Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your name is John Egbert, and contrary to popular belief, you are not entirely oblivious.

A lot of people on Earth-C thought you were straight, apparently, which Dave tells you you shouldn't take as an insult because most of Earth C thought that everyone was straight. With the exception of Kanaya and Dirk, and then Jake by association given that Dirk and Jake used to date. Not only that, but they thought you were the kind of straight person who didn't know that everyone in his friend group was gay or bi! As if you could ignore it, with how many of your friends are dating each other.

Even amongst your friends, there was a tendency to think you were straight, even after the Game; Rose used to say that among your friend group, you were the 'token heterosexual'. You suppose your crush on Roxy didn't exactly do much to dissuade that title.

But you've known you weren't exactly straight for... a while, now. You think you started to figure it out during the Game; the way you looked at girls and boys was different from the way that people did on TV. It took a long time for you to be okay with it, but now you're out, you're kinda-dating this orange dork that you like to watch movies and make jokes and go to Earth C Buffalo Wild Wings with, and you're happy with yourself.

Mostly.

(Some times, even though you should feel okay with yourself, some thing in you feels broken. You spend long moments in the morning in front of a mirror, poking and pulling at the edges of yourself, not knowing what you want. Some thing in you is missing, and you are afraid that even though you have learned to cope with your depression, even though you are going to therapy and have started to deal with the trauma that has been part of your life since you were sixteen years old, you are never going to be happy without that undefined missing piece.)

All this to say: you've known that your friends are gay or bi for a long time now! Some of them, you found out at the same time as everyone else- you were there when Jane got everyone together to announce that she'd finally figured out that she was a lesbian, and that she and Roxy and Callie were dating now, and you remember offering your sincere congratulations, because if there's one thing you know, it's that all of them deserve to be happy.

You've learned a lot over the past few years, from the Game and from the life you started living after it. You are a well educated young man now, and you are very glad that you and all of your friends are either gay or bisexual. You can't imagine your life any different!

You are John Egbert and you are sitting in Jane's living room, wondering what exactly it is that she wants to tell the rest of you. It's movie slash anime binge-watching night at her place, so it wasn't as if you had to take time out of your (admittedly not very busy) schedule. But instead of letting Vriska, who has been waiting for her turn for 'like, foreeeeeeeever', pick out what the group is going to watch this week, Jane is standing in front of you, waiting for the rest of you to simmer down so she can make an 'announcement'. She is picking at the pocket of her pale green pajama slacks and gulping furiously.

At her back, Roxy and Calliope are leaning against the wall by the fireplace, Roxy in a fluffy pink fur night gown, sipping at a glass of sparkling apple juice with one of her pinky fingers out and offering a sip to Calliope, who declines. She is delicately unwrapping a hard caramel candy with her sharp claws, and pops it in her mouth to swallow it whole. The two of them look up as Jane speaks, and the soft warm contentment on their faces fades to an expression of some thing you can't quite name. 

"Is everyone here?" Jane asks tentatively, her eyes- a lighter shade of blue than yours- scanning over people that take up most of the space of her living room. There's Rose and Kanaya, sprawled across the love seat together, one of Rose's hands combing through Kanaya's black hair, the pads of her fingers brushing across the high collar of her black lace Victorian night gown. It's sickeningly sweet, and some thing in your heart squeezes to look at it. You look away. 

On the old, falling-apart couch that leaks stuffing at the corners, Vriska and Terezi sit half on top of one another, Terezi perched in Vriska's lap and giggling into her ear as Vriska blushes a furious cobalt. Next to them, Dave and Karkat are cuddling next to each other, Dave muttering what is probably some of his ironic ramblings under his breath. At the far end of the couch, Jade perches next to Davepeta on the arm of the couch, stimming just a little by swishing the skirt of her cloud patterned night gown around her knees, humming quietly as Davepeta shows off their painted nails. Jasprose is sprawled on top of a book case, smirking down at everyone as she grooms the backs of her paws. Her long pink purple tentacle tail drips bright pink periodically on the floor, leaving a small, pale pink puddle beneath her that Jane will probably yell at Jasprose for leaving there later. 

Jake and Tavros sit together on the floor. Jane's words have broken them out of their discussion of the new Pokémon movie, and Tavros blinks brightly up at her, his wet, pink nose twitching. Sitting criss cross apple sauce next to them is Aradia, who smiles beatifically up at Jane as Sollux, grumbling behind her, undoes a braid in her long, curly hair, complaining about the dust and dirt that's gotten into it over the course of her day at an excavation. For all his grumbling, he doesn't seem all that upset about it; his fingers, painted with red and blue nail polish, pick apart her tresses with gentle speed. 

You and Dirk are sitting on the other love seat, facing Kanaya and Rose. One of Dirk's arms is wrapped around your waist, and the warmth and weight of it is comforting. His head is tucked against your neck, and you can see his dark roots growing in. He has shed his traditional black triangle shades for a pair with lighter tinted lenses for the movie, and you catch a glimpse of his orange eyes underneath them.

"Everyone's here, Crocker," Vriska calls out. "What's the hold up? There was this guy on the internet talking about this Earth C anime, Revolutionary Girl Something, and I wanna check it out, so hurry up so we can defer to the people with good taste."

Jane blinks. "Revolutionary... are you talking about Revolutionary Girl Utena?"

"Yeah, sounds about right," Vriska says, nodding. "Congrats, Crocker, you get a cookie!"

"If that is your pick, I think I will have to use my annual veto. Not out of spite or anything along those lines, Vriska," Rose holds up her hand as Vriska opens her mouth to interrupt. "I will concede that I can be that petty, but not in this case. I do in fact enjoy that anime myself... when I am able to watch it. However, some of the topics in that anime would be... shall we say... upsetting to some of the people here, including myself, and I do not think I am emotionally prepared to deal with them. Perhaps some other time, Vriska."

Vriska deflates as soon as Rose says 'upsetting', but she grumbles something about it not being fair and every one being dumb and stupid. You know she doesn't really mean it, though, and Terezi does too evidently, because she whispers something into Vriska's ear that makes her smile grudgingly and kiss her girlfriend's temple. 

"If you guys will let me speak," Jane bites out, drawing the room's attention back to her. "Thank you."

She takes a deep breath and smooths her hands on the surface of her slacks. "I have something really important to say, and it's really important that all of you be the first people to know. This has been coming for a long time now, but I hadn't really realized it until a few weeks ago.

"I've always... had a complicated relationship with gender. I knew I wasn't... that I didn't..." Jane's voice is shaky, and her nerves written all over her face as she tries to grasp for words in the silence. Behind her, Roxy steps forward and grabs Jane's left hand, Calliope only a step behind her as she grabs Jane's right.

"You can do this," Roxy tells her, voice full of enough belief and encouragement that you would almost think that she was the Hope player instead of Jake. On Jane's other side, Calliope nods.

"I believe in you, lovely," she adds, smiling beatifically up at her girlfriend. "It's all right. You're doing wonderful.

Jane breathes in once, twice, three times, before smiling at both of her girlfriends. "Thank you, both of you. I'm sorry."

"I was never really comfortable with femininity in the way I know that girls were supposed to be," she continues, picking up where she left off. "I couldn't quite put my finger on the nuances of it, and even if I had, I doubt that it would have done much good. I was supposed to be the heiress of a baking empire, the representation of the perfect housewife. I tried so hard to fit that mold of femininity, but I couldn't. I couldn't find a way to be a woman in the way that it felt for other people. And even if I could, after so much of what all of us have been through, I don't have the energy to force it anymore... not when it shouldn't matter anyways. The only part of womanhood I want to keep is the love I have for other women... so after a lot of wrestling with the truth about who I am, I've come to terms with myself."

Jane squares her shoulders, plants her feet, and smiles that buck tooth smile that she shares with you and Jake and Jade. "I am a lesbian, and I'm also nonbinary." 

There is a moment of quiet before Dirk disentangles himself from you and strides across the room to sweep Jane up in a hug, drawing a small 'oof' from Jane as she stands there, evidently a little shocked. "I'm so fuckin proud of you, Crocker," he murmurs into her hair. "So fuckin proud."

At that, the room erupts into noises as everyone gives Jane their congratulations, you among them. Jane is swallowed under a swarm of hugs- Davepeta swooping over and wrapping her up with their arms and their wings, Jake and Jade right on their heels and you right behind the two of them.

"I'm so happy for you, Jane!" you say into the soft waves of her short hair, and she hugs you tightly. You can feel her grinning into your shoulder. 

"That means more to me than you know," she tells you, and you can't help but squeeze her closer to you until Tavros, stuttering, taps you on the shoulder so that he can give his congratulations and you step aside.

Rose shakes Jane's hand, and Kanaya swoops in right after her to kiss Jane on both cheeks, leaving a black lipstick mark on both; Terezi licks a long stripe up Jane's face afterward and says that Jane 'tastes like the sweet delicacy of gender hatred', which makes Jane crack a chuckle.

Vriska awkwardly pats Jane on the shoulder and mutters something about 'good for you', which you think is so quintessentially Vriska that you want to laugh. It is supremely awkward, and Jane looks at Vriska for a long second before pulling Vriska in for a hug. Vriska freezes, shocked for a second, before gently patting Jane on the back. It reminds you of when the lot of you started up the ectobiology machines and someone made Dirk hold a baby. He didn't know what to do with it, so he just made shushing noises and patted it robotically on the back. It made Roxy nearly piss herself with laughter. Vriska doing it to Jane is infinitely funnier, and you bite your fist to keep from laughing.

Dave hugs Jane and rambles incoherently the entire time as Karkat, hovering behind him, interrupts the rant with both congratulations for Jane and retorts to whatever the hell Dave is saying. You certainly can't decipher it. Jasprose follows behind the two and purrs a few congratulatory words before planting a kiss on Jane's cheek, right underneath one of Kanaya's lipstick stains. This one leaves a mark in pink-purple, Jasprose's favorite shade of lipstick, and Jane blinks a few times in confusion as Jasprose draws back just as quickly as she came and retreats to her place on the top of the bookshelf.

Aradia flutters over, trailing a path of red pixie dust with her wings, which spring bright and crimson from her back. She likes to fly places more than any of the rest of you, and she does that now, using the power to float across the room to clasp Jane's hands, cheerfully conveying her congratulations as Sollux lingers behind her and gives Jane a two-fingered salute. You wonder when he will give up on the duality theme. Probably never, you decide.

