Supernova

Chapter Forty Eight - Trouble in Paradise

A/N: Are you guys excited for a fun one? Buckle up, this one's a ride. In all seriousness, though, I thought it would be fun to explore and showcase Momo and Cass' relationship before UA. This is personally one of my favourite chapters, so I hope you guys like it too. 

My dad and Momo's dad are business partners first and foremost, but I suppose they are friends of some sort. Her dad is some whiz of a banker and handles my father's investments. My dad makes a pretty annual penny, being head member of the council and all, and he definitely made a killing off of me and my sisters from the training agency, and he hands it all over to Momo's dad to multiply it behind closed bank doors. Because my dad not only tolerates him, but calls him a friend out loud and makes an effort to plan family vacations with him, I can only imagine he's pretty fucking great at it.

How they met though, was Momo's mom, Aki, and my mom, whose name doesn't really matter, and therefore isn't worth mentioning, were friends. They went to high school together. They lost touch for a long time after my mom went to America. I suppose there was some mourning after losing her entire family and it doesn't sound like the chaos subsided any after they returned to the compound, but they managed to get back in touch around the time my youngest older sister Melanie was born. I heard all of this from my dad. I don't know how much of it is true, and honestly, I don't care to know. Neither of Momo's parents seem uneasy or nervous around my father, and that tells me that it is true enough.

They all think my mom is dead. Like corpse dead. Coffin in the ground. Ashes in the urn. Dead. Died giving birth to me. Lost too much blood. They knew she was sick, of course, because she was already tired from having my sisters. It's a good lie because it's halfway true, which always makes for the most believable lies, and because it's also quite tragic, nobody tries to pry or probe at it too much. Especially when it comes to me. They all assume I am traumatized and carry guilt from the whole affair, which I suppose I do, in my own way. It is a great shield. I have never tried to ask Aki about my mom, and she has never tried to offer up any information about her. I am grateful for that, because the mere risk of anyone chipping away at my parents' glorious damsel in distress love story would undoubtedly make me puke enough blood up for me to die from blood loss.

The only people who know about my mom's vegetative state are me, my dad, our staff, Elias, and my sisters. And whoever they fuck they might have told, wherever they are now. I don't know what the hell the adult Yaoyorozus think happened to my sisters, but everyone in America thinks that they've settled down and retired from both hero work and the spotlight, and nobody questions it. I assume my dad told them some version of that, and they believe it. If there's something besides lying that Americans are good at, it's burying things. In fact, we're so good at it, that anyone outside of the California compound would really have to dig to find out that Raina ever even existed, and most of what you do find is sparse and written off as The Third Invincible Sister Conspiracy Theory.

Yeah. I know. But that's Americans for you.

Anyways, the Strongholds and the Yaoyorozus are friends. Especially Momo and I. We were born a few months apart, and so we've naturally always gravitated together whenever they families got together. She never got on very well with Melanie, because the age gap was too vast when they were very young and I was still lying in a bed somewhere unable to walk or use my hands properly. When I was released into the world, her and I tolerated each other for a few years, and then we started getting along. Nowadays, we talk every so often. Well, we whisper on the phone, never text, never email, and our families do joint vacations a few times a year to celebrate investment returns and catch up and all that. Momo and I always get to share a hotel room and in more recent years, our parents have trusted us, well her, enough to leave us to our own devices the entire time.