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I can't really think right now and this place
Has too many colors, enough to drive all of us insane.
Are you dead?
Sometimes I think I'm dead,
‘Cause I can feel ghosts and ghouls wrapping my head,
But I don't wanna fall asleep just yet.
“You were always jealous of him… ever since he was born.”
No. This isn’t supposed to be here. Marc’s hand shakes so violently he can barely read the small print as he turns the paper over.
“I should’ve known you would do something like this.”
Mom’s name on the left. Dad’s on the right. This is… it’s not real. It can’t be here. He thought he’d gotten rid of it. His heart is racing; his mind swims. It’s—
His hammer heartbeat fractures every thought. His chest is going to burst.
Wrong.
But it’s there, printed in an unmistakable bold font. But it’s wrong, it’s not him, it’s not his name—
But it’s just a piece of paper; it’s innocent and it has no reason to lie.
“You’ve always wanted to be a… ha… haha… you’ve always wanted to be a real boy so bad. You were jealous of every bit of RoRo.”
It still hurts. It feels like a knife in the dip of his throat, a rock wedged under his adam’s apple. It feels like mom’s belt across his back.
It’s not me, it’s not me.
The paper tells him that it is. It reads—
(He throws down the napkin and runs away from the dining table, abandoning his birthday candles—)
“COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW—”
— in indisputable black ink —
(Mom is racing up the stairs, chasing him to his bedroom—)
“MARCELINE SPECTOR—”
Get a load of this monster,
He doesn’t know how to communicate,
His mind is in a different place,
Will everybody please give him a little bit of space?
“Marc, I’ve always wanted to ask… what are these from?”
Steven finishes unbuttoning his shirt with one hand, and with the other one he traces the faded crescent scars under his chest. “I mean, they seem oddly symmetrical for battle scars.”
From the mirror, Marc blinks back at him. He freezes for a moment, processing something, before his face scrunches into an doubtful squint. “Wait, you didn’t realize— hold on, wait, wait, no, you must— wait… wait. Are you pulling my leg?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What?” Steven frowns back, completely lost.
“Wait… Steven, you do know that we’re… we’re transgender, right?” Marc winces as he remembers that, no, his experiences are not universal. There are plenty of systems where alters identify as a different gender to the host. “Well, I’m trans.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah… those are— they’re top surgery scars. What did you think they were?”
“Santo cielo,” Jake hisses, popping into frame. “I always thought you got those from being tortured.”
Marc shakes his head in disbelief. “Wh— okay, Jake gets a pass because he always rationalizes things with the wildest guesses, but Steven, you’ve seriously never tried to ask anyone or Google what it is?” Before Steven can defend himself, Marc mutters, “You know what, I dunno why I asked. You didn’t even try to Google for a diagnosis on what you thought was a debilitating sleep disorder.”
“Well, I dunno, people told me not to Google my symptoms, because WebMD tells you some scary shit.”
They wait for Marc to speak, but he’s silent, glancing between Steven and Jake and gnawing on his lip so hard they’re afraid he might bite right through it. Eventually he posits the tentative question: “I mean… are you guys… like… okay… with it?”
Steven stares at him, puzzled. “Yeah, I mean, I think so? Why wouldn’t I be?”
Against himself, Marc scoffs. He’s got no patience for books, and yet Steven’s flat is filled to the dusty brim with them. He can barely remember the Spanish he used to speak at home, but Jake still speaks it perfectly. What’s to say that he can’t be trans, with a transphobic alter? How hard would it be to believe that either of them retained Wendy’s bigotry?
(She wasn’t always like that. In fact, she was pretty liberally minded for being an Orthodox Jew. She’d even indulged him in calling him by the nickname he picked for himself, and letting him buy clothes from the boys’ section. But after Randall… she refused to refer to him using anything other than his deadname. She threw out most of his clothes and toys. On the day that she found out he’d started hormone replacement therapy behind her back, she gave him a black eye.)
“Marc, hey, it’s okay,” Jake’s voice reels him back. Marc doesn’t realize he’d been dissociating until Jake pats him on the shoulder; he feels numb from the top of his arm to the tips of his fingers. “I mean, I don’t really know what all this gender stuff means… you can tell me you’re whatever and I wouldn’t care. I’m with you.”
“Yeah, same. I mean… I don’t really remember being anything other than male,” Steven adds.
Marc gives a calloused half-smile. He decides not to elaborate that that’s probably because he’s almost always wiped the slate and deferred to Steven when he was experiencing a particularly bad bout of dysphoria. Steven is supposed to live the life he could never have; Marc is relieved that he doesn’t remember.
No, he’s not jealous.
(He’s not allowed to be. Of course not. Because that would make him bitter, and a hypocrite, and a terrible person—)
“You disgusting human.”
Like a dog trying to shake off a flea, Marc winces and shakes his head. Get out of my head. Just a memory. I don’t have to LISTEN TO YOU—
“Marc, hey, hey, I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about this now,” Steven says, reaching towards the mirror, a symbolic (futile) gesture to comfort (STOP, STOP IT DON’T COME NEAR) Marc.
And then he’s gone. Jake looks around the mirror, bewildered, then turns back to Steven and shrugs uselessly. “I think he wants to be alone.”
“Bollocks, Jake… do you think I said something wrong?”
Get a load of this train wreck,
His hair’s a mess and he
Doesn’t know who he is yet,
But little do we know the stars
Welcome him with open arms.
Marc grips his hands so hard he feels like he’s going to claw the skin right off his knuckles. He wishes there was a way to disappear completely, to annihilate himself further into the headspace, to fall into a catatonic sleep at will.
