#trans!penny

Nickel flew through the air above Mantle, looking for grimm that managed to make their way through the streets while the walls surrounding the city were being repaired. His eyes scanned the city, nearly pausing as he detected several grimm sirens going off in different sectors of the city. For a moment, he closed his eyes to start to plot a course on the best way to make it to each grimm attack. Once that course was found, he rushed forward, taking care of each grimm in his path. 

Green lasers shot from his swords as he flew above each grimm pack in the streets. Though, the longer he took care of them, the more annoyed he became that the grimm almost seemed endless. Sure, it was usually only a pack of ten or so in each section of the city, but after months of protecting the city, it almost seemed like the walls were never getting repaired. Stuck in the role of tired hero. 

Nickel stopped as he finished defeating the last pack of sabyrs, catching a few familiar faces down on the street below him. Every instinct told him that he needed to go, to leave before any of them saw him, though, as he saw Ruby down below him, he couldnt help but make his way down to see why Penny held these memories so dear. Memories of team RWBY that never seemed to go away, a haunting memory of his past life. Though, he put his swords away as he landed, looking over his old friends. 

“Penny? Is… is that you?” Ruby asked as she slowly stepped forward. 

“It is Nickel now.” Nickel took a few steps forward to meet Ruby, scanning her to find out just how much he actually remembered. Memories flooded through his mind in the blink of an eye, watching the girl that had become his past life’s first and only friend for the first few weeks Penny was in Vale. His voice nearly broke as he spoke again, sadness running through him as he spoke again, saying the one sentence he had practiced over and over in case he ever ran into these old friends. “Penny was… unrecoverable.” 

Ruby nodded and looked away, holding her arm to her chest. “O-oh.” 

Nickel paused as he heard how heartbroken Ruby sounded, confused about why he cared so much about what she thought. Penny had cared deeply for Ruby, and those same feelings had stayed with him. A small sigh left his lips as he took Ruby’s hand, giving a small smile to her. “She would be glad that you are okay.” 

Ruby nodded and wiped a few tears away from her eyes. “You look just like her.” 

“I… I guess I am her, just a boy now.” No, that wasnt right, he was supposed to be different from her, a brother, right? He wasnt supposed to be her, but… the more he thought about it, the more he found himself being unable to deny it. “What are you doing here? You are supposed to be in Vale.” 

“We need to speak to General Ironwood,” Weiss answered in a matter-of-fact tone. 

“What for?” Nickel asked. 

“Its… complicated.” Ruby moved the lamp on her hip behind her cloak. “Though, we’re not entirely sure how far we can trust him.” 

Nickel nodded and looked around at his old friends, seeing there was something they were all hiding. “I think I can get you to him.” 

Ruby smiled a bit. “Thank you.” 

“I’ll need you to stay here though.” 

“Why cant we go with you?” Yang asked. “We need to get to him-” 

“Because there is a curfew and travel between Mantle and Atlas is a bit restricted,” Nickel answered, already starting to take off. “I will go talk to him and get you clearance, but I need you to stay with my father.” 

“We cant just sit here!” Nora exclaimed, getting her weapon ready. 

“Let Nickel go alone for right now, and we can find out a bit more about what’s going on here,” Qrow said. “Storming in to see Ironwood right now may just cause us problems.” 

Ruby nodded and smiled up at Nickel. “You will be back, right?” 

“I will,” Nickel said as he took off, flying off to Atlas Academy once more. He mentally cursed at himself as he thought about Ruby, already feeling old feelings starting to come back up. He wanted to be him, not Penny, and yet, Penny seemed to be trying to resurface at every turn. Even now, all he could think about was Ruby and how it made him feel. But for now, all he wanted to do was get them an audience with General Ironwood, and then he’d talk to his father to find out how to get rid of these feelings to keep Penny from being recovered. 

Technically speaking, Pietro is a doctor with doctor-patient confidentiality between himself and anyone who seeks treatment from him, so he can’t just let anyone look at those files.  He does most of those himself, or trusts Penny with them, now that she’s been sworn in as an official ‘assistant’ to his practice (with her own confidentiality status to boot).

