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It starts with a confession — not one of love, but a confession of a secret hidden safely inside the yellowed envelope and a seal adorned with a dried cornflower.
It’s a surprise, really, when Victor hands him the letter. It’s almost evening, the time when the sun is still just barely kissing the horizon goodnight. They’re sitting outside on the first-floor veranda, taking a breather from yet another party the more stir-crazy survivors had decided to throw to stave off their boredom. There’s no music — just the accompanying muffled, drunk wailing of a song in a language Andrew doesn’t recognize.
He takes the letter and looks at Victor quizzically, his eye focusing on the postman’s flushed face. Whether it’s the wine that makes his face appear redder than usual, the maroon sunset glow reflecting off of his skin, or something else entirely, Andrew doesn’t know.
Victor taps his index finger on the envelope. The message is clear as day — ‘read.’
And so Andrew does exactly that; breaking the seal and taking out a single sheet of writing paper. He brings the letter closer to his face and squints at the writing; sufficiently organized yet inornate, marching in orderly lines.
“Dearest Andrew…” he reads out loud, his voice low. When Victor doesn’t indicate that he’d rather have Andrew read the letter silently, the gravekeeper continues. “It should come as no surprise just how greatly I treasure you and your… companionship.”
He tries to suppress a smile at the averment.
“I don’t want to keep secrets from you, my friend; and this secret, although one I hold close to my heart… is the one I believe you have the full right to know. If upon learning it you wish to break off our friendship, I’ll understand—… huh?” he stops reading, turning his gaze to Victor. “What’s this all about…?”
And again, the postman doesn’t say anything. His eyes dart nervously back and forth between Andrew’s face and the letter in his hands. ‘Keep reading.’
He reverts his attention to the letter. “... I could write paragraphs describing my plight and turmoil, or produce an Illiad of abstract and poetic accounts of my body’s existence and how the world perceives it, but I think a simple explanation would work the best here.”
The writing gets messier, the letters bigger and bolder. Victor really wants to get the next point across.
“Upon delivery, the nurse had told my mother that she’d just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth…” Andrew pauses, reading over the sentence again in his mind. “... However, it took me a little over a decade to realize just how wrong she was, and how the words “woman,” “young lady” and “miss” always felt like they were describing someone else, not me.
“And this is what my clumsy confession ultimately comes down to: I was born a woman, but since a long time ago had chosen to live life as a man. … No, this doesn’t quite fit the feeling. I am a man, who, in spite of his feminine biology, will live as a man and would prefer to be buried as one.”
Andrew stops, mulling over the secret Victor had just confided in him. There are still two paragraphs of the letter left, but Andrew just stares at the writing, marinating in thought. An inordinate amount of time passes. Beside him, Victor starts fidgeting anxiously. The postman is about to pull out his notebook and ask his friend if something is wrong, but Andrew speaks before he can even make a move.
“... You can do that?”
Victor blinks and tilts his head, brows slightly furrowed.
“I mean—” Andrew turns to him again, “just… live? Live as something else? The opposite of what you were meant to be?”
His tone is not accusatory or condemning, as Victor feared it might’ve ended up being when he first drafted the letter. Instead, it’s careful and inquisitive.
And in a strange way, it almost sounds hopeful, too.
Victor takes out his notebook and writes, “It’s less about being the opposite of what you were meant to be, and more about defying what people assigned you to be. Or rather, doing what’s in your power to make others see you how you want to be seen.” He passes the notebook to Andrew and waits patiently as he reads the reply.
“I… I don’t know if I—…” The gravekeeper mutters.
It’s too personal of an explanation for him, Victor realizes; too vague and rhetorical. He scoots closer to Andrew, and writes another message in the notebook:
“Living as a woman didn’t feel right. So I tried living as a man. And that — that felt like I finally found a missing piece of a puzzle. … Does this make sense?” Victor’s auburn eyes scan Andrew’s face, searching for a reaction — for any hint of understanding in the placid expression.
And after a short while, Andrew hands him the notebook back. He keeps the letter, though, and skims over the confession again. He breathes in slowly through his nose, exhaling a long sigh. Then, he admits with a shake of his head and a small smile, “... It honestly made sense the first time.”
Victor returns him a smile of his own, relieved.
