Maybe Mantis

The mindscape had a way of being very quiet when Logan wanted it to be loud.

She'd noticed that about herself recently. The wanting. It was a newer thing—or rather, it was an older thing that had recently been given permission to surface—this awareness of what she wanted that existed separately from what was logical or necessary or productive. She wanted the mindscape to be loud so that she wouldn't have to sit alone with how much space her own thoughts were taking up.

Instead, it was quiet. It was always quiet in here, in her room, in the particular way that said this is your space and no one is coming unless you invite them and which she had, for most of her existence, interpreted as a comfort.

She was revising that interpretation.

She sat at her desk—her actual desk, in her actual room, the one that existed in the mindscape as something genuinely hers rather than a Thomas-facing performance of herself—and watched the video play back on her laptop. The desk was a dark mahogany she'd always liked, neat without being sterile, covered in the organized accumulation of someone who thought in systems: annotated index cards in labeled holders, a whiteboard marker in three colors beside the small whiteboard she used for working through concepts too large for paper, a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST FUNCTION and had been a gift from Patton that she used every day despite finding the grammatical construction technically incorrect.

The mug was empty. She'd been in here too long to remember filling it.

"The soft palate lifts," said the instructor on the screen. The module was titled Vocal Feminization: Finding Resonance, Not Performance and came from an online course she had paid forty-seven dollars for, downloaded the full curriculum of, and proceeded to annotate with the same rigor she applied to academic papers. Her notes on Unit Three alone ran to six pages. "You are not reaching for a different voice. You are locating the one that was there. Think of it as—excavation, rather than construction."

Logan had watched this module fourteen times now.

She had taken notes on it ten of those fourteen times. The four times she hadn't taken notes, she'd been trying to just listen, the way the instructor kept suggesting, which had turned out to be significantly harder than taking notes and was therefore, she had decided, probably more valuable.

She paused the video. Sat up straighter. Put one hand lightly at her throat the way the instructor demonstrated, not pressing, just resting.

"The brain categorizes sensory input according to prior experience and established neural pathways," she said.

She stopped. Listened to the echo of it in the room.

Better than two months ago. Not good, yet, but—the word yet was doing a lot of work in her life lately, which was either a sign of progress or dangerous optimism, and she was still collecting data on which.

She wrote day 52: vowel resonance improving, consonant softening inconsistent under speed, forward placement holding in her log, and then she stopped writing and looked at what she'd written, and then she put the pen down carefully, because she'd caught herself doing the thing again. The retreat into documentation. The immediate metabolizing of experience into data, which was a skill that had served her well for her entire existence and which she was starting to suspect had also been a very good way of never having to simply feel anything long enough for it to matter.

She had a sticky note on the corner of her monitor that said stop doing that (the documentation thing). She'd put it there three weeks ago. She'd since documented the sticky note in her log and written two paragraphs of analysis about why she put it there.

She understood, on a theoretical level, that this was ironic.

The room around her was evidence of time passing in ways the others hadn't witnessed. Her bookshelf had new additions in a section she'd created between Cognitive Psychology and Philosophy of Mind for texts she hadn't had before: a well-worn copy of Whipping Girl, several gender theory texts with different-colored tabs marking different sections, two memoirs she'd read in a single sitting each and then set carefully aside like objects that needed a moment before they could be put away properly. The corkboard above her desk, formerly dedicated exclusively to Thomas's life organization charts, now had a small section in the lower right corner. A few business cards. A printed confirmation email from the prescription service she used. A sticky note with the website for the vocal training course.

A printout of a women's-cut black collared shirt from an online retailer, which she had been using as a bookmark in Whipping Girl for six weeks.

She looked at it sometimes. It looked back at her from the page.

She reached up and pulled the elastic from her hair. The ponytail fell loose to her shoulders—longer now than it had been in what felt like her entire existence, though entire existence was a complicated phrase for a being like her and she tried not to pull on that thread too hard. She ran her fingers through it once. The motion served no particular function. She did it anyway.

The mirror on the back of her closet door reflected someone she had been slowly, painstakingly learning to recognize.

This was not a dramatic thing. She had expected drama—she'd read enough accounts, enough memoir passages, enough coming-out narratives—and what she had gotten instead was a series of very small adjustments that accumulated over months into something that could be looked at steadily. The HRT wasn't a transformation. It was a recalibration, the way you recalibrated a scale that had always been reading slightly off, and what you were left with wasn't a new reading but a correct one.

Her jawline had softened. She ran a thumb along it. Softer skin too—one of the earlier changes, the decreased oil production and the estrogen's effect on skin texture, which she had noticed first as an absence: the constant low-level irritation she'd assumed was simply what having skin felt like was gone. She'd written about that in her log. Have been experiencing skin as something neutral rather than something ongoing. She'd stared at that sentence for a long time.