Roxy and Callie stay by Jane's sides. Both of them are beaming bright enough to give Earth C two new suns, and the look on their faces is unbearably sappy, as sickly sweet as Calliope's breakfast cereal (half a bag of dehydrated marshmallow bits. Like Lucky Charms, but only with marshmallows. That's how sappy.)

Everyone else begins to settle down, retaking their seats, when Rose holds up a finger. "A moment, I can't believe this slipped my mind," she says, leaning forward. "Jane, will you be using new pronouns, or does she and her still work? And for that matter, will you be going by a new name? No pressure intended for either question, of course- you don't have to have decided yet."

The others make noises of agreement and curiosity in turn, and you feel a soft touch of shame for failing to have even thought of that. Your internal monologue kept using she and her, and you never even thought about whether Jane would want a different name. Some well educated adult you are. 

Jane(?) bites at their(?) lip, cheeks flushed by the excitement of it all. "I'm still fond of she and her, but I'd like to start going by he and him pronouns as well," he says, and brushes a strand of hair out of her face. "Just to see if it feels right. If that's okay with all of you."

"Of course," Rose smiles at them. 

"And... I want to keep using the name Jane," he admits. "I like the name, and I can't imagine going by anything else. I... did you know that the Condesce wanted to have my name be something different? And my gra-," a flash of tight pain crosses across her face with no real explanation. "Well, my dad and his... his parent wouldn't let that happen. They wanted me to be Jane, to have a name completely separate from that legacy. Jane is mine, and I'd like to keep it."

"A perfectly reasonable desire," Kanaya nods. The others nod and make noises of agreement- Jade picks up her can of pop and lifts it in the air.

"A toast! To my ecto-whatever-sibling Jane," she announces loudly to the room, "and his self-realization! I'm so proud to have her as a sibling!" 

A chorus of cheers echo her words, and you raise your own glass of Earth C Pepsi in the air and cheer alongside everyone else, the sounds of celebration and aluminium cans and glass cups clinking together filling the air. Jane is making the verbal equivalent of a keysmash in the corner, burying his face in the hard bony edges of Calliope's shoulder. It's a perfect scene, and you catch a flash of light from the corner; Dave shakes out the polaroid that prints from the old camera he carries with him almost everywhere. It's a moment immortalized.

"Well," you say after the toast has ended, "I'm glad to see that Davepeta isn't the only trans person in our friendcircle anymore!"

The rest of the room's chatter silences immediately at your words, everyone's heads turning almost in unison to stare at you. The embarrassed urge to hide from their gazes pulls at your chest, and you curl a little in on yourself, but laid under and over and through the feeling of exposure is utter confusion. You are baffled- how is what you said strange?

"John..." Rose says slowly, "almost all of us are trans." 

The words don't make sense for a moment, and then they sink in and you almost fall out of your seat. You catch yourself on the armrest, but it's a near thing. The words make too much sense and not enough. You stare at everyone and how none of them are denying it, and they stare back, with just as much bewilderment as you feel.

You take it back. Your name is John Egbert, and you are extremely oblivious. In fact, this might be your magnum opus. You have never been more aware of your own obliviousness as you are right now. 

The others explain it to you gently and slowly, answering your questions with patience that you don't feel like you deserve. You ask about why none of them told you, and they explain that they thought you already knew.

You ask about the specifics of their genders- have you been gendering them wrong? The answer is mostly no, with a few exceptions- Terezi, Aradia, Calliope, and Sollux provide you with a list of their pronouns and their conjugations. You didn't know there were so many different kinds!

They explain to you that all of them have found ways of loving their bodies- hormone replacement therapy that Roxy voidies into existence, tricks of fashion and of clothing that lets them look the way they want to. They love their bodies, all of them, in a way that you don't understand, because you don't love your own. 

After all the standard questions have been exhausted you grow quiet. There is one that you have left, itching at the back of your skull, but the idea of putting it to voice makes your cheeks flush and your heart tremble. You don't know why. In some ways, it is entirely innocuous, but if you say it- if you speak it- you think you might put words to something you're not quite ready for. 

The evening proceeds as normal. The group of you watch some movie that Vriska's been into lately, though she grumbles about how she wanted to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena instead the whole time, but you barely process any of it. In your head, you can only think about the question that you have, slowly shifting back and forth in the confines of your brain, wondering and waiting and aching.

How did you Know you were a girl?

(Jane Crocker sits on the couch with the arms of her two girlfriends around his shoulders and stares at her brother from across the room. He knows that John is thinking about something. There is a secret in her chest, and he thinks that now might be the right time to share it.)

GG: Hey, John! Could you come over to our place next Tuesday?
GG: There's something I want to show you.

Chapter Text

The house that Jane, Calliope, and Roxy share is small and cozy, surrounded by gardens that bloom in a multitude of bright colors. White trellises sport pink and yellow roses that buzz with bees and drift in the wind, yellow motes of pollen following in their wake; gardenias and irises bunching around the rock path that leads up to the door.

Callie and Roxy like gardening; Callie didn't see much of life back when fae lived alone in a single gray room with their brother. She likes seeing all the bright and beautiful evidences of new and unfamiliar plants that remind faer they're not alone. Roxy, for her part, used to live on a planet where almost all life had been eliminated; she enjoys the garden for much the same reason. You don't know if Jane shares his girl friends' particular love for it, but she certainly doesn't mind the gardens. Who could? They are, after all, beautiful.

You stand outside the door to said house, preparing to knock. For some reason, you are finding it particularly difficult to ring the door bell, and you don't really know why! 

In the week following the discovery that literally every single member of your friend group is trans gender, you have had a bit of a crisis. The dissatisfaction with your own body has gotten worse; today you couldn't even bring yourself to wear your god tier outfit, instead choosing a dark blue hoodie and sweat pants that bag around your chest and hips. Even still, you can't look at yourself in the mirror. You aren't sure you want Jane to see you like this.

But Jane is your sibling, you tell yourself. He knows you. She has seen you literally dead because you ate a bunch of peanuts for a dare and thus died from your severe peanut allergy; he almost had to revive you before the god tier clock finally decided that your death was neither just nor heroic.

(You don't even know if you had actually liked the taste of the peanuts, which was the only reason you'd agreed; you could barely taste them over your throat swelling up.)

This is stupid, and you should just ring the door bell already.

In the end, you don't have to. Calliope must have seen you in the window, because you hear the door knob turn and open before you can muster up the courage to actually press the door bell. She stands on the other side, wearing a faded Studio Ghibli shirt and ratty blue over alls, cuffs rolled up. Looking at them makes your heart pang for reasons you can't explain.

"Oh, John!" fae smiles, showing a mouth full of sharp needle teeth that a few years back would have scared the life out of you but now just seem entirely Calliope. "Come in, Jane's been waiting for you!"

They usher you into the hall way, where you slip off your battered sneakers and pad over to the living room in your pink socks, where you find Roxy sitting curled up on the couch with her lap top, head set on and gaze trained on the screen as one hand dances across the key board and the other clenches the mouse. She looks up as you enter and smiles, beaming up at you. 

"Gimme a sec, chat, I got my friend here who's lookin to see Janey- calm down, I'll be right back. Play nice while I'm gone, ok?"

She pulls the head set off and stands, brushing off her pale pink skirt. "Hey, John," she greets you. "Here to see Janey, right? She's upstairs in our room- you know where that is, right? I'd escort you there myself, but chat's already throwin a fit and I'm half way through Mass Effect 2 with my new mods. Can you believe there weren't any good Fem Shep lesbian romance mods for Mass Effect 2? I swear I've gotta do everything around here."

You have no idea what that means, but you nod anyways. "Don't worry, Roxy, I remember where to go," you tell her. 

"Thanks John, you're a lifesaver," she tells you before shoving the headset back on and sitting back down on the couch. "Calm down, all of y'all, I was gone for like four minutes. Now let's get back to this..."

Jane, Roxy, and Callie's room is near the back of the house, up a flight of stairs lined with photographs. There's a baby picture of Jane, buck teethed and smiling in dirt stained pants playing in the mud; there's an old polaroid of Roxy in a pink hoodie with a sniper rifle slung over the back of her shoulder, there's a self portrait of Callie in her distinctive, colorful style. There are group pictures of all of them, hugging and kissing, and of the three of them alone. In each picture, everyone seems happy and care free and completely at ease with their own bodies. You look away.

You cross the hall way to Jane and Roxy and Calliope's room. The halls are painted bright and colorful, in pink and blue and pale green pastels. The door to their room is slightly ajar, and you push it open and step inside.

Jane is sitting on the bed, a photo album open on her lap and a lap top right next to him. She's gotten a hair cut since you last saw him; you didn't think an under cut would suit her, but it does. The cargo shorts do too, strangely enough- you think hemight be one of the only people who is able to pull it off.

"Oh, John!" She smiles, patting the space next to him on the bed. "I'm so glad you were able to come see me. I have something to tell you about that I think you might want to hear."

You approach her on the bed as he closes the photo album and readjusts her position on the bed, moving a little so that he faces you. 

"I'm glad to see you, Jane," you say to her as you settle next to him, tucking your legs underneath you and flexing the toes of your socks against the bed spread. "What's this about, though?"

Suddenly she looks very nervous, hands clutching at the pockets of his cargo pants. "Well. John, I don't want you to be mad at me for not telling you before, all right? I didn't want to... I didn't want to scare you off or pressure you into something you weren't comfortable with, but... after last week, I thought maybe you needed to see this."

She opens the photo album, flipping through some old photos before coming to the one he's apparently looking for, and slides it across to you for you to see, and-

Your first thought is that it's a photo of yourself, because that's your face- the mole under your left eye, the shape of your eyes and nose and mouth, the color of your eyes and the quirk of your smile. But it's not- the person in the photo has longer hair, and is wearing earrings, and a necklace of pearls.

And most of all, the person in the picture is undeniably a woman.

"That was," Jane says, voice quiet, "my Grangran June."

She traces the edge of the photo gently, his smile full of nostalgia and the warm ache of old memories. "My grangran June was a famous comedian. She was well-known for her stand-up routines, for her pranks, for her skill with sleight of hand. I grew up with her... stuffed corpse in my family room, which was strange but I can tell you that her presence was a comforting one. And though not much of the public knew it, she was a transgender woman."

Your breath catches in your chest. 

"My Grangran went through quite a bit before her death." Jane's voice is heavy. "She dealt with quite a bit of prejudice, a lot of which I didn't understand as a child. But she was unapologetically herself. I wanted more than anything to be like her. She was perhaps the most important female role model that I had growing up."