“You are… still a man, right?” the gravekeeper asks delicately. Victor gives him a nod, and he continues, “So nothing’s changed, right?” After a small pause, another nod, but slower this time. “I don’t fully understand this…” he makes a gesture with his hand, drawing a crude circle with it, “this… way of living; so unabashedly denying God’s design, but… Judge not and you shall not be judged yourself, you know?”
It’s a stream of consciousness more than an actual, coherent sentence — surely the alcohol had played its part in turning Andrew’s own tongue against him. He coughs, tiny red spots appearing on his cheeks. The corners of Victor’s mouth twitch and his lips press into a tight, thin line; taut like a violin string. Strained.
“Wait, shit, I-I didn’t mean to…” Andrew shakes his head and curses under his breath. “I’m not… regarding you negatively after this or anything is what I want to say. It’s just— it’s, it’s new. I never knew people could… do that, is all.”
A short pause. Victor’s pen sails over the notebook page again, ink escaping into a clean pattern and reaching its black roots across the paper. “Don’t worry, I understand. … It’s getting cold now. Shall we go back inside?”
Not a defeat at all, but still a tactical retreat. Talking about himself is already uncomfortable enough, and having to take Andrew’s hands and walk him through the most intimate part of his life feels like a task for another day; not when they’re half-drunk with sugars and wines.
Andrew seems content with that decision. “Y-yes. Yes, let’s go.”
He tucks all of the thoughts and questions about this new concept — of living as another gender — away, and prepares for it to become another simple fact about Victor; just like how his hair is honey blonde, or his favorite color is pink. A state of reality that surrounds him, nothing more than that.
…
But the thought doesn’t leave his head. Like a moth to a flame, his mind wanders back to it whenever he’s left static and alone for too long. It sticks to the hollowness in his chest, to the confusing, disorienting sensation of something being wrong; that feeling of a missing puzzle piece that Victor told him of. It’s like now that it’s been pointed out, he cannot stop searching for it everywhere and seeing clues to its whereabouts in things and people he had previously never paid attention to.
It hides in the way Miss Gilman laughs and waves her hand dismissively when she speaks about her “boy past,” and how Miss Nair nods tersely to her words, an incredibly easy-to-miss sign of empathetic agreement.
(Had it been days earlier, he would’ve simply assumed she was speaking of her male romantic conquests when she mentioned “boy past.” But now, he feels like he can gauge the real meaning behind her words, and why she treats femininity as a gift of freedom that was bestowed upon her, rather than something she was promised when she was born.)
It crawls and slithers between his closest friends when they speak of the Mechanic, about how “they’re probably at the workshop messing with their robot again,” — and how no one even thinks about asking who else has joined Tracy’s tinkering.
(Had it been weeks earlier, he would’ve simply assumed Tracy wasn’t working alone; “they” implied a company, several people present at the scene. But now, he feels like he owes the Mechanic an apology for all of the previous “young lady”s and “Miss Reznik”s he addressed them with.)
But most glaringly, though, it dances and ululates when Emma — his friend Emma, who is so very careful around men like him, — invites him for a tea party with the other female survivors and jokes about it being “a girls’ gathering.” When she says that a little gossip "between us girls” never hurt anybody. It’s all said in jest, without a trace of malice in her cheery voice, and Andrew knows that. He knows. Yet… something in him stirs. That ‘it,’ nestled inside his ribcage, tapping a rhythmical tune against his bones, supine and open to intrusion. He has no words to describe this feeling, but its cause quickly dawns upon him.
Or no, not quickly. It took him decades to finally notice it, after all.
You see, Andrew has never quite felt like a man. Sure, he’s felt like a master of the house, a provider, and a protector. However, those words were never synonymous with his idea of “a man,” no matter how much the Bible and people around him tried to meld them together. But his mother said he was her “precious boy,” M.S. had respectfully called him a “gentleman,” and the survivors had referred to him as “the big guy with the shovel” when he first arrived at the manor. So, surely, a man is what he must be.
… But must he? Must they, really?