She'd spent her entire existence thinking that ambient discomfort was normal.

She looked at the mirror. Looked at the slight difference in the way her polo fit across the chest—not dramatic, not visible to anyone who wasn't looking for it, but there, undeniable. She'd ordered a size up, which helped structurally but not aesthetically because the problem had never been structural. The problem had been the cut, the assumptions built into the cut, the way the garment was constructed around a body that was no longer precisely the right reference point.

She thought about the shirt on the printout.

She thought about the cart she'd been failing to check out of for six weeks.

She pulled her hair back into the ponytail. Straightened her tie. Looked at herself in the mirror for one more moment.

Not yet, she told her reflection.

Her reflection had stopped looking surprised at her. That was something.

The emotional dysregulation, she had not been prepared for.

She'd known about it academically. She'd done extensive research before starting—she was incapable of not doing extensive research before anything—and the literature was clear that the first three months of hormone replacement therapy involved significant hormonal adjustment that could include mood swings, emotional volatility, increased sensitivity, and changes to baseline emotional responses. She'd read it all. She'd annotated it. She'd created a table comparing the expected timeline of effects and highlighted the section on emotional changes in yellow and made a note that said monitor closely and manage accordingly.

The note had not helped.

Week three, she'd snapped at Remus.

This was not, on its face, unusual. Remus was extremely snappable-at, because Remus was the dark creativity, the intrusive thought given form, the part of Thomas that could not be reasoned with and frequently didn't try to be reasonable. Snapping at Remus was a normal component of Logan's operational parameters.

What was not normal was that two hours later she'd been sitting at her desk thinking about it and had felt bad. A sustained, low-grade, functionally unpleasant feeling of I shouldn't have done that. Not because snapping at Remus was strategically unwise, though it was. Not because it disrupted group dynamics, though it did. But because she had been unkind, and Remus had looked briefly and clearly surprised before turning it into a performance of not caring, and Logan had clocked that expression and sat with the memory of it for an hour and a half and felt terrible.

She had not historically been someone who felt terrible for an hour and a half about things.

She documented the incident and did not tell anyone.

Week six: she'd been watching one of Thomas's older videos alone in the common room—a research exercise, examining rhetorical strategies in self-presentation—and the video had contained a moment where Thomas talked about his friends believing in him, and she had felt something happen in her chest that had, after a brief delay, resulted in her eyes doing something she did not appreciate. She'd been alone, at least. She'd blinked it back quickly and made a note that said aberrant emotional response, cardiovascular sensation, possible estrogen-related affective sensitivity, monitor. Then she'd made another note below that one that said this is the third time this week. Then she'd closed the laptop and made herself a cup of tea and tried to re-read three pages of a philosophy of mind text and gotten through about half a page before giving up.

Week eight: Roman had said, offhand, in the middle of a completely ordinary discussion about Thomas's next video, "Logan, you've been pretty checked out lately, everything okay?" with the particular performance of casual he used when he was actually concerned but worried concern would be unwelcome, and Logan had said "fine" and excused herself to her room and had sat on the edge of her bed with her hands flat on her knees and breathed carefully through her nose for six minutes before the tightness in her chest resolved.

She hadn't been fine. She also hadn't been able to explain what fine would look like, which was a more fundamental problem.

The others weren't transphobic. She knew this. She had, at some point in the months of sitting with this alone, made a list—she made lists compulsively, it was not a character flaw, it was a cognitive organizational strategy—of every relevant data point suggesting how each of them would respond to disclosure, and the list had been overwhelmingly positive. Patton loved unconditionally and would almost certainly cry and then hug her and ask what he could do. Roman was loud about his allyship in the way he was loud about everything but the allyship was genuine. Virgil had enough experience with being looked at sideways for who he was that he wouldn't be anything except supportive.

She knew all of this. She had it organized in a table with color-coding.

And yet.

The thing about knowing something and experiencing something was that they were not the same process. She could know, with complete confidence, that telling them would be fine. She could also experience, when she tried to formulate the sentences, a sensation in her sternum that she had cross-referenced with three different descriptions of anxiety and found significant overlap, which was its own kind of information.

Emotions were not her strong suit. She had always understood this about herself, framed it as a fundamental aspect of her function. The logic side. The thinking. Not the feeling.

Coming out was, at its core, an act of emotional exposure. Of laying things out on the table that had been kept private, not because they were shameful, but because they were hers—deeply, vulnerably hers—and once they were on the table other people could look at them, and the looking made her aware of how much it mattered, and the mattering was the problem, because if something mattered this much and someone responded to it badly—

But they wouldn't. She knew they wouldn't.

She sat with the knowing and the anxiety side by side and let neither of them win.

