Archive of Our Own ^beta

Calvin lay on his stomach in the middle of the bed, toes hooked over the edge, the cotton of his too-big pyjama pants twisted around his ankles. The cheap desk lamp on his nightstand washed everything in a pool of yellow, leaving the corners of the bedroom thick and shadowy. Beyond the blinds, the city made its soft, busy noise—horns far off, a siren cutting briefly through, the hum of traffic never quite gone.

On the wall opposite the bed, a Knicks poster slouched slightly in its frame. Next to it hung the toy sword Jack had given him “for a young knight,” chrome plastic catching the lamplight. Below, a shelf sagged under things that actually felt like his: a library book about archery, worn at the edges; a tin of coloured pencils; two small horse figurines half-hidden behind a stack of comic books like they had snuck in where they did not belong.

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks with his eyes as if they were lines on a map. His mind kept circling back to the same place: Mia from his class, the way her braids swung when she ran at recess, how she laughed with her whole chest, shoulders and all. When she had sat next to him in science last week, and their elbows had bumped, his stomach had done something weird—light, nervy, like it wanted to float away.

He liked that feeling.

He liked her.

That part made sense.

He thought about the word he had heard on TV, tossed around by older kids at school, half-whispered, half-daring: gay. The way they said it, like it was a stamp someone could put on you. A label that stuck.

Gay means boys who like boys. He repeated it to himself, testing it. I like girls. So I’m not gay. That’s simple.

Then why do I feel… wrong?

Not wrong about Mia. Wrong about… him. His skin, his voice, the way people said his name and always meant something he couldn’t quite fit into.

He let the question float up: Maybe I’m gay anyway?

He tried to imagine it properly. Closing his eyes, he pictured one of the boys in his class—Tom, who told the loudest jokes, who always got picked first for soccer. He forced the thought of leaning in and kissing him, mouths touching.

Nothing. No butterflies, no warmth. Just a flat, embarrassed blank, like pretending to like a TV show everyone else was obsessed with.

Then, without really deciding to, he changed the picture. He imagined himself… different. Softer around the edges. Hair brushing his cheeks instead of hanging short and stubborn over his forehead. A t-shirt that fit differently on his chest. A body he did not have words for yet, only a feeling.

He pictured that version of himself standing next to Mia, their hands laced together. Two girls, shoulder to shoulder, heads tipped together as they laughed at something only they knew.

Warmth hit him like stepping into sunlight from a cold hallway—sudden, full, sinking all the way down into his stomach. His chest loosened. His whole body, for a second, felt like it slid into place, like a puzzle piece finally dropped where it belonged.

His eyes flew open.

He sat up quickly, heart thudding, fingers tangled in the duvet.

What was that?

He swallowed, throat tight. The lamp hummed faintly. From down the hallway came the murmur of voices—Eleanor on the phone, her tone clipped and precise; Jack laughing at something on TV. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. His world.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum as if he could calm his heart back into its usual rhythm.

“I like girls,” he whispered, barely audible over the city outside. “So I’m not gay.”

The sentence felt like a school worksheet answer. Correct on paper. Wrong in his bones.

He looked over at his desk. His name was written across a notebook in neat marker: CALVIN BISHOP. All capital letters, as if shouting.

“Calvin,” he said aloud, testing the shape of it. It felt heavy in his mouth, like marbles. Adult, almost. Serious. Not… him. Not the him from that warm, secret picture.

He said it again, softer. “Calvin.”

Nothing shifted. Nothing clicked.

He let his gaze wander across the room, catching on a book lying half-opened on the floor. It was one of Eleanor’s, left behind in here when she’d been organizing his shelves last week. A character named Katie. Or was it Kate? He’d seen the name, liked the way it curled across the page.

“Kate,” he tried, so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d actually spoken. The sound slipped out anyway.

That felt different. Like a door opening a crack.

He tried again, a whisper to the empty room. “Katie.”

A ripple went through him, sharp and sweet. It was small—just a word, just three or four letters—but his stomach swooped, and his shoulders relaxed a fraction.

He slid off the bed and crossed the room barefoot, the floor cool under his toes. At the bottom of his dresser drawer, under folded t-shirts and socks, lay something he wasn’t supposed to have: one of Eleanor’s scarves. She had left it on the back of a chair weeks ago; he had taken it to his room and then never given it back. It was silky, patterned with pale blue and gold, smelling faintly of her perfume.

He lifted it out as if it might shatter.

This is stupid, he told himself. It’s just fabric. It doesn’t mean anything.

But his hands were shaking.

He looped the scarf around his shoulders, the way he’d seen Eleanor do when she got cold in the office. The fabric slid over the cotton of his pajamas, cool and weightless. He crossed over to the TV, dark and glossy on the dresser. In the screen’s reflection, a blurred version of himself stared back—lamp glow behind, city glimmering in little broken lines across the glass.

He adjusted the scarf, letting it drape down his front like the top of a dress. Tilted his head. Tucked his hair behind his ear, copying how Mia did it during class.

For a second, the wrongness inside him thinned. The reflection wasn’t exactly what he wanted—his jaw still too sharp, his hair still too short, his shoulders still too square—but it was closer. Closer than anything he’d seen in the mirror before.

“Hi,” he whispered to that version of himself, barely mouthing the words. “I’m…”

His tongue stumbled.

Not Calvin.

His chest tightened, and the word he’d been circling all night rose up, insistent, pushing past his fear.

“I’m Kate,” he breathed.

The room did not explode. No alarms went off. The city kept humming. From the living room came the canned laughter of the sitcom Jack was watching.

But something inside clicked. A soft, internal snap, like a bone sliding back into its socket.

It’s me. That’s me.

The truth rushed in behind it, bigger than the room, bigger than the soft pool of lamplight.

I don’t want to date a boy, he thought, the words suddenly crystal-clear. I want to be a girl.

The thought landed so sharply he gasped, fingers tightening on the scarf. It was terrifying in its certainty. It did not feel like a phase, or a game, or a costume. It felt like the answer to a question he had not known he was asking.

His eyes burned.

What if they get mad?

What if Eleanor says it’s wrong? What if Jack laughs? What if everyone at school—

The weight of the possibilities pressed down on him all at once, heavy and suffocating. His breath hitched.

He tore the scarf from his shoulders and crumpled it in his fists, heart racing like he’d been caught doing something forbidden. For a moment he just stood there in the narrow space between bed and dresser, chest heaving, the reflected boy-with-a-scarf version of himself now just a boy in too-big pajamas again.

He shoved the scarf back into the drawer, burying it under t-shirts until the silk vanished from sight. He slammed the drawer shut a little too hard, flinched at the sound, and glanced toward the door. No footsteps. No one had heard.

His hands were still shaking.

He turned off the lamp. The room fell into dimness, lit only by the smear of city light seeping through the blinds. He climbed back onto the bed, pulling the duvet up to his chin, lying on his side facing the window.

The ceiling was only a darker patch above him now, but he stared at it anyway, eyes wide. Every time he blinked, the reflection came back: the scarf, the name, that moment of rightness.

I’m Kate.

No. Stop it. Don’t think that. It’s too big.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but the thought kept looping, a quiet chant under the roar of his heartbeat.

I don’t want to date a boy. I want to be a girl.

His body lay motionless under the covers, but his mind ran in circles—past Mia’s braids and Eleanor’s perfume and Jack’s easy laugh, past the wedding and the move and the new school, all the way back to that single word that felt like a lifeline and a cliff edge at once.

Kate.

He did not sleep for a long time.

The school library always felt a little too big for Calvin, like a grown-up coat he had been told to wear. The ceilings were high, the shelves taller than any ten-year-old had a right to be, the fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead. At lunchtime it was almost empty: a couple of kids trading Pokémon cards at a back table, the student librarian shelving books in the fiction section, the soft, rhythmic whirr of the old desktop computers along the far wall.

Calvin sat at one of those computers, hunched forward, backpack at his feet. His sandwich was still untouched in its plastic bag, sweating a little in the warmth. The monitor’s bulky frame made the whole thing feel ancient and important, like something from a movie about hackers, except all he was supposed to be doing was looking up sources for a social studies assignment.

He clicked the browser icon with a sweaty hand. The school homepage loaded slowly, blocks of blue and white, the district logo staring blandly back at him.

His heart was already beating faster than it should for computer time.

Just type the thing, he told himself. Then you’ll know.

He clicked in the tiny search bar and stared at the blinking cursor. It seemed to mock him: Well?

His fingers hovered above the keyboard. He started safe.

“boys who like girls,” he typed.

Dozens of results appeared—dating advice, articles about “puppy love,” a quiz that asked if he had a crush. He scrolled quickly, face heating. Nothing about the wrongness, the feeling like his whole life was someone else’s hand-me-down sweater.

He backspaced the whole thing, watching the letters vanish.

He thought of last night, of the scarf, of the way “Kate” had felt in his mouth. A fizz of panic shivered under his skin.

He checked over his shoulder. The library aide was at the main desk, facing away. The nearest kids were whispering over their cards, not paying attention.

He turned back to the screen.

His fingers moved almost on their own.

“boy wants to be girl.”

He hit Enter before he could lose courage.

The results took a second to load. He had just enough time to imagine the principal storming in, or the computer exploding, or a huge red “INAPPROPRIATE SEARCH” warning flashing across the screen.

Instead, a list of links appeared. Some were question sites with titles that started, “I am a boy but feel like a girl…” Others were longer articles with words he didn’t know. “Gender identity.” “Gender dysphoria.” “Transgender teens.”

Transgender.

The word snagged his eye. It was new. He sounded it out silently. Trans-gen-der.

He clicked on an article from what looked like a medical website, lots of text and tiny font. At the top, in bold, was a sentence about people whose gender identity didn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth.

Assigned at birth.

He read more slowly, eyes dragging over every line.

Some people are assigned male at birth but know themselves to be girls. Some people are assigned female at birth but know themselves to be boys. The word transgender describes…

He stopped there, staring at the screen so hard his forehead hurt.

Assigned male at birth. That was what the nurse had probably written down when he’d been born, what it said on his birth certificate, what every form at school said. M. Boy. Male.

Know themselves to be girls.

His stomach swooped. The library around him seemed to fuzz out for a second, the noise of chairs scraping and whispers dimming under the thrum of his own heartbeat.

That’s me, he thought, and the thought came with the same frightening clarity as the one from his bedroom.

His hands hovered over the mouse and keyboard, suddenly clammy. A little voice in the back of his mind hissed: You shouldn’t be reading this. You shouldn’t be here. If someone sees—

He forced himself to breathe. In. Out. The library still smelled like dust and printer ink and the faint, comforting scent of old paper. Nothing catastrophic had happened.

He scrolled.

The article talked about kids knowing from a young age, about feeling uncomfortable when people used certain names or pronouns, about liking different clothes. It mentioned stuff that made his throat tight: “feeling like you’re pretending when you’re called ‘he’ or ‘she’ in a way that doesn’t fit,” “imagining a future where your body looks different,” “finding relief when you’re seen as the gender you are inside.”

Relief.

He thought about the scarf and the mirror and the way the room had felt for one whole second like it shrank down to just him and that other version of himself. The version that made sense.

He was leaning so close to the screen now that his nose was almost touching it.

Transgender girl, he read. A girl who was assigned male at birth.

He wasn’t sure when the word stopped being just a word and started sticking to him. It slid into place in his head with an awful, wonderful inevitability.

Transgender girl.

Me.

He swallowed, hard. His eyes stung, but he blinked quickly, furious at the idea of crying in the library. Crying would get attention. Attention would get questions. Questions might mean someone looking at the screen.

Footsteps approached. He jolted, scrambling to move the mouse. He clicked another tab at random, some homework page about state capitals, just as a shadow fell across his shoulder.

“You okay over here, Calvin?” Ms. Reed, the librarian, asked, leaning slightly on the back of the chair in front of him. She was young, with a nose ring and chunky glasses, always smelling like peppermint tea.

He forced his shoulders to relax, tried to make his voice normal. “Yeah. Just… looking up stuff for class.”

She glanced at the screen: list of state capitals, a little map of the U.S. “Looks thrilling,” she said dryly. “Don’t have too much fun.”

He managed a weak smile. “I’ll try.”

She moved on, cart squeaking faintly as she pushed it down the aisle. He waited until the sound faded before flipping back to the other tab.

The article was still there, patient.

He didn’t read every word this time. He skimmed, catching phrases: “social transition,” “changing your name,” “pronouns,” “supportive parents,” “doctors who can help with puberty blockers when the time is right.” The medical terms blurred together, but the idea cut clear through.

