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Marinette flops backward on the bed. “You’re so lucky,” she says. “You get to have this. I have to wait.”
“That’s how time works,” Luka jokes. “Could you help me out? You’ve always been good with needles.”
“Kind of have to be to sew,” Marinette jokes. “But, um. I’m not sure I’m qualified.”
“The doctor said I could ask someone else to help me out. I think he was probably talking about my mom or something, but I would not trust her to inject something into my body. She’d probably replace it with drugs or something.”
Marinette laughs. “I don’t think she’d do that to you. But…you really want me to do it?”
He shrugs. “You’re one of the first people that’s truly understood me. I mean, maybe it’s because we’re similar.”
“It sucks that you have to use a syringe, though,” she remarks.
“It’s not safe to take it orally,” Luka explains, “and the gel’s not as common. I’m not afraid of needles, I just have trouble stabbing it in myself.”
“Okay. What do I need to do?” she asks, taking the syringe from his hand.
“Here, I’ll show you,” he says, guiding her hands towards a spot. “Here. This is where you should inject it.”
“Okay,” she says. She opens the cabinet under the sink and grabs some hydrogen peroxide, wetting some toilet paper on it and wiping around the spot. Opening up the syringe, she takes a deep breath, and pokes the needle in, following that up by plunging the contents of the syringe in. “There you go.”
Luka smiles. “Thanks, Marinette.”
It takes a few months for everything to start, she knows. The changes are slow, but Luka seems more settled as time goes forward. She loves this newfound physical confidence in him; he’s always carried a sense of self-assurance, but that wasn’t always visible at first glance.
Now it is.
It’s hard to be confident about appearance when you’re trans. Marinette got into fashion because of that — she wanted to make clothing that was comfortable for her so she could express confidence about her appearance. There are still bad days, but they’re infrequent, especially since she’s started voice training to make sure her voice stays high. It’s mostly her voice that makes her dysphoric. She’s inherited her mother’s shortness and not her father’s height, thank goodness. She’s still taller than her mother, but her mother’s a short woman. Marinette is within reasonable height of being a woman, and she doesn’t think she’ll grow much more than she has, but then again…
Sixteen seems so far away. Marinette understands the safety cautions, but she wishes things were different. She’s just glad that her parents are accepting. Her life would be so much worse if they didn’t.
She just doesn’t want to feel like she’s fallen behind. She’s younger, so there’s always a little bit of that, but Luka’s never made her feel like she was falling behind. It’s hard not to notice as physical changes happen, though.
Transition isn’t a race, she tells herself. There’s no reason to be jealous. Everyone makes progress at their own rate.
Progress.
She hates having to wait for it.
"Marinette, you’re okay, right?" Luka asks. His voice cracks mid-sentence.
"I am. Was that…a voice crack?" Marinette asks.
"Oh my God, it was," Luka says.
She wraps him up in a hug. "I'm so happy for you."
She’ll get there at her own pace.
Marinette starts a countdown of the days until her sixteenth birthday. She had seen something similar in Luka’s room before that incident with Anarka and Jagged ruined the party.
It’s still a long way off. She just has to survive until then. It’s something to look forward to.
"Have you ever felt hopeless?" she asks while they hang out on a city bench, eating fro-yo together. "Like you were never going to live the life you want."
"Sometimes," Luka admits. His voice has gotten deeper. It’s very attractive. "But…I don’t know. It feels more like a concrete reality. It never really did before. If you’re doubting that you’ll get there…I think you will. You’ve had support every step of the way. It’s nice to…feel myself changing. It reminds me of why I went through all this trouble of coming out in the first place. It reminds me of the person that I want to be."
Marinette throws her head back. "I want to see it. I want to know what it’s like to be that happy."
The closest she’s come to it is when she’s with Luka. But romance euphoria isn’t the same as gender euphoria. Being Marinette used to give her a thrill of joy every time someone called her that; now she’s settled further into herself, and she doesn’t get as much joy out of it anymore because it’s normalized in her head.
"You will," he reassures. "You’ll get it. It’s so nice."
"It feels like you’re going to leave me behind," she murmurs, "since you’re further ahead in all this."
He shakes his head. "Marinette. Look at me."
She looks.
"I won’t leave you behind, no matter how far I get in my transition. I love you. We might have connected at first over being trans, but that isn’t everything when it comes to you. You’re more than just your gender to me," he says. "You know that because you don’t feel that way about me."
He’s right in that there are many reasons Marinette loves Luka; his understanding of why she is just happens to be one of them.
She can wait, but patience is difficult. It isn’t a virtue she possesses; she tends towards the impulsive over anything else.
"I don’t," she agrees. "I’m trying to be patient. It’s really hard. It feels so close now that you’re there. But it’s further away than I think it is."
"One day at a time. We all get older at the same rate, after all," Luka says. "You’ll make it. I believe in you."
She thinks, maybe, she can believe in herself too.