Not yet.

The Thomas problem she saved for when she was feeling already unsettled, which was perhaps not the ideal mental health strategy, but when had Thomas's summons ever waited for an ideal moment.

When Thomas needed them—for a video, for a decision, for a moment of crisis at 11pm because he'd sent an email he immediately regretted—they appeared. She appeared. And in appearing, she was Thomas. Thomas's body, Thomas's face, Thomas's hands with the callus on the right middle finger and the scar on the left wrist from a childhood kitchen incident. His voice, his vocal cords, his larynx that had never been through vocal training because Thomas had never needed vocal training in that direction.

She put on his face and his clothes—always slightly wrong, always hers in some academic sense that didn't translate to the reality of standing in a body that felt like a borrowed coat—and she gave good advice and sound logical reasoning and went back to the mindscape and sat at her desk and sometimes looked at her actual hands for a while after.

It wasn't anyone's fault. It was simply the structure of what they were. Thomas was the source. They were the expressions. His body was the body.

She was working on the good kind of peace with this. Currently she had the functional kind, the kind that said this is the shape of things right now and I can continue to operate within it. The good kind was further away. She knew it existed; she'd read enough accounts of trans people navigating dysphoria to know that acceptance came in stages and that the stage of I can live with this was real and valid even if it wasn't the same as I'm not sad about this.

She was not, currently, going to examine how sad she was about this.

She went back to the vocal training module. She restarted it from the beginning.

"You are not performing femininity. You are locating it."

"The brain categorizes sensory input," she said carefully, to the empty room, "according to prior experience."

She kept her hand at her throat.

Better.

---

The problem arrived, as many problems did, in the form of Patton.

She had been allowing herself more time in the common areas of the mindscape lately, because the isolation had been a practical necessity during the worst of the emotional adjustment period and was now becoming, she suspected, a habit she was maintaining past its usefulness. Complete self-imposed isolation had its own set of problems, notably the way it could be perceived by the others and the questions it generated, but more practically: she was lonely, a word she had historically been somewhat reluctant to apply to herself and which she had recently added to the list of things she was trying to be more honest about.

So she had been appearing at meals more. Sitting in the common room with books she was sometimes actually reading. Participating in conversations at approximately her normal rate rather than the significantly below-average rate of the past three months.

This had, predictably, given Patton more opportunities to observe her at close range.

She was on the couch with a book—Principles of Uncertainty in Knowledge Systems, which she was in theory reading and in practice staring at while actually composing and discarding various versions of a conversation she was going to have to have eventually—when Patton appeared from the kitchen.

He was carrying two mugs.

That was, on its own, significant data. Patton carried two mugs when he intended to sit down, as opposed to one mug, which was casual neighborly beverage distribution, or no mug, which was a business-only visit. Two mugs meant I am staying.

"Tea," he said, setting one on the side table nearest her elbow.

"Thank you," she said, and closed her book, because the book had been decorative for forty minutes anyway.

Patton sat. Not crowding, not close enough to require anything of her, just there. He had this way of occupying space that felt like an open hand rather than a demand, and Logan had spent a lot of time studying the mechanism of it because she thought it was a skill worth understanding. He sipped his tea. She wrapped both hands around her mug. The warmth worked its way into her palms in a way that was, objectively, pleasant.

They sat in silence for approximately forty-five seconds, which with Patton was always a considered silence, not an uncomfortable one.

"You've been pretty quiet lately," he said. Carefully. With the cadence of someone who had practiced the sentence.

"I've been working on a project." True. Accurate. Not complete.

"Oh yeah? That sounds good." A beat. "What kind of project?"

Logan looked at the middle distance.

A pause that lasted exactly 1.7 seconds too long, long enough for both of them to know it.

"Research," she said.

Patton hummed. He looked at the coffee table. He looked at his tea. He looked back at her with an expression she had carefully catalogued as Patton Variant 7: I love you and I know you're not telling me something and I'm going to give you the space to not tell me while making it completely clear that the door is open, forever, unconditionally.

She had catalogued Patton Variant 7 specifically because it had the highest statistical likelihood of destabilizing her emotional composure, and she had wanted to be prepared for it.

She was not, currently, remotely prepared for it.

"Logan." Very gently. As though the name itself were a whole sentence. "You don't have to tell me anything. I want you to know that first. You don't owe me or anyone an explanation for—whatever's going on. But I—" He stopped. Gathered himself. "I notice things. That's just—that's kind of my whole thing, you know? And I've noticed for a while that something's different, and I've been trying to give you space because I didn't want to push, but I think—" He turned toward her slightly, not much, just enough to indicate direct intention. "I think maybe having it said out loud might feel better than both of us just quietly knowing something's up. Even if what you say is that you're fine and you don't want to talk about it. At least then we both know."