There are people like me. Adults who have seen kids like me before. There are words for this. There are doctors for this. There is a way.

A knot he hadn’t known he was carrying loosened just a little.

He reached for his notebook, the one with “CALVIN BISHOP” on the front. His hand hesitated over the cover. Then he opened it to a blank page in the middle, heart banging in his ears.

Very carefully, in small letters near the top, he wrote:

transgender

The word looked foreign in his handwriting, like it belonged to someone older. He underlined it twice, then once more for good measure.

On the line below, he wrote:

assigned male at birth = me?

He stared at the question mark. It felt important to leave it there, as if not writing it meant the world would shift too fast and he would fall off.

Underneath, slower this time, he wrote another word.

Kate?

He sat back a little, the plastic library chair creaking. Just looking at the page made his chest feel tight and weird and strangely light.

Kate Bishop, he thought. He imagined the name on a school roster, on a birthday invitation, on a future something he couldn’t yet picture—a jersey, a trophy, a hero’s file. The idea sent a little spark of hope through him, quick and electric.

Someone coughed nearby; the boys with the cards had gotten louder. He snapped the notebook shut, fingers lingering for a second on the soft cardboard cover.

The bell rang, shrill and abrupt. Chairs scraped back, conversations burst into full volume as kids grabbed bags and headed for the door. The spell broke.

Calvin closed the browser window with a few quick clicks, watching as the words disappeared, replaced by the bland school homepage again. His heart was still racing, but the fear had changed shape; it wasn’t just panic now. It was something sharper, more focused, like the feeling before stepping off a high diving board.

He shoved the notebook into his backpack, making sure it slid all the way down, hidden between textbooks. He wrapped his fingers around the strap like it was an anchor.

As he stood up, he caught a glimpse of himself in the darkened reflection of a nearby window: small, shoulders slightly hunched, hair sticking up in the back. A boy, if you didn’t know any different.

He looked away before the image could sink its hooks too deep.

He joined the slow-moving line of students heading toward the hallway, the noise of the school folding around him. Somewhere under the roar—locker doors, shouted jokes, the squeak of sneakers on tile—those new words repeated themselves, steady as footsteps.

Transgender girl.

Kate.

He didn’t say them out loud. Not yet.

But as he walked back to class, backpack heavy on his shoulders, the knowledge sat in his chest like a secret light: small, fragile, impossible to put back.

The bathroom was the only room in the apartment with a lock.

Calvin closed the door behind him and turned the small metal latch with a soft click that sounded louder than he’d expected. For a second he just stood there, hand still on the lock, listening.

Out in the hallway: the television low in the living room, a faint murmur of dialogue and Jack’s occasional laugh. The clink of glass from the kitchen where Eleanor was probably rinsing out her wineglass or stacking dishes. The apartment’s usual evening sounds, familiar and distant.

In here: the hum of the overhead fan, the drip of the tap that never quite shut off all the way, the faint echo of his own breathing.

He should turn on the shower. That was what he’d said he was doing—“I’m gonna take a shower”—when he’d slipped past the couch and into the bathroom with his pyjamas folded over one arm. He should make it sound like that was true.

Instead, he stepped up to the sink and stared at the mirror.

The fluorescent light overhead flattened everything: his skin a little sallow, the shadow under his eyes darker than it was in daylight. His hair—too short, sticking up in the back where he’d slept on it wrong—curled stubbornly away from his forehead.

The person looking back at him was the one everyone saw when they said his name, when they called roll in class, when teachers said “Young man,” when Eleanor said “Calvin, come here a moment.”

A boy, if you didn’t know any different.

His stomach flipped.

He thought about the article he’d read in the library, the unfamiliar words that had settled in his chest like stones: gender identity, assigned male at birth, transgender girl. Words that had felt too big for his small body and yet somehow made perfect, terrifying sense.

Transgender girl. A girl who was assigned male at birth.

Kate.

The name floated up again, uninvited and unstoppable.

He turned on the tap, letting the water rush loudly into the sink as if he could drown out his own thoughts. He cupped his hands under the stream—too hot, then cooler—and splashed his face, more for something to do than because he needed it. Droplets clung to his eyelashes. He blinked them away and looked up again.

Same face. Same wrongness, sharp and sour under his ribs.

He reached for the comb on the counter, the cheap black plastic one Jack used. For a moment he hesitated; it felt like stealing even though it was just a comb. Then he dragged it through his hair, teeth scraping his scalp, trying to coax the short strands forward, over his forehead.

It didn’t do much. His hair was still just… short. But if he squinted, if he tilted his head, there was a hint of something different. Softer lines. Not so much “messy boy hair,” more like—if you imagined hard enough—a fringe growing out wrong between haircuts.

He put the comb down and used his fingers instead, smoothing, tugging, pressing the hair into place. He’d watched girls in his class do it absentmindedly, tucking pieces behind their ears, collecting loose strands. The motions felt borrowed, like wearing someone else’s shoes, but also weirdly natural, like a dance step his body already knew.

He leaned closer to the mirror until his nose was inches from the glass.

“Kate,” he mouthed silently, lips forming the syllable without sound.

The reflection’s mouth moved with him. For a heartbeat, it was like seeing a stranger who looked exactly like him but wasn’t. The ghost of the girl from the library article, from his bedroom the night before.

His heart thudded.

He swallowed and tried again, this time letting the word out on a breath of air.

“Kate.”

The sound barely existed—more exhale than voice—but hearing it in the tile-lined space made something inside his chest twist. It was wrong and right at the same time. Wrong because no one had ever called him that; right because it felt like something loosening that had been knotted for years.

He straightened his shoulders, the way Jack told him to when practising fencing stances, and looked himself directly in the eyes.

“Hi,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I’m Kate Bishop.”

The sentence dropped into the quiet like a pebble into deep water. Ripples spread out from it in his mind, touching everything—school and birthdays and future summers, the way people would look at him, the way he would look at himself.

He felt suddenly enormous and very small all at once. The bathroom seemed to tilt.

Kate. I’m Kate. That’s me, that’s—

His chest tightened so abruptly he had to grab the edge of the sink. It felt like his ribs were both expanding and squeezing shut, like he couldn’t get enough air and yet there was too much of it at the same time.

He didn’t know if the feeling was relief or fear.

Maybe both.

He said it again, because part of him was terrified that if he stopped, the word would vanish and he’d go back to not knowing.

“I’m Kate,” he said, a little louder. His voice cracked on the last consonant, high and thin. He winced.

The mirror didn’t flinch.

For a flicker of a moment, the person in the glass didn’t look like a boy playing dress-up in his own head. The combed-forward hair, the loosened posture, the too-big pyjama top hanging differently under the harsh light—it all blurred into an almost, a maybe. A girl not quite grown, not yet who she would be, but on the way.

He felt his eyes prickle.

There was a knock at the door.

He jumped like he’d been shot, the image in the mirror jolting with him.

“Calvin?” Eleanor’s voice, cool and efficient, seeped through the wood. “You’ve been in there a while. Are you actually showering or just hiding from your homework?”

Panic crashed over him, hot and immediate.

He glanced wildly around the bathroom as if there were evidence scattered everywhere—words on the walls, the name he’d just spoken written across the mirror in fog. But there was nothing. Just his flushed face and his ridiculous, forced hairstyle.

“I—I’m going to,” he called back, voice higher than usual. He cleared his throat, tried again. “I’m just… getting the water right.”

A pause. Then, “Ten minutes, please. Jack made dinner and I am not re-heating it three times.”

Footsteps clicked away down the hall.

He exhaled hard, the breath shaking. His hands were trembling again. He gripped the sink until his knuckles went white, then forced himself to let go.

The mirror looked back at him, calm and unforgiving.

“I’m Kate,” he repeated in his head, not daring to say it aloud now. The words looped silently, stubborn as a heartbeat.

He turned the tap all the way on this time, water gushing loudly into the basin. He splashed his face again and again until his skin felt raw, using the cold shock as an excuse for the heat in his cheeks, the redness around his eyes. If Eleanor asked why he looked like he’d been crying, he could say he’d gotten soap in his eyes. Or water had gone up his nose. Something stupid. Something normal.

Another voice joined the apartment’s background noise; Jack, from down the hall, called cheerfully, “Tell our young swordsman dinner’s ready in five! Bathroom use it or lose it, mon ami!”

Calvin flinched at the word swordsman, at the “he” wrapped inside it, unspoken but implied. It clanged against Kate in his head like metal on metal.

He shut off the tap and dragged a towel over his face, scrubbing hard. When he dropped it, his hair was a mess again, sticking up in damp spikes instead of the almost-fringe he’d tried to create.

The brief illusion in the mirror was gone. Just a small, skinny boy in pyjamas stared back, shoulders hunched, eyes too wide.

But he knew now. The knowledge didn’t wash away as easily as water.

I’m Kate. I’m a girl. I’m…

He couldn’t finish the thought. Not with the door between him and the rest of the world so thin.

He unlocked the bathroom and opened it. Cooler air from the hallway brushed his damp face.

Eleanor passed by on her way from the kitchen, tablet in one hand, a dish towel slung over her shoulder. She barely looked up, just said, “There you are. Calvin, dry your hair properly before you come to the table. I don’t want you catching cold.”

The name hit him like a slap. Calvin. Heavy, wrong, scraping against the inside of his skull.

For the first time, it didn’t just feel like his name used incorrectly. It felt like someone had taken that pebble of truth he’d dropped into himself and tried to rename it.

He nodded anyway. “Okay.”

He stepped past her, the bathroom light spilling out behind him, and padded down the hall toward his room to swap pyjamas for regular clothes. The carpet under his feet, the framed photos on the wall, the smell of dinner drifting from the kitchen—all of it was exactly the same as it had been that morning.

Inside his head, everything had shifted half a centimetre to the left.

He didn’t know, yet, how to move that shift from inside to outside. How to turn “I’m Kate” from a whisper in a locked bathroom into something spoken in the bright, unforgiving light of the dining room.

But as he closed his bedroom door behind him, the thought was still there, steady and impossible to un-know.

The person Eleanor had just called down the hall—the careful, dutiful, wrong-feeling Calvin—wasn’t the whole story anymore.

Behind his ribs, behind his too-big boy clothes, Kate was awake.

Jack’s car always smelled faintly of leather and the cologne he put on too much of when he and Eleanor were going somewhere fancy. Today it smelled like that and takeout coffee, the cardboard cup wedged in the holder between the front seats, a little ring of brown staining the plastic from where he’d braked too hard at the last light.

Calvin sat in the passenger seat, buckled in, backpack on the floor at his feet. His notebook was balanced on his knees beneath his hands, the cover closed, his fingers working nervously at the spiral binding. The seatbelt cut diagonally across his chest, the strap rough under his thumb where he kept rubbing the same patch over and over.

Outside, the city moved around them—yellow cabs sliding past, bikes weaving between lanes, pedestrians bundled in coats against the thin spring wind. Traffic on the avenue crawled, starting and stopping in fits.

From the speakers, some old jazz song played low. Jack hummed along off-key, tapping the steering wheel with two fingers in time with the saxophone. He looked… content, in that easy way he had, shoulders loose in his blazer, hair a little messy around the ears from the wind.

“We will be on time,” he declared as they caught a yellow light that turned red a moment later, forcing him to brake. “Probably. Nearly. It will be fashionably late if anything, and that is always more interesting.”

Calvin made a noise that might have been a laugh if it had more air in it. His eyes stayed fixed on the dashboard.

They were supposedly on their way to a Saturday fencing lesson, Jack’s latest project: turning “our young swordsman,” as he kept calling Calvin, into someone who could handle a foil without taking out a lamp. But the lesson felt very far away from the tight coil in Calvin’s stomach.

He could feel the notebook through the thin denim of his jeans. Inside, somewhere in the middle, was the page he’d written on in the library. The words transgender and assigned male at birth = me? and, in smaller writing, Kate? They buzzed in his mind like the fluorescent lights in the bathroom.

Tell him, he thought, then immediately: No. Later. Tomorrow. Never.

The car eased forward a few feet, then stopped again.

Jack shot him a sideways glance, the kind that looked casual but wasn’t.

“You are very quiet, mon ami,” he said lightly. “Even for someone about to face the terror of the épée. Everything all right?”

Calvin shrugged, eyes still on the little blinking numbers of the clock. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Mm.” Jack drew the sound out. “You are about as convincing as a paper sword. Try again.”

Calvin swallowed. His fingers tightened on the notebook, the metal coil biting into his skin.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered.

Jack let the jazz play for another thirty seconds. The windshield wipers clicked once across the glass, smearing a thin line of city grime.