She places a hand on your shoulder, turning you to look him in the eyes. "I didn't want to tell you about my Grangran until now because I didn't want to pressure you, John. You aren't my Grangran June, just as much as I'm not your Nanna. But after last week, I think maybe you need to hear from her- to learn about her. And I want you to know who she was. She was a kickass woman, and I think you would have liked her quite a bit."

You stare down at the image of the woman who was you in another timeline. She's laughing uproariously at some thing out of frame, and she looks- she looks so much like you in a way that both hurts and soothes. It's like looking in a mirror, and seeing a version of yourself that is undeniably better. You don't know how to feel about it.

"She had quite a few comedy specials that were recorded before her death, and she left me some tapes," Jane says, pulling up her lap top and clicking through a page until they find what she's looking for- a folder of videos entitled "Grangran Crocker". The files are grainy and old, some of them blurry, and Jane clicks on the first one. "I thought you might want to watch them with me?"

You stare at the paused video, the image of a might have been you grinning back at you, humor pulling at the edges of her smile as if she's sharing the funniest joke in the world with you. She seem to sparkle with secrets and promises, this illusive woman that you have never seen before to day but already think you love- if only you'll listen for a while, her eyes tell you, I can help you. 

In the end it's a no brainer. 

"If you're okay with it..." you say, slowly, "I'd like that."

You have decided that your alternate universe self is the funniest comedian you have ever heard.

She is witty, genuine, full of laughter and sly naivété. She has some of your qualities- your 'doofishness', as Jade would put it- and your penchant for pranks. She can sing, a little, though she uses the talent mostly to croon soft songs with melodies entirely at odds with their hilarious lyrics into the radio microphone. She talks about her friends- a group of women with whom she is engaged in a perpetual prank war, a couple of old guys who have seen and done just about everything. She talks about the ordinary, the mundane, and makes it funny. 

You can't look away.

In the tapes that she gave to Jane she talks about serious things, too. About how she realized, about how she told people, about how she recognizes that her status as a woman who is heiress to the Crocker corporation has made her able to do things that others can't. She doesn't bring up Betty much, and you think- remembering how Jane talked about Betty, and the pressures that were put upon him- you understand why. 

"It was like I lived my life in a haze, before," your alternate self says. She brushes some of her white hair out of her face. "Realizing- it was hard, but it was gratifying, too. I am happier now than I have ever been. You don't know how much you're hurting until you're finally happy. I hope you're never in that position yourself, as my grand child, but if you are, you should know you are not and have never been alone."

Your heart rings like a bell inside your chest at those words in some strange recognition, and you push it down. This is not about you, right? You can't possibly think that's meant for you. It was meant for Jane.

You sit on the bed, eating the Lunchables that Calliope brought up for the two of you to share, and then a question strikes you. 

"Jane, how did June manage to..." You don't know the words, but Jane seems to understand what you're getting at. 

"Betty was certainly a factor," he says, tapping her chin. "One of the only good things my great-grandmother ever did, but I doubt it was entirely out of a sense of acceptance. She had always wanted an heiress, after all- when Jade English ran away, she was... displeased to say the least. I think she just wanted an heiress, and June worked. Of course, then I came along a few decades later, but Grangran was for all intents and purposes her heiress up until that point. The Crocker corporation could buy quite a lot, and in this case I think their money was well-spent. It didn't hurt that she had started her transition when she began to make her own name for herself, in the comedy clubs and elsewhere. She had a support system of her own, of course, which is always the most important thing in my experience." 

You nod. You can't tear your face away from the low resolution image of an older version of yourself, hair white with age and eyes sympathetic from underneath her blue tinted reading glasses. You want to be like her-

Whoa, where did that thought come from? You're not- you can't be- it's not as if you're- 

Jane must catch the look of panic on your face, because he puts her hand on your arm and draws you close. "You don't have to say anything," she tells you, his voice as soothing as her grandmother's. "You don't. I promise. You can take as long as you need."

Your breath shudders in and out. You think about June Crocker- about her blue patterned suits and dresses and her hair curling around her shoulders and underneath her ears, the softness of her face and body, her deep but still undeniably feminine voice, the dark pink lipstick shining under the lights of the comedy club, the blue hue of her nail polish.

You want that, more than anything- you want her confidence, the way she moves without hunching in on herself, the fearlessness in her steps. You want to wear those blue dresses and put on that makeup, want your hair to touch your shoulders in a wave of soft comfort and protection, want to pin that hair back with Jade's hair clips.

You have seen your friends and family take parts of their ancestors and try them on- eschewed and remade them. You have seen Dirk discard orange baseball caps and polo shirts, have seen Roxy renounce the woman that raised Rose, have seen Jane strive to be more than a nurse maid and Jake try his best to relish in the love and acceptance of his friends in the stead of self isolation. Ancestors are not always good. Some times, you have to let them go.

In turn you have seen Jade adopt Grandma English's rifle techniques, her scientific methods and hypotheses, have seen Rose begin to rewrite the novels that her alternate self was so famous for, have seen Dave watch SBAHJ movies and laugh, start filming his own home videos. You have not understood any of it until now.

You want to live up to your ancestor. You want to be like her.

You do not say any of this to Jane, but you think that he might understand what you are feeling right now. You sit on her bed with him and breathe in, out, think about the woman who faces you on that screen, eyes staring directly into your soul.

When you go back home, you have not- decided anything, if decided is even the right word.

You are thinking about a grandmother a time line away, and you are thinking about dresses and possibilities and maybe not being what you thought you were. You are thinking about all the strange hurts that have plagued you for a long long time, and how similar they are to the things that she talked about. You are thinking about how long you have known you were different from the other children, and not known how, exactly, and what answers you might have.

You stay at home for a long time, thinking, before picking up your phone and texting two people that you know very well. 

Roxy and your sister sit in the living room of your small apartment. They are looking at you with confusion in their eyes; you will admit that you were not very forth coming about the reasons why you wanted the two of them to come over when you texted them, but you couldn't think of a way to say it to them- you haven't even been able to put words to what you think in a way that might explain. 

"So, John," Roxy starts, and you flinch a little. You hadn't realized how much your own name hurt until she says it out loud. Her eyes narrow at that a little before she continues, "What's up?" 

Where do you even start with a thing like this, you wonder. What are you supposed to say to them that will explain what you've been thinking and feeling as of late? You barely even know what you can say to define this to yourself, let alone to another person.

You fumble for words. "Well, um, Jane showed me a bunch of videos from his time line, about her version of me, and it's been... I wanted to understand," you confess, slumping a little. Blood rushes to your cheeks, flushing them a dark brown. "I don't..."

Jade's brow furrows, but Roxy lets out a sound of understanding. "Is this about June, then?" She asks. 

"Um, yeah," you say, rubbing at the back of your neck. "You... know, then?"

Roxy shrugs. "Hard not to know, back before. I knew about her mostly from Jane- he talked about her a lot, actually, really looked up to her. And she was a pretty public figure, too. Lots of news articles to look through. Is this about her, then?"

You nod, and Jade looks between you and Roxy, bunches of her curls bouncing as she turns to stare at Roxy and then at you, head tilted a little in confusion. "I'm sorry, John, but who's June? Was that a girl from the Alpha Earth?"

"Oh, yeah, I forgot you wouldn't know about her." Roxy's voice is a tad apologetic as she starts to explain to Jade. "June Crocker was Jane's grandma. She was-" she bites her lip as she searches for words- you don't know why. "She was Egbert here's counterpart," she finally settles on, nodding a little to herself. "And she was a transgender woman."

"Oh!" Jade's ears perk up a little. "Oh. I didn't know that."

"Yeah, and I didn't either," you say, staring down at your knees. All of this is so hard to say- you are starting to understand why Jane had such a hard time telling all of you about being nonbinary. You have a newfound respect for her courage. "But... seeing the videos of her... and the stuff that she talked about... I don't know."

Jade's eyes widen before she makes an understanding noise in the back of her throat. "Oh... John, are you..."

"I don't know," you interrupt. You aren't sure you can bear to hear her say it out loud. "I don't, honestly. I asked you two over because... I wanted to know how you figured it out. How you let yourself be okay with it."

Roxy and Jade look at you with soft eyes that are full of pity, and you shrink back a little into yourself. You want to disappear inside this hoodie and hide yourself away in it for a long, long time. Maybe this was a mistake. 

Before you can tell them that, Jade speaks up. "Well, I figured it out because... I always wanted to be like other girls when I was a kid. I always felt closer to the female characters in the Squiddles cartoons, and I loved wearing dresses. When I was on Prospit, my dreamself... I could make her have the body I wanted. I think that's how I first started to come to terms with it? It really helped that I had the internet to tell me all about this stuff, too." She smiles brightly up at you. "It helped to know that I wasn't the only person who felt that way, and that there was a word for it!"

Roxy nods at that. "Knowing other people felt the same way as me was prolly what made me okay with telling people and finally actually comin to terms with it. Part of it was actually Jane's grandma- knowing that there was this super cool older lady who'd felt the same way I did and who was able to live happily as a woman really helped. And cause I knew the words for it I was able to find forum discussions and stuff that really made it clear to me that I was a girl."

"Even then, though," she continues, "I wasn't even real sure that I wanted to tell people. I was so scared that I was maybe doin it wrong- which was dumb, cause there isn't any wrong way to be trans- and that my friends would think I was awful or weird. But it got real hard bein referred to as my old name when I had a brand spankin new one that I wanted to try out, so I decided to hell with it and right in the middle of a random convo, I told Dirk- which he laughed about, cause the whole reason that he started pestering me that day was because he wanted to tell me he was a boy."

"Really, it's just..." Jade trails off for a moment, biting her lip, trying to find the right words. "It's about being happier. It doesn't have to be the same for everyone- like, I know me and Rose have way different experiences, and don't get me started on the trolls! But the thing that's true for all of us is that we are so much happier being girls than we were being boys, you know?"

You fidget, a little, which Jade notices. "And, you know, sometimes it's nice to try stuff out," she continues, leaning forward from where she sits on the couch. "Like dresses, or names, or makeup! Even if you don't end up thinking that the word girl is right for you, you can still do things that maybe other people wouldn't think of as masculine."

There's that yearning again, in the pits of your chest and the bob of your throat. It keeps coming back, but this time it feels so large and all-consuming that words disappear in its depths, never to be spoken out loud- you can't open your mouth to say anything. 

