Gemini knows she'll never show up as anything less than human.
They can invent whatever scans they want- emotional, thermal, plasma-paranormal, it doesn't matter. Gem is as natural as any person born, and that means she counts.
Okay, yes, there is the small matter of the horns- they were stubby in her childhood but have grown in her move from adolescence to adulthood. They are cartilage and bone twisting together in fine points, branches the color of old lace with feathering bases.
So can Skizz, but not like Impulse. Skizz can see Gem's horns because Skizz is in his own way like her. He blinks at her with all his Eyes sometimes and she just smiles back. He laughs, gives her a pat or a hug as time allows, and takes his rake out to the gas pumps.
They don't talk about life outside of GiggsMart, at least nothing important. It's safer that way, the employee handbook tells them.
That doesn't mean they don't share, but Gem thinks that maybe Skizz- he didn't have what she had.
A glen of golden-leafed birch trees, a den of soft ferns, a mother who taught her to walk on four legs and then two.
The things that come around the back sometimes, they could be relatives. Or they were, before whatever helped Dopplegangers thrive got their hooks in them. Gem tries her best to ignore them, is thankful when Impulse and Grian tromp out into the night to complete whatever ritual will get them to leave for a week or a month. They're never gone for good, that would be far too convenient, but at least it means Gem will be able to take out the trash without feeling harassed.
It's stupid, at the end of the day. The whole thing is stupid- sticking around, working a job, keeping a gas station neat and tidy and killing things that aren't people when they do a bad job at pretending. If the world had been kinder to Gemini Tay and people like her, maybe she wouldn't be working retail in the only gas station between the metropolitan area and the nearest NET base.
So Gem makes GiggsMart kind.
She does it with plants, coaxing specimens to flower and smell sweet by the coffee machine and the bathroom doors. She does it with order, making sure the shelves are stocked and neat.
She does it with careful monitoring of trends and funds, reading all the local headlines and paying attention when Agent Pickles intentionally drops copies of his very classified briefings on top of the pile of local community periodicals.
"Okay, good news," Gem says one particularly vicious evening, checking outside the reinforced door as her fellow employees pick themselves up out of cracks and off the cement floor of the stockroom, "My plant got here!"
They burst into laughter, her boys- exhausted, disbelieving laughter. Skizz has been splattered with gore, and Grian's glasses are flecked with it. Impulse's broom has snapped in half, the third this month- she'll have to order another soon. Maybe she'll finally spring for the reinforced handle.
"Is it a good one?" Impulse asks.
"All my plants are good, Impulse!"
"Hard to argue with that," Skizz says. Grian snorts but he grins at her before he says, "Let's wash up, I think I hear someone out in the lobby."
"We just killed another doppleganger and we close in like ten minutes who in their right mind would be in our LOBBY?" Skizz asks, though he is obediently following Grian towards the door that separates checkout and the stockroom.
Impulse hangs back. "What kind of plant?"
"A potted rose," Gem tells him. She shows him the small barely open pink buds and he smiles. "That does sound cool."
"I know!" Gem chirps, and takes her newest darling out into the flickering lights of the recovering storefront.
She'll put it by the payphone, she thinks. If she can keep it fertilized it might someday block a user from view with bursts of pink and orange.
"It needs a name," she says as she makes her way across the store. Skizz emerges from the bathroom, looking slightly better and definitely less gore-stained.
"Bob," he says automatically and she rolls her eyes.
"A real name, Skizz!" She insists. Grian maneuvers out from behind Skizz and heads to the counter to deal with the shell-shocked looking customer, who is babbling about having to hide in the ice machine through chattering teeth.
"Could name it Pearl," he suggests and despite the fact that everyone knows you don't talk about life outside of GiggsMart Impulse and Skizz both look at her.
"You know what?" Gem says. "I will."
She puts Pearl down by the payphone and makes sure to give her fertilizer before they close up for the night.
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