Then, more gently, Jack said, “You know you can talk to me, yes? About… whatever this ‘nothing’ is.” He lifted one hand briefly from the wheel to gesture between them. “You look like you are carrying a very heavy invisible backpack.”

Calvin’s throat felt thick. He tried to swallow the lump down, but it stayed.

If you say it, you can’t take it back.

He watched a bus lumber through the intersection ahead, advertisements plastered along its side, faces of actors grinning into the traffic. He chewed the inside of his cheek so hard it hurt.

“If… if someone…” he started, then the words tangled. He picked at a loose thread on his jeans. “If a boy didn’t feel like a boy,” he tried again, the sentence coming out in a rush. “Like, what if they felt more like a girl?”

There. It was out, sitting between them like a live wire.

Jack’s grip on the wheel tightened for a fraction of a second, a tiny tell. His eyes stayed on the road.

He did not laugh. He did not say, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He considered.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I would say that maybe they are not really a boy. Sometimes that happens.” His tone was cautious but matter-of-fact, like he was talking about left-handedness. “Sometimes the world says one thing, and the person is… another thing. Inside.”

Calvin’s heart gave a painful lurch. His vision blurred around the edges.

He stared at the glove compartment so Jack wouldn’t see his face. “What would you… what would you call them?” he asked, his voice small. “If they were born one thing and… and felt like another.”

Jack blew out a breath, the kind that meant he was circling unfamiliar territory and trying to put his words in the right order.

“I am not the vocabulary expert,” he admitted. “But I think there are words for this now, no? Your generation is very good at words.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “If someone feels like a girl, I would call her a girl. And I would ask her what name she wants. And I would do my best not to screw it up.”

Her. The pronoun landed with a quiet, seismic weight.

Calvin’s fingers slipped from the notebook spiral. He realised suddenly that his hands were shaking.

“It’s me,” he blurted, and once he started, he couldn’t stop. The words tumbled out, tripping over each other. “It’s not just, like, a question, I’m not asking for—homework or something. It’s… I think it’s me. I think I’m… I think I’m a girl. I want to be a girl. I don’t know what that makes me exactly, I don’t know all the words, I just—” His breath hitched. “I don’t want to be Calvin.”

Silence swallowed the car for a second, except for the soft hiss of the air conditioning and the jazz playing thinly from the speakers.

Jack’s eyes flicked briefly to him, then to the traffic light ahead, then to the empty stretch of curb just beyond the intersection. He flicked on the blinker and guided the car into the next lane, then eased over to the side of the road, away from the buses and taxis.

He put the car in park. The engine idled.

Then he turned in his seat to face Calvin fully.

Up close, his expression was not shocked. It wasn’t angry. It was… careful. Like he was handling something fragile.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Thank you for telling me.”

Calvin stared at his lap. Tears blurred the notebook cover into a grey smudge. He wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand, frustrated at himself for crying now, of all times.

“You’re not… mad?” he managed.

“Mad?” Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “Mon dieu, no.”

There was a sad little laugh in his voice, but it wasn’t at Calvin. It was at the idea.

“I am…” He searched for the word, gaze moving briefly to the windshield, then back. “I am worried you have been carrying this all by yourself. That makes me… a little angry, but at myself, for not seeing it sooner.”

Calvin risked a glance at him. Jack’s eyes were steady, a little shiny at the corners.

“I kept thinking it would go away,” Calvin whispered. “Or that it was just… because of the divorce, or the new school, or—” His throat closed. “But it doesn’t. It just… it just keeps getting louder.”

Jack nodded slowly, like he understood that in a way Calvin hadn’t expected.

“Sometimes,” he said, “the truth is like that. It sits quietly for a while and then starts banging pots in your head until you listen.” He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “It sounds like this is one of those truths.”

Calvin pressed his fist against his mouth to keep it from trembling. “I don’t even know if I’m allowed to feel like this,” he admitted, voice muffled. “Like, I was born one thing. Everybody has decided already. It’s on all the forms. And if I say it’s wrong, it’s like I’m… arguing with the whole world.”

Jack’s expression softened. He reached out slowly, giving Calvin time to flinch away if he wanted, and rested a hand, warm and solid, on his shoulder.

“You are allowed to feel how you feel,” he said. “You are allowed to say, ‘This thing everyone told me about myself is not true.’ The world is big. It can survive being argued with.”

Calvin let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh.

“I don’t know what happens next,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. The article said things about… about doctors and… and talking to parents, and I—I got scared, and—”

His voice cracked. The words tangled in his chest.

Jack squeezed his shoulder gently. “I do not know everything either,” he said honestly. “I am not an expert on… how this works. But I know one thing very, very clearly.” He waited until Calvin looked up again, meeting his eyes. “I love you. That does not change. Not with a different word on a form, not with a different name, not with any of it. You understand?”

Something in Calvin’s chest crumpled at that, then re-formed into a slightly different shape. He nodded, a single jerky movement, tears spilling onto his cheeks in spite of his best efforts.

“Okay,” he whispered.

Jack let his hand fall back to his own lap, giving Calvin space.

“So,” he said, tone still gentle but a little more practical now, “we figure it out together. We find someone who knows these things. A doctor, a… counsellor. We learn the words. We make a plan.”

He tilted his head. “And we talk to your mother.”

At that, Calvin’s stomach clenched. His shoulders hunched instinctively.

“I don’t… I don’t know if she’ll understand,” he admitted. Saying it out loud made the fear feel bigger.

Jack’s mouth tightened for a moment, like he wanted to say something about Eleanor and then thought better of it.

“Maybe not right away,” he said instead. “She is… very good at plans she has made for the future. Less good at when the future decides to be different.” A wry smile flickered. “But she loves you. And she will have to learn, too.”

He paused, then added, in a firmer voice, “And I will stand with you. When we talk to her. You will not do this alone. D’accord?”

That last word, the little French tag, landed like a promise.

Calvin nodded again, slower this time. Something untied a little inside him.

“Okay,” he said.

Jack studied his face for another second, as if checking whether he was breathing evenly, whether this was too much for one car ride. Then he leaned back slightly, his posture easing.

“One more question,” he said. “Very important. If… if you are not Calvin—at least, not only Calvin—then who are you? What name feels right in here?” He tapped two fingers lightly against his own chest.

Calvin’s heart hammered.

He thought of the notebook page. Of the bathroom mirror. Of the word that had been circling him for days like a bird waiting for a window to open.

He swallowed.

“Kate,” he said quietly. The car seemed to shrink around the syllable, pulling in close. “I… I like Kate.”

Jack repeated it like he was tasting it. “Kate.”

He nodded, slowly at first, then with certainty.

“That is a good name,” he said. A small smile unfolded across his face, warm and bright. He held out his hand as if meeting someone for the first time. “Well then. Enchanté. Very nice to meet you, Kate Bishop.”

For a second, Calvin just stared at his hand. His vision blurred again, but this time it wasn’t just from fear. It was something else—something like relief, sharp and dizzying.

He wiped his palm on his jeans and reached out, fingers closing around Jack’s. The handshake was ridiculous and formal and perfect.

“Nice to meet you too,” he said, voice still trembling but steadier than before. “I’m… Kate.”

The name felt different this time. Less like a secret stolen in the dark, more like something being offered back to him.

Jack gave her hand a gentle squeeze and let go.

“Okay, Kate,” he said, turning back to the wheel, slipping the car into gear. “Let’s go be fashionably late to fencing. And later, if you like, we will look for those experts, yes? The ones who can help us not be complete idiots about this.”

She—Kate—nodded, the pronoun shifting in her own mind in a way that made her chest ache with something almost like joy.

As the car pulled back into traffic, the city rolled past outside as it always had—taxis, buses, crosswalks, people. But inside the car, something had changed. Her backpack still sat on the floor at her feet, as heavy as ever, but the invisible weight on her shoulders felt a little lighter.

She stared out the window, watching the blur of storefronts and streetlights, and let the words repeat silently to herself, in time with the rhythm of the turn signal and the jazz.

I’m Kate. Jack believes me. We’ll figure it out together.

The Bishop penthouse always felt colder at night.

Not temperature—Eleanor hated being anything less than perfectly climate-controlled—but in the way the light fell. The big floor-to-ceiling windows turned black after sunset, reflecting the living room back at itself: white leather sofa, glass coffee table, art on the walls that probably had names. The lamps were on, warm pools in the corners, but the room still had that quiet, echoing feeling of a place meant more for being looked at than lived in.

Kate stood in the doorway between the hall and the living room, sneakers planted on the edge of the expensive rug, suddenly very aware of her scuffed toes. Her hands were jammed into the pouch of her hoodie, fingers twisted into the fabric so tightly they hurt.

On the couch, Eleanor sat with one leg crossed over the other, tablet balanced on her knee. A neat stack of printed documents lay on the coffee table beside a half-full glass of white wine. She was in her “home but working” uniform: silk blouse, tailored trousers, bare feet tucked under her. Her hair was pinned up, not a strand out of place.

She looked up when she heard them, eyebrow lifting in polite inquiry.

“Everything all right?” she asked. “You’re back early. Did fencing get cancelled?”

Jack was a step behind Kate, one hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades. His touch was steady and warm, an anchor she kept drifting back toward.

“Lesson was… abbreviated,” he said. “Our prodigy had something else on her mind.”

He caught himself, almost too late, on the pronoun. Kate felt the faint flinch in his hand as he corrected in his own head. Eleanor, focused on her tablet, didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh?” she said, tapping something. “Homework? We can look at your schedule tomorrow and see if we’re overcommitting you. Sit down, please, you’re making me nervous hovering like that.”

Jack’s fingers pressed gently between Kate’s shoulders, guiding her forward. Moving felt like wading into very deep water. Her legs obeyed anyway.

She perched on the edge of the armchair nearest the couch, spine straight, hands clenched together in her lap now. The upholstery was too soft; she didn’t know what to do with her feet, finally tucking them back under the chair like she was trying to take up as little space as possible.

Jack took the other armchair, diagonal to her, giving himself a clear line of sight to both her and Eleanor. He rested one ankle on his knee, casual on the surface, but his eyes were very intent.

“Eleanor,” he said, his voice dropping into the register he used in serious conversations and business meetings. “Calvin has something important to tell us.”

The use of her old name made Kate’s stomach clench, but she understood why he’d done it. They were still crossing the bridge.

Eleanor finally set the tablet down, folding the cover over with a soft snap. She leaned back against the sofa, glass of wine in one hand, regarding them with what she probably thought was a patient, open expression. To Kate it felt like being under a microscope.

“Important how?” she asked. “I’ve had enough surprises this quarter.”

Her tone tried to be light, but there was an edge underneath. Divorce papers, new marriage, new apartment, new school. Enough surprises.

Kate wet her lips. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth.

She had practised this in her head all afternoon, in the car with Jack, in the mirror when she’d gone to the bathroom after they’d gotten home. Every version had sounded better than this moment did.

“I…” The word came out too quiet. She cleared her throat, fingers digging into her own knuckles. “I need to tell you something about me.”

Eleanor’s gaze flicked briefly to Jack, then back. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

The room seemed suddenly huge—the distance between the armchair and the couch, the high ceilings, the wide dark glass of the windows framing the city. The air tasted dry.

Kate tried again.

“You know how… things have been weird,” she started, immediately hating the word but unable to think of a better one. “With the divorce, and the move, and the new school. And… and everything.”

Eleanor’s expression softened a little. “Yes,” she said. “It’s been a lot. I know it’s been difficult for you.”

“This is not about the divorce,” Jack said quietly, as if he knew exactly where Eleanor’s mind was about to go. “Let her talk.”

Kate’s chest tightened. She stared at a small flaw in the glass coffee table—a tiny swirl in the otherwise perfect surface—as if the right words were hidden there.

“I’ve… felt wrong. For a long time,” she said, voice trembling. “Not just because of… stuff happening. Before that. I didn’t know how to say it.”

Eleanor leaned forward slightly, wineglass suspended halfway to her lips. “Wrong how?” she asked. “Is this about school? Are kids bothering you? Because if there’s bullying, we can—”

“It’s not about school,” Kate cut in, surprising herself with the force of it. “Not just school.”

She took a breath that scraped down her throat.

“It’s… when people call me a boy,” she said. The word felt foreign now, like she was trying on a coat that never fit. “When they say ‘he’ or ‘young man’ or… Calvin.” Her voice caught on the name. “It feels like they’re talking about somebody else. Like I’m pretending to be… the person they think I am.”

She risked a quick glance up. Eleanor’s brow furrowed. Jack’s face was very still, listening.