Instead you nod shyly, and Jade and Roxy smile back at you, kindness beaming like light on their faces.

You are standing in your bathroom with your eyes squeezed tightly shut. Your face feels weird- you've never worn makeup before, and the feel of it on your face is unfamiliar. You have to restrain yourself from running your tongue over your puckered lips as Jade puts the finishing touches on the edges of your mouth before you hear the soft sound of her socks taking a step back. Roxy pulls the hair brush through your hair one last time; you hear the clack of its back on the stone counter as she puts it down.

"Okay, you can open your eyes now," she announces, her hands on your shoulders gently turning you towards the mirror. You wrap your arms around yourself, take a deep breath, and open your eyes.

The person that meets your gaze in the mirror is undeniably you, but you look so, so different. The outfit that Roxy voidied up is a replication of your god tier duds, with the pants replaced by a blue skirt that brushes against the underside of your knees. The shirt is long-sleeved, too and a little looser around the chest; you like it much better than your 'real' god tier outfit. Your body does not look alien and uncomfortable to you, for the first time in a long time. 

Jade was sparing with the makeup, you notice; just lip gloss and some stuff around your cheeks and eyes. Your ordinarily chapped lips are a red-pink and shiny with lip gloss that you recognize as the kind that Roxy wears sometimes. Soft black hair falls an inch below your ears, brushing against the edge of your jaw. Your face looks softer, fuller, its hard edges less sharp or prominent when framed by your hair.

The blue eyes that stare at you through the mirror are surprised but not unhappy. You are softened; no more hard edges that hurt to see, just warmth. You think you might just be beautiful.

"Oh," you breathe, "oh."

You swish the skirt back and forth- it feels nice against your skin. You and Jade both have the same taste in textures, and the fabric of this particular skirt is just right. You feel freer in this skirt than you have for a long, long time; maybe since... you think you last felt this way because of an outfit when Vriska alchemized that jacket outfit for you. It made you feel secure in a way that you haven't really felt since.

Roxy is hovering over your shoulder, smiling; Jade has her hands over her mouth, but her eyes, which sparkle with stars and nebulas, bely the grin she's hiding behind them. You find your self smiling too.

It hits you like a freight train. You can't hide it- not with your ancestor's words ringing around your head, the soft touch of black hair against your jaw, the bright blue skirt swishing around your knees, the face in the mirror who looks happier than you've felt in a long time, happy in a way you didn't even know you were missing. There's no room to hide here, not in this bathroom where your sister and a girl you used to have a crush on for reasons that now feel a little more complex than you realized are standing by your side, emanating nothing but support. 

And you don't want to hide, either. For the first time, the light of seeing and being seen feels welcoming. 

You say, "I'm a girl," and that weight, which has sat heavy on your chest for so long that you thought the feeling was normal, finally, finally slips free.

Chapter Text

Your name is Egbert, and you are a girl. More over, you are a girl who wants to be seen as a girl.

In your living room, you pace back and forth, thinking about how you want to approach this. There are things you feel you need to do before you tell anyone- figure out what you want your name to be, namely. (Pun intended). 

You know you want your name to start with a J, and you know you want it to be four letters. You could choose a name from a list online or something- but you don't particularly like the idea of it, not for you. You want your name to still tie you to your family.

You could choose the name 'Joan'- apparently that's the female version of 'John'- but when you roll the name around in your mouth, it sits wrong on your tongue. No, not Joan. 

Who are you kidding? You know you want your new name to be June. You've wanted that since the moment you heard Jane's grandma say it; it felt yours, like something given to you by someone who understood you more than you understood yourself. You didn't even understand it, but you wanted it.

And you think that Grandma Crocker would have wanted you to have it, too.

So your name is June. 

(Is it supposed to feel strange, when you take a name? Abrupt? You don't know- you will have to ask your friends, the ones who've changed their names in the past. You feel like you're settling into a new skin.) 

And... pronouns.

You know from the discussion you had with the others when you realized just how oblivious you could be that just because you want to be a girl doesn't mean you need to use 'she', and you certainly don't need to only use she. Aradia and Calliope use other pronouns too, after all. You could choose to keep using 'he', if you wanted.

Still: you want to use she, more than anything. And the thought of people calling you 'he' sets your skin crawling- like a sword to the chest, or a punch to the gut, an attack on who you are. You don't want to be called 'he'.

'They' isn't as bad, but it still feels wrong- it makes you feel like someone's deliberately overlooking part of you, in the worst way. And the other sets that you've heard don't really feel right either. 

So... she it is.

The thought of the people you love calling you a girl, calling you by the name June, using the word 'she' to refer to you- it makes your heart thrill, bright and shining. Before Roxy and Jade left, promised to secrecy while you figured the details of how you want to proceed after this revelation, Jade called you her sister, and you didn't stop smiling for an hour afterwards.

Now, the only issue is- how to tell them?

You are not Jane. You don't think you are nearly as brave as he must be, to be able to tell everyone at once- especially in such a small space, where anything could go wrong, where there would be no room to flee. You don't think your friends would hurt you- not on purpose- but if they thought you were pranking them, or otherwise joking, then... well, you don't know what you'd do, especially not surrounded by everyone you love. 

No, better to do this slowly. In increments, until you aren't as afraid anymore- starting with the people whose possible rejections will hurt the least- namely, the people you don't really know at all.

EB: um. hello every body
TT: Ooh, a groupchat~ And with an Egbert at the helm !!! I am positive that this will be very interesting indeed.
AP: B33 < *davepeta enters the memo*
AP: B33 < oWo what's this?
TT: Though I'm hardly in the mood to roleplay, I must STRONGly concur with the sentiment of my moirail's question.
AT: oH,,, aRE WE ROLEPLAYING,,, i'M NOT REALLY GOOD AT THAT ANYMORE SORRY I'VE BEEN OUT OF PRACTICE,,, bUT I GUESS I COULD DUST OFF MY SKILLS AND TRY,,,,
TA: i thought ii fuckiing 2aiid ii diidn't want two be iin any group chat2 E2PECIIALLY not roleplay one2
AA: sollux we roleplayed archaeologist indiana jones/mummy pale smut literally last night don't be such a hypocrite!
TA: AA THAT WA2 2UPPO2ED TWO 2TAY BETWEEN U2
EB: oh for fuck's sake. this isn't supposed to be a role play chat!
TA: oh thank gog, a voiice of rea2on
EB: i acutally brought you all here to tell you something important and you guys are going to start role playing?
TT: Please tell me it's gossip >:3
EB: no, jasprose, it is not gossip. besides i highly doubt i have any gossip that you don't already know, so what would be the point?
TT: You make a fair point, there! Maybe you have brains after all.
TT: Then again, you are dating a Strider, so I shouldn't get my hopes up.
EB: am i gonna get to tell you guys what i wanted to say, or not?
AA: go ahead, john! i await your news with patient excitement!
TT: I am STRONG in my certainty that 'patient e%citement' is a #$%^&* o%ymoron.
TT: Also, I take a degree of offense to Jasprose's insinuation that us Striders are in some way unintelligent or inferior. I am, after all, one of them my self, and I have a world of information at my fingertips.
AA: no, you're right. you're part zahhak, so you're worse.
AP: B33 < i don't apurrove of of you being mewn to my meowrail, aradia!
AP: B33 < also, i'm a strider too technically jaspurrose, and i furrown upon the implication that i'm anywhere near dirk or dave in terms of idiocy! i n33d an apawlogy!
TT: Never. >:3
AT: uMMM,,,, hAS ANYONE NOTICED THAT IT'S BEEN LIKE FIVE MINUTES,,, AND JOHN STILL HASN'T SAID ANYTHING,,,,
EB: ugh, you're right. i'm sorry, this is just really hard for me to say.
AA: i find that when one has something hard to say, it's best to rip off the synthetic adhesive bandage possibly patterned with hello kitty or other cartoons quickly!
TT: Oh, I don't mind at all. I've been taking bets in PMs with the others about what it is exactly that you're going to tell us. I'd do it in the group chat itself, but I've been trying to work on being more 'sensitive' and getting a 'filter'.
EB: um, thanks i guess?
EB: any way, what i want to tell you all is that...
EB: i'm a trans gender woman.
AA: oh, congratulations!
TA: yeah, congrat2
AT: oH,,, tHAT'S GREAT!!!!! i'M SO HAPPY FOR YOU,,,,
AP: B33 < HELL YEAH yet another one of our furriend group is trans
AP: B33 < *davepeta frolics in delight and doesn't even mind that they just lost furrty bucks to jaspurrose*
TT: Pay up, bitches!
EB: wait, jasprose, you knew?
TT: It wasn't that hard to figure out after that movie night we had! Your facial expressions are soooo easy to read, Egbert. You should work on that. Plus Rose and I- back before I became my amazing and incredible self- used to have a crush on you, and there's no way we actually had a crush on a guy!
TT: G-d, when she finally finds out she's going to be so glad that she can officially put those moments of doubt to rest!
TT: Putting my moirail's sister's antics aside: That's very epic of you, and I'm so #$%ˆ&* glad that you finally decided to join our ranks, Egbert.
TT: Speaking of which: will you be getting a new name?
EB: yeah, actually! i wanna go by june now. and i'm gonna use she/hers too.
AA: welcome to the club then june :D
TA: al2o, who know2 about thii2? nobody want2 two out you, but i don't want two mii2gender you unnece2ariily iif ii can help iit.
EB: oh! um... right now only jade and roxy know. but if someone refers to me as 'she' around you in the future then they definitely know, and you can talk about me to them.
AP: B33 < well, i'm furry happy for mew, june! and i'm so glad mew felt that mew could tell us!
TT: I echo the above sentiment. Is there anything else you want to tell us, June?
EB: um... no, not really?
TT: Cool. Who wants to roleplay now?
EB: oh my god. im leaving.

Despite the roleplaying, telling the sprites (and Aradia and Sollux) went well. Better than you could ever have imagined. You spend the following day in a daze of bliss, wandering around unable to stop smiling. 

In said haze of bliss, you decide to talk to Calliope and Jake next. You don't know them quite as well as you know most of your circle of friends, even though Jake is related to you, but they're still closer to you than Aradia, Sollux, and the sprites. But you're sure that it will go well. You know it will. They're your friends, and they love you.

What could go wrong?

You curse past you. What were you thinking?