The discomfort they’ve experienced when society has deemed them a boy, and then a man, was buried so deep inside the shallow grave of their consciousness they no longer remembered there was something to bury to begin with. He was never allowed to dig up and confront it head-on, not in the conditions he lived in; knowing little tenderness in life, they couldn’t afford to dream about acting as anything other than a man. Even when his mother’s tattered hand-me-downs embraced and held his figure with safety and comfort, draping off their skinny shoulders like a nature morte composition.
Being regarded as a white-haired, cadaverine monster was already more than enough to deal with. He stopped thinking about wanting to rejoin and assimilate into a society that isolated him a long time ago, and yet, he found himself still trying to appease it by acting out the role he was given at birth. To even attempt to reconcile with and explore their gender identity on top of everything felt like a death sentence.
But there’s no society to scrutinize them anymore. Within the walls of the manor, cut off from the outside world, every resident was an outcast one way or the other. And one of those outcasts just so happens to hold an answer to his question.
It is how, months later, he finds himself in the greenhouse with Victor at the break of dawn, planting pink carnations in the dark soil. The greenhouse offers almost no protection against the sun, making it difficult for Andrew to work there during the day when the shimmering lights glint off of the clear glass panels, blinding him. So he goes there early in the morning, and Victor tags along to help.
They pat the dirt down two more times, the methodology of the action recorded in their hands. Then they draw back and sit on their heels properly. Behind them, they hear Victor grunt in exertion as he picks something up from the ground. After waiting a moment, Andrew gathers all of the courage in their heart and turns around, calling out quietly:
“Victor?” They watch the postman carry a large pot of maidenhair fern to the gardening table.
“Mm-hmm? What’s up?” he replies, setting the pot down with a dull clang.
Victor hasn’t spoken to anyone in a while; his voice feels rusty and dry, scratching against his throat like sandpaper. He has, however, gotten more comfortable with letting Andrew hear him talk recently. He only did so when they were alone and away from the prying eyes of the other manor residents, but still, it made Andrew feel special; like they were in on a secret no one else was allowed to know.
And a secret is exactly what it was. When Victor strained his vocal cords and spoke out loud, his voice was a little more high-pitched than what one would expect from a young man like him. Feminine. Andrew didn’t want to use that word, but Victor himself had acknowledged it and confirmed that that was one of the reasons he preferred to stay mum, ridiculous as it may be.
“... Is it okay if I ask you something personal?” they question, voice hardly above a whisper. They notice the postman visibly tense up at the word ‘personal’ and add, “It’s nothing too personal, I suppose, I just… need a little help understanding something.”
Victor blinks. “Oh! Of course! I’m… not sure if I’ll be able to give you a satisfying answer, b-but I’ll try my best!” He sits down on the ground next to Andrew, crossing his legs and making a come-hither motion with his hand, “Shoot.”
Andrew scratches the back of his neck, grimacing when he feels small chunks of dirt stuck to his gloves touch his skin. “How did you…” they begin sheepishly, eyes cast downward at the painted flowerbeds before them. “How did you know you were not a woman?”
“... How I knew, huh…?” he repeats, following Andrew’s gaze. “It’s… It was more of a growing feeling than— than a fact of reality that I just one day become aware of, I guess.”
“Can you… describe it?”
Victor considers. “Hmm… I can only give you a clumsy metaphor for a description. Would that be okay?”
Andrew nods, their eyes still glued to the bed of freshly-planted petunias.
“Alright,” Victor begins. He lowers his voice and props his chin on his hands. “Imagine you’ve been given an exquisite pair of clothes. But to you, it doesn’t matter what material it’s made of, or how beautiful it looks, because it’s too… tight, for your frame. Too constricting. You feel like you’re suffocating every time you have to wear it, yet everyone keeps telling you how nice it looks on you and how well it fits. But you know that’s not true... You know something went wrong during the production process, which is why you can never take a whole breath with your chest, and your joints ache and lock up with each movement,” he holds a short pause, “and… the worst part? You have to wear those clothes for the rest of your life.”
He closes his eyes as if imagining the scenario he’s described in vivid detail. “That’s what being a woman was like to me: suffocating and uncomfortable. I couldn’t understand why all the other girls around me seemed so—… so okay with it, and I couldn’t understand how I was different… Until I tried wearing something else,” he chuckles, “literally, in this case.
