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When Urushibara Ruka looks in the mirror, she always wants to hide.
Some days, it's better than others, like when she catches herself in the cosplay Mayuri made for her. Mayuri always makes her feel loved, lovely, beautiful, and her tailoring even moreso; she knows how to accentuate the bend in her waist, make an illusion of a swell at her chest. Mayuri and Kyouma and the others make her feel alive.
But they know. There's no getting around it - not with the way they treat her, unlike any of the guys but entirely unlike any of the other girls. A freak in women's clothes, she thinks, on her worse days. She wonders if strangers can see her tells the flat chest, the bump in her throat, the line of her hips. Every "ma'am" makes her back a little straighter, her smile a little bigger, until she catches a crack in her voice where it shouldn't be and she sinks.
And so she goes through her life with head bowed and voice tiny, hoping the world does not notice her.
If Ruka could choose, she would have been a woman at birth - pure, simple, no testosterone that feels so foreign in her body, no whispers of "but he's actually a guy" that she hears even when they're not there. She has dreams, sometimes, that she was; they're fragile and beautiful and terrifying all at once, because she feels settled into that skin more than she ever has in her own. The way people look at her, the way people talk to her, it's right and Gods, if that were as real as it felt.
They always end the same way, though - she chooses to take it all away, and it feels like being torn apart limb from limb by spacetime.
There are other dreams, though, less lucid - dreams of marriage and beautiful wedding dresses, of her own veiled face blushing before a crowd. Before, it was always a man who stood beside her - tall, dark-haired, stubbly and shaggy. Now, it's sometimes a woman, with that same dark hair and beaming blue eyes, a dress she had sewn herself. Ruka dreams of a fragile and precious child in her arms, one she held inside of her. Ruka dreams of warmth, a family, everything she was, once. Everything she was meant to be.
Someday, Urushibara Ruka might know what Urushibara Ruka was meant to be. Perhaps she already knows, and that terrifies her more than anything. For now, a million world-lines thin as bowstrings embrace her in her sleep.