Fuschia Backstory

Fuschia's life started as sort of a mistake. Her and her twin, Mauve as you know, were born to a pair of nobody factory worker Faunus cats who got too frisky. Never wanted the kids, ditched them at birth. The orphanage was not a nice place. It was underfunded, had cruel staff, and didn't take kindly to a couple of rascal kids who liked to play by their own rules. Fuschia was beaten a lot as a child. She would often take them in the place of her sister, and started to slowly evolve into the bad girl of the two because of constantly scapegoating herself for Mauve's protection. Eventually, when they ran away from the place to join a gang on the street, this same sort of behavior continued. Mauve, she realized, was a delicate girl put into a place where she was forced to be something she wasn't, and Fuschia, on the other hand, fit like the fist inside a glove, so much so that it started to scare her.

Fuschia became essentially a scumbag, running cons on people and using her dynamic with her twin to her advantage on the street. She had the aspect of never being alone on her side, so they always worked together. Even as underage girls they'd lure in people with promises of prostitution and mug them instead, she ran drugs, did drugs, beat the shit out of whoever she felt like cuz the gang had her back, at least until they didn't. She started to sleep around in the gang for purposes of gaining rank more or less, and gradually it started to drive a wedge between her and her sister's relationship. Mauve stopped partaking in the gang life slowly but surely, while Fuschia embraced it more and more. They both learned to fight on the streets, using guns and swords, they learned how to be bad and take whatever they needed. They were a terror to the people in Mantle. Fuschia had a reputation as an alley cat, someone you didn't fuck with, someone to avoid. Eventually, though, it started to get under her skin.

When Mauve and Fuschia learned more about the world outside of Mantle, particularly, they started to realize that they had been deceived by the gang they'd more or less called a family for years, that they had dragged them into a situation that would be almost impossible to get out of unless they cut their loses and ran as soon as they could. Fuschia grew disillusioned with her lifestyle, started to realize and become self-aware at what she was doing. The drugs were fucking with her head, there was a point when she realized she couldn't wake up and go for a few hours without seeing some sort of violence or she would feel anxious and angry. Her and Mauve were always close, and she had to try to talk all of this through with a wonderful girl who should've just been left alone to grow into somebody to be respected, while Fuschia had become someone infamous instead. It started to eat at her what she was making Mauve go through, so they eventually planned to get out, one day, after Fuschia had murdered a defenseless man with her bare hands because he didn't have any money for the drugs they'd gave him. Her anger had consumed her for something as silly as currency that it finally flipped a switch in her head and she started to see what she'd become.

Well, so Fuschia killed a guy over a small sum of cash, as opposed to other men who she'd probably killed (she didn't stop to check) in gang fights and of course some sad Atlas military folk that got in the way of her gang, but this guy was just a homeless dope fiend that had been sucked into the drugs that she was peddling so much that it had destroyed his life and she didn't even care that she had taken the only thing left from him which was that life that she'd had a hand in creating. When she got home that night, her hands still soaked in his blood, that was when she finally broke down and started to build herself back up again. Mauve witnessed her finally caving to the horrors of everything she'd done and seen, and if Mauve hadn't been there, she'd probably have straight just shot herself in the head. Instead, her sister convinced her that there was more to her than that, and that they would see it together, get out of there, and go find out what life was really like in places where it wasn't a poor man's grave. So they hatched their plan to steal money from the gang they worked for, and take off with it. The plan worked until they found out their boss had a Semblance that let him know when people had crossed certain lines, in this case, the line was the door to the gang's vault.
He sent his best enforcers after them, although Fuschia was arguably his best one, and they chased Mauve and Fuschia all the way to the docks and a warehouse near the boat they'd planned to stow away on. A fight broke out, the sisters were cornered, and they had to improvise to get out of there so they pulled off a sneaky trick to get Mauve in close with her sword and cut them down. It worked, and together they killed everyone except for the guy on lookout, who then basically just turned around and filled Mauve full of bullets. Fuschia had to watch her sister die in a senseless, pointless way, just gunned down like she were some sack of potatoes used for target practice. It still haunts her, how quick and easy it was, this person who had been moving around like the wind a moment before just flopping onto the ground, dead as fuck.