Well, that and it’s just plain fun to listen to Ruby get excited when she reads over a particularly interesting project of Pietro’s.  The flare of pride Penny feels toward her father and the joy she experiences over getting to witness Ruby be incredibly happy make for a very nice emotional mixture.

“Ruby?  Is something the matter?”  Penny probes gently.

Ruby’s head jerks up.  “No!  No, I, uh…I’m not sure I should have seen this?”  She passes some blueprints over to Penny without making eye contact.

Penny takes the blueprints and looks down at them.  “Oh.”  Her circuitry seizes uncomfortably when she realizes what they are.  She hasn’t seen them, thought about them, in years.  They haven’t mattered since…since the very beginning really.  It was one of the first things, if not the very first thing, she knew about herself.  And, of course, Pietro had been more than willing to create her a new body to properly reflect her identity when she came out to him.

“Were you supposed to have a brother?”  Ruby asks softly.

“No.”  Penny chews on her bottom lip.  Her innards (metaphorically) twist with fear.  Back then, with the first scientists outside her father she’d met, the ones who knew what was on this specific set of blueprints, it had been hard.  They’d made compelling sounding arguments.  Ones that denied her herself.  She was designed a certain way, they’d said.  Her aura was a transplant from her father’s, so therefore it proved she wasn’t really what she knew she is, they’d said.

Yet, Penny knew.  She knew herself, and Pietro had supported her (and swayed Ironwood), and that had been all that really mattered.  Up to now.

Ruby had never given Penny any reason to believe she’d think along similar paths to those scientists, but still.  There’s a chance.  It’s why she always hesitated in telling Ruby.  Sure, Ruby had handled her first secret surprisingly well, but that didn’t necessarily mean she’d handle the second one the same way.  What if she didn’t?

Ruby accepted Penny as a girl now.  Penny had decided that was all that mattered.  An old secret could remain an old secret.

At least until it accidentally came to light during a tidying session.

“You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to,” Ruby tells Penny gently.  “It’s none of my business.  Seriously.”

Penny takes a breath.  She looks down at the blueprints in her hands.  Now, that they are out in the open, she kind of does want to know Ruby’s response?  She’ll wonder about it otherwise.  Does Ruby genuinely support her or is she just politely not saying anything?  That’s happened in the past too and, frankly, Penny prefers people to be upfront.  It’s way more draining to continuously guess someone’s intentions than to know where they stand and interact with them accordingly.

“When my father first designed me,” Penny begins, and then stops.  She gulps.  “It, um, wasn’t as a girl.”  She looks down at her hands, rubs one thumb over the palm of the other.  “This was before I was…” ‘Born’ really isn’t the right word for her.  It’s never felt like it to Penny.  But how to explain the moment she first gained consciousness, awareness, to someone who came to life a very different way than her?  Penny sighs.  She doesn’t know, and this conversation is making her apprehensive enough as it is.  “I had to learn a lot, in the beginning.  Like a baby.  I mean, I wasn’t a baby, but I, um…” she looks at Ruby, pleading with her eyes for Ruby to understand.

Ruby offers her a small, but comforting, smile.  “No one knows everything at first.  We all have to learn.  Human, Faunus, robot, alike.”

“Yes.”  Penny exhales the breath she didn’t know she was holding.  She checks in with her internal fans to ensure her temperature is at its normal setting (she doesn’t usually have to resort to breathing unless she manually has to cool herself down).  “I…my father taught me a lot of things.  Gender included.  I realized I was—am a girl.  We changed my designs.  The new designs went into my official file and these ones…”  Penny shrugs.  They’d needed to keep them because they held some of Pietro’s original concept work and who knows when or if they’d need that again (Pietro had when he rebuilt her after Beacon, but he’d also assured Penny when she woke up that he’d ignored everything that wasn’t the bare, functionality necessities from them).

Finally, Penny looks to Ruby.  “Is that okay?”

Ruby maneuvers around the piles of boxes and papers strewn across the floor (the way she did a wiggly crab-walk would have made Penny laugh under different circumstances).  Ruby settles next to Penny.  “Of course it is.”  Ruby goes in for a hug, pauses, her expression asking Penny for permission, and then hugs Penny as  tightly as possible when it’s granted.

