Work Text:
Viola had thought the hardest part would be when the captain cut off her hair.
She’d donned the trousers, shirt and vest he’d given her, and enjoyed a good few minutes striding around the room, free of her skirts. As a child, she’d often worn her brother’s clothes and chased after him to the woods to climb the trees. If that had been tolerated in her youth, it was forbidden in recent years. She found she enjoyed the illicit thrill of it.
The captain laughed to see her try the stride and stance of a man. His coaching produced some results, but still her hips moved too much or, then, not enough, her step too heavy or, then, too light.
“It will come to you,” the captain said. “Hopefully, they will see you as not much more than a boy, and forgive you a slight lightness of gait.”
And then he had sat her on a stool and cut her hair.
Her hair, a long mane of red to her waist, had been uncut since childhood. It was her one womanly grace; those who saw her said she was oddly featured, but that her hair lent her passing beauty. As the captain’s shears sent it to the floor, she felt a finality, a severance of her old life from the new, as if without her hair she was no more a girl, and therefore no more herself. This, she thought, was surely the worst thing about becoming a boy.
But she was wrong, for as soon as she lifted her face from the pile of copper tresses on the floor, she looked up to see her brother staring back at her from the looking glass. Her brother, her twin – her other self – drowned and gone, and yet staring at her. This was the very worst.
Her breath caught in her throat and for a moment she thought the pain of it – the realness of it would overwhelm her. It was too much to step into his shoes, too much to go on. Except he would want you to, she knew.
The captain’s voice was gentle when next he spoke. “And what are we to call you, now that you are a man?”
She hesitated, she had meant to give him her brother’s name – it was so dear to her, and she knew it as her own – but now it would feel like being possessed by a ghost. She gave him instead the name of a story from her youth.
“Introduce me as ‘Cesario’, sir, and so I shall be known.”
“A good name,” he said. “Shall we to the Duke’s?”
She stood, and took her brother’s ghost with her. “Yes, good sir. Lead on.”