Fuschia killed the man who murdered her sister in cold hatred, and fled the scene before authorities could arrive, and stowed away with a leg wound of her own that she only knew how to nurse back to health because her sister had been trying to learn things on her own for a few years, and imparted stupid random stuff to Fuschia along the way. At least, she thought it was stupid, but it probably saved her life in the long run, because first aid was one of those things. Fuschia lost the money in the fight, so she left without anything at all. No money, no food, not even her sister. She had nothing and was entirely alone. She more or less left believing she was already dead. It wasn't until the boat reached another shore that she realized she was truly still alive and Mauve wasn't. Obviously, she broke down, in the midst of her previous breakdown, she was stripped bare and lost everything. So she sought essentially a hole to sit in and die in and figured that was the end of it for her. She found a cabin in the snowy woods, and sat there and cried until she couldn't anymore, and then sat there some more. It was boredom that eventually snapped her out of it and hunger that made her mind go blank enough not to think about her shitty situation.

So while Fuschia was slowly coming to terms with her life being in ruins, she eventually decided to occupy her mind by doing some of the stupid things Mauve had taught her about. She fixed up the cabin so it was a lot like their little shack on the roof where they lived in Mantle, she planted a little garden and tended to it like Mauve showed her how, she basically started to emulate her sister's lifestyle because, to her, it was the only thing other than sex, drugs, and gang violence she knew how to do. It wasn't until a little while later that Dargo found her and started to learn about who she was. She didn't trust him at first but he simply kept coming back, kept showing interest, kept bringing her things to help her out. She'd never experienced real kindness like that before, with Mauve it was different, they simply shared everything but this guy was going out of his way just to lend a hand for her. Dargo was her mentor, and he basically showed her how to be a person and not some gang thug, too. A lot like Viorel, I suppose, because without him she'd have been nothing more than a worthless criminal. Well, him and a little of Mauve.

Dargo was the one that taught Fuschia more or less who she is as a person. He walked her through it, step by step, asking her things about herself so that she would answer it for herself (not really for him). She learned that a lot of who she was came from how she felt and a lot of how she felt had been suppressed by drugs and other emotions and false conceptions of how the world worked, so she slowly figured out the core traits of her personality and built on them enough that she eventually started to interact with the people in the town near where she lived alone. She usually wore disguises of some kind so nobody ever figured out who she was, but she started to feel a lot more normal just having everyday conversation with people who didn't know the first thing about what life had been like for her. She definitely developed PTSD throughout her intense years on the street, but it didn't manifest until around this time, coming out as this sort of condescending front or tough-guy attitude when inside she was actually just scared shitless. Fully automatic gunfire still terrifies her.
Her PTSD is more the classical type, like a war veteran's. She can and does have flashbacks to moments where it was real bad, unlike Psitti's PTSD which is rather mild in comparison, and was brought about by a near-death experience that only happened once. Fuschia's was a product of watching people have their teeth kicked out or being mutilated or raped basically every single day
It took Fuschia quite awhile just to accept the fact that people don't, like, beat the shit out of each other over money all the time nearly as much as she thought
She honestly thought that life was like that everywhere, it took Mauve months of assuring her it wasn't for her to even consider that they were just in one small shitty part of the world
Fuschia still had no real purpose to her life, though, but through Dargo's understanding ways, she was able to at least establish that she wanted to be more like Mauve and less like the Fuschia that had died when she left Mantle. All of Mauve's hobbies became her own and she embraced them as a way to immortalize her sister and remember her, and her purpose was driven, her skills applied, toward becoming a Huntsman under Dargo's suggestion. She was to take her knowledge of harming people and instead apply it to harming Grimm in order to help people. It was an idea that she is still skeptical about but it is something she has sworn to uphold because she feels it's what Mauve would've wanted for her; to grow into somebody who can do things that others can't because she's a talented and wonderful person.