“I—... I was thirteen when I cut my hair and bought a nicer pair of trousers from a picker. They were ragged and dirty, and I had to take to scissors to cut them shorter to match my height at the time, but… When I wore them… When the old ladies on the streets called me ‘young man’ ...” he exhales and opens his eyes — and they shine, brilliantly gold under the light of the rising sun. “I swear, I felt like I was able to breathe for the first time in my life.”
Silence reigns for a few, long seconds before Andrew nods again, clasping their hands together and resting them atop their thighs. Their expression is unreadable, eyes shifting minutely as they search for something inside their mind.
“Is there… any reason in particular… you’re asking me this?” Victor’s voice breaks the silence, pulling the gravekeeper back into the present. It’s hushed, tender, and eminently full of understanding.
He already knows.
Andrew sucks in a steadying breath. Then, with a whisper, they speak into reality the thought that’s been plaguing them all this time:
“... I think my clothes are too tight for me.”
Victor stares at them for a moment, then nods slowly, his eyes creasing at the edges as he smiles.
“Maybe… you could try wearing something else?”
“Is— isn’t too late for me? To be figuring this stuff out, and to—…” they trail off, forcing themselves to face the postman, their lip quivering with uncertainty.
Victor shakes his head no. “Oh, it’s never too late! And you know what?” He takes Andrew’s gloved hands in his, laying one hand atop the other, and leans in closer to their face. “Miss Violetta sometimes sews outfits for other hunters and survivors… You could— we could ask her to make you something more fitting.”
Victor’s touch is sweet and soft. It reminds Andrew of the way their mother used to hold them close and read them verses from the Bible, and fairytales from distant lands. Under the comforting warmth of Victor’s hands, they think of Emma’s tea parties again, and how beautiful a tall, slender woman like Vera looked in her pearlescent day dress.
It doesn’t take much to convince them to try it out.
…
When they come to Violetta’s makeshift atelier a few days later, it is Victor who hands her the letter with a custom sewing request. Neither of them could really decide on the details of the dress they wanted to see, the only pointer given to the manor seamstress being “a modest gown.” The moment the Soul Weaver tears the envelope open and reads the letter, Andrew half-expects her to refuse, or to bombard them with questions about why a man like him would want to wear a dress, or worse - laugh. However, when she sets the letter down on the table and approaches them—
“Lilac would look so wonderful on you…”
—is all she says before she scutters off into the corner of the room and begins rummaging through the chests filled with colorful fabrics. They don’t spend much time in Violetta’s boudoir: she simply takes their measurements and sends them off with the promise of the dress being done within a week.
She keeps her word, because six days later Andrew opens the door to his bedroom to the sunny postman holding a gift-wrapped package. They don’t need to ask him what’s inside to know. Their hands shake with both excitement and apprehension as they carefully pull out the silk, lilac-colored day dress, with a high neckline and fitted sleeves puffed at the shoulders. They hold it against their body to gauge its fit and how it would look on them, admiring the cream-colored lining and light purple trimmings.
Andrew’s never worn such garments, so it takes them some time to put the dress on properly, having to ask Victor to help them cinch the bodice. The postman’s fingers glide across their back with trained precision, fastening the brass hooks and tying the decorative ribbons into tight bows. Once they’ve gotten fully dressed, they smooth out the wrinkles on the skirt and look in the mirror — and their heart, which was already racing with anticipation, skips a beat. All this time, they’ve been breaking mirrors in vain, scowling at the misery-clad stranger that stared back at them, but now — a mirror shall break them no more.
Andrew meets the mirror reflection’s eyes through the tussled fall of blond bangs, and the person, — the woman, — that looks back at her finally feels like herself. And although she is not used to the intricacy, to the sheer number of buttons and frills, and how the boning digs into her skin, for the first time in her life, just like Victor described, she feels like she can finally breathe.
Victor joins her reflection a few moments later, offering Andrew his right arm with a flourish; like a gentleman would when escorting a lady outside. She accepts, tucking one hand under his bicep and resting the other on his forearm.
“How do you feel?” Victor asks her, his voice all but dripping with awe and affection.
Andrew smiles. It’s a storm of emotions, a blooming garden in her chest after several decades of drought and desolation, all but condensed in a single word:
“Lovely.”