Logan looked at her tea.

She thought about the weeks of choosing her words carefully. The early dismissals of breakfast. The movie nights she'd excused herself from before her voice or her face could do something she couldn't explain. The very careful management of every interaction for five months, the constant low-level exhaustion of it.

She thought about the coffee mug. World's Okayest Function. Which Patton had given her with such unself-conscious delight, holding it out and saying I saw it and thought of you immediately, which I realize might sound like an insult but I promise I mean it in the nicest way, and she'd looked at it and thought about all the ways she was a function in Thomas's mind—the logical function, the processing function—and had laughed, which surprised both of them, a short sharp genuine laugh that she could feel the edges of.

He'd kept the receipt for a month in case she wanted to return it.

She still used the mug every day.

"I'm not—" she started. I'm not distressed was the sentence, the default, the reliable deflection. She felt it rising up and recognized it and set it aside. "I have been managing something. For several months. Something that has required—" She pressed her lips together. Found better words. "More resources than I anticipated. Particularly at the start."

"Months," Patton said softly.

"Approximately five."

He was quiet. The kind of quiet that was listening, all the way through.

"It's—" She turned the mug in her hands. "It's not bad, is the thing. I want to be clear about that. It's—it has been difficult, but the difficulty is, largely, instrumental. It's in service of something." She paused. "That's a difficult thing to explain without context."

"Okay." He nodded slowly. "Is it—I don't want to overstep, but—is it medical? Are you okay? Like, physically?"

She almost smiled. "I'm physically—improving. Actually. Yes."

Something in Patton's expression shifted slightly—relief mixed with continued attention, the way he always balanced caring about process with caring about outcome simultaneously.

"Okay," he said again, softer. "Okay, that's good. That's really good to hear."

"I should—" She stopped. Started again. "I would prefer to explain it fully once rather than in pieces. I think it would be better if I told all of you at the same time. I don't want to repeat it." Because repeating it would mean reliving the moment three more times of someone looking at her while she explained what she was, and once was already going to require significant preparation.

"Of course," Patton said immediately. "Absolutely. Whenever you want. Or never, also completely fine—"

"Now," Logan said, before she could recalculate.

Patton blinked. "Now?"

"Before I—yes. Now. If you could." She exhaled through her nose, slow and deliberate. "Please get them before I make a pros-and-cons list about whether to get them."

"On it," Patton said, and set his mug down, and stood up, and then stopped and looked at her. "Hey. For what it's worth?" He put one hand briefly on her shoulder, the light-pressure way he'd learned she tolerated. "I meant what I said. Whatever it is. Okay?"

Logan looked at the hand on her shoulder. Looked up at him.

"I know," she said. "That's actually part of why this is—" She stopped. "Go get them, Patton."

He went.

She sat with both mugs and the empty room and tried to decide where to put her hands.

---

They arrived in the order she expected: Roman first, because he moved quickly and arrived early to everything regardless of whether he'd been given context; Virgil second, with the deliberate unhurried pace he used when he was actively not rushing even though he wanted to; Patton last, because he'd detoured past the kitchen for reasons she suspected had to do with having something to do with his hands.

He was carrying a small plate of cut fruit.

She looked at the cut fruit for a moment, and then at Patton, and something in her chest did the thing she'd been trying to manage for five months.

Roman dropped into the armchair across from her with a performance of casual energy that she'd learned to read as I was told to act normal and I am attempting it. He was fidgeting with his sash, which he did when he was sitting on questions. Virgil took the far corner of the couch, hood up but not forward—present and listening, which was his version of open. Patton settled beside her on the couch with exactly the right amount of space, close enough to matter, far enough to give her room.

She had, in the time they'd been getting settled, done something she was mildly embarrassed about: she'd taken her notes log from the coffee table and opened it to a new page and written three bullet points.

Roman was staring at the open notebook with barely concealed curiosity.

1. What it is.

2. What has been happening.

3. What I am asking for, if anything.

She looked at the three bullet points.

She thought: this is the worst-organized presentation I have ever given, and that includes the time Thomas needed me to explain his own sleep schedule to him at 2am when I had not slept either.

She closed the notebook.

"Okay," she said.

The room got quiet. Three people looking at her—four, counting the cut fruit, which she wasn't, but she noticed it anyway.

She had prepared this. She had unprepared it. She had prepared it again. She had spent two days constructing the perfect explanatory framework and then scrapped it because a perfect explanatory framework wasn't the point, and what was the point was—

She looked at Patton for 0.3 seconds. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod. Still here. Still open.

"I am transgender," she said.

She heard Roman inhale.