It’d be selfish to throw Steven or Jake to the front over this. Steven was born to be kept away from all this. And Jake… Jake already had to shoulder the brunt of mom’s physical abuse. If Marc shoves this burden (stupid fucking dysphoria, stupid fucking made-up problems by a pathetic human being who can’t stop wallowing in self-pity) on him as well… Marc wouldn’t want to live with himself.
This is his issue and his alone.
“Marceline…”
His nails break skin. His… his—
“She’ll grow out of it. I should never have let her play her childish make-believe games with RoRo. I let her mind be poisoned… I will fix this.”
Marc wants to stop… being. Wants to fly out of this body, this cage of skin that he’s been fighting to burst out of from as early on as he could remember. Layla always said that she’d love him either way, that it didn’t matter to her what he looked like ten years ago or fifty years from now but it matters to me, it matters because looking at myself hurts and living in myself hurts and even surgery couldn’t fix this, nothing can ever fix this fucked up head of mine—
“Marc?”
His breath hitches. Not now, Steven, please G-d just leave me alone, leave me alone or take me out of this body because I can’t be here— “Steven, hey, what’s up?” he forces out the words, straining, as if each word is a knife he has to pull out of his throat.
Steven is sitting on the edge of the bed, fidgeting with the hems of the blanket. “How do you feel? Do you wanna talk?”
Silence. A shrug. “I dunno, Steven. I… don’t know what there is to say.”
“I’m sorry if I triggered you earlier. I didn’t realize it was a sensitive topic.”
Marc shakes his head and waves his hand vaguely to dismiss the apology. “Yeah, well, you didn’t know. It’s fine. You deserve to know… it’s your body too.” He shrugs and tries to lighten the mood. “Y’know… I always thought me being a tr—y was the reason why Jake acts so macho. Brain’s way of trying to affirm who I am, I guess.”
Steven snorts. “Don’t kid yourself. You’re the only one that grumbles when Layla paints our nails. Jake loves the pampering.”
“I don’t mind it. I just don’t get it.”
“Well, I mean, how you act doesn’t change who you are, right? I mean, I learnt ju-jitsu via Duat osmosis and I’m still just little ol’ me, the gift shop-ist.”
Marc chuckles. “Give yourself more credit, buddy.” He’s still absentmindedly rubbing his hands together, but he’s not digging his nails into himself anymore. Steven can see him mulling over the words. Eventually he settles on this, “Sorry, Steven. Earlier, I… I found my old birth certificate when I was tidying the place. I thought I’d thrown it out. It had my deadname— well, y’know, the birth name that I don’t go by anymore— on it and I just kinda froze. I’ve been on the go for the last, dunno, twenty years. Crisis to crisis. I just kinda buried all this stuff about gender and whatnot down.”
He pauses and looks up from the floor to gauge Steven’s reaction. The Brit seems to be listening quietly, offering sympathetic nods every other sentence to show he’s listening. Marc flounders a bit for his next words, his hand twitching as they fail to decide on the right gestures. “And then you asked me about that stuff earlier and it all just kinda came crashing down.” He sees Steven’s face dropping and quickly adds, “Like I said, not your fault at all. Just came out of left field for me, personally.”
A hand around his shoulder makes Marc tense up instinctively. He’s ready to take a swing at whoever came up to him from behind until he remembers, dammit, who else can it be? “Jake, stop doing that. One of these days I’ll punch you for real.”
“I’d like to see you try, tonto.”
“Oi, quit it,” Steven chides. They both clamp their mouths shut and turn to him. “Okay, so, should we like…” Steven presses his palms together and points them at the mirror. “Let’s go around and introduce our pronouns. We’ve never really done that, have we? We do it at work now, whenever we do onboarding for a new hire.”
“Huh, you mean like… nouns and verbs? Mi corazón, have you lost it?”
“He means like…” Marc grumbles and puts his head in his hands. Then picks himself up and continues, “Like, hi my name is Marc, my pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘him’.”
“I still don’t get it.”
Steven explains with far more patience than Marc, who seems to be cringing at the whole conversation. “It’s the words that you want to be referred to as. So for Marc, I’d say ‘he’s got angry eyebrows’, and for Layla I’d say ‘I like her a lot’. And my pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘him’, but like, ‘they’ is also fine… y’know what I mean?”
“Uh… I’m just here to fuck around and find out,” Jake offers, scratching the corner of his mouth. “Then I’m ‘he’ and ‘him’ too, I guess? Actually, I really don’t give a shit.”
“Okay, good. And at work we have these little badges for what kind of gendered titles— o-or not gendered titles— we prefer—” Steven notices Marc curling in on himself again and quickly redirects, “But we can talk about that later.”
Jake shrugs. “Right, well, I’m outta here. Ring a bell if you need me.” He pats Marc on the back again and walks out of frame.
“Marc, mate, you alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, I am,” he mumbles, taking one hand off his face to curl it into a loose thumbs-up. “I dunno, I just squirm a bit when we talk about this pronouns stuff. Guess I’m just a bit outdated, huh?”
Steven chuckles. “You don’t say. And repressed. I could fill a library with things you don’t wanna talk about.”
“I’m working on it.”
“I know, I know.”
They pause. Steven lifts his shirt up again and touches his chest scars. The outlines are jagged and faded now, but he thinks to himself, huh, they look like little crescent moons. “Well… I quite like them, actually,” he finally settles on saying. “They look quite badass.”
Marc laughs, and Steven smiles. There it is, the laugh he’s always trying to bring out. “Steven?”
“Hm?”
“Thank you… for bearing with this. With me. Even if I don’t understand myself sometimes.”
“You don’t have to thank me for anything, Marc. I just want you to be comfortable with yourself.”
“Thank you anyway. And yeah… I think I will be.”
I’m a little sick right now
(when danger is near)
But I swear
(Steven Grant has no fear),
When I’m ready I will
fly us out of here.