#majormoonweek2025

Pearl was a creature of fluid gender, drifted between binaries with the grace of a cloud shifting shape in the sky. Some days, she felt the gentle pull of femininity, finding comfort in soft fabrics and a certain lilt to her voice. Other days, he ached for the sharp lines of masculinity, the grounded weight of his presence. But Scott loved her through all of it.

Or... so Pearl believed.

Then Scott left. Didn't want her as a soulmate. Didn't want her.

Pearl stared at the empty space where Scott had been, a single thought solidifying in his mind like a shard of ice. It’s because of me. It’s because I’m not enough. She replayed Scott’s words, twisted them, diced them, desperate for a reason that made sense, a problem she could fix.

And then it hit her, a poisoned epiphany. Scott was gay. Pearl had feminine days. Pearl had femfluxes. Scott liked men. And Pearl? Pearl wasn't a real man. Not a full man. Not his type. 

The realization was a punch to the gut, an insidious whisper that coiled around her thoughts. Scott wanted a man.

From that day forward, Pearl was only "he." No more fluid pronouns, no more drifting. He purged his wardrobe of anything remotely feminine, his shelves of any book with a soft cover. He cut his hair brutally short, the shears scraping against his scalp, a desperate act of excision. He started working out with a furious intensity, determined to chisel away any hint of softness. He would be Scott’s type. He would be a man.

He swore it to himself in the mirror every morning, his reflection gaunt and haunted. "I'm a boy now," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Look at me. I'm a boy, Pearl. You're a boy."

But the ocean of his own nature was not so easily tamed. His femfluxes, once a gentle tide, became a torturous storm. There were days he woke up, the air feeling wrong against his skin, a deep, unsettling ache for the comfort of a soft sweater, the sway of a skirt, the gentle curves of his body. She'd catch glimpses of himself in shop windows, his broad shoulders, his short hair, and a wave of nausea would wash over him. This wasn't him. This hyper-masculine shell felt alien, suffocating. He’d force a smile, force his voice deeper, force himself to walk with a swagger that felt like a painful charade.

He was forcing himself into a box that, for all his desperate desire for Scott, did not fit. But how could he admit that? How could he let even a flicker of femininity show? Scott would never come back then. So he pushed it down, the longing for demifemininity, the comfort of his true genderflux self, burying it under layers of denial and self-loathing. He was a boy. He had to be.

But if he was a boy, why did it make him want to claw out of my skin? Was he really a boy, or was she just faking it, just a girl who hates herself? The thought terrified him, because if he wasn't a "boy," then Scott would never want him. His repulsion for his own desire for feminity deepened, his own assigned gender as a curse, a barrier to love. But now, ironically, his forced masculinity was making him feel repulsion for masculinity, too, the constant effort and discomfort slowly eroding any genuine connection he might have had to his masculine side. He was adrift, scornful of both poles of his own gender, terrified of his own fluidity.

He began to stalk Scott. Not directly, not overtly. But he knew Scott’s routines, their shared history a map in his mind. Scott looked happy, unburdened. And Pearl, wrapped in the suffocating cloak of his self-created identity, festered in his own misery.

Pearl needed to be undeniable. Unambiguously male. He traced the lines of his chest in the mirror, the curves that still stubbornly remained. These were the problem. These were the things that kept Scott away.

He remembered Scar. Scar, who once tried to fix a leaky faucet with duct tape and a prayer. Scar, who was decidedly not a surgeon. But Scar was willing to listen, willing to do. Desperation was a potent anaesthetic to common sense.

 "I need… I need to be rid of these. To be… flat. Male." Pearl begged. He didn't mention Scott, not directly. He just said it was for himself. Scar, oblivious to the deeper psychological currents, had agreed.

The "specialized tools" Scar had turned out an assortment of kitchen knives and a bottle of cheap vodka for "sterilization", and some pills for pain relief. Pearl, by now, was beyond rational thought. His internal landscape was a wasteland of self-disgust and a singular, burning desire for Scott’s acceptance.  He clutched a dirty rag in his teeth, his eyes fixed on the grimy concrete floor.

The pain was immediate, a searing, white-hot agony that ripped through Pearl’s chest. Scar, unsteady and clearly out of his depth, began to cut, his movements clumsy, unsure. Pearl bit down on the rag, a guttural scream rising in his throat.