Kate looked back down at her hands.

“I went to the library,” she said. “At school. I looked stuff up. And I found… I found this word. Transgender.”

She let the word sit in the air a second, waiting for something—shock, anger, disgust. The only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator down the hall, the muffled city noise outside.

“It said… a transgender girl is someone who was assigned male at birth, but she knows she’s a girl,” Kate continued, the words tumbling now, too big to hold in. “And when I read that, it was like… like someone had written down the thing in my head. I didn’t know anyone else felt like that, and then there it was, and it was—”

She broke off, realising she was breathing too fast. Spots danced at the edges of her vision.

Jack’s chair creaked softly as he shifted, leaning forward. “Breathe,” he murmured. “Take your time.”

Kate sucked in air, held it, let it out slow, the way he’d shown her before a fencing match.

“I think… I’m a girl,” she said, when she could speak again. The words left her mouth and everything in her tightened, bracing for impact. “I don’t feel like a boy. I never have. I didn’t have the words before, but… now I do. I’m… I’m a girl.”

She was shaking. She pressed her hands between her knees to hide it.

“And I don’t… I don’t want to be called Calvin anymore,” she added, voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t want to be… him. I feel like Kate. That’s the name that feels… like me.”

Silence spilled into the space after her words, thick and heavy.

Eleanor stared at her, face unreadable for a moment. Kate wished she could crawl inside the armchair and disappear.

Finally, Eleanor set her glass down very carefully, the base making the faintest sound on the table.

“Calvin,” she began.

The name hit like a stone. Kate flinched.

Eleanor either didn’t see or pretended not to.

“Sweetheart,” she said, and there was genuine concern in the pet name. “You have had a very turbulent year. Your father and I separating, the move, a new school, new routines… It’s a lot for a ten-year-old. It would be a lot for anyone.”

Kate’s stomach sank. She could hear the shape of where this was going.

“I know,” she said quickly. “But this isn’t just—”

Eleanor lifted a hand, a small gesture asking for the floor. “Sometimes, when everything feels out of control, we… look for ways to explain why we feel bad. We latch onto ideas we see online, or things we read. We say, ‘Ah, that must be it.’” She folded her hands together, fingers interlacing, boardroom calm. “I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, necessarily. But I think we need to be very careful here.”

Jack’s jaw tightened. “Eleanor—”

“I’m not finished,” she said sharply, then softened her tone again as she turned back to Kate. “You’ve always been imaginative. You love stories, costumes, playing pretend. You throw yourself into roles. That’s not a bad thing; it’s part of your charm. But this feels… connected to that. To acting out, to trying to find your place after everything that’s happened.”

The words landed like little separate blows.

Acting out.

Pretend.

Part of your charm.

“I’m not pretending,” Kate said. Her voice shook, but there was iron under it now. “This isn’t… a game. Or… or a character. It’s me.”

Eleanor’s lips pressed together. “You’re ten,” she said. “Ten-year-olds don’t know everything about themselves. I certainly didn’t.” A humourless half-smile flickered. “I thought I was going to be a concert pianist until I was twelve.”

“This is not about piano lessons,” Jack said quietly. There was a warning buried in the softness.

Eleanor shot him a quick look, irritation flashing. “I am trying to put this in perspective,” she said. “That is my job here.”

“Your job,” Jack replied, “is to listen to her.” He emphasised the pronoun deliberately. “She has just told you something very vulnerable. Maybe we put aside the perspective for five minutes and just… hear her.”

The room felt suddenly like it had a wire strung taut across it, between couch and armchairs.

Kate’s eyes bounced between them, pulse roaring in her ears.

Eleanor inhaled slowly, visibly reigning herself in. When she spoke again, her voice was cooler, more controlled.

“All right,” she said. “Let me try this another way.” She turned fully to Kate. “Where is this coming from? I mean specifically. Is there someone at school who’s talked about this? A video you watched? A celebrity? Did Jack—”

“Eleanor,” Jack interrupted, sharper now. “Do not make this about me.”

“I have to ask,” she snapped. “You kept calling him—” She stopped, corrected herself stiffly. “You have been… very enthusiastic about him fencing, and… expressing himself. Maybe this is—”

“This is not my influence,” Jack said. “If I want a daughter, I marry a woman with a daughter. I do not… manufacture one from a son. That is insane.”

The bluntness of it cut through the tension for a second. Even Eleanor blinked, thrown off stride.

He softened his tone again. “She came to me,” he said, looking back at Kate. “Scared. She has been feeling this for a while. This is not a weapon she is using against us. It is a truth she is handing us. We should not drop it.”

Kate swallowed hard. Tears were leaking down her face now; she hadn’t even noticed when they started. She wiped at them with the back of her sleeve, embarrassed.

“I’ve felt like this since… since before the divorce,” she whispered. “I just didn’t have the words. I thought I was… broken, or… weird. When I found out there was a word for it—transgender—and that there were other kids like me, it… it was like someone turned on a light. I can’t just turn it off again.”

Eleanor closed her eyes briefly, pinching the bridge of her nose. For a moment she looked less like the impeccably composed CEO and more like a tired human being whose life was being rearranged without her permission.

“I believe that you feel something very strongly,” she said, opening her eyes. “I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m saying… I’m not convinced you understand what this means.”

“I don’t understand everything,” Kate admitted. “I don’t know… all the medical stuff, or… or what I’ll look like when I’m older, or… or anything. I just know… when people call me ‘he,’ it feels wrong. When I think about growing up and everyone still seeing me as a boy, I—” Her breath hitched. “It feels like… like being trapped in a room that gets smaller every year.”

That image seemed to land somewhere deeper. Eleanor’s fingers tightened around the stem of her wineglass.

“And when you think about… being a girl,” she asked, “what does that feel like?”

Kate stared at the rug, following the pattern of the fibres with her eyes.

“It feels like… breathing normally,” she said, after a long moment. “Like not having to pretend all the time.” She hesitated, then added, “Like the world is still scary, but at least I’m… in the right skin while I deal with it.”

Jack’s gaze softened. He looked back at Eleanor, as if to say: You hear that?

Eleanor exhaled slowly.

“I am afraid,” she said, and the nakedness of the admission surprised all of them, including herself. “I am afraid of you getting hurt. Of kids at school. Of parents. Of the press, when you’re older. Of doctors doing things to your body that we can’t undo. Of you waking up one day at twenty and saying ‘why did you let me do this.’”

Her eyes glistened. She blinked the moisture away, not quite letting it turn into tears.

“I am afraid,” she repeated, softer. “And when I am afraid, I try to control the variables. It is… not my best habit.”

Jack’s shoulders loosened a fraction. “Then let us find better variables,” he said. “Ones that are not ‘ignore it and hope it goes away.’”

Eleanor looked at him for a long moment, then at Kate.

“In the article you read,” she said to her, “did it mention… doctors? Therapists?”

Kate nodded. “It said… there are doctors who help kids like me. With… with talking about it. And… and maybe medicine later. To stop… puberty stuff. So we have time to figure it out.”

Eleanor absorbed that, eyes narrowing slightly as she thought. You could almost see the gears turning: research, specialists, liability, cost-benefit analysis.

“I am not promising anything,” she said finally, each word precise. “I am not promising hormones or… social transition tomorrow or… changing everything overnight. But I will not… ignore this.”

She reached for the stack of papers on the coffee table, pulled a pad of monogrammed stationery free, and clicked a pen.

“I will… find someone,” she said, more to herself than them, as she started to write. “A specialist. A real specialist, not some blog. We will talk to them. All of us. We will get information. We will… see.”

She looked up at Kate again, pen still in her hand. “In the meantime,” she said, “I need you to be patient with me. This is… new. I may… make mistakes.”

Her mouth twisted on the word, clearly unused to apologising in advance.

“So if I… if I call you…” She hesitated, the old name hanging unspoken between them. “If I… slip, you correct me. Calmly.” She swallowed. “And I will try to… listen. To learn.”

It wasn’t the wholehearted embrace Kate had let herself dream about on the drive home. It wasn’t Eleanor saying, “Of course, honey, you’re my daughter.” There was still doubt there, and fear, and a part of her that seemed to believe this could still be a phase they would manage away.

But it wasn’t a no. It wasn’t the door slamming shut.

Kate realised she’d been holding her breath and let it out in a small, shaky rush.

“Okay,” she said. “I can… I can do that.”

Jack relaxed back into his chair with a quiet exhale, tension bleeding out of his shoulders. “Merci,” he murmured to Eleanor, genuine.

Eleanor gave him a look that said not to push his luck.

She turned back to Kate. A thousand emotions flickered across her face—worry, frustration, protectiveness, an accountant’s instinct to tally pros and cons. Underneath all of it, something softer that Kate desperately wanted to trust.

“What… what did you say your name was?” she asked, voice almost casual, but her fingers were still white-knuckled around the pen.

Kate’s heart thumped against her ribs.

“Kate,” she said. It felt less terrifying this time, spoken into the open air of the living room instead of the fogged mirror of the bathroom. “I… I like Kate.”

Eleanor repeated it, as if testing the weight. “Kate.”

A tiny, wry smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Of course you’d pick a name with strong branding potential,” she said softly.

It wasn’t quite a joke, but it wasn’t unkind, either.

She set the pen down and picked up her wineglass again, swirling the liquid without drinking.

“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” she said, slipping a little awkwardly back into routine. “You should wash up. Both of you.”

She paused, then added, with a stiffness that didn’t quite hide the effort it took:

“And… Kate? Don’t… don’t hide in the bathroom if you’re feeling like this again. Talk to us.” She glanced briefly at Jack. “To one of us, at least.”

The name landed differently from Jack’s, less easy, but it was there. It counted.

Heat rushed up into Kate’s face. She nodded, throat too tight to speak.

Jack stood, clapping his hands together like he was physically dispersing the heaviness in the room. “You heard the boss,” he said lightly. “Wash up. I have made pasta. It is almost edible this time.”

Eleanor snorted very quietly into her wineglass.

Kate rose on unsteady legs. As she passed behind Jack’s chair, he reached back and squeezed her hand once, quickly, out of Eleanor’s line of sight. The touch was brief but grounding.

In the hallway, on the way to the bathroom, Kate caught a glimpse of herself in the framed mirror: hair mussed from running her hands through it, eyes red-rimmed, shoulders a little less hunched than before.

The reflection still looked like a kid in clothes everyone called “boy clothes,” still had the same face she’d seen every day.

But behind her, faint in the mirror’s glass, she could see both of her parents—Jack in the armchair, Eleanor on the couch—no longer entirely turned away. Not fully turned towards her yet, either. But angled in her direction, listening.

It wasn’t everything.

It was a start.

The clinic waiting room didn’t look like a doctor’s office, not exactly.

There were no posters of skeletons or diagrams of organs, no sharp smell of antiseptic. Instead, the walls were painted a pale, almost cheerful green, and a big window let in a slice of late-morning light that spilled across the chairs. Someone had tried for cozy: a low shelf with children’s books, a basket of fidget toys, a corkboard covered in crayon drawings and construction paper collages.

Still, it felt like the kind of place where serious things happened.

Kate sat in one of the plastic chairs near the window, feet not quite touching the floor. Her sneakers swung a little above the tiles, bumping softly against the metal chair legs when she forgot to hold still. Her hands were wrapped around the straps of her backpack like she was afraid someone might try to take it away.

She’d chosen her clothes carefully that morning: jeans that weren’t too baggy, a soft purple t-shirt under a zip-up hoodie. Nothing that would draw comments from strangers on the subway, but nothing that felt like the old costume either. Her hair was a little longer now, enough to tuck behind her ears. She’d slipped a tiny, clear hair clip into one side in her room and then had a minor panic about it until Jack had just said, “Looks good,” like it was no more remarkable than putting on socks.

Now she kept reaching up to touch it, fingers brushing the plastic, making sure it was still there.

On her left, Eleanor sat rigidly upright, ankles crossed neatly, handbag in her lap. She’d dressed like she was going to a meeting: dark pencil skirt, cream blouse, blazer. Her tablet was in her bag for once, not in her hands, but it might as well have been—her attention was narrowed, focused, the way it was when she was evaluating a proposal.

On Kate’s right, Jack lounged in his chair with deliberate ease, one arm slung across the back, one leg crossed over the other. He’d worn a blazer and a nice shirt, but his tie was loose, and he kept rolling a small stress ball between his palms—a discreet little thing in an unassuming grey, like he was trying not to break any decor.

Across from them, two other families dotted the room. A teenager with teal hair and a denim jacket sat next to a woman who must have been his mom, both of them scrolling through their phones. On the far side, a younger kid—maybe eight, maybe nine—played with a set of plastic animals on the carpet while their dad watched, coffee cup in hand.

