★Timelines: 1?

★IDs

• Bisexual trans man (he/him)

★Canonmates

• None found
• Looking for Lawrence (!!!) and Amanda

★General memories

• I grew up in a really poverty-heavy neighborhood and my family was no exception. My dad was a real asshole, I actually ended up a lot like him when I got older, but I didn't like to admit it. Half the time he didn't have a job and my mom had to support the family. I think I might've had a sibling? Not sure. Anyway I went to a normal public elementary school but I had a lot of behavioral issues. My mom was raised Catholic so she figured sending me to a Catholic middle & high school would help. It didn't, but they never took me out. I suspect it was partially because the Catholic school days ran longer than the public school days, and they wanted to keep me out of their hair longer.
• I think I must've been perceived just as a "tomboy" type of girl, because I got called lesbian slurs in school and wasn't able to really come out as trans. But I always knew, I think. I could always tell, especially in the way I was attracted to guys, that it wasn't the way girls were attracted to them. Once I graduated high school (somehow) I totally cut off everyone I knew, except my parents because I would need to borrow money and stuff sometimes. I worked various shitty jobs until I had enough money to pay for hormones, top surgery, and bottom surgery.
• After that I immediately quit those jobs and focused solely on photography, which is why I lived in such a gross awful apartment. I didn't get many jobs, mostly creepy peeping tom stuff. I did it, because I needed the money, but I didn't feel good about it.
• Private investigative sort of work was uncommon but it did happen, usually just wives looking for evidence that their husbands are cheating on them. I think one of those women put Tapp in contact with me. He paid me $200 a night to take photos of Lawrence, basically just documenting the places he went. Nothing too extravagant. He didn't tell me why and I didn't really care. Since I had literally nothing else to do with my days other than do or sell drugs, I basically spent all my time following Lawrence around or developing photos to drop off for Tapp. I didn't have a car so I had to walk or ride the bus everywhere, which made it very difficult to keep up with him at the beginning, but he wasn't one to deviate from his schedule very often. In the process of following him everywhere, I genuinely became obsessed with him and took way more photos than necessary, keeping a lot of them for myself in my red room (where I spent most of my time- and yes I called it my red room and not my darkroom because haha red room scary). I have a specific memory of coming home for the day, developing the new photos and smoking a cigarette, shooting heroin once I'd finished, and just staring at one picture of Lawrence until I zoned out completely.
• I just wanna mention somewhere in here, Lawrence was British but lived in America so long that he kind of had a blended accent. I was fully American.
• At some point while taking the photos I stopped doing hard drugs and just started smoking a fuck ton more cigarettes. I have no idea how, just that I justified it by saying like, why would I use my own stash when I can just sell it? I think I was also sick of thinking about heroin so much when I COULD be focusing on Lawrence.
• I don't think I had any contact with Amanda before she knocked me out. The kidnapping took place as it did in the film, as did the whole of the bathroom trap. I remember the first time Lawrence said my name out loud it felt like an out of body experience, I'd been so obsessed with him it did not feel real at all that he was actually having a conversation with me. I'll admit, it took some of the sting out of being kidnapped and psychologically tortured.
• Except surprise, I got out! I don't know who showed up or what happened, I always had an assumption that it was a SWAT team or something, I never asked. I just remember waking up in the hospital in tremendous pain, evidently having been asleep for a couple days, and immediately bursting out laughing despite how much it hurt. I was just so fucking delirious with relief and joy that Lawrence had kept his word. I asked the nurse who came running in what hospital we were at, because I couldn't recognize it from the room they put me in, and turns out it was the emergency ward in Lawrence's hospital! He was able to come visit me almost everyday while I was recovering, but once I was let out and went back to my shitty apartment (because I still couldn't afford anywhere else), he didn't contact me for months. I don't know why I didn't reach out first, maybe I thought he didn't want to see me.
• Obviously I was very fucking traumatized from the whole experience and honestly did not go in my bathroom for a majority of the time back at my apartment. If I needed to pee I just went outside. I rarely showered and when I did it was always in public places like a park or gym, and the water always had to be scalding hot so it didn't remind me of the cold bathtub water. I could only wear certain pairs of pants because I couldn't stand the feeling of something around my ankle. I'm not sure if I started doing heroin again at this point. If I did, Lawrence helped me get clean. I also had a lot of trouble with the dark and basically had to start relying on nightlights to keep me from breaking down in tears.
• When Lawrence did show up in my life again, he was knocking on my door very loudly at like 1am, and I fell face-first off the couch trying to wake up and answer the door. He burst in with his cane, very flustered and upset, and when he couldn't figure out how to articulate anything, he grabbed me against the wall and all but shoved his hand down my pants. We had sex for the first time on the couch in front of the tv static, grabbing and scratching at each other, very loud, shaking the whole time, and both crying by the end of it. I was the first man he'd ever been with - let alone the first trans person - and he definitely called me Ali a few times while we were fucking but I didn't say anything about it. He would do it a few more times later on though, and I DID get mad then.
