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“Kim, hurry up!” Jackie called. She stood by the door of her and Kim’s apartment wearing a t-shirt striped with blue, red, and black with a gold heart intertwined with an infinity symbol. She rested her rainbow flag on her shoulder.
“Just one more minute!” Kim shouted back, just as she had ten minutes ago.
Ox looked over at Jackie and the two metamours shook their heads at their girlfriend’s tardiness. The meister smoothed out his sweater vest, which was striped like Jackie’s shirt, but unlike hers, had the pi symbol instead of the heart. Ox then turned to his weapon. “Harvar, thanks again for-”
“Dude,” the spear insisted. “Stop thanking me, you're my meister I’m going to support you.” He pointed down at his own shirt, which said ‘got your back’ and Ox smiled.
“Okay okay I’m ready!” Kim bellowed, rushing down the hall towards them. She had pink, blue, and purple stripes painted across her face and had on a striped shirt like her partners, but hers had a graphic of three hearts holding hands and the phrase ‘enough love to go around’.
“You look beautiful!” Ox proclaimed, kissing her on the cheek.
“Well,” Jackie kissed Kim’s other cheek. “Shall we go then?”
Jackie and Ox linked hands with their girlfriend Kim as they headed out to Death City’s Pride Celebration and Harvar followed behind, ready to electrocute anyone who questioned them.
“T-There’s so many people out there! I don’t know how to deal with this…” Crona said nervously, gazing out the window of Gallows Mansion at the rainbow crowd outside.
“Don’t worry Crona, we’re all going together,” Maka reassured, digging through the bins of pride gear and dishing items out to the others.
Crona gave a small smile, but was still nervous, gazing out the window again.
“Hey Crona,” Patty said, approaching the meister with a tone usually reserved for comforting Kid during a symmetry-induced freak-out. “Do you want to carry one of these?” She held up a tub of small pride flags in a variety of colors.
“I don’t know what they mean…” Crona muttered.
“Well this one is the transgender flag, this one is the demiboy flag, this one is the demigirl flag, this one is the bigender flag, this one is the agender flag-”
Crona looked incredibly overwhelmed. “There’s so many terms, how does anyone process all these?”
“Well,” Patty said. “What do you feel like? A boy? A girl? Somewhere in between?”
“I- I- I don’t know,” Crona stuttered, seemingly short circuiting. “I, I don’t feel like any of it, but I don’t feel like none of it either, but, there’s just, I-”
“You don’t have to have an exact label,” Patty said. “I just thought you might want to have a flag.”
“I, I just don’t know what I am…”
Patty thought for a moment. “Do you like the name Crona?”
“Y-yeah?” The question came from confusion, not uncertainty.
“Do you like ‘he’ and ‘him’?”
“Not really…”
“Do you like ‘she’ and ‘her’?”
“No…” Crona was getting worried again. Neither option sounds good, how am I going to pick-
“How about ‘they’ and ‘them’?”
Crona looked surprised. “Wh-What?”
“They/them,” Patty repeated. “Just means you’re not a boy OR a girl.”
“I like that,” they said. “I tried to read about this sort of stuff before today, but all the demigenders and stuff is just, well, I don’t know how to deal with all of those labels.”
Patty picked a flag out of the box, the stripes yellow, white, purple, and black. “This one is the non-binary flag. ‘Non-binary’ is sorta a big term, not super specific like those other ones. It just means anybody who’s not a boy or a girl, which could include any of these other flags.” She gestured to the flags she’d gone through earlier. “You can use this one if you want. You’d be able to be included but you wouldn’t have to worry about finding a label that describes your gender exactly.”
“Thank you,” Crona took the flag and gave it a little wave, a small smile spreading across their face.
Ragnarok leaned over Crona’s head. “Hey! What about me! How come you get to pick what gender we are?”
“Ragnarok, that’s what gender Crona is, you don’t have to be the same gender.”
The demon sword’s eyes got big. “We don’t?”
“Of course not silly! You can pick your own.”
Ragnarok thought for a while. “Hmm… I don’t know, I’m pretty new to all this ‘gender’ stuff, but I don’t really wanna think about it right now.”
“Then here,” she handed him a flag with many different colored stripes, pinks, purples, blues, yellows, and greens. “This one is the gender questioning flag. That way you get a flag, even if you haven’t decided yet!” Ragnarok waved his flag, his eyes squinting with glee.
Crona looked out the window again. “I don’t know… there’s such a huge crowd, I don’t no if I can deal with th-”
Patty laced her fingers with theirs. “Relax Crona! I’ll deal with it for you!” she said, giving them a huge grin.