Although, dying doesn’t necessarily scare Penny.  She’s done it once already.  She doesn’t remember it or the time between it and her reactivation.  She never felt pain, terror.  One moment she knew nothing more, and the next she was blinking awake in her father’s lab.  Penny knows truly dying means not waking up again, but she finds it hard to fear the moment when it’ll eventually happen definitively for her.

What she does fear, and what she would cry over if she had the capacity, is the possibility of an afterlife.  Penny has hard evidence now that, if an afterlife does exist, she doesn’t get to go there.  She doesn’t go anywhere.  She just shuts off.  Like any other machine.

She’s not real like actual people are.  She’s a very close replication of life, but there’s still a gaping chasm between her and everyone else.  One that she can never cross precisely because of what she is.

I have come too far to be stopped by some toy!

They’re words said in rage by someone whose opinion Penny knows she shouldn’t really be considering, but they’ve stuck with her since they were yelled at her.  Is that what she is?  A toy?  A puppet?  A plaything?  An imitation of life meant to explore humanity’s capacity for creation?

An imitation of humanity itself, one that deceived—stole—one of its greatest powers out from under it?

Penny can’t describe what having the Maiden powers feels like.  They’re just there.  A part of her, but one that’s somehow detached from her operating systems.  She controls them, can send commands and signals to them like she does literally every other aspect of her body, but they are distinctly separate from her machinery.  Like a magnet that got accidentally stuck to her and won’t come off.  Not truly a part of her.  Not really.

She shouldn’t have gotten them at all.  The Maiden powers were intended as a gift from an old wizard to four living girls, to aid mankind.  Penny isn’t alive, not like everyone else is.  The gift to the maidens was never meant for her.  She intervened in a process she should have stayed out of.  It was not her place to act like she had.

But if she hadn’t…

Penny can imagine what would have happened if Cinder won that fight.  Fria’s final moments would not have been peaceful.  Winter, out of aura and injured, would be in no condition to continue a fight against an even stronger opponent.  Penny herself…well, she already knew how little Cinder regarded her life.

She’d had no choice, hadn’t she?  To save all three of them.  To not waste the window of opportunity Winter gave her by distracting Cinder.  In those precious moments, there was only her.  Penny.

She could have told Fria to think of Winter, couldn’t she?  Fria knew Winter.  Thinking of her probably wouldn’t have been too hard.  But, Penny hadn’t.  Penny had taken Fria’s hand and held it.  Because no one should be alone in that final moment.  Because she couldn’t say she knew what awaited Fria on the other side and she wanted to give Fria whatever comfort she could to send her off.  Because, in that moment, the magical powers hadn’t mattered, but the old woman in Penny’s arms did.

Now, here she is, the Winter Maiden.  A thief of a gift to humanity.

“You okay?”

Penny nearly jumps.  She hadn’t heard Oscar come up behind her.  Her receptors had captured the echoing sound, sure, but her processors hadn’t been attuned to register it.

“I—I’m fine,” Penny says too hurriedly, and closes her lips firmly to prevent the hiccup from escaping her.

Oscar looks at Penny a long moment, and then sits down beside her.  “I hate staying behind like this,” he admits, gesturing to the cave opening the airship flew out of to exit the Crater.  “I know there’s more I can be doing but I…”

“Are too important,” Penny finishes for him.  And he is.  Ozpin can always reincarnate into someone else, yes, but there will only ever be one Oscar Pine.  Even if he stayed behind, like her, because of the special magic connected to him, that’s the truth Penny believes firmly in.

“I guess you know what that’s like.”  Oscar laughs quietly.

Penny doesn’t answer.  They settle into silence.  It’s an odd place to sit, really, the opening that looks out over the Crater.  They have an entire, somewhat comfortable, temporary hideout to go rest in, but neither really want to leave the spot where they can see the sliver of the sky where the airship will first appear when it returns.

“Penny, I…” Oscar begins, and Penny turns to him to listen.  “If it was going to be anyone, I’m glad you’re the Winter Maiden.  I know we don’t know each other well, but I do know you’re a good person.”