Kate didn’t know any of their stories. She wasn’t sure if they were all there for the same reason. But something about the way the receptionist had spoken—calm, practiced, using “they” and “she” and “he” with an ease Kate had never heard in a doctor’s office before—made her think the odds were high.

She glanced at the corkboard again. Construction paper hearts, scribbled rainbows. One drawing, done in heavy marker lines and careful handwriting, showed a smiling stick figure with long hair and a cape. Underneath, in shaky letters, someone had written: ME.

Her throat tightened.

She dropped her gaze to her lap, focusing on her hands. They looked the same as they always had: small, knuckles a little scraped from archery practice, ink smudges along the side of her index finger where she held her pencil wrong. But knowing where she was, what this place was for, made them feel newly important, as if any second someone might reach out and take them and say something like, You belong here.

She wasn’t sure if that idea made her want to cry or run.

Beside her, Eleanor shifted, the movement small but tense. “We are fifteen minutes past the appointment time,” she murmured, checking her watch. “This is already unacceptable.”

Jack squeezed the stress ball once, twice, unconcerned. “They are probably with another family,” he said. “You know, doing the thorough, careful work that you will appreciate once it’s us.”

“I appreciate punctuality,” Eleanor said crisply. “If they can’t manage their own schedule, I’m not sure they’re the experts we want.”

Kate hunched in on herself a little. Their voices weren’t loud, but in the hush of the waiting room they carried more than she wanted.

Jack noticed. His tone softened. “Hey,” he said quietly, leaning in just a little toward her. “How are you doing, Kate?”

Just the name helped. Her shoulders unwound a fraction.

“Okay,” she lied, staring down at the zipper of her hoodie. “Nervous.”

“Me too,” he said, like it was no big deal. “First time I went to physical therapy after I broke my arm, I nearly threw up in the waiting room. And that was only because a horse didn’t like me.” He made a face. “This is much more important than one angry horse. So, being nervous is allowed.”

The corner of her mouth twitched despite herself. “You always say it was a stallion and then a mare and then a—”

“It was very large and very ungrateful, that is all that matters,” he said. “And I survived. You will, too.”

Eleanor cleared her throat softly. “No one is forcing you to do this,” she said, and there was a strain under the coolness. “If you want to go home, we can. We can… think about this more.”

The offer dangled in the air.

Part of Kate wanted to grab it, to flee back to familiar streets and familiar wrongness, to pretend she’d never heard the word transgender at all. To stay Calvin, at least on paper, because that was what everyone expected, because it would be simpler.

The larger part of her wanted to keep breathing.

“I want to stay,” she said before she could overthink it. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I want to talk to them.”

Eleanor’s lips pressed together in a thin line, but she nodded. “All right,” she said. “We stay.”

The receptionist at the desk—an older man with kind eyes and a tie patterned with tiny planets—looked up from his computer. “Ms. Bishop?” he called.

Three heads turned.

“Doctor Levin is running just a little behind,” he said, his tone apologetic but not frazzled. “She’ll be out in a minute to take you back. Snacks and water are over there if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Eleanor said automatically, professional politeness snapping into place.

Kate followed her gaze to the little table by the wall with a water cooler and a basket of individually wrapped granola bars. Her stomach was too tight to think about eating.

She shifted in her chair, her backpack bumping against the metal leg. The notebook inside seemed to vibrate, the word transgender underlined three times in her mind even though she couldn’t see the page.

The clinic door opened with a soft hydraulic sigh.

A woman in her forties stepped out, closing it gently behind her. She wore dark jeans and a simple blouse, a stethoscope looped casually around her neck like an afterthought. Her hair was shot through with grey at the temples, pulled back into a loose bun. She had laugh lines around her eyes and a lanyard with a rainbow stripe peeking out from under her collar.

“Kate Bishop?” she called.

Kate’s heart did a strange, hard jump. For a split second she almost didn’t recognise the name as hers—not because it felt wrong, but because she wasn’t used to hearing it here, in a place with appointment books and clipboards. She was used to it being whispered in locked bathrooms, in the car with Jack. Not spoken by a stranger in a doctor’s office, in a tone that made it sound official.

She forced herself to stand. Her knees wobbled.

“Here,” she said. Her voice came out small but clear.

Doctor Levin’s eyes flicked to her, then to Eleanor and Jack, and back. She smiled, not the too-bright, everything’s-fine smile adults sometimes used with kids, but something gentler.

“Hi, Kate,” she said. “I’m Dr. Levin. It’s nice to meet you.”

The way she said it—like there was no question about whether that was the right name—sent a sharp, unexpected heat to the back of Kate’s eyes. She swallowed hard.

“Hi,” she managed.

Dr. Levin turned to Eleanor and Jack. “You must be Eleanor,” she said, shaking her hand, then, “And Jack. I’m glad you all made it in today.”

“We’re… glad to be here,” Jack said. He meant it. Eleanor said nothing, but her handshake was firm.

Dr. Levin looked back at Kate, tipping her head slightly in a conspiratorial way. “So here’s how this usually works,” she said. “We’ll go back to my office. I’ll talk with all three of you for a bit. Then, if you’re comfortable, Kate, I like to talk to kids alone for a while. No tests, nothing scary. Just talking.” She smiled again. “If at any point you need a break, you tell me, all right? You’re in charge of your own pause button.”

Kate let out a tiny breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. The idea of being “in charge” of anything in this process felt foreign and… good.

“Okay,” she said.

Dr. Levin gestured toward the door. “Come on back,” she said. “We’ve got a very exciting hallway with beige walls and terrible art to experience.”

Jack chuckled. Eleanor’s mouth twitched, almost a smile.

As they moved toward the door, the teal-haired teen across the room caught Kate’s eye and gave her a quick, crooked smile, like a nod that said, Yeah, I’ve been through that door too. It’s weird, but you’ll survive. The little kid on the floor drove a plastic dinosaur along the edge of the carpet, oblivious.

Kate shifted her backpack higher on her shoulder and followed Dr. Levin.

The hallway was, as promised, beige and unremarkable. Closed doors on either side, the smell of coffee and printer ink stronger here, the faint murmur of voices behind walls. The overhead lights buzzed.

Her sneakers squeaked softly on the linoleum. Eleanor’s heels clicked a precise rhythm behind her; Jack’s steps were softer, his hand hovering just above the small of her back, not touching but there if she wanted to lean.

They reached an open doorway with a plaque next to it reading LEVIN, M.D. Inside, the office was small but warm: two armchairs, a couch, a desk with a computer that looked like it had seen a few technology upgrades, shelves lined with books and a few small plants. A miniature basketball hoop hung over the wastebasket, a foam ball wedged in the net.

“Have a seat wherever you like,” Dr. Levin said, moving to her chair and setting the file she’d brought down on a side table. “There are no wrong choices, I promise.”

Kate hesitated just long enough for Jack to catch her eye. He tilted his head toward the couch, an unspoken offer: we can sit together if you want. She nodded and went for the couch, climbing onto the end closest to the door. Jack took the other end. Eleanor chose one of the armchairs, crossing her legs with her usual precise economy of movement.

Dr. Levin sat in the other armchair, angled slightly toward Kate but not so much that it felt like a spotlight.

“So,” she said, folding her hands loosely in her lap. “I’ve read the basics on the intake forms, but pieces of paper only tell me so much. Kate, is it okay if I ask you some questions? And if there’s something you don’t want to answer right away, you can say that. This is about you, not about a checklist.”

Kate nodded slowly. Her fingers had found the edge of a couch cushion, worrying at the seam.

“Okay,” she said.

Dr. Levin’s gaze was steady but soft. “First question is easy,” she said. “What would you like me to call you? Name and pronouns.”

It was the kind of question that should have been simple, like filling out the top of a worksheet. But it landed like a small miracle.

“Kate,” she said, heart thumping. “Um. She. She and her.”

“Kate, she/her,” Dr. Levin repeated, as if writing it on an invisible list in the air. “Got it. If I ever mess up, you can tell me. I do my best, but sometimes my brain and my mouth are not perfectly coordinated.”

Jack snorted softly. “Relatable,” he murmured.

Eleanor shot him a look but said nothing.

Dr. Levin smiled. “Second question,” she continued. “How long have you felt… off, when people call you a boy?”

Kate took a breath. The room seemed to shrink down to the circle of chairs, the couch, the plant in the corner. Safe enough, for now.

She looked down at her hands, then back up, meeting Dr. Levin’s eyes.

“A long time,” she said. “I just didn’t know there was another option.”

The words felt like the beginning of something—like the first arrow loosed at a target you’d been staring at for years but never been allowed to aim for.

Dr. Levin nodded, listening.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Then let’s start there.”

Outside, beyond the office walls and the muted hallway and the waiting room with its crayon drawings and plastic dinosaurs, the city went on as usual. Cars and cabs and people and noise. No one out there knew that a ten-year-old girl had just been called by her name in a doctor’s office for the first time.

Inside, for Kate, it was enough to change the shape of the day.

She sat up a little straighter on the couch and began to talk.

The hallway outside Kate’s bedroom was full of morning.

Not sunlight—Eleanor kept the blinds in the main rooms at a strict, half-open angle to avoid glare—but the ordinary, busy sounds of the apartment getting ready for the day. The low murmur of the news channel from the kitchen TV. The clink of cutlery. The hiss and pop of something in a pan. Jack’s voice humming along to some song on the radio, a half-remembered French tune drifting under the smell of coffee and toast.

Kate stood just inside her bedroom door, hand on the knob, heart thumping so hard she could feel it in the tips of her fingers.

The outfit had taken her nearly forty minutes to decide on. The therapist had suggested “small steps that feel big inside,” and this was what she had settled on: a soft grey sweater that hung just past her hips, leggings the exact shade of navy she’d once seen on a girl’s uniform skirt at school, and—under the sweater, where only she would know—an actual skirt. Simple, dark blue cotton, reaching just above her knees.

It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t pink or frilly. If she tugged the sweater down, it almost looked like a long shirt over leggings, something she could pretend was “just comfortable” if someone made a face.

But she knew. She could feel the difference every time she shifted her weight and the hem brushed her thighs. When she walked, even around her own room, the fabric moved in a way jeans never had. It felt like a secret, swishing along with her steps.

Her hair—longer now, weeks of careful negotiations and “just growing it out a bit”—was pulled back into a low ponytail. The clear clip she’d worn to the clinic had been upgraded: a small, pale purple barrette, no bigger than her thumb, holding back the shorter pieces at her temple. Jack had bought it for her in a pharmacy line three days ago, tossing it into the basket with toothpaste and dish soap like it was nothing.

“Every archer needs something to keep the hair out of her eyes,” he’d said, and that had been that.

Now she stood there with her hand on the doorknob, staring at the narrow slice of hallway visible through the crack. The wooden floor, the framed photographs, the faint reflection of the living room in the glass. Beyond, she could hear Eleanor’s voice, clipped and precise, answering an email aloud the way she did when she was planning a response: “…no, that’s not acceptable, we’ll have to revisit the terms in—yes, yes, I’ll call you from the car.”

The therapist had said this part wouldn’t be one big ceremony. There wouldn’t be a ribbon-cutting where everyone clapped and said “You are officially our daughter now, congratulations.” It would be a lot of small, ordinary moments, building on each other.

This felt like one of them.

“Just try it,” Dr. Levin had said, two sessions ago. “A day at home where you wear what feels right. See how it goes. You don’t have to announce anything. Let your parents see you in your clothes, sitting at the table, being their kid. Sometimes the most radical thing is just… existing.”

Existing, Kate thought now, felt like walking out of this room.

Her fingers tightened on the knob. She took a breath, the way Jack had taught her at the range: in for four, out for six. Her stomach still swooped, but she could breathe around it.

“Okay,” she whispered to herself. “Okay. Go.”

She opened the door.

The hallway light was on, casting a soft glow over the framed photos lining the wall—vacations, business dinners, posed smiles. Some showed her younger, hair shorn shorter, wearing stiff collared shirts. Those images tugged at her as she passed, like ghosts she was slipping out of.

Her bare toes curled inside her socks as she took the first step onto the polished floor. The skirt swished faintly with the movement, the sensation startling even though she’d been pacing in it all morning. It was different out here, in the shared space instead of behind her closed door.

From the kitchen, Jack’s voice drifted: “—I promise, the pancakes are only slightly burnt this time. I am a man of improvement.”

Eleanor’s reply was distracted, the click of her phone keyboard audible between words. “You say that every Saturday and somehow the smoke alarm still goes off.”