She kept going, because stopping was worse, because the momentum of it was the only thing currently preventing her from retreating into documentation. "Specifically, transfeminine. My gender is female. Has always been female. I have—for the entirety of my existence I've been experiencing what's called gender dysphoria, which is a persistent discomfort or distress arising from the incongruence between one's gender and the gender one has been assigned or is perceived as. I didn't identify it as dysphoria for a long time because I had no reference point for what not feeling it would be like. I assumed—" She paused. Heard how this was going to sound before she said it. "I assumed it was simply what existing felt like."

The silence that followed this was the specific kind where three people were all feeling large things simultaneously and were all trying to prioritize listening over responding.

She continued, because the notes were still there even if the notebook was closed. "Approximately five months ago I started hormone replacement therapy. Estrogen and spironolactone. The physical effects have been—" she moved her hands slightly "—ongoing. I have been managing the adjustment period, which involves hormonal fluctuation and some emotional dysregulation, which is the primary reason I've been—less present—over the past several months. I haven't—" She stopped. Recognized this as the harder part. "I haven't told you before now because—"

Because emotions are involved and I have never been good at being looked at when something matters this much.

Because vulnerability isn't a cognitive process and I have almost no experience with it.

Because the moment I say it out loud it becomes real in a different way, a way where other people can see it, and I wasn't ready to have it be real like that.

She said: "I wasn't ready."

Another silence.

Then she kept going, because there was more and it was better to get it all out: "I'm keeping my name. Logan. It's not exclusively a masculine name, and it fits me, and I have no intention of changing it." She heard herself getting faster, more clipped, the way she talked when she was processing something and trying to stay ahead of the feeling. "I've been growing my hair out. I've been doing vocal training, online, for several weeks. I'm—" She put both hands flat on her knees. Steadied. "Those are the things currently in progress. I wanted you to know."

She stopped.

Looked at the three of them.

Patton's eyes were doing the thing she had predicted. He had both hands pressed over his mouth, which he did when he was trying to contain something too big for a normal expression, and his eyes were very bright and red-rimmed and he was already, visibly, failing at the containing.

Roman had gone extremely still in a way that was unusual for him. He was staring at her with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously, none of which she'd catalogued yet because they were too complex and too layered, and his hands had stopped fidgeting.

Virgil was very quiet in his corner. He was looking at her steadily, and she couldn't fully read the expression, but it wasn't bad—it was careful and thoughtful and something like recognition, which she didn't know what to do with.

Into the silence, Patton made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the specific sound of someone who has been holding a feeling in place for long enough that the holding-in-place mechanism has finally, comprehensively, failed. He took one shaky breath and then another and said, slightly muffled through his hands: "I'm happy for you, I'm so—I'm so happy for you, I'm sorry, I told myself I wasn't going to make this about my feelings, I told myself—"

"Patton, it's fine—"

"It's not fine, I'm crying, I specifically said to myself on the way over here, Patton, don't cry, let Logan talk, be supportive and calm—"

"Patton."

"—and I have been neither of those things—"

"Patton." She put her hand over one of his. The motion surprised her as much as it seemed to surprise him. She didn't, historically, initiate contact. "It's fine. I know you're—it's fine."

He looked at her over his hands. Tear-bright eyes. "Can I hug you?" he asked, very small. "You don't have to say yes. I just—I need to ask, because I really, really want to, but only if you want me to."

She looked at him.

She ran a rapid inventory of how she felt about being hugged, which she could report to herself, without ambiguity, was: she wanted it. She wanted it the way she'd been wanting things lately, the way that had started to feel like permission rather than weakness—a warm, specific wanting that she was trying to learn to honor rather than immediately file away under non-essential.

"Yes," she said. "I want you to."

Patton moved and immediately she was enveloped in the specific type of Patton hug that operated on the principle that warmth should be total, the way sunlight was total, not from one direction but from every direction simultaneously. He had his arms around her and his face turned into her shoulder and he was sniffling in a way that she normally would have catalogued as excessive emotional response, see: sentiment and which she was currently finding that she didn't want to catalogue at all.

She put her arms around him.

He made a helpless noise. "She," he said, slightly muffled. "Right? She/her?"

"Yes."

"She." He said it like he was committing it, the way you committed a fact that mattered to the part of your memory reserved for things that mattered. "Okay. She. Got it." He pulled back enough to look at her. His face was a complete disaster. She found it—she found it—

She found it moving, which was new and uncomfortable and she was going to examine it later.

"You've been dealing with all of this for five months," he said, "by yourself."

"For longer than that, technically. The transition has been five months."

"Logan."

"I'm aware it would have been more efficient to—"

"Logan, I'm not—I'm not criticizing, I'm just—" He took her hands in both of his, which she allowed, because she was apparently allowing things today that she didn't normally allow, which she was choosing to attribute to the estrogen rather than to the fact that she was sitting in the middle of something she'd been afraid of for five months and it was, so far, fine. "I'm so sorry you went through the hard part alone. Okay? I'm really sorry about that."