This is going to crash and burn, you tell yourself as you fidget on the couch in your living room. You hold on tightly to the mug of hot chocolate in your hands, rubbing the pads of your fingertips against the ridged edges in an attempt at soothing yourself. It doesn't really work.

Jake and Calliope aren't here yet, but you can already tell this is going to be a disaster. The only time you did this in person, it was in front of Jade and Roxy, and also you really weren't thinking much at that point in time as you were preoccupied with the surge of gender euphoria and a self shattering revelation about the nature of who you are.

The dilemma is this: you're going to tell Jake and Calliope that you're a girl, and you are deathly afraid that despite everything, you don't... look like one.

You've started to grow your hair out and have made an effort to wear makeup and do other, gender-affirming things, but sometimes, when you look in the mirror, the face that stares back at you makes your heart ache. You don't want your friends to look at you and see the version of yourself you're trying to shed. 

Is it too late to text them and call this off?

The door bell rings. Fuck. Evidently not.

You are sitting on your couch, and you have no clue what to say. 

Jake and Calliope are also pretty obviously curious as to what you are going to tell them, sitting on the couch across from you. Calliope slurps from her mug of glitter, but their eyes, wide and inquisitive, never leave your face. Jake keeps scratching at the back of his head in that way that you know he and Jade do when they're nervous. They haven't said anything out of the ordinary, simply made quiet cheerful small talk, but you can tell from the way they glance at each other and then back at you that they are wondering when you'll get on with it and finally actually spill the beans.

You take a deep breath and put down your hot chocolate, smoothing the sweaty palms of your hands against the fabric of your couch. When you breathe in, the air rattles in your lungs. You clench your hands and then open them again, flat, bounce your knee once, then breathe out. 

"I know that you are probably both wondering why I asked you here," you start. "Recently, I um. I found out some stuff that made me take a look at myself and think about who I am, and I figured some very important things out. Um. Which is to say. That I'm a trans gender girl."

Both Callie and Jake look at you for a single, terrifying silent moment, before Calliope breaks into a beaming smile so wide that faer cheeks must hurt from the strain, and your heart skips a beat. Jake, for his part, reaches over and clasps your shoulder. 

"I'm sure chuffed for you, my dear ectocousin," he smiles at you, and you can't help but let out a sigh of relief at the look of pure familial love on his face- not pity, not disappointment, not disbelief. Nothing but acceptance. Calliope is looking at you the same way, and it makes your heart swell in your chest.

"Will you be taking a new name then?" she inquires, and there's no judgement in their question, just genuine curiosity. "And will you want to use she/her, or do any other sets of pronouns suffice?"

"Yeah, she/her please," you say. God, saying this out loud is so much harder than doing it from behind a keyboard. "And as for names... I want to go by June." 

A flash of recognition sparks in Calliope's eyes, and you remember belatedly that Calliope, of all people, would know about June Crocker, being Jane's girlfriend. Fae doesn't say anything about your choice of name, though, just smiles wider and nods knowingly.

Jake tilts his head. "Like Jane's grandma?"

You smile down at your lap, remembering the woman whose name you're taking, and nod. "Yes. I saw some of her work, and she... I wouldn't have gotten here if it wasn't for her." You rub at the back of your neck, and your mind recalls the way she smiled in those videos- unafraid and proud and very kind. "I owe her a lot."

Jake reaches over and pats your hand, gently. "I'm sure she'd be proud of you."

You suppress the urge to cry.

The rest of the afternoon passes much more quickly, consumed by discussion of one of Jake's new favorite movies. You haven't seen it yet, but Jake's really into it- Calliope is too, surprisingly enough. The two of them have tastes that rarely overlap, but they seem to both have enjoyed it, and you promise you'll watch it at some point in the near future.

Neither of them seem to begrudge you the way you sniff, occasionally, get teary-eyed and a little weepy. You try to hide it, wiping the wet salt away behind the flat of your hands, and they let you, patting you on the back at times, gently offering to get you some more tea or coffee or a tissue. Every time you can't help the way love, warm and soft and overwhelming, curls up in your chest and almost purrs at the comfort. 

Both of them leave at the same time, around four- Jane is cooking dinner tonight, Calliope tells you, and she makes a mean steak, which is a fact you know from experience. Jake tells you he and Tavros are going to be rewatching Detective Pikachu, and you tell him that you hope they both have fun. Both of them wave to you as they step out onto your tiny balcony and stretch before both of them perch up on the railing and take off, flying back home.

You flop back on the couch and take a second to just breathe and absorb all that's happened. It's been what, two days? And you've come out to your sister, your kind-of-ex who you used to have a crush on that was half legitimate feelings and half envy, the sprite gang and Aradia and Sollux, your ecto relation, and said kind-of-ex's current girlfriend. 

And each and every one of them has accepted you wholeheartedly.

For the rest of the night you can't keep the beam off your face. You fall asleep smiling. 

You don't have to think about who you want to tell next. Vriska Serket and Terezi Pyrope are your friends, and they've always meant so much to you- and you will admit that part of you has been dying to tell them.

Back during the Game, you had... complicated feelings about Vriska Serket. She was mean, and she was abrasive, and she did messed up things, but she guided you through the fraught landscape that Skaia built with nothing but grace. She was so confident and strong, and so undeniably a girl in that messy screwed up way that you didn't entirely understand but wanted to. A girl in the same way that Rose and Jade were girls.

You remember when she sent you that alchemized outfit and you put it on, and you'd felt- strange in it, the way the clothes loosened around the chest and hips and made you feel not quite as uncomfortable as you usually did in your body, the feeling that plagued you all your life until you had finally put the name 'dysphoria' to it after years of aching.

It had been a freeing and terrifying feeling. You'd been torn between burning the outfit and never taking it off. 

Your feelings about Vriska have shifted and changed over the years. You've loved her, been infatuated with her, been confused by her, been frightened by her, disliked her, envied her, hated her, pitied her, felt seen by her. Kanaya tells you that this is a common reaction to Vriska, the most polarizing person that any of you have ever met. 

The recent realization that you're a girl has put quite a few of those feelings into perspective. In some ways, you think Vriska was the first person who ever made you feel things about gender, who made you question yourself even as you desperately buried those feelings under mounds of rock, bottled them up and threw them away. It is those feelings that you go back to now as a touchstone, overturning each with new understanding of what they meant.

Terezi, too, imparted understanding. You think she understood you in ways that she's never spoken out loud- you can still feel her eyes on you at the party where you asked yourself in silence about girlhood and want. Maybe she has known this longer than you have.

The two of them share an apartment on the fifth floor of a tall building, fancy enough for a functioning elevator but not fancy enough for a doorman. When you buzz in, Terezi's voice is near incomprehensible over the static of the intercom, but it only takes a touch of your fingers to the silver metal grill and a simple whisper of Breath to clear it up enough that her voice carries and you catch the apartment number. 

Even if you hadn't, you reflect, looking at the door to their apartment, it would be hard to miss by the multicolored faux fur tails hanging from the door knocker. They remind you of 'scene fashion' from a few years back, a kind of fashion that you've seen Terezi dabble in before. You can't help but huff out a breath of laughter- of course she has these on her door- before you raise your hand and knock. 

There's the sound of shuffling around the apartment and the soft thump of socks on wood flooring before Terezi opens the door, grinning up at you with her big sharp teeth that have always reminded you of a shark's. 

"Egbert!" She cackles, and reaches on her tiptoes to give you a noogie. It's a futile endeavor, considering you have around half a foot on her, and it's never worked before. You duck around her outstretched arm and slip through the space between her and the door, laughing as you do so. 

You are always continuously surprised by Terezi's choice in interior decor. The apartment is an explosion of color- pinks and reds and greens and blues, all in neon, like a slightly more bloodthirsty version of Lisa Frank. There's chalk and spray paint on the walls, shaggy rugs strewn all over the carpet, scalemates scattered around the living room, half-finished books on the floor. You don't judge, though. Your own room has looked much, much worse. And there's a certain character about it; a sense of Terezi-and-Vriska that permeates the air and settles around your shoulders like a warm blanket. 

"Whaddaya want to drink?" Terezi yells from where she's disappeared into the kitchen. "We got water, coffee, milk, Kool-Aid, hair dye, juice, Dr Pepper- no spiders, though, Vriska refuses to have them in the house-"

"Spiders?"

"No, Egbert, I just told you we don't have any spiders!"

Your disbelief is interrupted by Vriska padding her way into the living room with a yawn and then collapsing next to you on the couch. "Hey Egbert," she says, and grabs a discarded granola bar on the coffee table and shoves it in her mouth, still wrapped. "How ya doing?"

"I'm... well, I am kind of freaked out by this," you say, eyes wide behind your glasses. "I forget sometimes how you two are..." You trail off, searching for the correct word in an attempt at tact.

"Huge messes? Complete disasters? A pair of dykey gremlins?" Vriska finishes for you.

You choke on your own spit at that, and flush bright red- she's not... wrong. You're pretty sure that there are pictures of this room on the tumblr corvidcore tag somewhere. "I was going to put it a little bit more tactfully," you mutter under your breath.

Terezi cackles high and loud, throwing her head back in laughter, and your blush turns even darker. "You? Tactful?" she gasps for air, slapping her hand against the fridge. "Oh, Egbert, you truly are following in Crocker's footsteps! What a comedian you are!"

You put your head in your hands as both Vriska and Terezi laugh and joke to each other and try to remember the reason that you came here in the first place. Terezi and Vriska tend to do this- make a conversation all their own. Rose says it's a Light player thing. Dave says it's a Vriska-and-Terezi thing.

"Anyways, why are you here, Egbert?" Terezi asks, and you look up to see her closing the fridge, a glass of something bright red in her hand. You hope it's just Kool Aid and not the aforementioned hair dye. "Is it about the whole 'I'm a girl' thing?"

You freeze, the thoughts in your head stuttering to an awful stop and the room falling silent except for the harsh intake of Vriska's gasp. Terezi stands at the counter, expression drawn into a grimace of regret. You've seen her make the same expression when she accidentally spoiled a surprise birthday party for Dirk, and your hands tremble. 

"Did you-" your voice cracks high, almost high enough that it enters the register you want it to. "Did you know? This whole time? You knew I was a girl?"

Terezi's wince gets more pronounced, and she sighs, setting down the glass of mysterious red liquid on the counter with a thump. "I suspected," she admits, and shrugs her shoulders. "To be honest it was hard not to notice for me! I grew up with Vriska, I can spot an egg a mile away! But no, I didn't know for sure until movie night." 

