decided to get the best out of her entire body. And she liked doing it. The girls there, were of a different kind though. They were meek. Obeyed easily. They weren’t from the shelter. If they were, they would have been crushed, pulverized and swept under the carpet like dust in a day. For the first time in her life she was being listened to. It felt good. The girls impressed by her social skills and knowledge about the world, asked her for advice and they listened to her advice. In return, she felt good with herself. Being an advisor. Being a comfort. She started feeling for the girls, their meekness, and tried her best, like she always did, to lift them up to a form of independence. In short, she was the lead in every troublemaking they could invent.

Her experiences with leadership didn’t stop at the gymnastics club. She evolved to a caretaker for the younger kids at the nunnery. Feeling for them. Comforting them. Leading them. Making lots of problems for the hags at the nunnery.

The nuns had enough of it when she reached the age of fifteen. Permanently this time, she had to say goodbye to her friends, and was shipped off to a different foster care program for teens closer to the so-called adulthood. The mythical age of eighteen, where she would be free of all the rules.

The first foster family failed miserably and gave up after one month. For some idiotic reason they had a rule that girls shouldn’t do gymnastics and refused to pay for it. She could run all she wanted, but it was gymnastics that she desired. Fights ensued, she won, but left the family to go back to the nunnery. If there was one thing she could appreciate in the nuns, is that once they had made up their minds, they stuck to it.

Hence a second foster family was found. One that did approve of her doing gymnastics. The problem was that her so-called father figure approved it way too much. Leering at her. Making unappropriated remarks about her developing body. Trying to touch her, but failing miserably. Sadly it was only after quite a while he gave up his non-fatherly attentions, before he realized it would end bad for him. Too late of course as she reported him to her teachers at the school she was attending. They informed the police. The police took him in for a short while, but let him go, after he promised to get rid of her. Not that she minded that much. His wife was very unhappy with her husband, but for some reason she blamed Ella of instigating it. The fight they had was short and explosive.

The third foster family also approved of her hobby. They were quite fine by it, and the father figure was not acting like the idiot in the previous family. There was only one big rule. No physical ****, under no circumstances. She felt quite good in that family. Her academic skills were at the top. She devoured books. She could reason well. She found in herself a distinct skill to cut all the bullshit away from a problem and solve it without effort. A skill most admired by her peers, at her school and at her hobby. She really liked the family. For the first time in her life she felt at home, and stayed at home. She barely went out. Her energy was at optimal level. She didn’t bother with boys or girls all too much. Okay, she fell in love for the first time. Not with a boy though, but with a man, only four years older. She lost her virginity to him. But he dumped her in the end, leaving her devastated, but also realistic. The young men may have found her cute, in a way, but quite normal as they were, went out of their way to evade her obvious approaches. She tried to be more subtle, but it didn’t work either. And boys her age were stupid to say the least.

Getting seventeen, she had to move to a different group in the gymnastics club. Her friends went along. But the trainer remained teaching her same age group as before. A new problem arose. The new trainer was an older man, in his sixties, doing this for a hobby as well. The older man was sadly one of those guys that liked to bully his pupils into submission. And most sadly, he also liked his pupils for their bodies. That combined, with being a most successful trainer, the club being happy to have him overlooked his ‘minor’ faults. He did it for free and was a very good trainer. And a very bad man. It may have worked in his past classes, but this time he had Ella in his group.

He had tried to seduce her, giving compliments, attention, little expensive gifts even. Then he tried it with **** at little parties. Ella was quite resistant to ****, more than anyone her age, or even anyone’s age. She kept up with it, because she was again, feeling sorry for the meeker girls, not wanting to leave without protection. As long as the old fuck would pay attention to her, he wouldn’t seek elsewhere. She was getting very protective of the girls, treating them as little sisters, even if they were the same age or older. But the advances would of course retain no results at all.

The old fuck was not an idiot. He had tried his best to seduce her, tried even to bully her into submission, quite aggressively even, but she would not budge, and she would not leave the group. He tried then to get rid of her, but she was one of the best gymnastic talents in the club, so that didn’t make sense to the club owners. He had tried everything except ****, not because he was afraid of being expelled, but because she was also a girl that could punch very hard. So he gave up. And focused his attention to one of the other girls.

Which was the one thing he shouldn’t have done. Well, besides all the other things of course. But for his sake, he shouldn’t have done that. He tried to single out a meeker girl, but at his first attempts to compliment her, he was caught by Ella. Who punched him for it. Perhaps out of frustration of his past antics, perhaps she had no idea of her own strength when she was really, really angry, she punched him very, very hard. He deserved it of course. But it also knocked him out at once, collapsing against an unstable rack with lifting weights, falling on the ground, with the rack upon him, after the heaviest weights had dropped on his head and torso.

An ambulance had to be called, the cops were called, she had to explain herself, the owners had to explain themselves, they tried to lie their way out, but failed, especially after the girls had stood up for her, supporting her long testimony. The rich owners layered up, the cops couldn’t get more evidence, or perhaps influenced by expensive gifts by the owners, the whole affair was covered up and swept under the carpet.

The only ones that couldn’t be convinced of the righteousness of her actions were her... foster parents. She had broken the one rule she shouldn’t have broken, even if the circumstances clearly had called for it, but after begging and crying, Ella realized she had to be realistic about her odds, and left for the nunnery.

Getting close to eighteen, she was moved to her final destination. Foster family number four. She wouldn’t remain there for long. She knew it. Her foster parents knew it. And made her know about it. They lived quite isolated in the Black Forest. Except for running, there was not a lot going around there. There was a school in the area, some pubs, but mostly for old tourists. A hospital and a few hotels she worked for.