Her throat did something.

"I managed," she said, which was true, and also was not quite the right response to what he'd said, and she was aware of both of those things simultaneously.

Patton squeezed her hands. Didn't push. Looked at her with that expression—the one she'd been cataloguing for months—and it was clearer now, up close, what it was. Just love. Uncomplicated. Present-tense.

"I love you," he said. "We all do. That's not—this doesn't change that, this just means we get to love you a little more accurately now. Okay?"

She pressed her lips together.

Made a note to examine, later, at length, in her log, why love you a little more accurately was the specific phrasing that made her feel like she'd been briefly disassembled and put back together.

"Okay," she said.

She became aware, over Patton's shoulder, that Roman was still in his armchair. He had not moved. His expression had settled into something that was—and she was still parsing this—careful. Roman was not, by nature, a careful person. Roman was theatrical and big and present, and the carefulness was its own kind of loudness.

"Obviously," Roman said, and his voice was doing something slightly unsteady that he was performing steadiness over, "this is the most wonderful news and I am completely, one hundred percent, fully and entirely—"

"Roman," she said.

"—supportive and thrilled—"

"Roman, you can just say it."

He stopped.

She waited.

He said: "You are—you have always been—" He stopped again. Swallowed. Started over, differently. "I want you to know that when I said 'the most wonderful news,' I meant it. I meant the—the you part of it. Specifically that we get to know who you actually are. That's—that's genuinely wonderful, and I mean that before I say anything else."

"Noted," she said. "What else."

He looked at her. He looked at the ceiling. He appeared to be having a significant internal conversation. When he looked back at her, his eyes were slightly brighter than they'd been before, which she filed and did not address.

"I have," he said, very precisely, "so many ideas."

"I assumed."

"We could go shopping. There's a boutique—Virgil and I found it, well, I found it and Virgil tolerated being dragged there exactly once, but they have the most—"

"I want a women's-cut black collared shirt," Logan said. "And new dark-wash jeans."

Roman's expression did the thing she had also predicted: it went through approximately five stages of feeling in under two seconds, like a very fast weather pattern. She watched shock, aesthetic conflict, restraint, more restraint, and finally a kind of determined goodwill chase each other across his face.

"...That's it?" he said.

"That's what I want right now, yes."

He folded his hands together. He looked at them. He appeared to be having another internal conversation, this one more clearly contentious.

"The shirt—"

"Women's cut. Black. Collared."

"Just—no—" He pressed his lips together. "You've had the same—"

"Roman."

"I'm just saying—"

"I know what you're saying."

"A fitted blazer would—"

"Roman."

He stopped. Breathed. Put both hands flat on his knees in a gesture she recognized because she'd just done the same thing. "I support you fully," he said, "in your extremely specific and—and reasonable—fashion choices."

"You're judging my fashion choices."

"I am choosing not to comment on your fashion choices."

"That is the same—"

"It is categorically different, Logan, choosing not to comment requires active effort which demonstrates respect—"

"Does it not also demonstrate that you have comments you are restraining?"

"It demonstrates that I have comments and I care about you more than I care about my comments, which is—which is significant, actually, because I have strong feelings about—" He stopped. Closed his eyes for a brief moment. Opened them. "You would look beautiful," he said, quieter. "In a women's-cut black collared shirt and dark-wash jeans. I want you to know I genuinely mean that and I'm not just saying it."

Something in his voice had shifted. The theatricality had dropped partway, and underneath it was something more earnest. She recognized it. It was the same tone he used when the performance got too small to contain what was actually there.

She looked at him for a moment.

"Thank you," she said, and meant it differently than the word usually meant in her mouth.

He straightened up. Cleared his throat. Made a show of recomposing himself. "I am going to make a list," he said. "Of suggestions. That I will give you, unsolicited but lovingly, and you are welcome to ignore all of them."

"I will ignore all of them."

"I know. I'm making the list anyway."

"That is your prerogative."

"It absolutely is." He was pulling himself back into his usual register, and it was almost seamless—almost. She could see the slightly-too-bright edges of it. "She," he said then, testing it. "Logan. She."

"Yes."

He smiled, sudden and genuine and slightly crumpled at the corners. "I like it," he said. "It suits you."

She looked away. "The name hasn't changed."

"Not the name." He waved a hand, a little vaguely. "Just—she. It sounds right. I don't know how to explain it better than that."

She didn't know what to do with that, so she didn't do anything with it and made a note to revisit it later.

Virgil had still not said anything.