• As far as what our sex life looked like, it was probably pretty unhealthy but it worked for us I guess?? I also consider a lot of the non-explicit stuff we did to still be sexual acts. For example, he really liked when I got hurt and he had to fix me up, especially whenever he would have to stitch closed a wound. Sometimes I would cut myself with a kitchen knife just so he could clean and stitch it. We also liked to shower together, that was how I started to get a bit more comfortable with bathrooms. When we were actually having sex, he was very much the more dominant party. He held me down and manhandled me around a lot, pulled my hair, stuff like that. Some nights he would talk to me during and other nights he wouldn't- I didn't mind either way, I wasn't someone who could hold a conversation while being fucked. I have a specific memory of him sort of convincing me (in a slightly shitty way) to try out sex tape, so he taped my hands behind my back and my mouth closed, and his tie went around my eyes. It was ok while his hands were on me, but at one point he stepped away and I didn't know where he was in the room, and that was too similar to the bathroom trap and I lost it. I made him promise not to tie me up or anything like that again.
• Eventually he got sick of coming over to my awful apartment so he moved me out and into a way nicer, fully furnished, uptown apartment. Since he'd been divorced for awhile he sold the big house and bought himself like, a condo or something. So he had enough money to be paying my rent for me. I made a joke about me being a sugar baby but he sort of just laughed it off? I don't think I was REALLY a sugar baby, but I do think he had some primal desire to take care of me as completely as possible. Which I did not complain about. He never officially moved in but we spent a lot of nights together. Never at his place, always at my new apartment.
• I started suspecting more and more that being a doctor wasn't the only way Lawrence was spending his time. I don't know how I ended up confronting him but somehow he finally told me that he was a Jigsaw apprentice. This sent me into a huge spiral and PTSD episode that lasted for at least a week or two, and - for better or worse - Lawrence was there through the whole thing, making sure I was safe, taking care of my basic needs, holding me when I would sob uncontrollably, talking me down from flashbacks. He swore that he would never let me get hurt again, that he wasn't going to leave me behind, that I was his now and he was mine and we were going to be ok. Honestly, I don't know what would have happened to me if I had left him, both in the sense of what he and Jigsaw would do to me, and I just had nowhere else to go and no resources to stay afloat. But it's all good! It's cool!
• After this huge explosion of a reveal, when I started calming down more, Lawrence sort of slipped in an introduction to Amanda. I'm confident she had more permanent scars on her cheeks from the bear trap than the movies show. She was very avoidant at first, she didn't wanna look me in the eye at all, and it wasn't until later that I found out she was the one who kidnapped me. It took me awhile before I could stand to be in the same room as her, but I do remember offering her a cigarette in the kitchen as a sort of olive branch. We became weirdly close friends, like neither of us ever felt totally relaxed around each other but we were very closely bonded. Somehow. I dunno.
• I also don't know what went down with her and Jigsaw as far as the events of Saw III, I just know she didn't die. I was aware that there were other apprentices but I never met them.
• Lawrence started out by asking me to do favors and stuff for him, like picking up something from the hardware or grocery store. They slowly got more and more specific and I sort of picked up on what he was doing and I confronted him again, this time with Amanda there. She very calmly lead the conversation and agreed/admitted that they were interested in bringing me on as an apprentice. We were all quiet for a minute before I agreed, with conditions. I wasn't ever involved with the actual traps, only following people, getting information and supplies, and overall being a clean link to the outside world. Everyone agreed to this! Lawrence's job was all of the medical/surgical stuff, like implanting keys in people's guts or providing medical consultation about the traps. Amanda's job was a lot of the physical stuff, like building traps and kidnapping people. She was also sort of our superior, and the one who most often had a direct contact with Jigsaw before he died. I had a small "initiation ritual" of sorts, which did involve Amanda suffocating me with a plastic bag until I passed out. Jigsaw was in the room for it, but he didn't say or do anything, he just watched. When I woke up, Lawrence had brought me back home and put me to bed, and he said I was ready to start. Things carried on like this for awhile before Jigsaw died, and Amanda took over as the real brains of the operation. Nothing really changed for my job, and I didn't ask many questions about the others' jobs, especially not Lawrence's.
• My main motivation for becoming an apprentice was wanting Lawrence's approval and feeling like I would never be able to fully move on and leave what happened behind me anyway, so I might as well just lean into it. I completely justified it in my head by convincing myself that these people were 100% awful and deserved to be reborn and taught a lesson. This was not always true! But it's how I coped with everything.