“Thanks,” Penny replies quietly.  She knows the words are supposed to be reassuring, but they fall flat to her.  Again, she’d been the only one there, in that moment with Fria.  If the Maiden powers could have gone somewhere else, they probably would have.

It was unfair to them, and Fria.  There’s no way the previous maiden could have known Penny’s true nature.  Fria had much more important, pressing matters on her mind to truly take a second and notice the exposed metal of the palms of Penny’s hands, first when she touched her leg, and then when she held her hand.  Fria probably hadn’t had time to realize no ordinary person could have come through the freezing whirlwind of ice and snow.  She probably hadn’t seen how Penny’s legs were clearly synthetic and attached together at an artificial knee.

Despite being a Maiden who lived well into old age and was, therefore, arguably very clever,  Fria probably hadn’t noticed all the little hints that indicated what Penny is, even though she had every reason to critically examine Penny, since she’d been attacked for the power she was tasked with protecting mere minutes before.

Because that would mean Fria had known (or at least suspected) Penny’s true nature, and decided to choose her anyway.

And why would she do that?  Penny, as she keeps telling herself over and over again, isn’t actually real.  Not a real girl.  Not like Ruby and the rest of her team.  Not like Nora, or Winter, or even Cinder, who’s part Grimm now.  All of them were born, created as girls, and Penny was…well her father had been more focused on building something that functioned.  He’d never chosen a gender for her.  She did that herself, later on, after she gained consciousness.  But he’d given her his aura, and her father was a man.  So, following that line of logic, shouldn’t she too be a man too?

“What if it was a mistake?”  Penny asks Oscar in barely a whisper.

He looks at her.  “What if what was a mistake?”

Penny takes a breath she wholly doesn’t need, but the action she learned is one that people do when they need to prepare themselves to say something important.  “Me becoming the Winter Maiden.  I have my father’s aura.  I’m not a real girl.  I tricked some of the most important magic in the world and stole it from humanity and…” she trails off, unsure of how to finish her self-doubting argument.

At first, Oscar doesn’t reply.  Then, “I have Ozpin’s magic, and his memories,” he says slowly.  “Does that make me him?”

“Of course not,” Penny retorts.  “You’re your own person!”

Oscar grins, and Penny gets the feeling it was his ploy to get her to say that, for both their sakes.  “So, if I can still be me, even if I have a wizard living in my head, then why can’t you be your own person even if your father gave you some of his aura?” He posits.

Penny huffs.  “I know I’m not the same being as my father.  There is substantial evidence supporting the concept that we are two entirely separate entities, but I have his aura, and he is a man.  The maiden powers only attach to females.  Therefore, logically, they should not have come to me.”

“So, following that reasoning, aura and gender are linked,” Oscar muses.  He pauses and, if Penny weren’t so wrapped up in her own tumultuous thoughts, she’d recognize the signs that he’s mentally preparing himself to say something he considers very important.  “What if I had evidence to the contrary?”

“What do you mean?”  Penny asks, her curiosity getting the better of her.

Oscar doesn’t look at her.  His shoulders hunch in.  Instinctively, Penny reaches over and wraps a reassuring arm around his shoulders.  She doesn’t know what he’s going to say next, but she can still recognize it’s hard for him to say.

“I was…I am…Penny, do you know what being transgender is?”

Penny doesn’t reply.  The moment she heard the unfamiliar word, she immediately sent out an inquiry to the Internet to find its meaning.

“Transgender,” she finally says.  “Denotes or relates to a person whose gender identity and expression does not correspond with what it was at birth.”

Oscar lets out a sharp laugh.  “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.”  He pauses.  Sensing he’s not finished, Penny waits for him to continue.  He does.  “For me, it means, when my parents’ only child was born, they had a daughter.”  Oscar glances at her warily, but Penny doesn’t interrupt.  He gazes down at his hands, and sighs.  “And that they never got to meet their son either.  They died before he figured that out about himself.”  Hurriedly, he adds, “That’s not the point,” while wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

Penny hugs Oscar, hoping to communicate that he doesn’t have to explain further to her if he doesn’t want to.

