Work Text:
It was amazing, Rincewind reflected, that you could save the world not once, but twice(or three times? She’d actually lost count) and people, especially the ones with penises, especially the wizards, could still ask her to mop the floors. Not even in a malicious way, mind you, which just made it worse, oh no, they’d ask her because they barely looked at her. To them she was just another vaguely female-shaped figure with a bad habit of hunching her shoulders nervously at loud noises and they didn’t think twice.
Sometimes she thought that the hat didn’t work at all. You probably couldn’t misspell “wizard” and get away with it. Power of imagination and all that rubbish. Then again, without being a wizard she didn’t really know what else she was.
Rubbish, probably.
She didn’t think that Ponder knew what he was either, which is why visiting his workshop as of late came as a relief, because it was so very un-wizardly, and she was comforted and jealous at the same time because he didn’t even have to try to be taken seriously. But he wasn’t a bad man by any means and probably best of the lot and she quite liked the whirring, beeping machinery and magic, the sound of organized disorganization, papers upon papers of calculation that made no sense to her but fascinated her to no end, Ponder’s perpetual inky nose-tip and his habit of launching into lectures which were only interrupted by regular apologies when he saw her eyes glaze over.
“- attached to the tube over there it calculates the consistency of the – sorry, I should explain, when I say consistency - “
“I know what that means!” Rincewind snapped. “I’m not a total idiot, you know.”
Ponder paused, looking startled and worried, blinking behind his glasses owlishly. “I know that,” he said tentatively.
Rincewind quite liked him but sometimes he wanted to smack a little more spine into him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, grouchily, instead. “The Dean asked me to come and clean up a little mess in his quarters.”
“Oh no,” Ponder said worriedly. “He didn’t try to - “
“No, it was just mayo all over – that’s not the point! The point is that I’m not a maid!”
“I know that,” Ponder said tentatively. “But you know how the older wizards are. It takes them time to - “
“To what?” Rincewind snapped, something in her chest swelling and squeezing uncomfortably. “To accept women as sentient beings? To make me stop want to glue hair on my chin? It’s ridiculous, you’re shorter than me, and you don’t got a beard and they still think that what’s in your pants - “
“You’d be surprised,” Ponder interrupted, calmly, “what you can find in my pants.”
This was followed with a silence as Rincewind digested this with blank face and Ponder’s cheeks turned red when he realized what he just said.
“Did you just- “
“No!” Ponder squeaked. “I mean! Oh gods – I mean, I am – actually more familiar with your – er, struggle than you might imagine. Er. I wasn’t- I mean, in the future- no, NO. Sorry. Er.”
“What?” Rincewind stared at him. Ponder was slowly starting to look like his head might pop.
“I mean,” Ponder said, a little hoarsely. “That I might have – started my university career – a little different. Similar to you. And then I found a spell. And I did the spell. And now – I am… more comfortable. In my own skin.”
He had an adam’s apple. Rincewind knew this because as she stared, it bopped quite noticeably as he swallowed.
“You mean you were - ?”
Ponder smiled, pink-cheeked but not ashamed, glancing down for a moment. “Yes.”
Rincewind considered this for a moment.
“All right,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to, no offense. I quite like – being a woman otherwise. I just wish other people would wise up.”
“It’s not for everyone, yes,” Ponder agreed cheerfully.
“But you’re a man, yes?”
Ponder exhaled, puffing up his chest a little. “I am man,” he said. “And you are a woman.”
Rincewind looked at him, and well – he was a bit of a scatterbrain, yes, and she wished he’d stop apologizing so much, no one ever said ‘sorry’ to her, but she quite liked him, despite that line. He’d made her the Hat. And she was tired of playing coy. She had a distinct feeling that it was yet another rule made up men.
“All right, yes, you can breathe out now,” she said. “Fancy a cuppa? Have you eaten anything today?”
“What day is it?” Ponder asked.
“Tuesday?”
“Oh dear.”
“Come along, then,” Rincewind said. “I can rustle us up some potatoes.”
“I can cook them,” Ponder said, clearly intending to impress. “I know how – er, magic potions, you know?”
“As long as my bits will stay the same,” Rincewind said dryly.
“Course they will. I quite like your bits.”
“Oh.”