Supernova

Chapter Sixty Nine - It's a Girl Thing

A/N: The urge to make a haha nice joke on this chapter is insane. Anyways. 

All chapters will have an implied TW: cringe until further notice. But in all seriousness, the real TW for this chapter is blood. Of the girl variety. That's right. Cassie gets her first period (my baby is growing up so fast!) and she handles it about as well as you'd expect. So. Yeah. 

Did I mention I was tired of putting out fires?

Cue sigh. Cue explanations of no, I didn't have to be married by the time I turned eighteen. When? None of your fucking business, that's when.

Although, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to brush off, dodge, and weave around the question, I did eventually have to admit to Katsuki, in the dark and right on the edge of sleep, that my contract end date wasn't my eighteenth birthday, and it wasn't my nineteenth either, if that made it any better. It was my twentieth. He sucked in a harsh breath, let it out, and then he was quiet for a long time. I stayed as still as possible, closing my eyes tightly, as if it would protect me from whatever was to come, and when he finally spoke, all he said was:

"Okay."

Not necessarily a horribly negative response, not one that particularly surprised me, but certainly not a thrilled one. It was so horribly neutral that I pretended to fall asleep because I didn't care to elaborate on it or talk about it any further.

I found myself wondering if Elias did have some of his mother's quirk inside of him as well because he sure was driving me fucking insane.

Actually, on second thought, that's not very funny.

The nice thing about Katsuki is that it seemed he wanted to play high school fantasy as much as I did, because as tense as those moments could be, we could go right back to tossing pillows at each other, practicing sign language, and kissing like movie teenagers just as fast. The world outside of the one we built around ourselves was treacherous and uncertain, but I felt comforted in the fact that I had a warm armchair or hot shower to crawl into. For now, at least, that was good enough for me.

The showers we shared were juvenile and playful and I cherished them. Even if he still was kind of weird about it. I mean, we spent this time together naked, but it wasn't like that. No, I'm serious. We didn't so much as kiss. We didn't even really touch. The way we stood was with his chest to my back, chatting while we washed ourselves, elbowing each other in the safe spots when one of us was hogging the water, which we were both equally guilty of, but I was way better at. He washed me sometimes, but his hands and his eyes didn't wander. He'd run soap over my shoulders and my arms and my back, but whenever he reached the small of my back or below my collarbones, he'd swallow hard and take a subtly pained breath and retreat. My hands didn't wander, but my eyes did, mostly via the reflective handle. He caught me once and got really red in the face and told me to cut it the fuck out, or else! He was so weird. I loved it. I loved him.

These showers normally wrapped me in up a sweet, steam filled envelope of candy apples and jasmine and cherry blossoms that I could lose myself in for an entire afternoon. It was beautiful and dreamlike and something I could dance around in, one foot in real life, one foot in fantasy land. But in this one in particular, the sharp scent of metal cut through my nose and snapped me back to reality like a bullet between the eyebrows. I whipped around, suds still moving lazily down the black river of my hair, breaking the rules. The red glare was already waiting for me.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Turn. Back. Around." Every word fell out like it was heavy, falling to the floor with a smash.