The tip of her finger dances around the rim of her glass. "Your expressions are shockingly easy to read!"

You turn to her girlfriend in disbelief, and Vriska bites her lip and avoids your gaze guiltily, like a child whose parent finally found out about a long ago act of misbehavior. And the realization that Vriska has known you were a girl since before the party- since before you finished the Game- since the both of you were children, since you met- it hits you like a truck to the face. You stare at her and the guilty darting of her eyes and her hand wrapped around her own waist, and you don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

So you do both.

It's so fitting that the girl who was the model of girlhood to your younger self knew that you were trans. It's so fitting that she figured it out before you did, that she looked at the baby fat on your cheeks and your bucktooth grin and your desperate strive to be a man in the way that you knew you could never be, and understood. On sight, or through text, she saw all the signs that you displayed as a child, those bottled up feelings that you pretended didn't exist, and she realized.

So many more things fall into place now- offhand comments made in passing, both during the Game and since. The outfit that felt loose and fitting and perfect that Vriska sent you. It is only now that you realize it was no accident that the clothes she gave you eased your childhood hatred of your body. They must have been based off her own clothes, the ones that alleviated her own dysphoria; they were meant to help you too. 

Vriska knew. And in her own small ways, she was trying to help, do the things that she must have wished that someone had done for her. She was trying to help you even before anyone else noticed.

You laugh and you cry as Vriska and Terezi stare at you in bemusement and then in understanding, as Vriska pets your hair and murmurs soothing words, until the storm of emotion calms and you explain the entirety- that you're a trans woman, although they knew that already, that you want to use she/her and only she/her, that you want to go by the name June. Vriska throws her head back in laughter at that and you stare in confusion until she calms and promises that she'll send you something that will explain it later. They listen as you tell them that Jane helped you figure it out, and Vriska tells Terezi to remind her to send Jane a gift basket at some point.

"I try so hard for years to help you, and then you spend an afternoon with him and you figure it all out," she complains. "Trust her to come in and steal all the glory."

When you leave the apartment, you leave it with a spring in your step and Vriska's promise that she'll send you a bunch of links to stuff that helped her figure herself out when she was still figuring herself out ringing in your ears.

This joy lasts until you realize that with this last visit, there are only a few people you have left to tell. There's Jane, of course, who you haven't been able to figure out how to tell yet- how do you thank someone for making you realize that you're trans, after all? And then there's Rose and Kanaya. Dave and Karkat. Dirk. And Dad Crocker.

How are you going to tell them?

Chapter Text

You approach Rose and Kanaya next.

Despite the success of your previous disclosures, you can't help but dread this against all logic that tells you otherwise. Both of them are trans women, as they've told you, which should make you more at ease here, knowing that they will probably understand- but that does nothing to ease your apprehension, not really.

You know from surfing the internet that there are some people who say you have to do certain things to be trans, and you don't necessarily fit into all of them. You haven't grown out all your hair, shaving can be a pain even if it does make you feel happy, you suck at makeup- though Roxy's told you that she'd be happy to help you figure it out as you go- you only figured this out recently, you haven't Always Known. 

Maybe they'll think you're fake.

Rose doesn't do psychoanalysis anymore. At least, not seriously- she'll make joking comments and banter with all of you about it, but the second she hits onto something that might be hurtful on accident, she stops. She's said that not only were her attempts at psychoanalysis intrusive and often overstepping boundaries, they were, in her words, "the coping mechanism of a young girl dealing with the neglect of her mother by attempting to make sense of the world around her and the people in it by any means possible." 

But maybe she'll break it out when you tell her about who you are, laugh and make some comment about Freud or Oedipus, ask if this is due to the fact that you lost the only father figure you had during your teenage years, or due to your perpetual lack of a mother, and you'll sit there and try not to cry.

And maybe Kanaya will look you over, look at your baggy godtier hoodie that almost covers your simple skirt, your dark blue leggings, your sneakers, your lack of jewelry or earrings or makeup, and will sniff, turn up your nose at you, make a comment about expecting her to believe that when you're dressed like that, and you'll tremble in your clothes, all sense of euphoria they give you gone, try to laugh as best you can and hope that neither of them will notice the tears welling in your eyes.

You know this isn't logical. In fact, it's downright ludicrous. Nothing that you know of either of them suggests that they'd behave in this way towards you. But the idea of being rejected by them is so awful, so horrible.

It was different with the others. You don't know Jasprose or Aradia or Sollux or Gcatavros or ARquius or even Davepeta well enough to be truly hurt by their rejection. Jake is your ectocousin, but you've never been particularly close with him, not the way you know Jade is. Calliope is sweet, and she's your friend- you care deeply for them- but you don't know faer as well as some of your other friends. And Vriska and Terezi- well, that was a leap made on impulse. You knew a rejection would hurt, but you were so high off the adrenaline of telling Jake and Calliope that the possibility didn't truly register. 

But it has been days since you told those two, and now the idea of Rose and Kanaya rejecting you, their noses scrunched up in disgust and their mouths pulled in grimaces, it weighs on your mind. You haven't been able to stop thinking about it. 

Kanaya... Kanaya is the woman Rose loves, and she's someone you consider a close friend- she is kind, and funny, and bitingly sarcastic at times, and determined and so full of fierce love. The two of you have known each other since you were thirteen. You spoke at her wedding. Losing her would fucking hurt.

And Rose... you've known Rose since you were ten, since you were a little kid messing around with computer programs and making bad jokes on the Internet. You've gone through Hell with her and come out stronger. She is in some ways like a sister to you, just as much as Jade is. You cried when she said her vows to Kanaya. If Rose laughs- if she makes comments that hit home- if she refuses to speak with you- you might as well be losing a piece of yourself. You'd be losing part of your family, for sure.

You can't stop thinking about the possibility that this will going. It is for this reason that you are hovering over their house, debating whether or not you can actually go through with this. 

You could leave, you think. Tell them it's no big deal and make your excuses. You don't ever have to tell them, technically. You could avoid them for as long as you need to.

But that would mean hiding yourself for just as long, whenever you're around them, and you couldn't do that. The very thought makes you sick to your stomach, to hide for that long- you couldn't do it, not any longer. Not with the knowledge that you could be happy and free and unburdened if you were only brave enough to speak. And it wouldn't be fair to either of them, not really, to hide this from them. They deserve better than that.

You take a deep breath and land on their front step and ring the doorbell, shoving your hands in the pocket of your hoodie as you wait. 

The waiting only lasts a few seconds before Kanaya opens the door, smiling. She's dressed casually, and the knees of her skirt are stained with mud, so you think she must have been gardening today. She has her veil on, a loose green headcovering with gold patterned around the edges- it reminds you of mantillas.

"Hello," Kanaya's smile is small and private but still warm, gentle. "Come on in, John."

The use of your old name makes you want to flinch but you resist the urge, forcing your shoulders to stay flat instead of bunching around your ears the way they tend to when you get defensive or angry or scared. 

And though you know no one is going to hurt you, and the likelihood is that Rose and Kanaya will accept you for who you are, you can't help it. You are very scared.

"Hi Kanaya!" You force a smile and step inside, wiping your flats on the doormat as you toe off your shoes. "How are you doing today?"

"I am good, thank you," she tells you, gently ushering you into the living room. "Rose and I have been doing very well. Rose is working on her new novel, and I have started a new fashion project incorporating knitting with Rose's help." 

You spot what must be the latest product of said project on the couch- a lumpy shapeless blob of knitted yarn with three arms and way too many holes. You cannot help but wince at the sight of it- you don't think that Kanaya is doing all that well with learning to knit. 

"Yeah, I'm sure you're doing great," you tell her. Kanaya raises an eyebrow and you wince internally- she's always had a talent for telling when you're lying. But she doesn't say anything, merely purses her lips, which in some ways you think might be worse.

There's a sound of clattering from the kitchen and a suppressed yelp, which makes you half jump out of your skin as Kanaya sighs softly. 

"Rose? Are you alright?" She calls, and you wince as you hear an oven door slam in response.

"I am perfectly fine," Rose announces from the kitchen, her voice as steady as ever. "Don't worry yourself on my account- I simply dropped a tray of confections out of the oven." There's more clattering and the sound of water running. "I'll be with you in a moment." 

Your blood runs cold. Rose's cooking skills are the stuff of nightmares- she regularly substitutes salt for sugar, often burns things, and she has, upon occasion, exploded her own microwave. You're pretty sure that she thinks that cooking is essentially the same as Sburb alchemy- there's a reason that Kanaya, despite the issues that rainbow drinker myths have posed, is normally the one who cooks between the two. You dread what creation she's concoted this time.

Sure enough, when Rose comes into the room, you see piled high on the white paper plate she's holding are a mound of 'cookies'- at least you think that they're supposed to be cookies. They're clearly burnt beyond edibility, a mountain of rock hard jet black circles. She offers one to you first as she sits.

"Um... no thank you..." you stutter, trying to avoid Rose's gaze and failing miserably. She doesn't seem angered by your refusal to eat her cookies, though, if the smirk on her face is any indicator.

"Suit yourself," she shrugs instead when you continue to refuse them, and pops one in her mouth. You stare, horrified, as she chews and swallows without a single wince or cringe. Your eyes must be circles the size of dinner plates, and Rose stifles a giggle when looking at you.

"Relax, John," she laughs, patting at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. "I wouldn't inflict these on you anyways. They are a bit of an.. acquired taste. Kanaya, do you want one?"

Kanaya shakes her head. "No, darling, I fear that if I ate one of those the God Tier clock would pronounce my death Just for my hubris. The fact that you can eat them without keeling over is a miracle."

Rose rolls her eyes. "Your opinion is noted. Now, shall we return our attention to our guest here? John, how are you doing?"

The sound of your deadname sends a jolt of hurt running through your chest, one that you plaster over with a smile. "I'm doing fine, thanks Rose! I wanted to, um, tell you something actually..." 

Your voice trails off as Rose raises an arched eyebrow, the glass studs around the cut in it catching the light from a nearby lamp and glittering with a prism of colors. "Hm, really? Do tell, John, you know that we're always here to listen."

You do know that, actually, but it's hard to remember it sometimes. On some days, Rose and Kanaya and the rest of your friends speak for hours at a time in long languid conversations that swap back and forth with all the quick, graceful intensity of a tennis match- their words full of convoluted metaphors and references to books you've never heard of, and it can be hard to get a word in. You've stood on the outside looking in more than once, waiting for a moment to get a word in.

