Work Text:
Be quiet. Be calm.
You're mostly OK with being quiet, frankly. You like staying in your corner with books, so quiet fits you. Except when you want to share and no one wants to listen.
Calm… It's another matter. When you're lost in your books, it's easy, but the rest of the time you have the urge to move, run, climb, explore. But that's not acceptable. "Be a good girl, Shoko," they say. "Good girls don't ruin their clothes by trying to get into a rusted car!"
Don't ask questions. Don't argue.
You always have questions. How could you not? The world is fascinating and there's so much to learn! But your family dismiss you and the teachers complain about your "attention grabbing tendencies". (You never hear them berate this boy who's sitting two rows away from you and, in your opinion, asks as many questions, but more stupid ones.)
Of course you argue. You can't stand unfairness, can't stand being ignored, can't stand–
You're punished, and made to stay in a room, alone, so you can "calm down", more times than you care to remember.
Be quiet. Don't argue. Be a good girl.
As you grow up you begin to hate being a girl. You're not blind to the fact that boys get punished too, and told to talk less, stay in place… but… less than you.
Be a girl.
Well, how about no when that means being interested only in sewing and cooking and, if you're lucky, literature? You want math, physics, engineering and how the world works, dammit!
Shut up.
You flip the bird to those who already hate you anyway. You get punished more (and only some of it is because it's not polite). (It's boyish to be rude, but girls don't get to defend themselves?)
Stop being stupid.
Except you're not. You're one of the most intelligent persons of everyone you ever met, but people dismiss you because they can't conceive you know anything interesting.
When you demonstrate theorems years above your level, you get accused of cheating.
So you run away.
You run away and an accident later, you're in a whole new world and you have so many questions and you want to modelize it all.
And maybe you already understand enough to realize that some life constants are very much variables here.
So you leave behind you the curves and the long hair and the lowered eyes. You're angular, ready to bite, looking down at people and not at your toes.
"I'm Sho," you say, delighting in ripping in two every expectation placed on you as you do with your name.
You're gonna be so loud they never forget you.