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Daisy has never given him trouble about it. No one has, not really. She seems to think it’s sweet, that he’s interested in what her life is like most of the time. In a way, that’s true, but ultimately Donald doesn’t dress himself up to learn about her or imitate her, or any of the things that he knows his friends and family vaguely assume.
He did it to satisfy an itching underneath his feathers. To settle skin that, sometimes, rarely, didn’t fit quite right.
Sometimes, he went all out: lacy gowns, floral headbands, mascara, perfume. The fortune of being a duck was that these outfits looked correct, no matter who wore them. Between a hen and a drake, there wasn’t a difference in height; though he was far heavier than an average hen, his feathers kept that fact tucked far away from view. He looked like any other hen would.
Sometimes he went without clothes entirely. Plenty of ducks did so. Their feathers were more than modest enough, compared to mammals. Without the shortcut of gendered colours or cuts, it was hard to distinguish them. Not like beagles or tigers or mice, with their built-in identifiers. He was only a duck.
With only the shoes on, he cut a very different sort of image.
He studied his ankles in the mirror, twisting his feet back and forth. The bare scales, freshly exfoliated in the shower, caught the light fetchingly. The pale violet satin contrasted nicely with the warm yellow of his legs, making them bolder, brighter. The heels clicked gently against the tile with every flourish, impossible to forget or ignore.
And yet, there were his feathers, white, matte, wholly exposed.
The combination was very peculiar indeed. Almost clothed, but not quite.
He’d dated a few mammals, back in the service. There weren’t many birds who could stand the demands of war, and most who could handle it were massive predatory sorts or silent long-range killers. Unappealing in the extreme, though it was far from Politik to say things like that. If some other duck wanted to marry a vulture, that was their business, but Donald would pass.
For mammals, especially short-hairs, clothes were considered almost mandatory. A cultural difference. One that he had gotten familiar with. Birds didn’t dress like this, naked but for the feet. Mammals did, sometimes.
It was a sex thing. To appeal to a partner—or maybe themselves, who could say. The effects mammal culture might have on their brains weren’t really his business either. Except, of course, that they might be his business, now.
He’d always been entertained by the way his mammal dates back during the war had treated nudity as a prelude to sex. Not really understood it, but accepted it as part of the deal, in the same way they always came to accept his inability to eat without water between bites. Mammal mouths were so wet.
Staring at himself in the mirror, at his exposed feathers and his hidden webbing, he could just begin to grasp the shape of it. Fragments and half-ideas percolated in his mind. What if he could do this with Daisy, would she compliment him on his fashionability? Would she find it as charming—he refused to think the word intoxicating. Perhaps the next time he and Goofy were called away to a very different sort of war, he could try it then. Goofy was a mammal, he’d understand the implications, but he was also only interested in women and even then only barely. Though, as Donald turned to the side, examined the way the height of the heels forced him to move with care and poise, forced his tail to lift enticingly, he could probably be a woman for a day or two. Not that he would ever do that to Daisy, but the idea…
It was a dangerous idea.
Be a woman for a day or two.
That wasn’t how these things worked.
He’d been friends with a tuxedo cat during the war. A nurse. A woman’s profession, and a woman’s body, and a man’s mind. He was a doctor now, which wasn’t a man’s profession as such, but he was a man now all the same. Medicine could do those sorts of things. But only if the mind was already there.
People didn’t put manhood or womanhood on and take them off like pretty dresses or sailors’ collars. It was all but blasphemous to suggest that. To even think it, safe in his bedroom, borrowing his girlfriend’s shoes.
The vague notions of allure and attraction froze and crumbled away, replaced by overwhelming guilt.
He slipped the shoes off, returned them to the closet.
They were only thoughts. His head-doctors, after the war, had explained how thoughts weren’t proof that he was a monster. Had taught him how to think of other things, so the monstrous thoughts couldn’t turn into monstrous words, or explosions of violence, or fogs that left him too tired to get off the couch for days at a time.
He could just refuse to think about it.
So, he did.