Oscar leans into the hug.  He doesn’t wrap his arms around Penny in return, but he does rest his weight on her.  “The point is,” he starts again.  “I once had…doubts.  Kind of like you do.  But I learned aura and gender aren’t really related.  Aura is just aura.  It doesn’t really concern itself with any other part of you.  It’s just there.  Completely yours.  It’s what we believe about ourselves, our identities, that makes us who we are.”

“But my aura is my—”

“Yours.”  Oscar sits back.  “Penny, have you ever considered that all parents create their children’s auras when they conceive them?”

“What?”

“It’s something Oz told me once.  We had a conversation kind of like this.”  Oscar inhales slowly and exhales.  “Oz told me everything comes from somewhere.  He has…interesting theories on the origins of Dust and semblances, for instance.  But he told me, our parents are always a part of us, because they gave a part of themselves to make us.  He said, because of that, mine will always be with me.”  Oscar stares down at his hands.  “Even if I never got to know them.  My aunt used to say the same, that I had my father’s laugh and my aura is nearly the same shade of green as my mother’s, but she’s not an ancient, mystical immortal, so I guess she was harder to believe.”

He smiles softly.  “It’s reassuring, in a way.  To know they gave me part of who I am.  My aura.  My laugh.  My appearance, to an extent.  But they didn’t decide who I am.  I’ve done that on my own.”  Oscar looks up at Penny.  “So have you.  You said it yourself.  You aren’t your father.  You have substantial evidence proving that.”

“But you’re human.  I’m not alive.  I don’t have a soul like—”

“How do you know?”  Oscar interrupts.  “How do you know you don’t have a soul?”

Penny hesitates, and then admits what she’s been thinking,  “I died.  I died and I didn’t go to an afterlife or anything.  I just shut down like any other old machine.”

There’s a long pause where Oscar doesn’t say anything.  Penny begins to think he doesn’t have an argument to refute her claim.  When she’s about to stand and walk away, Oscar finally speaks.

“What if you weren’t dead?”  He asks quietly.

“What?”

“Your father recovered your core, you, from Amity Arena, and used it to rebuild you.  A part of you never shut down completely.  In your own way, you were still alive.”  Though the words seem more like an statement, Oscar speaks them like he’s asking a question.

“I guess.”  Penny frowns.  She’s never really thought of it like that before.  Everyone told her she died, so she assumed she had.  But, a part of her had still existed in the world, hadn’t it?  Vulnerable.  Weak.  But not snuffed out completely.

Penny thinks about it more deeply.  Maybe it was like she had been in a coma?  When people are grievously injured, they can go into comas.  They don’t necessarily remember what happens during them either.  They wake up on the other end still alive, just with a gaping hole of time they weren’t conscious for in their life.  Like her.

“That doesn’t mean I have a soul or will go to an afterlife like everyone else,” Penny mumbles, but she’s not as certain that she believes herself now.

“Penny, I’m not sure how else to tell you this, but no one knows what happens to us after we die.  Not even me, and I—well, Ozma—sort of died once.  Actually, it was more like a couple times.”  Oscar winces.  “But Ozma didn’t maintain memories of what happened to him after once the God of Light brought him back.”  He smiles at her.  “Wondering about it, I think, is one of the most human things someone can do.”

“Oh.”  Penny considers the idea that she’s just as alive as everyone else is, and lets that sink in.

“If it helps.”  Oscar leans back on his hands and looks up to the small sliver of sky that’s visible to them.  “We’re probably the only two people who can be completely certain about their identities.”

“How so?”  Curious, Penny cocks her head.

“I was chosen as the next life as an immortal who only reincarnates into men.  You’re the Winter Maiden, who can only be a girl.”  Oscar shrugs.  “We were each chosen by magic older than this incarnation of humanity itself based on the identities we decided for ourselves.  If that’s not validating, I don’t know what is.”

“I never thought about it like that.”  Penny sighs.  “I—I thought I tricked it.  That I looked enough like a girl that the maiden powers came to me because they had no place else to go.”