Only for a brief period though. It was one of those wellness hotels, for rich tourists, trying to get the most out of their money. Even if it meant going for the hostesses. Fed up with it after a brief period, she pushed one of them right into the pool, to cool him off, but almost left him drowning. The life-guard had to save him. And that was it. Blacklisted in every hotel and pub and the Black Forest being mostly a tourist area, she had to remain at home, penniless, getting broke, before she would be released into the free world, where everything and everyone had a cost she had to pay for. She had dreaded the day of her eighteenth birthday, longed for it, but dreaded it most severely after she lost her work.

Then the war started. At first her so-called guardians had felt safe. Then it came closer to their doorstep. Then even more closer. So they fled. As a couple. Not to join the war, but simply had fled and didn’t want to take Ella with her, since she was very unreliable to provide for the family. Suggestions to sell her body didn’t work. So they left her, unable to take care of herself. Unable to ask for help to the neighbors, since she had developed a bad reputation. Moneyless to convince others to take her with them. And since she was a minor she couldn’t join the army.

So she scratched her living together on her own. Plundering empty houses for anything she could find of food. Being grown up in the cities mostly she had no idea how to survive in the forests. Then there was a rumor that deserters had settled in the forests. The remaining women and men in the villages were scared shitless. They didn’t dare to go into the woods if one of the two were sighted in the area.

How they had met, she wouldn’t tell, but one of the girls in the village had met one of the two deserters, named Tom, hunting with a sniper rifle. She was the daughter of Maria. Or Marie. It never got clear what exactly her name was. She liked Marie. She had it difficult but tried her best to give her food, out of her own fast dwindling stockpile. She was however getting more and more hesitant to give Ella food. Ella understood, but it felt like being abandoned once more.

Then suddenly there was a rumor one more deserter had joined the two. There were now three of them. The third was a commander. The previous commander of the other two. He kept at himself in the forests and was never seen. But Marie told me that he was the one advising Tom, now the boyfriend of her daughter to go hunting for the villagers, how to set up stockpiles, how to set up a safe distribution system, giving her the first taste of fresh real meat after some time. Hunger had set in.

Marie had **** to ask for a meeting with the mysterious commander. And the commander had agreed. His name was Alex. She told Ella how the meeting went. When she first saw him, Marie was surprised by his age. He was a lot older than Tom. About thirty-five. He was clean shaven, in a certain way handsome, polite, tried to put her on her ease. Marie had been pretty straightforward to get to know him. The reason he had joined the war was of a promise he had made to the mother of Tom and his sister Kate, to try to protect him. But after some questioning by Marie, he didn’t know why exactly he had done that, since he wasn’t remotely connected to the mother, other than being the gardener. He had led the section, then the platoon and after some battles, he left the war with the six remaining people in his section, trying to continue to protect them.

Marie had asked him for more help to the villagers in the region. He had replied he didn’t want to be the sole savior of the region, that he only was willing to teach and advise the villagers how to become self-sufficient or independent of him. He would organize lessons for some of the villagers to make sure about all of the families would be able to provide for themselves.

Ella realized the problem she was in. The villagers were not willing to share and if only they would be taught it would simply leave her little choice to do whatever was needed to keep the hunger away. Even when she had lied to Marie about her age, being just seventeen, her reputation was bad enough, the villagers wouldn’t help her even if she was dying at their doorsteps. And at some doorsteps that didn’t care about her reputation, she didn’t want to lay.

She was free of her foster parents, but she was utterly trapped in the area. She asked Marie to mention the commander of the existence of the children left to their own. Because there were more like her. About nine of them. Some younger than her, some older. They had met at the council and had seen each other before in the villages when they all were plundering houses or asking for favors. Most of them were girls. Each with their own story of getting trapped in a hopeless situation.

Marie would go to a second meeting, together with a select few of the council meeting and had promised to mention us. Ella had little hope. Ella had to be realistic. If the villagers didn’t even want to help those children left behind, why would a stranger do that? He had probably more problems than he could handle, taking care of his own people.

But when Marie returned, she was a bit shaken up. She had mentioned the group of abandoned children. And the commander was not all happy with what the villagers had done. Not at all. He hadn’t given them a sermon, but his anger had radiated from like a **** glare to the council selection. First he had practically **** Marie to take up two of the orphans, as she liked to call Ella and the rest. Which was technically not true, except for Ella, perhaps. Which left the eight orphans hanging at the lips of Marie as she continued. The commander then had decided to adopt the eight remaining orphans and train them to responsible and self-sufficient people.

Now, that was a surprise for Ella. For all of the eight. But also a bit worrisome. There was no reason for the commander to do that. Despite Marie’s assuring the commander ‘seemed’ a good man, that ‘seemed’ in her assurances left them quite a bit scared. And training them into ‘responsible’ people was an odd phrase too. It felt like obedience. In exchange for self-sufficiency. The oldest of the eight looked at each other, worried and afraid, but there were few options left. None of them good. The eight agreed to choose for the unknown danger, rather than the known dangers lurking in the villages.

Marie must have seen the eight’s hesitance and would talk to the villagers. Perhaps they would take more of the eight in, in the hope to please the commander enough. Because the guy had left a deep and lasting impression of fear into the hearts of the selected council members at their first meeting with him. She later came back and said the two youngest would get housing and food by the villagers, **** as they were, but fear won in the end. They felt they had to keep up their end of the agreement if they promised to take care of the youngest two. And leaving the commander a bit more willing to help them, if other problems arose.