Kate edged further down the hall, heart in her throat. The doorway to the open-plan kitchen and living area yawned ahead of her, bright with recessed lights, the sound of dishes and the faint murmur of the TV.

She stopped just before the threshold.

From here, she could see a slice of the kitchen counter, the edge of the dining table, Eleanor’s shoulder in a white blouse as she sat at the end nearest the window, phone in hand. Jack stood at the stove in his weekend uniform—t-shirt and sweatpants, apron tied haphazardly around his waist, spatula in hand.

Neither of them saw her yet.

This was the moment where, in her worry-dreams, Eleanor looked up, went very still, and then said something like absolutely not or what are you wearing or we are not doing this.

This could still go wrong.

Her fingers dug into the soft knit of her sweater. The fabric whispered against her palms.

She stepped into the doorway.

Jack saw her first. He turned to put the spatula down and his gaze flicked automatically toward the hall. For half a heartbeat his face went unreadable; then his mouth curved up, slow and proud, like he’d just watched her hit a bullseye.

“Ah,” he said lightly, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. “Our guest of honour arrives.”

Eleanor glanced up, irritation ready in the tight set of her jaw at being interrupted. Her eyes landed on Kate.

They widened.

For a second, she just looked.

Kate felt every millimetre of that gaze: the ponytail, the barrette, the sweater hanging a little differently over the line of the skirt, the way the leggings ended at her ankles instead of baggy jeans puddling over her socks. She felt like a painting being examined for flaws.

She fought the urge to fold in on herself, to tug the sweater down further, to spin and run back to her room and slam the door.

The silence stretched.

Eleanor’s mouth pressed into a faint line. Her phone lowered an inch in her hand. Kate could see the option flicker behind her eyes: comment, criticise, correct. Put the old order back together.

Jack’s hand tightened on the edge of the stove. He didn’t say anything, but the line of his shoulders went subtly rigid, ready to step in.

Eleanor inhaled.

“Kate,” she said.

Just that, at first. The name, clean and unhesitating.

It landed in Kate’s chest like a dropped stone, sending out ripples that reached all the way to her fingertips. She blinked.

“Breakfast is getting cold,” Eleanor added, the rhythm of the sentence slightly awkward, as if she’d had to rearrange it around a word she wasn’t used to yet. “Come sit down.”

Her voice wasn’t warm, exactly. But it wasn’t icy, either. It was the same tone she used every morning about schedules and food and homework, stretched over a new shape.

Kate’s throat closed up. She tried to say “okay,” but the word stuck. She nodded instead, stepping further into the room, past the invisible line where her private hallway ended and the shared space began.

Her skirt moved with her, the hem brushing the backs of her knees. No one said anything about it.

She pulled out her usual chair at the table, the one midway down the side, and sat. The cool wood pressed against the backs of her legs through the leggings. A plate of slightly misshapen pancakes waited there, steam still curling off them, syrup bottle within reach.

Her hands shook a little as she reached for her fork.

Behind her, Jack flipped the last pancake onto a plate and turned off the burner. He hung the spatula on a hook with unnecessary care, then called over his shoulder, “Tell her if she is late again next week, I will eat all the pancakes myself. No mercy.”

Tell her.

Kate froze.

The pronoun slid into her ears with a strange, echoing clarity. It wasn’t attached to a lecture, or a deliberate, emphasised moment like in Dr. Levin’s office when they practiced. It was casual, tossed into the air over pancakes.

Her head snapped up.

Jack was looking at Eleanor, eyebrows raised theatrically. The line was for her benefit, but the real audience was the woman at the end of the table.

Eleanor’s jaw tensed. For a split second, she looked like she might correct him back to he out of habit, reflexive as adjusting a crooked frame.

Then something in her face shifted. Maybe it was the memory of Dr. Levin’s office, of Kate’s tiny, trembling voice describing a room that got smaller every year. Maybe it was the look Jack was giving her—steady, almost pleading. Maybe it was just the sight of her child sitting there in a too-big sweater and a navy skirt, fingers white-knuckled on the fork.

Whatever it was, the correction died before it reached her tongue.

“She heard you,” Eleanor said instead. The word she came out slightly stiff, like a new pair of shoes, but it came.

Kate stared at her.

A laugh track on the muted TV in the corner burst into tinny sound, some sitcom rerun in a corner of the screen. A traffic helicopter on the news showed a map of red lines through midtown. The ordinary world went on.

Inside the little circle of the table, everything tilted.

Kate’s eyes burned. She dropped her gaze back to her plate before either of them could see her face crumple.

She poured syrup in a slow spiral, watching it pool and soak into the uneven pancakes. Her hands still trembled, but not from fear now. It was too much of something else—relief, maybe. Or the shock of finally hearing the words she’d been replaying in her head for months said out loud, in this kitchen, in this house.

“Merci, chef,” Eleanor said, picking up her fork. Her voice sounded almost normal. “Not quite as burnt as last week.”

“It is called rustic,” Jack said loftily, sliding into his chair across from Kate. “You Americans have no appreciation for texture.”

He met Kate’s eyes across the table.

The look was small but unmistakable: See? You’re still here. We’re still here. The world did not end.

Her throat was too tight to talk, so she nodded, once, the tiniest of smiles tugging at the corners of her mouth.

She took a bite of pancake. It was a little undercooked in the middle, battery and too sweet, and absolutely perfect.

The conversation slid back into its usual grooves—Eleanor outlining her schedule for the day, Jack making jokes about investors, a reminder about Kate’s homework. No one mentioned the skirt. No one said the old name.

But every time Eleanor needed to refer to her—when she asked, “Do you have gym today?” or when she told Jack, “Make sure she has her lunch packed before you leave”—she hesitated for just a fraction of a second, like feeling for her footing on a new staircase.

Every time, she landed on she.

The words stacked up quietly over the course of the meal, one on top of another, until they formed something solid enough for Kate to lean against.

“Finish up,” Eleanor said at last, checking her watch. “We need to leave in ten minutes. I have a call at nine.”

Kate nodded, swallowing the last of her pancake. Syrup clung to the corner of her mouth; she wiped it away with her thumb.

As she pushed back her chair, the skirt brushed her thighs again. The sensation startled her less this time. It matched the pronouns now, the name that had echoed through the room.

Kate.

She carried her plate to the sink, rinsed it, and put it in the dishwasher the way she always did. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic.

But as she moved through the bright, overly tidy kitchen, ponytail swinging, barrette catching the light, she felt the shape of the morning settle around her.

For the first time, in this apartment, in the place that had always felt a little too shiny and sharp for her to fit into, she wasn’t just pretending in secret.

She was Kate, in her skirt and sweater, with her parents at the table.

And her mother had called her to breakfast.

By fifteen, the rooftop felt more like hers than her bedroom ever had.

The Bishops’ building had a flat, gravelled roof with a waist-high wall around the edges and a view that made realtors use words like “sweeping” and “commanding.” To Kate, it was mostly a place where the city noise came up softened—the honks and sirens turned into a steady, distant rush—and where the wind had enough room to move.

Jack had cleared it with the building board, then with Eleanor, then with three different lawyers: a small, temporary archery range, strictly supervised, no arrows anywhere near the edge. In the end, the compromise was a portable target butt, a locked equipment trunk, a set of very strict rules, and a security camera pointed just close enough to keep insurance happy.

On this late afternoon, the sky was a washed-out blue, streaked with thin clouds. The air smelled faintly of tar and exhaust and the ghost of someone else’s cigarette five floors down.

Kate stood twenty yards from the target, feet set shoulder-width apart on the gritty surface. She wore compression leggings and a faded T-shirt with some indie band’s logo, the neckline a little stretched from overuse. Her hair—now long enough to actually pull back—was tied in a low ponytail. A purple elastic snugged it at the base of her neck; a few shorter strands had slipped free to frame her face.

The bow in her left hand was a modern recurve, sleek and dark, not as fancy as the ones she’d seen in Olympic videos but good enough that Jack had winced at the price. It fit her hands now in a way his old gear never had. They’d adjusted the draw weight gradually over the past two years, stepping it up as her shoulders filled out and her arms grew stronger.

Her body still felt new to her most days—limbs lengthening in unpredictable bursts, hips and chest changing in fits and starts. But here, with the bowstring against her fingers and the familiar ache in her shoulders, everything came into sharper focus. She knew where her muscles were. She knew what they could do.

She nocked an arrow with practiced fingers, the motion smooth. The fletching brushed the back of her hand, a little whisper of plastic and feather that always made her think of the sound of pages turning.

She inhaled.

Front foot aligned with the target. Back foot angled slightly out. Knees soft. Weight balanced.

She raised the bow.

The city dropped away to a gentle murmur. The only sounds that mattered were the soft creak of the string as she drew it back and the steady rush of her own breath.

At full draw, the muscles across her back and shoulders burned in a familiar, satisfying line. She could feel the bow’s energy coiled between her fingers and her chest, waiting.

For a moment, she let herself think of nothing but the shot. Not her voice, which still jumped between octaves when she got excited. Not the stares in the hallway at school when she’d first started wearing the girls’ uniform. Not the whispered questions about “what she used to be” that leaked through no matter how carefully the administration tried to clamp down.

Just this: the sight picture, the line from her eye through the arrow to the center of the target. Her lungs expanding. The wind on her bare forearms.

She released.

The string snapped forward with a soft thrum, the vibration humming through her wrist. The arrow flew, a dark blur against the pale sky, and hit the target with a satisfying thunk just outside the inner ring.

Not a bullseye. But close.

She exhaled, a slow stream of breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Better,” Jack said from behind her.

He was leaning against the rooftop access door, hands in his pockets, suit jacket off and tie loosened. His hair looked like he’d run his fingers through it a few too many times. A discarded briefcase sat at his feet, as if he’d come straight up here the moment he got home.

Kate didn’t turn, but one corner of her mouth tugged up. “You weren’t supposed to be watching,” she said. “The deal was, I get a half-hour alone.”

“The deal,” Jack said, pushing off the wall and walking toward her, “was that you get a half-hour with no coaching. I said nothing about my excellent, silent audience.”

He came to stand a few yards behind and to her right, well clear of her line of fire. He’d learned that lesson early on.

She rolled her eyes, but there was no heat in it. “You’re terrible at silent,” she muttered, reaching into the quiver at her hip for another arrow.

“I am improving,” he said. “That last one, I only commented afterwards. This is progress.”

He had been the one to show her the basics when she was younger, laughing as she struggled to draw a bow that was too big for her then. Now, more often than not, he watched rather than instructed. The balance had shifted somewhere along the way. Her form was cleaner than his now; he was honest enough to admit that, at least to her.

She set another arrow on the string, the nock clicking into place. Her fingers found their position almost without thinking.

“You know,” Jack went on, more quietly now, “when I was your age, if I had been dealing with as much as you have and then someone handed me a weapon, I would have decided the universe owed me some revenge.”

“Revenge is inefficient,” Kate said, quoting something she’d heard him tell a business rival once. “I prefer accuracy.”

He laughed, pleased. “Now that is my girl.”

The phrase warmed and hurt at the same time. It still did, every time.

She raised the bow again.

“Back straight,” he said, softer. “You are collapsing a little on the left side.”

She adjusted, feeling the line of her spine lengthen without overextending. The bow sat snug against the web of her thumb and forefinger.

There had been a time, not long after she’d started puberty blockers, when her body had felt like a problem to be solved, a ticking clock to be fought against. Every appointment had been numbers and charts and talking about what might happen if they did nothing, if they did something, if they waited.

Here, her body was not an enemy. It was a tool. Not perfect—her elbow still wanted to flare out, her grip still sometimes too tight—but something she could learn, improve, inhabit.

She drew the string back, anchor point to the corner of her mouth. The string kissed her chin lightly. She could feel the faint tremor in her shoulders but kept it steady.

She aimed.

In her mind, Clint Barton’s voice overlay Jack’s for a moment—not from reality (she hadn’t met him yet, not properly), but from interviews she’d watched online, old footage of him on the range, easy and precise. You don’t fight the bow, kid. You listen to it. Let it do its job.

She released.

Thunk.

This one buried itself closer to the center, shaving the edge of the bullseye.

She smiled, small and sharp.

“Ha,” Jack said. “See? Accuracy. Very efficient.”

He moved closer, inspecting the target from where he stood without actually going to it. “Another few inches inward and the target will have to start paying us rent.”

“I can group tighter,” Kate said, automatically. The competitiveness was reflexive, a natural extension of the way every part of her life had felt like something to prove.