Hundreds of blocks away, Scott was tending to his ranch when a jolt of pure, unadulterated agony shot through him. It was as if someone had plunged a red-hot poker into his chest, then systematically twisted it. He gasped, falling to his knees, clutching his shirt. The pain intensified, a nauseating wave of slicing, burning, tearing flesh, a phantom sensation of his own body being violated. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, his vision blurring. Unlike Pearl, he wasn't even granted the privilege of a few painkillers, he was feeling the entire extent of his body undergoing bloody, visercal, unwarned and unconsentual surgery. He felt every slice, every scalpel, all in vivid detail.

Pearl was losing consciousness. Scar, panicked, had managed to roughly excise parts of his chest, leaving behind a mangled mess of flesh and blood. Pearl was bleeding profusely, his breath shallow, ragged. Scar, realizing the extent of his amateur butchery, stumbled back, a look of abject horror on his face.

PearlescentMoon was slain by GoodTimesWithScar.

Smajor1995 died.

When Pearl respawned, his chest was throbbing with an infernal rhythm. He felt weak, light-headed, but a strange, dark elation flickered within him. He looked down, and through the pain, through the grime, he could see. It was flat. Mangled, scarred, but flat. Sure, the respawn had been painful, but had mended the open wound, leaving nothing but a grotesque scar where his boobs had been. It was honestly a relief he'd died, now he wouldn't have to wait for his chest to heal itself to show Scott.

He croaked, a thin, humourless laugh bubbling up. The words tasted like blood and victory.

Scott found him soon after. It was no surprise. He wasn't thrilled to be on yellow.

Scott’s eyes, usually so gentle, were blazing with a cold fury. "What the hell happened, Pearl?" he demanded, his voice low, shaking with suppressed rage. 

Pearl looked up, his eyes bright with a delusional hope. He slowly peeled back a corner of the bandage, revealing the grotesque, scarred landscape beneath. "Look, Scott," he whispered, a triumphant smile stretching his lips. "I did it. I'm flat. I'm a boy now. See?" He gestured vaguely to his mangled chest. "I did it for you. Now… now will you love me? Now will you come back?"

Scott staggered back, his face draining of all colour. The sight of the botched surgery, the raw, angry flesh, sent a wave of nausea through him. His anger morphed into a profound, aching pity, tinged with horror.

"Pearl…" Scott took a shaky breath, forcing himself to meet Pearl's desperate gaze. "Pearl, I'm gay, yes. But that's not why I left. I left because I couldn't be tied to anyone, because I needed my freedom. It had nothing to do with whether you were a 'boy' or a 'girl,' or anything in between. It was about me, about my own choice." He paused, his voice cracking. "And you… you did this to yourself? For me? Scar is the farthest thing from a medical professional on this server, why would you let him do it, of all people?! Pearl… I would never want you to change yourself, to hurt yourself. Especially not for me.”

Pearl's smile fractured. His eyes flickered, the desperate hope dying, replaced by dawning horror. The words Scott spoke, so clear, so unambiguous, were like a sledgehammer to the carefully constructed edifice of his delusion. His entire world, built on a foundation of misinterpretation and self-loathing, began to crumble.

He looked at his chest, no longer a source of triumph but a testament to his grotesque mistake. He felt the phantom aches of his femfluxes, the remembered comfort of soft fabrics, the familiar embrace of his demifeminine self. He felt the crushing weight of the forced masculinity, the nausea it still evoked. He was neither boy nor girl in that moment, but a ruin. A physical ruin, scarred and infected. A psychological ruin, shattered beyond recognition by his own desperate, self-inflicted wounds.

He was fem-repulsed, still, by the internalized misogyny he’d cultivated. But he was masc-repulsed too, by the agony of forcing himself into a shape that was not his own. He was trapped in a self-made hell, a body he had mutilated to fit a lie, a mind broken by the impossible demands he’d placed upon it.

The horror wasn't just the mangled flesh. The horror was the twisted, irreversible landscape of Pearl’s soul. He had destroyed himself, not for love, but for a phantom, a ghost of a desire that was never Scott’s to begin with.