Aegis's thirteenth birthday approaches. She is slowly acquiring the promised features of adulthood, little by little; she's issued a new set of uniforms after she grows two inches. Boys begin leering at her, although she has not yet been outright propositioned. There just aren't enough girls to go around. Even a barely-pubescent one who has demonstrated no indication that she even knows what her sexual orientation is going to be when she grows up gets attention.
Meanwhile, Sue -
Her bird is kind enough to bring boys (both regular- and space-gay-or-bi) home only while she's in classes, but she can tell when they've been there - they leave things, there are hairs in colors that don't match her or Sue on his pillow, xenobio let out early once and she saw one leaving. Sometimes he's gone a long time and doesn't react when she bird-bird-birds at him and comes back walking funny or refusing to make eye contact.
He flirts with everyone.
He flirts with her, and she hasn't the slightest idea what to do with that, and he always backs off after a little while, but he doesn't seem quite - happy. He isn't fully unbroken, and she doesn't know how to help.
On the day she turns thirteen, she says, "Happy birthday to me."
"I haven't sprouted a sex drive yet," says Aegis, unfolding and stretching and leaning over the back of her chair. "So I don't have one to take apart and see what its moving parts are and try to figure out if it looks like everyone else's, and I don't know if that would be a good standard anyway, but if you're doing stuff you don't want to do - well. That doesn't sound very Sueish if we assume this isn't somehow its own thing. You do what you want to do."
Type type type stare type draw draw type.
It's like you don't live in your body - or you're trying not to - if it's yours, if it matters, then it matters if people take it, but if it's nothing, if you give it out like Halloween candy and it doesn't matter, then - they can't hurt you? she says, obviously not confident in her conclusions.
There's a relic of someone they both know lurking under the surface there, but not very far: wanting sex carries residual shame in a way that apathy doesn't.
If you quit having sex you're not into all that'll be left is the kind you feel ashamed of, she sends, looking at her incomprehensible symbols and lines and flicking her eyes between them. And because that creep found out that you had mixed feelings and was insofar as that's possible even assholier about that, those are the only categories you're seeing, and going without is intolerable, so you're - saturating, fixing the ratio as best you can without zeroing everything out, but the basic problem is it feels gross to want it? she concludes.
You think your - your wanting is broken, that you must want things incorrectly if you could be at all ambivalent about what happened, she concludes. You've been ignoring what you want because you think your wanting is - fucking with you.
She's loosened up again, she's swaying with the timing of her passing thoughts again. Mm. Well, it's okay. I'm fine and everything. And you know that mister creeper didn't - I dunno, psychically implant being all kinky into you. He just said shitty things about it. He said shitty things about me too and you don't feel weird about being my bird, do you?