---

He was still on the couch when Roman and Patton eventually untangled themselves from the conversation—Patton extracting promises from Logan about letting him help, promises she'd made knowing she might not honor them but making them anyway because Patton's visible relief was worth something—and the evening settled into something quieter, more ambient.

Logan had been okay. She had been—fine. Better than fine, probably, in the objective analysis, because the conversation had gone approximately as well as any conversation could have gone and the data collected had been fully consistent with the projected model and yet the fact of having had it had left her feeling like she'd been held at a different temperature for an hour and was still recalibrating.

She'd said good night to Patton, who'd hugged her again, briefly, checking first, and to Roman, who'd said something about a shopping list that she'd already begun ignoring, and she'd come back to the couch to retrieve her book and found Virgil still there, in his corner, hood up, looking at his phone.

She looked at him.

He looked up.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," she said.

They regarded each other.

"You don't have to—" she started.

"I know," he said. "I'm not going anywhere because I have to. I'm going nowhere, actually. I've been sitting here thinking."

She sat back down. At the other end of the couch, maintaining the appropriate distance they'd both established years ago as the correct default, close enough to share a couch, far enough to have autonomy. "Thinking about what."

He put his phone face-down on the cushion. "I've been trying to figure out what to say for the past hour and I keep coming up blank. Which—" He made a slightly frustrated gesture. "I know is probably not reassuring to hear."

"It's more reassuring than a poorly-considered response."

"Yeah." He exhaled. "I don't know how to—I'm not good at this. The big feeling stuff. I never know if what I'm saying is the right thing or if I'm making it worse." He paused. "Have I been? Without knowing? Like, were there things I said or did that—"

"No," Logan said clearly, before he could finish the construction of the guilt. "No. None of you did anything wrong. None of you knew, and I was—I was deliberately keeping it contained, so you couldn't have."

"But you've been going through a hard time, and we were all just—" He picked at the cuff of his hoodie. "We were all just being normal. While you were—"

"While I was also being normal, as much as I was capable of it." She looked at her hands. "I made a choice to handle the adjustment period privately. That was my choice, not something that happened to me because of any failure on your part."

Virgil was quiet. She could tell he was still sitting with something, the way he sat with things, turning them over until they were worn smooth.

"Can I ask something," he said.

"Yes."

"Was it scary? The—deciding to actually start. The HRT and everything."

She considered this for a moment. "I had extensive research."

"That's not what I asked."

No. It wasn't. She'd known that when she'd said it.

"Yes," she said. Not loudly. "Yes, it was—yes."

He nodded. Not like he was surprised—like he'd needed the confirmation of the honest answer rather than the deflection. "I think—" He stopped. Started again. "I think there's this version of you that I've always known, right, and then there's apparently also this whole other layer of—of you—that was just there, existing, being difficult, while you were—" He gestured at her, at the general situation. "While you were figuring it out. And I don't know how to feel about the fact that you were doing that alone because I can't tell if I'm more—I don't know. Sad about it or glad you figured it out."

"Both responses are valid," Logan said. "They're not mutually exclusive."

"Yeah." He let out a short breath. "Yeah, that's—yeah." A pause. "I'm glad you figured it out."

She looked at him. He was still looking at his cuff.

"I'm glad you told us," he added. "Not glad like—pressuring you, not like you had to or anything—just. I'm glad you did. It feels better than not knowing." He glanced up. "Is that—is that weird to say? Like from your perspective, does that help or is it just about me?"

"It helps," she said. "Knowing that it was—received. As information. Without the response I was concerned about."

"What response were you concerned about?"

She considered how to phrase this. "The response where it becomes a larger emotional event than I can manage. Where I have to absorb other people's reactions on top of—" She moved her hand. "On top of having already used significant resources to get to the point of saying it."

Virgil was quiet. "But Patton cried."

"Patton cried in a way that was—manageable. He asked before he hugged me. He focused his response on me rather than on himself." She paused. "He does that better than almost anyone."

"He does," Virgil agreed. A beat. "For what it's worth, if you'd needed me to be—if you need me to not do the big reactions thing. I can do that. I'm pretty good at not doing big reactions because I'm always worried about the big reactions."

She looked at him.

"I mean—" He made a small frustrated gesture at himself. "I don't always succeed, but I try. And with—with this stuff. I get it. You don't want to feel like you have to manage everyone else's feelings about your own life. That's—I get that specifically."

She thought about the months of managing. The careful choices. The calculated exits from rooms.

"Yes," she said simply. "That's it exactly."

"Okay." He nodded, decisive in the quiet way that meant something had settled for him. "Then just—tell me what you need, when you need it. I'll try to do that instead of whatever I might default to."

"What do you default to?"

He looked at her flatly. "Panic."

"Ah." She nodded once. "I see."

"I panicked earlier, for the record. When you said—when you told us. I panicked for about thirty seconds and then I got it together and sat very still."

