Private Finished Its not Polite to Drain People

Chloe rummaged through some drawers, eventually finding some small capillary tubes. She found some gauze, too, but she couldn't find the little needle-like thing she was supposed to use to prick her finger.

She noticed Amber just in time to see her pulling away from the glowy thing. "Yeah, Amber, I wouldn't touch that. The professor who runs this lab is doing black magic research with souls. No idea what that does." Chloe rummaged through the drawers for a little bit longer before giving up.

"Guess they're out of needles," Chloe muttered to herself, pulling a knife from the sheath hidden under her skirt. After rubbing her finger and the knife down with disinfectant, she held each over a sink and cut her finger. She winced. Blood came out. At least Amber wouldn't be able to see it from where she was standing. Chloe collected some of the blood with three capillary tubes, then held the gauze to her hand and put the tubes inside of a strange black box.

She pressed a button on the black box and went to sit down at that table. She took a deep breath. "Ok, Amber. Now, I'd... like for you to drain me for a little while. Maybe ten minutes. I promise you that I'll be fine. Can you do that for me?"

"I want to be extra sure," Chloe was calm, now. "Ten minutes is just to let me be sure. Plus, it'll be good for you." A weak smile.

If Chloe was right about their power, then Amber was about to eat a part of her soul. The blood test was an indirect measurement of a soul's health. The cursed books people used this device sometimes, before and after working with certain books. If she told any of this to Amber, she was afraid her daughter would refuse.

"The thing I'm worried about isn't a problem if it happens to me. If I find that this power is really dangerous to people, you'll still be able to drain me when you need it."

Chloe said this with confidence in her voice. She didn't know any of that stuff for sure. She held her hand out for Amber. "We can talk about your day while we're at it. Anything exciting happen in your classes? Other than the thing I got called about."

Chloe was watching the clock. She knew when they were supposed to stop.

She gave Amber her full attention as she talked about her day. Nodding along, making comments on certain points (she read the whole thing - way to go!). As Amber asked her how she felt, Chloe needed to think about it. "It's different from how I feel when I'm the one doing the draining. But it's still a nice feeling. You're right."

The conversation moved on. It took a dark turn. Chloe didn't know how to answer Amber - she must have picked up some of those urges from Pandora's side. "Yeah, it feels great to be strong, but, you have to be extra careful when you're powered up. I slammed a guy through the gym's floor, once, because we were practicing judo. It... it made me feel really bad afterwards."

She was spacing out. This felt really good. Way better than what her own powers gave her. Did she used to feel this way, when her powers were new? Amber seemed to be losing her grip on reality, too. She felt Amber's grip tighten. She saw the clock move to the eleventh minute after they started.

"We should probably stop," Chloe said. Even through the euphoric haze Amber was giving her, she could tell that this was wrong. But it felt good. "I'll give you... just, one more minute. Then we're done. Ok? I've gotta finish my experiment." If there was such a thing as a threshold for this power becoming dangerous, Chloe was sure she'd found it. Something that felt this good couldn't possibly be healthy.

She laughed a little at the sounds Amber was making. "You're such a little cutie, Amber. I love you. You know that, right?"

Once Amber let go, Chloe felt... well, drained. Tired. Weak. But it was a satisfying sort of tired, like the kind she would feel after running a long distance. She was still distracted; she was still coming down. It felt very different, being on the receiving end.

"Yeah, that was great...results? Wh... Oh!" Chloe had almost forgotten why she was here. "Right. I need to finish the experiment. I, I think this cut will still work." Chloe held up the hand with the slightly bloody gauze; she was more talking to herself than to Amber. She managed to get to her feet, but it was difficult, and her legs were shaky. "Lemme go finish that up. Just, ah, stay here and don't touch anything, okay Amber?"

Chloe went to collect more of her blood in more of those tiny capillary tubes. She took the other little tubes out of the black box, pressed some buttons, wrote a few numbers on a piece of paper, and put the new tubes of her blood into the black box.

Then she sat down. "So. I should probably tell you what I'm worried about, Amber. I don't want to keep it a secret from you. The experiment I'm doing, which will be done in another five minutes or so, will tell me if you just ate a part of my soul." Chloe said this very calmly and matter-of-factly. "It doesn't matter very much if this happens to me, like I said, and I think other people can just... heal from it, over time."

That was only true if the damage was very small, and of a specific type. But Chloe didn't want to make Amber worried.

"H-hey, Amber." That was an uncomfortably tight grip. "Like I said, it... it might not be a big deal? If it's even happening at all."

Chloe reached down and gave Amber a weak hug. She stayed there for a while. She was about to say something about how she had been worried about this for a while.

And then something clicked.

"... Now that I think of it, Amber, I might have had a silly reason for being worried about this." She pulled away from the hug."So, ah. This is a few years before I knew your mom or before I went to this school. It was my first boyfriend. I actually only had the power and the cravings after I was fourteen, and I had a boyfriend. I drained him a a lot, and pretty much nobody else, for months. At some point I thought he was turning into an a--" She shouldn't use the term 'asshole' around her daughter, "A real jerk. He ended up breaking up with me, and I started being worried that I..."

Chloe sighed. It sounded fucking stupid, now that she was saying it all out loud. She had been legitimately terrified about this for years. Too scared to talk to anyone about it. And now that she was saying it out loud, it sounded so fucking asinine. She had just been too afraid to think about it more, to assess it. She let if fester into a big, massive fear, and now that she was dragging it out into the light it was withering into something small and weak.
She was almost too embarassed to continue.

"Well. I worried that it was my fault. When I learned that souls were real, and that my dad used them, I started to worry that I was eating them without realizing it. It made sense, you know. But I was too scared to check."

She searched Amber's face for an opinion. Did she think her mom was an idiot, now? Chloe certainly felt like an idiot. She was starting to think she owed Amber an apology, for scaring her so much over something so stupid.

... But at the same time, it didn't seem that unreasonable. They would both find out soon enough.