Now there is silence, but you still feel the same way- biting your lip, waiting to speak. And yet the silence does not feel heavy; it's comforting, patient, and when you finally look up and admit, "I think I'm a girl," there is nothing less than understanding in Rose's violet eyes.

She doesn't say anything, just crosses the room to wrap you up in a hug and you stand there, frozen, as she squeezes you close. Your limbs aren't moving; you're trembling. Your mouth won't open to say anything. You just keep thinking oh God, she believes me, she believes me.

It is at this point that it hits you, and you bury your face in her shoulder and burst into tears.

After around fifteen minutes of weeping onto Rose's shoulder as she sways the two of you back and forth and Kanaya makes gentle shooshing noises while rubbing your back, you calm down enough to sit down and explain the whole spiel; the realization that you are trans, the pronouns and name you want to use. Rose nods and assures you that she'll help in any way she can, and Kanaya promises to make you new clothing, better suited for you.

"I have quite an amount of experience in the art of creating clothes for women like us," she tells you with a matter of factness that just about knocks the breath out of your chest. You feel your eyes well up with tears again, and you wipe your face hurriedly, trying not to look like you're still on the verge of crying , and turn the conversation in a new direction.

"Did you know?" you ask, wiping your still-sweaty hands on your legs. "Vriska and Terezi did, but I didn't know if you... knew. The way they did."

Rose contemplates the question for far longer than it should be necessary, honestly, before shrugging. "Somewhat, I suppose. There were signs that I picked up on. But it was not a conscious knowledge, truly. I am far less surprised than I would be if Jake, for example, came and told me the same thing you're telling me now, but I did not know this was the issue bothering you."

She takes a sip from the teacup that she pretends is full of tea but that you know is instead full of an ungodly combination of Red Bull, coffee grounds, and imported black coffee that is more potent than anything on Earth, and raises an eyebrow. "No one who dresses the way you do isn't a [SLUR REDACTED BECAUSE IT'S PRIVATE. THIS IS AN EMOTIONAL MOMENT. STOP LOOKING YOU VOYEURS]."

(You splutter in protest, your face a bright red, but the warmth that blooms in your chest now follows you for the rest of the day.)

You know the next group of people you have to tell, and it's... terrifying to you.

You don't know how to put into words all that Dave has meant to you, over the years. Dave and Jade and Rose, all of them, they've been your best friends since you were in elementary school. They own parts of your heart, each of them. You think that you would be dead without them- no, you know you would be dead without them.

They are all special, in their own way. Jade is your long-lost sister- you will protect her till the ends of everything, and you know that she'd do the same for you. Brilliant and bright and persevering throughout everything- she was your very first friend, before any of the rest of them. And Rose- Rose was next, Rose made you long for things without knowing that you longed for them, made you laugh and taught you things and you were always in awe of her. You still are. 

And Dave is your best friend. Your bro. The two of you spent hours trading quips back and forth as children and you always felt like talking with him was as easy as breathing, a tennis ball match of volleyed jokes. The conversations that the two of you had as children have touched your soul, molded you. And that's- that's not necessarily a good thing.

You love Dave, but you also can't help but remember years where the two of you joked about how terrible it would be to be a girl, how the two of you were Men, the manliest of men; the way your stomach had clenched at the words the two of you typed. And you can't help but wonder if things had been different- if you hadn't heard those words so young- you might have turned out differently.

Last night you dreamt you told him and when he opened his mouth in response, out came every word from those year-old conversations. His words and yours, both of them, burning a whole in your chest until you were stripped down to your ugly body and he laughed, laughed, laughed. There was cruelty in his sunglasses, and you burnt alive there on the same itchy plaid couch that you sit on now, knees bouncing furiously and irrepressibly. 

"What's the big deal?" Dave asks. He's positioned awkwardly- he flopped down on the couch across from you when you sat down, and Sir Dumpling decided that his chest was the perfect spot for him to take a nap, so now Dave's pinned underneath the weight of a big fluffy cream cat that is purring so loud you can hear it from across the room. "No offense, but it's kinda early for this, dude."

You refuse to let him see you flinch at 'dude', but your laugh still comes out cracked. "Just because you sleep in till noon doesn't mean the rest of us do, Dave," you tell him, folding your arms across your chest. "Eleven A.M. is a perfectly reasonable time to come visit a friend."

Karkat's eyeroll is audible even from the kitchen. "Up until, like, a year ago you were waking up at noon yourself, Egbert," he yells over the hum of the microwave. "You  don't get to talk!"

You can't help but snort out a laugh at that before you force yourself to get back to the topic at hand. "It's kind of important, Dave. I had to do it now otherwise I would've talked myself out of it."

Dave reaches up and gives Sir Dumpling a scratch behind his ears. "Is this going to be another 'Are you sure I'm okay with you dating my brother' conversation? Because the answer is that you and Dirk can do whatever you want so long as you keep it to yourselves. I swear to god, dude, Kanaya doesn't apologize to me for dating Rose every five minutes, you don't have to either. It's fucking weird, too, and so awkward, like I feel like I have to apologize to you for giving you the impression I was ever not okay with you dating him-"

He drones on in this vein for a while, but you can't hear him over the rushing of blood in your skull. You haven't been looking forward to telling Dirk- you know he's gay, and that you're a woman, and that kind of ruins all the chemistry that you had with him. You don't know if the relationship you had with Dirk was built on anything except for a kind of yearning for something that neither of you could name- you still can't name it, even now. And if you tell him, you are... somewhat afraid he'll think you were leading him on or something. 

Not now, you tell yourself. You can deal with Dirk later. But this conversation, with Dave, this is what you need to focus on first- otherwise you'll never have the courage to tell Dirk, either.

"It's not about that Dave, jeez," you sigh, and run a hand through your hair to calm yourself down- the texture of it, its length, is a comfort you keep coming back to. "It's about... well, it's about me."

Despite Dave's characteristic denseness, he picks up on your distress now- sooner than you thought he would, honestly. "What is it, John?"

"Well, um. 'John' is a great place to start," you say. Your fingers are shaking like... like... like you don't even know what. They're just shaking a lot. You think that you might shake right out of your skin and then die. "I...  I don't think I'm going to go by John anymore."

"Oh thank god," Karkat mutters under his breath, having chosen this moment to walk into the living room with a couple of ceramic mugs. He passes one of them to Dave and a second that he keeps in his hands as he sits on Dave's feet. "I thought we'd be stuck with our token forever."

You don't get a chance to respond to that, because Dave says, "Good for you, dude. I honestly think we should normalize cis people changing their name more, honestly, like, what if I were cis and I was named Greg? That'd be fucked up. Have you ever met a good person named Greg? I didn't think so. But like, good for you bro. What new name do you want?"

Karkat puts his head in his hands. His shoulders are shaking. You're not sure if he's crying or laughing, or both, but honestly, you understand that. You want to do exactly the same thing right now, because if any situation calls for it, this one does.

"Dave." You try to keep your voice level, and you smooth your sweaty palms out on your pants, hoping that you're not going to stain them permanently. "I'm. I'm trying to come out to you right now. As a trans woman."

The emotions that cross Dave's face within the space of two seconds are something you wish you could capture forever and freeze, because you have never, ever in your life, seen someone cycle from confusion to shock to pure mortified embarrassment. Karkat finally looks up at the two of you. His face is bright red and covered in tears, and he is at the point in laughter where one ceases to make sounds and instead simply gasps for air.

Dave hides his face in Sir Dumpling and makes a noise of pure humiliation. Sir Dumpling purrs, and it sounds suspiciously similar to laughter. 

"How did you not pick up on that," you ask, dumbfounded. Karkat is doubled over now. "What, you thought I was just going to change my name out of the blue coinicidentally after Jane came out as nonbinary and I learned that every single one of our friends is trans? That was your first thought?"

Karkat's vocal cords start to work, finally, and he lets out a howling gasp of laughter. You half-wonder if he's having a stroke.

Dave burrows his face even further into Sir Dumpling's fur. "It's not that funny," he mumbles, and you can't stop yourself from starting to laugh too.

Karkat calms down after taking a few puffs from his inhaler, though he still lets out an incredulous giggle every few minutes. Dave peeks out from Dumpling's fur eventually, his face flushed dark from embarrassment. You are still sitting on their uncomfortable plaid couch that doubles as a pullout bed, and your palms have finally stopped sweating.

"I'm sorry br- dud- I mean, buddy," Dave tells you finally. "Kinda a shock to me, that's all. I don't think I have to tell you that I um, pretty much imprinted on you when we were kids, and I had a lot of... gender moments, I guess, that revolved around tryin' to be like you. Makes this whole sitch more than a little awkward."

You shrug- you'd figured that might be the case after identifying your own past feelings towards Terezi and Vriska to be gender envy of a similar nature. "It's not that big of a deal. Honestly, it's a little funny."

His mouth twitches. "You can say that again, June. Repeat it over and over again. Like the chorus of a bad musical. It's a little funny. Kinda like it's a little shop of horrors but it's people fucking up instead of plants. Spreading their fuckups to others till the fuckups rule the world. Actually, I don't think that works real well as a metaphor. Let me workshop it a bit, flesh it out till it can actually stand a chance. And uh." 

He gestures at Sir Dumpling, who is currently licking Dave's face from his position atop his chest. "I'd come over there and hug you right now, but. Well. " 

The smile that spreads across your face is more than a little cheesy, but you don't think anyone in this room will mind.

Dirk is up next, and you have to say that as shitty as it is, you are kind of glad that this gives you an excuse to break up with Dirk.

It's not like you don't love and care about him. You do. But not in a way that's special, not in a way that's different from what you feel for Dave or Karkat or Sollux or any of the other guys you know. Not in a way that makes you feel like you're in love. 

You think he might know this too. In the early days, the awkwardness could be explained away as the two of you still fumbling your way around the relationship, but now you've been dating for long enough that it should have gone away, and it hasn't. Kissing him feels wet and weird and like a clumsy act of intimacy that you don't much care for. All of the good times that you've spent with him have been in contexts that have been more platonic than romantic- Wild Wings outings and shit like that.

Hopefully that means this will go well. You hope. You pray. You really, really don't want to have a breakup so bad it fractures your friend group. Who would you have trauma parties with then? 

Dirk slides into the booth at the local Wild Wings that has also functioned as your date spot for the past months and starts out with, "I think we should break up," so. You think that maybe it wasn't just you.

