Supernova

Chapter Ten - Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

tw: sexual assault/rape. this chapter can be a bit of a hard read and this is where read at your own risk really comes into play. feel free to skip.

You're probably wondering why someone incapable of feeling any sensory stimuli is even interested in sex, what they get out of it, or why they would even think to try. Remember how I've kind of alluded to how I lie about ever feeling anything to people like my dad and my teachers? There are very few people in the world that both know about my disability and when I'm capable of feeling things, and most of them are people that I both trust and have slept with. It has to do with trigger points. All of mine are somewhere weird, one of them especially. As for why I'd ever think to try it, well, I didn't. I found out by accident the last time I'd ever lost a fight.

Melanie left a few weeks before I turned twelve, and by the time my birthday rolled around, I had mostly pushed her out of my mind. My father enrolled me at the California Compound Society for Champions. He was friends with half the staff, and I'd trained a lot of my classmates and their parents through his agency. Because of this, and because my father was the head member of the council, everyone knew who I was and was eager to see what I could do. Between my overfed ego and my newly renewed contract, I was ready to prove myself and feeling absolutely untouchable.

The CCSC had dorm rooms, despite the fact that the compound was relatively small and most of the students lived within easy walking distance. Because twelve was the time you started doing real hero work, it was also the time you moved out of the house. We were in a strange limbo, being fundamentally children with adult responsibilities, so we still had staff members that were assigned to certain dorms to keep an eye on us. This suited both my father and I just fine. I didn't really like being home much anyways, and lately less so than ever. I moved into my first dorm room, which I'd had all to myself, and it doubled as an office for classmates and staff members who wished to train with me. For that reason, my door was always unlocked.

Aside from Momo, I'd had one friend at this point in my life. Her name was Esme. Her dad and my dad were good friends and associates, and I'd been training her since I started working at my father's agency four years earlier. She'd inherited both smoke generation from her dad and ink generation from her mom, but all she ever wanted to train was hand-to-hand combat. The reason I first took a liking to her was because she worked harder than anyone else our age that I trained, even the boys. As if she had something to fight for, just like me. I knew I'd latched onto her for the same reason that Momo and I got very close at the same time, and it was because I'd missed having a sister and enjoyed the idea of having one that I didn't have to claw at on my way to the top. Esme was like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Momo that I could see every day.

Esme and I lived in the same dorm building, right across the hall from each other. We were both thrilled about this. Her dad, who was powerful enough to have become a staff member at the school but didn't rank high enough to be in the top ten that made up the council, was assigned supervisor of our dorm. I thought nothing of this. Esme seemed to really dislike it. I didn't think much of that either, because I would have disliked having my father walk around the dorms day and night keeping an eye on what I was doing too.

I really enjoyed my first two months being at school. The formal academic lectures took up only about an hour a day, and we had an extensive library where we could research subjects relevant to our own training and interests in our spare time. We went out on tour for a couple days at a time, and then we'd go back and train for a week. Esme, however, seemed to be reacting the same way as Melanie. It was taking a toll on her. The only difference is, she liked being out on tour. It was being at school that she didn't like.

"You look terrible," I told her one day at lunch, eyeing the dark circles that had grown more prominent under her bright blue eyes, which were also less bright than I remembered.