Amber
The New Year was always so damn fucking intense.
A battle of wills and desperate determination to be good and quiet for a day filled with absolute superstition. There was something about the first day of the year that just had to be absolutely shit-eating perfect. A day to be deeply blessed by one's God and to celebrate the impending wealth that you should obtain if one just followed all the traditional rules of back-breaking slave-like devotion.
Nothing could or should piss one off on such a prosperous day.
Not the queues that stretched far and wide, people lining up one after another like chicken waiting to be slaughtered. Nor the drunken men that piled—dead bodies from a battlefield against food and God. Not even, the hours spent travelling. Taxi fare rising with each passing minute of gas use spent on a road that was stifled by movement. Screaming mothers bantering for that last sliver of meat from a closing market. Crying children begging to be held.
The day just had to be good.
But on the morning of the Big Day, Amber awoke to nausea that had her questioning the reasons why she had to part from a bed as soft and as beautiful as the one in the five-star hotel owned by Hikaru's brother. Something else sat heavy in her gut when she'd tried to get up and the world had spun as if her head were bouncing in the enclosure of her skull, desperate to let her know of its miserable fucked up existence.
A gut feeling that she wanted desperately to ignore.
Something had made her swipe through her phone for that too pink app, and thumb trembling fingers over the dates that were coloured red for blood. She'd chewed on her lips hard, biting down the need to vomit, and then peered at the set of birth control pills on the counter. Pink as well, because people just seemed to assume the whole goddamn female population was into just one colour. The expiry date was checked, and then the date of her cycle, three times to be absolutely sure.
Maybe, the condoms were the ones that had expired.
She'd cursed silently, knowing full and well her soulmates would break down the door if she'd verbalised her anxiety despite how sleep deprived they were. And then the chaos would ensue along with discussions that she didn't want to have because—No, no there was no way.
There was no need to alarm them, not until she was sure. Was she sure? She considered the millions of ways she could purchase what she needed from a drug store. An online store? Nah, her men might be the ones answering the door. Self-collection from a robotic parcel collection? Going to Miri's? Her head spun with a thousand scenarios, pathways that calmed her down as she sat down to piss in hopes that normalcy would calm her pounding heart.
The droplets of dried blood like rusty pennies on her favourite white panties were God's answer to her.
Negative.
She'd laughed at herself for another minute as she brushed her teeth, shaking her head at her own overreaction. She was overthinking, over worrying, fucking with her own head. The symptoms of menstruation were placed on a list so long that it took up two pages on her browser, and two of them included nausea and dizziness. More was on the picnic mat she called the side effects of her birth control. The symptoms that seemed to be considered the forefront symbols of gestation were also on the list for fertility.
As always, her body was a bitch and she was just as stupid as teenage Amber. The Amber that considered pregnancy despite her virgin status. The Amber that wondered if water could actually get her pregnant because of some idiot upstream jerking off into her water source. The Amber that wondered if she could get pregnant just because she'd taken a bath in a cubicle that males had used.
She was just being a worrywart as usual.
The osechi-ryōri (御節料理) they'd ordered in from a restaurant was good. A minute in the microwave turned slightly cold food into a steaming hot meal that glistened with a hundred colours like gemstones in a jewellery box. Each dish was a different wordplay and symbolism of luck, luck and more luck.
She'd tried to polish off her plate for all that fucking prosperity, forcing herself to scarf it all down with a fake smile on her face to ease her soulmates' concerns. The need to eat was mostly fuelled by what had happened the night before featuring traditional mindsets versus a more modern perspective.
Hikaru had been a little more than just upset when she'd left strands of her new year soba in her plate, buckwheat noodles his father had made by hand. He wasn't mad because it'd taken his dad hours to knead the dough, but he was superstitious as fuck. The noodles were symbols of longevity and uneaten strands were deliberate years off her life. Her soulmates had gobbled down her leftovers just in case. They didn't want her dying anytime soon, and they reminded her of that fact with insistent nagging.
The annoyance from her men had easily and quickly turned to concern when she admitted that she wasn't feeling well. She'd been sent off to bed by her soulmates much to her chagrin. Maybe that was what had pissed her off, the fact that she'd missed the fireworks, the countdown and a chance to frolic about the temples and taste sake created by shrine maidens for sleep.
She now knew for sure that it was just the usual premenstrual syndrome screwing with her head.
Life was good with understanding soulmates who didn't give a fuck about how they looked in the eyes of others, scandal-filled celeb or not, standing at the convenient store with a handful of female products. They weren't as concerned about crazy fans here in the land of the rising sun. With a culture so heavily obsessed with modesty and introversion, what once could be criticized as a lack of passionate love for their idols, was now a blessed example of humanity.
People could be kind when they wanted to be.
Pads with wings, panty liners and heat packs for the pain were all loaded into a cart by Sieon and Ezra, probably the most horrible combination of feminine hygiene stupidity in her family. They'd taken a bit too long though, and she'd overheard Hikaru squawking with disbelief over Sieon's comment on the 'flavour she wanted' and whether she'd need triple protection. And if the sizes of the tampons mattered at all since, they'd already taken her virginity.
MinJae had to head downstairs to save their sorry asses, a well-trained individual, the fantastic result of a mother who overshared.