"Uh." You say intelligently, before you process the words and say, "Oh thank god."

"I mean I know you might still have feelings for me but like, it's nothing about you, it's just-," Dirk keeps rambling, and you feel something clench up in your stomach. "Like, first of all, I think I still have feelings for Jake, and then there's the gender thing. I mean, I'm gay, and you're a girl, and I don't think I ever liked you in that way but because I have jack shit in the way of romantic experience I got confused-"

"Wait, what? Did-" Panic hits you hard in the chest, and you have to clench the edge of the table to prevent yourself from getting up and just fleeing this whole situation. "Did someone tell you?"

The thought that someone told him, before you got the chance- you feel sick. This is supposed to be yours, and no one else's, and the thought of someone stealing it from you, as if it were nothing, as if it were something that easy, as if they had any right-

Tendrils of wind curl around your arms, and the fear and anger and shock curdling in your chest is about to tear this Wild Wings apart when Dirk lays a hand on yours and squeezes your fingers until the air untangles and dissipates and your heart stops beating faster than a rabbit's.

"It's okay, Egbert, no one told me," he says, soothing. "I could kind of see it coming. Roxy's my sister and also one of my best friends. One starts to get real well acquainted with what it looks like when trans girls figure themselves out, y'know?"

You release a breath you hadn't known you were holding and the air pressure drops at least two degrees. Your ears pop, and Dirk winces. 

"Jeez, Egbert, you really know how to do a number on a guy's ears, huh," he complains.

"I'm sorry," you blurt out. "I didn't- I just- it's nothing about you, I just- I don't know if I ever liked you in the first place, Dirk, I think I just saw you as a friend, but I thought I liked you because if I was gay then the way I felt when I looked at boys made sense, I could write it off as- internalized homophobia, but I- I don't think I like guys really, I don't know if I ever have, and I'm sorry I kind of ruined everything and I want us to still be friends can we still be friends?"

The words spill out of your mouth and they don't stop coming no matter how much you tell yourself to shut up. Dirk stares at you, aghast, and you curse yourself out furiously in your head, because if there was any chance of the two of you remaining friends after this, then you just ruined it with the words that have flopped out of your mouth without your permission or consent. 

"Egbert, of course we can still be friends," Dirk interrupts, squeezing your hand, and your heart slows. So you haven't fucked this up irreparably. "Who else am I going to introduce bad animes to? And buy expensive merchandise of unfairly maligned pieces of cinema with? And get relentlessly and effortlessly made fun of by?"

You giggle, eyes wet despite yourself. "I'm pretty sure all of our friends make fun of you, Dirk," you tell him, and you don't even mind that your voice sounds low and croaky and masculine through the weight of your tears. "You make it really easy."

"This is exactly what I am referring to, Egbert," Dirk deadpans, before quirking an eyebrow. "You planning on choosing a new name, too, by the way, or is the old one still serviceable?"

You can't help the smile that breaks out on your face. The act of saying your own name is one that lights a cradled joy in the depths of your heart, and you relish every opportunity you have. "June. I want... my name is June."

"Like Jane's grandma?" Dirk asks, raising an eyebrow at you from across the booth. "You know we already don't have much in the way of 'original' names here. Should have expected that you'd continue the tradition, I guess. Dad Crocker's gonna be thrilled."

Oh. Dad. You'd almost forgotten.

"Yeah," you say, and you hope that your voice is steadier than you feel, because you'd forgotten- you still have to tell Jane, and then- your Dad.

Dirk probably notices the way you fall silent and don't contribute much to the conversation for the rest of your meal. You're eternally grateful that he doesn't comment on it. 

Chapter Text

You tell Jane and your father at the same time.

It feels best to you that way, after all. Jane is your grandmother, even if he is not your grandmother- or grandparent, you suppose. You don't know if she still wants to be referred to as a 'grandmother' or if he would rather be a grandparent. That is a conversation you'll have to have another day.

And Dad is your father, even if he is not your father.

The fact that he isn't quite your dad is something you have long since struggled with. You look at this man who is so much like the one who raised you, and you want to believe that he and your memory are the same. But he's not- he does not remember your shaving cream pranks. He did not make you cakes as a light-hearted and often spurned gesture of love. And he did not leave you a note saying he is so proud of you. 

That man is dead. 

But still- you were sixteen when you met this man, and he took you in. He might not have made you cakes as a child but he makes you cupcakes now, helps Jane teach you how to stir the batter just long enough that the lumps are evened out but not so long that it's not thick anymore. He might not have been on the receiving end of your shaving cream pranks as a child, but he has felt your trickster's wit often enough now that it counts.

And yes, maybe he didn't write you that note that you still keep in a music box in your room, the one that is stained with teardrops from all the nights you've cried over the man who will never come back, but he is the man who for four years sat by your bedside with a cup of warm milk and his hand in your hair as you cried into his shirt. He is the man who patted your back and told you it would be alright, that he loves you, that you will never have to go back to the Game. 

He's your dad, even if he's not the man who picked you up from that crater and brought you home. And you want- you hope- for him to love you, and accept you as you truly are.

It is for this reason you sit on the fading blue couch in the house in which you used to live and cradle a mug of hot cocoa in your hands. Jane and your father sit across from you and Jane looks at you, in all your borrowed finery- Roxy's blue skirt that's too long for you, Jade's hairclips dotting your bangs, a pair of glowstick bracelets from Vriska and Terezi on your wrists. You know your face is bare of makeup, you know your fingernails are the same brown as your skin, but you hope- you pray- that this will be enough.

It's silent. You know that both of them know what you are here to say- it's kind of hard, not to know, when you're sitting here in a skirt with your hair finally growing out and an assortment of blue pink yellow barrettes adorning the black strands, a mess of colors that make you free.

These are the two remainders of your past in front of you- the last living proof of your once-life, the boy you had once been and could never be again. Your previous self died when you heard Jane tell you about his grandmother- you can't go back. You can never go back.

You can't tell if you are comforted or pained by that knowledge. You think it might be both.

There's nothing but understanding in your father's eyes, a sad smile on Jane's chapped lips. In another world, another life, you were older than both of them. In another world, you were Grangran June, and you raised this man to be a good father, and he raised Jane as best he could in turn. You know that in some ways, he failed- the Crockercorp merchandise burning that all of you did a few years back is proof enough of that. But these two, they're the last you have of your old family- the family you had before the beginning of the Game.

There are tears in your eyes. You open your mouth and you let yourself say it.

"I'm a girl."

Jane doesn't hesitate a moment before launching herself across the room to wrap you in his arms, and you let out an audible oof! with the impact as she bowls you over, your back hitting against the back of the couch. He is babbling about how she knew, ever since that moment in the living room, how glad he is that you're finally telling her, how proud and happy for you he is. You're laughing a little, fingers clutching in her flannel, and then your father joins the hug.

He smells like cologne and shaving cream, and his voice trembles when he tells you, "I'm so proud of you, my daughter."

You can't stop yourself from crying, after that.

You have a party a few weeks later. 

Every one of the gods is there- no press, yet. You will tell the world when you're ready, and no sooner. But for now, all of your family- blood and otherwise- knows who you are, and that in itself is a miracle, and a gift.

You wear a jean skirt and leggings and an old Nicholas Cage t-shirt, and Rose groans and tells you how disappointed she is that transitioning has not changed your awful taste. You tell her that she should actually try and enjoy an Nicholas Cage movie some time, and see what she thinks.

"Never," she emphasizes, hand to her chest in mock horror, and you laugh. You can barely believe that a month ago, you were worried that she would hate you- that she'd leave you out in the cold. That any of your friends would do such a thing. 

Sollux and Aradia and Davepeta and Arquius are in the corner, playing Super Smash Bros, and when you join them, asking tentatively if you can try Kirby, Aradia positively beams and proceeds to give you a laundry list of pointers. Vriska keeps telling you that you need to come chug hot sauce with her, which you emphatically refuse even as Terezi calls you a coward and licks your face. Jake tells you he has some long dissertations on transfeminity in action movies that he has saved, which you make him promise to send you. Callie asks if you'll cosplay with her, and you laugh, flush brightly, give a tentative maybe? You've never considered the possibility before, but now it seems like something that could be... fun. 

Dirk passes you a Fluttershy figurine painted with the trans colors, a gesture that you laugh and tell him he's a nerd for. Roxy corners you to tell you that if you're thinking about going on E at some point, that she can always alchemize some up for you and that there are many different options. You emerge from the conversation with your head spinning with new facts, and promise to give her a call at some point, to let her know. 

Dave keeps calling you his 'sis', which makes you giggle and reach on your tiptoes to ruffle his hair, and Karkat tells you that you still look dumb, but in a happier way now, so that's good or whatever, which you know means that he approves. You jokingly squat to ruffle his hair and he immediately starts yelling about how he takes it all back, you suck, never mind. 

Jane and your Dad come out after dinner with a cake in the trans colors, a gesture that makes you almost knock them to the floor in a hug. It tastes delicious- blueberry and strawberry and vanilla- and Jane constantly hovers over your shoulder asking if it tastes good? You're sure? You like it? You reassure him over and over again, until she finally settles down.

"I just want this to be perfect," he says, eyes soft, and you beam at her.

"Well, it is."

You are distracted from that conversation halfway through your second slice of cake, when Jasprose flutters over to purr into your ear about how happy she is for you. You can't stop the blush that rises up on your face. This makes her chuckle and press a soft kiss to your cheek before flying off to join Davepeta in badgering Arquius, and you spend the next solid minute staring after her, a hand pressed to the pink-purple lipstick mark on your cheek as Jane tries very hard not to laugh.

After the party starts to wind down, you sit on the swing set in the backyard with your sister. You're too tired to try to actually swing yourself, and Jade seems to be just as out of it as you are. The two of you draw patterns in the dirt with the tips of your shoes in silence for a while, before you finally speak.

"Thank you."

Jade looks up and smiles at you. "Oh, June, there's nothing to thank any of us for," she says, tracing the beginnings of a cat. "You deserve to be able to be yourself, you know, you should be able to feel at peace. We've earned that much."

You look up at the sky. The stars are shining. You can identify a myriad of unfamiliar constellations- the old ones were destroyed with your home planet, you remember. For a while, they were lost forever. But in the sky above you, the stars are still shining, and even if the patterns that they make are different, they're still beautiful. Still shining. You think maybe they're shining brighter here, on this world, than they ever did back home. 

"Yeah," you say, and smile. "We have, haven't we."