Crona blushed. “What’s that flag?” they asked, pointing at the one she was holding.
“Oh, it’s a pansexual flag. It means I could like anybody, not just a boy or girl.”
“So… y-you could, you could want to date a… non-binary person?” Crona asked, pausing to remember the term she’d taught them.
Patty gave a big grin and kissed them on the cheek. “Yep!” She patted Ragnarok on the head. “Now get your asses moving slowpokes, we’ve got a celebration to get to!”
Crona blushed again, letting Patty drag him towards the door. Any time the crowd felt too big, too much, they could feel her squeeze their hand and suddenly they were grounded.
Ragnarok took a particular joy in smacking people with his flag and yelling, “Pride assholes!”
Kid walked through the streets of Death City hand in hand with his girlfriend Liz. She loved going to Pride celebrations and being a very protective ally. Growing up on the streets of New York City, she had met a lot of LGBT+ people who couldn’t get jobs or housing because of their identities, and she hated it. Kid, as a beacon of order and justice, was similarly motivated to do anything and everything to prevent such things from happening. They had lost sight of pretty much everyone else they’d come with instantly and moved through the crowd casually, taking in as much as possible.
“You’re all going to hell!” someone shouted from the sidelines angrily. The two swiveled and saw a woman screaming at a group of teens decked out in rainbow gear.
Kid instantly made his way over and put himself between the kids and the woman. “What was that?”
“You heard…” she trailed off as she realized who was in front of her. Kid’s gold eyes were gleaming. Shadows and cold seeped off of him, curling down at his feet. Despite it being summer in Nevada, the woman’s breath became visible as the temperature around the reaper dropped. The skull that Kid usually wore at his collar was hanging more loosely on top of his t-shirt, which read, ‘This god supports LGBT+’. Usually Kid refused to have any writing on his clothing as it would make them asymmetrical, but Liz and Patty had helped him craft a shirt with the words facing the correct way on one side and then mirrored on the other.
The lady, having read his shirt, seen his eyes, and watched angry shadows form skulls at his feet, ran off in terror. The teens cheered and Liz gave her boyfriend a quick kiss before they continued walking.
They passed some booths with several pride accessories, from flags to buttons to stickers, and Kid slowed his pace. “I don’t think I know that one,” he said, pointing out a white, purple, and gray flag with a black triangle on the side. “Those are the colors of the asexual flag, right? But it looks different.”
“Oh, that’s the demisexual flag.”
“The what?”
“Demisexual, it’s when you only experience sexual attraction to someone you’re close to emotionally. It is part of the asexual spectrum though, that’s why the colors are- Kid?”
Her hand had slipped out of his as Kid had come to a complete stop, staring down at his feet. “Kid, are you okay?” He nodded to her quickly so she didn’t panic but then laced his hands together behind his neck, looking definitely not okay.
Liz pulled her boyfriend aside, away from the movement of the crowd, and the two sat down out of the way. “Hey… take your time.” She wasn’t sure what it was that had set this off (there were a lot of asymmetrical things around them) but she knew him well enough to know he needed a minute.
“I… I didn’t… I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“Demisexuality?”
“Y-Yeah, I, that…”
Realization hit Liz. “That fits you doesn’t it?”
He nodded and swallowed. “I guess I just… being a reaper I didn’t think about all this stuff, it’s human stuff but…”
“But you’re in a relationship with a human.” She gave him a reassuring smile.
Kid gave a small puff of a laugh. “Yeah, and we have, uh… you know .” His face colored.
Liz smirked at him. He couldn’t say ‘have sex’ but he could make her orgasm eight times without any problems. “So you think you might be demisexual then?”
Kid leaned back on his palms. “I really haven’t been attracted to anyone, before you I mean, but I used to assume that was because I wasn’t human. But then, after I’d gotten to know you better I, well, you’re a… smokin’ hot.” Liz giggled as Kid gave her a playful smile. He liked to occasionally drop his more proper way of talking to get a reaction out of her.
“Well, now that you’ve gotten a chance to process, how do you feel?”
“Good actually. I like having a label, you know how I am about organizing things, and I feel… included in a ‘human’ thing which is always nice for me.”
“Well,” Liz stood up and he followed suit. “We should get you some demisexual gear then.”
“But the flag has the triangle off to the side, it’s not-”
“We’ll get two.”
The couple continued walking down the streets of Death City, Kid now sporting the flag in sticker form on his face, with each cheek mirroring the other, and a grin.