“To whom?” Jack asked. “The target?” He gestured at the skyline. “The pigeons? The New York Times? You are not in competition with any of them.”

“With everyone,” she said, before she could stop herself. “With… with the boys at school. With the girls at school. With the people who think I shouldn’t be in the locker room. With everyone who thinks I’m… not really…”

She trailed off, the word girl snagging on her tongue.

The wind picked up slightly, tugging at her ponytail. She felt a hot flush rise under her skin, angry at herself for bringing it up out loud. This was supposed to be her quiet place.

Jack didn’t jump in with reassurance right away. He let the silence hang for a few breaths, the way Dr. Levin did when she wanted Kate to finish her own thought.

“Archery is not about proving you deserve to hold the bow,” he said finally. “You already do. The fact you are up here practicing, sweating, missing sometimes—that is the proof.”

She frowned, nocking another arrow more forcefully than necessary. “It doesn’t feel like enough,” she muttered. “Not when people are already looking at me like I’m… extra.”

“With admiration?” he suggested.

“With suspicion,” she corrected. “Half of them think I’m trying to cheat. The other half think I’m a freak.”

“Ah,” Jack said mildly. “So fifty percent of them are wrong and the other fifty percent are extremely boring.”

She snorted, despite everything.

He went on, more serious now. “Listen to me, Kate. People will always find reasons to doubt you. Your age. Your gender. Your last name. Your height, your weight, your haircut. This is a hobby for them. It is not your job to keep up with their hobbies.”

He stepped around, careful to stay outside the path of her bow, and tapped lightly over her heart with two fingertips.

“Your job is this. Knowing who you are. Every time you hold this bow, every time you stand on this roof, you are reminding yourself: I exist. I am here. I am not going anywhere. That is already more than most people manage in a lifetime.”

She stared at the spot he’d touched, feeling her pulse thudding beneath skin and bone and the cotton of her shirt.

He stepped back again, nodding toward the target. “Now,” he said. “Show me that grouping you were bragging about to Dr. Levin last session.”

Her cheeks went hot. “I was not bragging.”

“You were absolutely bragging,” he said. “And you had reason to. So. Prove me right.”

She rolled her eyes, but some of the tightness in her chest eased.

She set her feet again. Nocked the arrow. Drew.

Inhale. The bowstring pressed against her fingers, the tension alive.

For a second, she thought about all the versions of herself that had led here: the kid in the library typing dangerous words into a school computer, the one whispering “I’m Kate” into a bathroom mirror, the trembling voice in Dr. Levin’s office saying she and her out loud for the first time.

They all lined up behind her, like a row of ghosts watching the shot.

She let go.

The arrow hit just beside the last one, the two shafts nearly touching.

A neat little cluster on the target’s heart.

“Très bien,” Jack said softly.

Kate exhaled, a laugh caught in the breath. The sound was almost giddy.

She sent three more arrows in quick succession, not rushing the form but not overthinking it either. Draw, anchor, release. Draw, anchor, release. The world narrowed to that rhythm: muscle and breath, the hiss of the string, the thud of impact.

When she finally lowered the bow, there were five arrows buried tight in the red and gold rings. Not perfect, but close enough that the sight of them made something glow in her chest.

“Okay,” she said, slightly breathless. “That’s not terrible.”

“That,” Jack said, “is the kind of group that would make certain Avengers very jealous.”

She snorted. “You don’t even know any Avengers.”

He lifted his chin, feigning insult. “You have so little faith. Perhaps one day, when you are very famous and being interviewed about your heroic exploits, you will say: ‘It all began on a rooftop, with my incredibly charming stepfather.’”

“Gross,” she said, but she was smiling now, shoulders loose, the earlier defensiveness blunted by the simple, undeniable fact that she had put arrows where she wanted them to go.

She walked up to the target, boots crunching on the gravel. Up close, the arrows looked even more impressive: clustered tight, feathers ruffled, the shafts quivering slightly from the impact. She rested her fingers against one, feeling the faint vibration still travelling through it.

She pulled them out one by one, stacking them in her hand. Each release was a small, satisfying pop.

When she turned back, Jack was watching her with a look that made her stomach do that weird, uncertain flip—the one that said he was proud and a little scared, like he could see a future where she wasn’t just his kid on a rooftop anymore but something bigger, riskier, with targets that shot back.

He covered it quickly with a grin. “Again?” he asked.

She nodded.

Again.

She walked back to her mark, arrows in one hand, bow in the other, the city sprawling around her. The wind tugged at her ponytail. Her shoulders sat square and strong.

There would be more therapists and more appointments and more hard conversations. There would be strangers with questions and strangers with opinions and, eventually, real training sessions with the hero whose bow she understood better than anyone else’s.

But right now, for this hour on this roof, she was just a girl with a bow and a target and a body that felt, finally, like it might one day be truly hers.

She planted her feet.

She raised the bow.

She breathed.

And she shot.

The gym looked like it had once been a respectable warehouse and then slowly decided it would rather be a bruise.

Concrete walls, scuffed and patched. High windows, half-painted over, letting in thin blades of late afternoon light that caught dust in the air. A permanent smell of sweat, resin, and something metallic—old equipment or old blood, it was hard to tell. Racks of mismatched weights lined one side, battered mats covered most of the floor, and a handful of paper targets hung from a cable system at the far end, riddled with arrow holes.

There was no logo on the door downstairs. Clint liked it that way.

“Again,” he said.

Kate groaned, but she was already moving before the word finished.

She dropped into a push-up, arms shaking from the last set. Her palms were slick against the mat, forearms pleasantly burning. Sweat darkened the back of her tank top, clinging to her shoulder blades. Her ponytail had mostly escaped its elastic, strands sticking to her neck and cheeks.

“One,” she muttered as she pushed up. “Two… three…”

From somewhere above her, Clint said, “You start counting out loud at fifteen. It’s adorable that you think I don’t notice.”

She gritted her teeth. “Sixteen.”

“See?” he said. “There it is.”

By twenty, her arms were jelly. She pushed through twenty-one on sheer spite, collapsed at twenty-two, and lay there sprawled on the mat, cheek pressed to the cool vinyl.

“I hate you,” she told the floor.

“I inspire so much affection,” Clint said mildly.

She heard his footsteps cross the mat, the soft squeak of his shoes. A water bottle appeared in her peripheral vision. She rolled onto her back and took it, gulping greedily. The water was warm but felt miraculous anyway.

“Don’t actually hate you,” she said hoarsely when she could breathe again. “Just… strongly resent your fitness standards.”

“You’ll miss them when you’re old and your knees make that noise when it rains,” he said.

He crouched down beside her, forearms resting on his knees, watching her catch her breath. Up close, he looked like the gym—battered but functional. Faded T-shirt, cargo pants, tape around two fingers on his right hand. There were faint bruises already blooming on his forearm from where her staff had actually landed a few times during their sparring drill.

She was proud of those.

He squinted up at the hanging targets. “Your grouping’s decent today,” he said. “For someone who did twenty-two push-ups under duress.”

“Twenty-six,” she lied.

He snorted. “Liar.”

She smiled, letting her head tip back against the mat, staring up at the high beams crisscrossing the ceiling. Her chest still rose and fell quickly, but the worst of the burn was fading.

She liked this place. Liked the way the outside world shrank down to the size of the mats and the targets and Clint’s voice giving curt instructions. Liked that here, nobody cared what her parents did for a living or what last name she had. Liked that the closest thing to gossip was Clint complaining about Stark’s taste in music.

Most days, she could almost pretend the rest of it didn’t exist. The file locked on some secure server, the whispered questions in school hallways, the internet comments she pretended she didn’t read. Here, she was just Kate with a bow and a stubborn streak.

Almost.

“Up,” Clint said after a minute, slapping her calf lightly. “Stretch or you’ll regret it tomorrow.”

She rolled to sitting with a groan and pulled one leg out, reaching for her toes. Her hamstrings screamed. She shifted to the other side.

Clint sat down cross-legged a few feet away, shaking his taped hand out, then starting to rewrap the tape with clinical efficiency. He did it like he did everything else—quick, practised, not looking down any more than he had to.

There was a comfortable silence. The kind Kate had learned existed only with people who weren’t trying too hard.

She watched him for a second, the way his fingers moved, the way his shoulders had relaxed now that the session was over.

He knows, a voice in the back of her mind whispered. Of course he knows.

Of course he did. People like Clint didn’t take on new protégés without reading every line of their files. Somewhere in whatever encrypted database the Avengers kept their stuff in, there was a few pages about one Katherine Bishop, assigned male at birth, socially transitioned at ten, medically transitioning under the supervision of blah blah blah. There were notes from Dr. Levin, signatures from Eleanor and Jack, probably Stark’s initials in the margins.

He knows, and he’s never said anything.

Which was… mostly good. But it left a strange, hollow space between them. Like an unspoken joke she was pretty sure he’d heard but refused to acknowledge.

She switched legs again, reaching for her other foot, and heard herself speak before she’d decided she was going to.

“Did they tell you?” she asked.

Her voice sounded too loud in the big, echoing space.

Clint glanced up. “Tell me what? That you cheat on your push-up count? Figured that one out myself, thanks.”

She made a face, but the joke skittered off the surface of her question and sank.

“No,” she said. “I mean… before you agreed to train me. Did they tell you… about me?”

The humor in his eyes cooled a notch. He finished looping the tape, tore it with his teeth, and smoothed the end down.

“Lot of ‘abouts’ in that question, kid,” he said. “Gonna need you to narrow it down.”

She swallowed. Her mouth suddenly felt dry again.

“Did they tell you I’m… trans,” she said. The word still made her stomach flip a little, even though she’d been saying it out loud for years now. “That I wasn’t always… on paper… that my birth certificate says something different.”

She didn’t know why that phrase—birth certificate—felt like such a confession. Maybe because so many people treated it like a sacred text, written in stone instead of ink.

Clint’s gaze stayed steady on her face. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look away.

“Yeah,” he said. “They told me.”

The answer was so simple it knocked the wind out of her more than another round of push-ups would have.

He must have seen something in her expression, because he added, “I read the file. The boring one, not the PR version. I know what box got checked when you were born. I know what it says now. I know the steps in between, as much as anyone bothered to write down.”

He shrugged, like he was admitting the weather was fine.

She pulled her feet in, hugging her knees loosely, the stretch forgotten. “And you… still agreed to take me on?” she asked, hating how small the question sounded.

Clint’s mouth curved. Not in mockery. More like—really? That’s where your brain went?

“Kid,” he said, “I also saw your audition tape. The one with the moving targets and the wind gust and the broken bowstring and you still hitting dead center on the reset.”

She winced. “That was not supposed to break, in my defence.”

“And yet,” he said. “You improvised. You didn’t panic. You adjusted on the fly and still nailed it. Three times. The file with that on it mattered more to me than what some doctor wrote down in a delivery room.”

She stared at him. “That’s not… how it works for everyone.”

“I know,” he said. The two words were simple and heavy.

He leaned back on his hands, looking up at the ceiling beams as if they held the right phrasing.

“Look,” he said. “Here’s how I think about it. You tell me your name, your pronouns, who you are. My job is to listen and get it right. Same as if you told me you’re left-handed or that your right knee hates stairs. It’s information I need to not be an ass and to keep you alive.”

He glanced back at her. “You told me Kate, she/her. So you’re Kate, she/her. That’s the end of the mystery.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said, automatically. It had never been that simple with school administrators or relatives or journalists fishing for a story.

“With other people? Maybe not,” he said. “With me? Pretty much is.”

He said it in that flat, unshakeable way he sometimes had in the middle of a fight, when he’d decided which target needed to go down first. Not bravado; just a fact.

She picked at a loose thread on the knee of her leggings. The mat was sticky under her palms where sweat had dried, faint chalk smears marking where her hands had been.

“What if…” She hesitated. “What if you get… I don’t know. Weird about it later. Or mad that nobody told you sooner. Or—”

“Or what if I decide you’re secretly a squirrel and this has all been an elaborate prank by Stark,” Clint cut in. “A lot of things could happen ‘later.’”

She glared at him. “I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he said. “About the part that matters.”

He unfolded his legs and moved so he was sitting directly across from her now, mirroring her posture, knees up, forearms resting on them. The distance between them shrank to a couple of feet and the length of their shared sweat and stubbornness.

“When I met you,” he said, “you introduced yourself as Kate. You corrected that idiot security guy who called you ‘young man’ without flinching. You hit my trick shot on the second try and you did not shut up about arrows for forty-five minutes in the car. That’s my first impression. That’s who you are to me.”