"I noticed the very still."

"Was it too much? The still? Was that weird?"

"It was fine. It read as processing, which it apparently was."

"Okay. Good." He exhaled slowly. "Good, okay." He picked up his phone and then set it down again. "She," he said quietly, apparently trying it the way Roman had, though less theatrically. He didn't say anything else about it. Just let it sit.

"Are you going to be weird about it?" she asked.

"Definitely," he said immediately. "For like, the next week probably. Not in a bad way, just in a—I won't know where to look while I recalibrate kind of way. Is that okay?"

She found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was—almost—smiling. "I can work with that."

"Cool." He pulled his hood forward slightly, which was his version of ending a conversation from a place of relative peace rather than avoidance. "I'll probably text you something at 2am because that's when I figure out what I actually wanted to say."

"I'll have my phone on."

She picked up her book. He looked at his phone. The couch was quiet in a way that felt comfortable rather than requiring anything from either of them, and she sat in it for a while before finally saying good night and going back to her room.

The room. The mirror. The familiar geometry of the space she'd built for herself.

She sat at the desk and looked at the printout of the shirt, which was still bookmarking page 147 of Whipping Girl.

She took it out. Looked at it for a moment.

Women's-cut. Black. Collared.

Simple. Exactly what she wanted. Nothing more than that, nothing performative about it, just—correct. A small exactness that she had been building toward for months, in the way that coming out had been something she'd been building toward for months, each day a small increment that looked like nothing from the outside and was, accumulated, the distance between where she'd been and where she was.

She opened the laptop.

She opened the cart.

She checked out.

She did not log the timestamp. She did not write a note about what it meant. She closed the laptop and reached up and took her hair down from the ponytail and sat for a long time in the quiet of her room, in the dark—not in a sad way, just in the way of someone who has put something down that they've been carrying for a long time and is allowing themselves the moment of noticing how much lighter their hands are.

Logan, she thought.

Her name. Which she had chosen, technically, by refusing to un-choose it. Which fit her the way things fit when they were right rather than merely assigned. Which had always been hers, even before she knew in what sense.

Tomorrow, Thomas might call on her. She would stand in Thomas's body, behind Thomas's face, and look out through eyes that weren't the right shape and speak with a voice that wasn't yet quite hers, and there would be nothing to be done about that—not tomorrow, not the day after, maybe not for a long time—and she had a kind of peace with it that wasn't the good kind yet.

She was working on it.

She was working on it.

She turned her hands over in her lap. Felt the change in the skin texture. The shift of weight at her chest. The slight different shape of everything that had been accumulating over five months of slow correction, all these small accurate increments, each one unremarkable on its own and collectively pointing somewhere she could look at and say: yes. That is the direction.

She put one hand flat against the desk. Felt the grain of the wood.

Logan.

She.

They fit together well, those two words. They always had, she thought. Even when she hadn't known why.

Remus is the loudest about wanting to be outwardly plural. Remus encompasses a variety of roles that have one common root: the things that Thomas actively tries to suppress. Intrusive thoughts, sexuality, and the plurality. The others (especially Roman and Thomas) fear that Remus would fall into the stereotype of "evil alter" a la Split, or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. However, Remus truly isn't evil; he's just loud and contrarian and flamboyant and crass.

After him is Patton. Patton thinks that hiding the Sides means that Thomas is lying to everyone about himself. Relationships require trust and honesty. Plus, Patton would love to be his absolutely smothering platonic-paternal loving self over all of Thomas's friends, but he's never been able to because it would be weird for Thomas to call them "kiddo" or "buddy" or all the other affectionate little nicknames Patton loves to use for those he cares for.

Roman would absolutely love to unmask himself, though doesn't believe that Thomas has to reveal all of the sides. He's Thomas's ego and romance and creativity! The parts of Thomas that Thomas already wants to present. Why shouldn't he take center stage at times? Why not let Thomas tap into that bold theatricality, that full-chested pride, become so much more a performer than just Thomas?

Logan thinks this entire debate is ridiculous. Thomas's identity is not dissociative and was never shaped by trauma, his memory is entirely stable, Thomas had intentionally created the Sides as a way to explore the facets of his singular personality for a YouTube series, so entertaining the idea of the Sides existing beyond that is illogical. (In other words, I am terribly sorry but Logan is on the side of "endos DNI".)

Virgil is incredibly fearful and hesitant of the possible backlash. What would Thomas's friends think if he were to say he wasn't always Thomas? What would they think about Virgil themself as Thomas's anxiety holder? Thomas's friends are the most important thing to Virgil. Becoming more visibly plural could rock the boat too much, could isolate Thomas further. (Patton's stance of 'well isn't it wrong to lie to our friends?' does get to Virgil.)