He tipped his head slightly. “The rest—the old paperwork, the hormone charts, the letters from therapists—that’s background noise. Important sometimes, sure. Medical people need it. Lawyers need it. I need to know enough to yell at the right people if someone screws up your accommodations. But who you are? That’s between you and you. I’m just trying to keep up.”

A lump formed in her throat. She stared down at their sneakers, the scuff marks on the toes, the stray length of white tape stuck to the mat between them.

“What if…” She swallowed. The next question felt raw, rubbed down by years of other people’s opinions. “What if other people on the team… don’t see it that way?”

He blew out a breath through his nose, a sound that was almost a laugh but not quite.

“First of all,” he said, “most of them do. Not all as gracefully as others, but the average IQ in that building is high enough to grasp ‘respect people’s pronouns’ once you explain it in small words.”

That earned a weak huff of amusement from her.

“Second,” he continued, “if anyone gives you crap about it—teammate, staff member, random guy in catering, I don’t care—you tell me. I will handle it.”

He held up a hand before she could protest. “And by ‘handle’ I do not necessarily mean ‘shoot them in the foot.’ HR gets mad when I do that. I mean I will make it very clear that treating you like anything less than what you are is not an option on my watch.”

“What if they think you’re just… playing favorites?” she asked.

“Oh, I am,” he said. “Don’t tell the others.”

She blinked, thrown.

He grinned. “Kid, my whole thing is strays and long shots. You show up in my life with a bow and more determination than sense, I’m gonna be on your side. That’s the deal. If someone has a problem with that, they can go complain to Stark, and he can write them a sternly worded memo about corporate values or whatever he’s calling it this week.”

Something unknotted in her chest at the casual certainty of it.

She picked at the tape stuck to the mat, nails scraping the edge. “I just…” She searched for the words. “Sometimes I worry you don’t see me as… like, a real girl. Just… ‘the trans one.’” The phrase came out bitter. “Like an asterisk next to my name.”

Clint’s face shifted. Not offended. Just… thoughtful.

He tipped his head, studying her. “Okay,” he said. “Honest answer?”

She nodded, stomach twisting. She wasn’t sure she wanted it, but she knew she needed it.

“Sometimes I remember you’re trans when I’m running through logistics,” he said. “Like, if we’re planning a mission and I’m thinking about your gear, your meds, which locker room we’re using, who’s on the transport crew. That’s… part of the job. Knowing your team’s details.”

He shrugged. “But when we’re sparring, when you’re shooting, when you’re making bad jokes in the car… no. I don’t think ‘this is my trans trainee.’ I think ‘this is Kate, who will argue with an arrow if she thinks it’s being smug.’”

“I do not argue with arrows,” she said automatically.

“You absolutely do,” he said, amused. “Point is: you’re a girl. That’s the box in my head. ‘Girl, archer, stubborn, annoying, good shot.’ The ‘trans’ part shows up sometimes as a sticky note on the side, not as a label stamped across your forehead.”

She sat with that for a moment.

In her head, the label was always huge, unavoidable, neon. She kept expecting other people to see it that way too.

“Sticky note,” she repeated slowly. “That falls off if the room gets too humid.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Or if Stark opens a window.”

She laughed, unexpectedly loud. The sound bounced off the walls.

Silence settled again, warmer this time.

Clint pushed himself to his feet with a soft grunt, knees popping. “All right, Bishop,” he said, offering her a hand up. “Enough feelings. My brand can’t handle this much emotional intelligence in one session.”

She took his hand and let him haul her up. Her muscles protested, but standing felt good.

He held on for an extra second, his grip firm.

“I’m glad you told me,” he said, more quietly. “With words, I mean. Not just letting me read it in a file. Matters.”

She felt that land somewhere deep. “You already knew,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “But hearing it from you? That’s you trusting me with it. That’s different.”

He let go and stepped back, businesslike again. “Now. Go hit the shower before you stink up my car. And if security calls you ‘mister’ again on the way out…”

“I know, I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Correct them. Calmly. You’ve only given that speech twelve times.”

“Repetition builds good habits,” he said. “Ask your bow.”

She grabbed her water bottle and towel, slinging them under one arm. Her legs still felt a little shaky, but it wasn’t just from the workout now. There was a lightness under the soreness, a sense of something heavy having been set down.

At the doorway, she paused and looked back.

Clint was on the far side of the mat, collecting stray arrows, examining the shafts for damage. He moved with the absent-minded focus of someone who had done this thousands of times before and still cared about each shot.

“Clint?” she said.

He glanced up. “Yeah?”

“Thanks,” she said. It didn’t feel like enough, but it was all she had.

He shrugged one shoulder, like he was brushing off a compliment he secretly liked. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Now go before Stark steals you for something tedious like a safety seminar.”

She made a face and pushed the door open, the cool of the hallway air washing over her sweat-damp skin.

As she walked down the corridor toward the locker room, the gym’s faint echoes fading behind her, she felt strangely taller. Not in the awkward, limbs-too-long way of the last growth spurt, but in the sense of having more space inside her own skin.

Her mentor knew everything the file said about her. He knew everything she’d just told him on top of that. And he’d looked at all of it and still seen the same person he’d agreed to train: Kate. Archer. Stubborn. His.

It wasn’t magic. It didn’t erase the looks or the questions or the other people’s labels.

But it made the room inside her head a little bigger. A little less crowded with pots banging for attention.

She pushed open the locker room door and stepped into the fluorescent light, the smell of soap and metal and damp towels. Behind her, on the other side of the gym, an arrow thunked into a target, clean and sure.

She smiled to herself.

Sticky note, she thought. I can live with that.

Tony’s workshop looked like a spaceship had crash-landed in the middle of an art supply store and decided to stay.

Holo-screens hovered at odd angles over a central workbench, each displaying something different: a rotating 3D schematic of a repulsor gauntlet, a scrolling column of code, what looked suspiciously like a paused scene from some old black-and-white movie in the corner. Half-built gadgets and taken-apart gadgets shared space with coffee cups in various stages of abandonment. There was a distinct smell of solder, machine oil, and espresso.

Kate stood a few feet inside the door, holding her bow like a peace offering.

“Before you say anything,” she began, “it only exploded a little.”

Tony, bent over a disassembled arrowhead with a magnifier flipped down over one eye, didn’t look up.

“There are no small explosions,” he said. “Only lawsuits waiting to happen.”

He nudged something tiny with the tip of a screwdriver, then finally straightened, sliding the magnifier up.

“How many fingers do you have?” he asked.

She glanced down at her hands. “Ten?”

He pointed the screwdriver at her. “Then I’m not mad. Come on.”

She crossed the workshop carefully, stepping over a tangle of cables and giving a wide berth to a robot arm that whirred to life as she passed, twitching like it wanted to wave. Her boots stuck slightly to a patch of dried something on the floor. She decided not to ask.

She set the bow down on the cleared section of the workbench he’d indicated—a narrow strip between a dismantled helmet and what might have been the guts of a toaster.

“It misfired on the last mission,” she said, resting a hand on the riser. “The grappling head. It caught, but the tether didn’t deploy right. I almost went off the side of the building.”

“‘Almost’ is a word I strongly discourage in the context of gravity,” Tony said. He turned the bow toward himself, inspecting the custom attachment near the lower limb. “Clint tell you to bring this in?”

“He insisted,” she said. “And then Yelena added a lecture about not dying stupidly.”

“Good. Peer pressure works when used responsibly.” He picked the bow up, weighing it in one hand. “You really like this thing, huh?”

She shrugged, trying not to look as protective as she felt. “It’s saved my life a few times. I’d prefer us to stay on good terms.”

He gave her a sideways look that acknowledged the understatement, then pivoted, hooking the bow into a clamp on the bench so it hung vertically at chest height.

“Okay,” he said. “Show me the scene of the crime.”

She pointed to the modified section where the grappling mechanism had been installed—a sleek housing integrated into the limb.

“It jerked when I fired,” she said. “Like it stuttered. Tether caught on the ledge but didn’t fully extend. I had to manually release the backup.” She tried to keep her tone matter-of-fact; the memory of her foot skidding on crumbling concrete still made her palms sweat.

“Hmm.” Tony flicked through a series of holographic menus with two fingers until a 3D model of her bow spun into existence above the workbench. He rotated it with a flick, zooming in on the attachment. “You got any helmet-cam footage?”

“I can send it,” she said.

He waved that off. “Already have it. Friday pulled it the second your heart rate spiked.”

Of course he did.

He tapped the side of his glasses, watching something only he could see. “Yeah,” he muttered. “There it is. Micro-delay in the spool. That’s on me. Old actuator, new software. Couple of milliseconds’ disagreement and your bow decides to have an existential crisis right when you’re going sideways off a tower.”

He set the glasses down and picked up a soldering iron. “We’ll fix it.”

We. The pronoun settled something jittery in her.

“Do I… need to get a new one?” she asked. “Bow, I mean. If it’s a design flaw.”

He snorted. “You wish. You think I’m scrapping my first-gen Stark/Bishop hybrid because of one bad part? No, Legolas 2.0, we’re upgrading this one. You’ve already broken it in with your emotional support death-defying.”

She watched him work, the quick, precise movements of his hands familiar and oddly soothing. He muttered to himself under his breath, half-formed phrases about torque and load-bearing tolerances and “Clint is going to owe me so many favours if this works.”

It was late; most of the compound was quiet. She’d come down here after debrief, after showering off the grime and adrenaline of the mission that had almost turned into a drop. She could have waited until tomorrow, but the thought of hanging the bow back on its rack in her room without knowing why it had almost betrayed her made her skin itch.

Next to the workbench, a tablet lay face-up, a roster open: AVENGERS INITIATIVE – ACTIVE & PROVISIONAL. Her own name glowed near the bottom: KATE BISHOP – FIELD TRAINEE. Above it, not far, CLINT BARTON. Farther up, N. ROMANOFF (INACTIVE – DECEASED). A knot tightened in her chest at that; she looked away.

Tony followed her glance, then flipped the tablet over with a fingertip, screen down.

“Don’t read the comments,” he said.

“I wasn’t,” she said.

“You were reading the comments spiritually,” he said. “Same thing.”

She huffed a breath that was half a laugh. The tension in her shoulders eased a notch.

For a few minutes, the only sounds were the faint buzz of the soldering iron, the soft clink of tools, and the distant murmur of the compound’s air-conditioning.

“Hey, Bishop,” Tony said eventually, still focused on the bow. “Off-topic question for you.”

“Is this going to be about coffee again?” she said. “Because I’m not switching to that cold brew sludge no matter how many TED Talks you send.”

“It’s not sludge, it’s science.” He set the iron down and pivoted the bow slightly. “But no. This is more… HR-adjacent.”

That caught her attention. “That sounds terrifying.”

He scratched his jaw with the handle of a screwdriver, eyes finally leaving the bow to settle on her.

“So,” he said. “There’s a line in your file most people will never see. You know the one I mean?”

She felt her stomach tighten.

The room didn’t change. The hum of the equipment stayed the same; the glow of the screens didn’t flicker. But something in the air went still.

She shifted her weight. “I can guess,” she said carefully.

He nodded once. “The sealed section. Kate Bishop, formerly known as… etcetera.” He made a vague gesture in the air, as if dismissing the old data like smoke. “Medical history. Legal paperwork. Pronouns. The greatest hits.”

Heat crept up the back of her neck. She stared at a smudge of oil on the floor.

“You weren’t supposed to read that,” she said, even though she knew how ridiculous that sounded the moment it left her mouth.

Tony’s eyebrows climbed. “I’m literally the guy who wrote half of it,” he said. “Or at least the security protocols around it. I signed off on your clearance. I’d be a negligent employer if I didn’t know what information my organisation was hoarding about my staff.”

“It’s just… weird,” she said. “Thinking about you scrolling through all that.”

“Kid, I’ve seen worse,” he said dryly. “You should see Thor’s dietary log. But that’s not the point.”

He set the screwdriver down and rested his hands on the edge of the workbench, leaning on them.

“The point,” he continued, “is that we need to talk about who gets to see that line and when. And I am not going to make that decision for you.”

She blinked. That was not the direction she’d expected this conversation to go.

“I thought you already had,” she said. “I mean… it’s in there. Someone decided to put it in there.”

“Oh, yeah, the lawyers love that section,” he said. “They get to say ‘we did our due diligence’ if anyone sues us for anything at any point, which is their favourite hobby. But sealed is not the same as public. Right now, that info is on a need-to-know basis. Medical, security, me, Barton because he’s your primary handler. Not the press. Not the merchandising goblins. Not the random agent in Dispatch.”

He tapped the workbench in a staccato rhythm, considering her.

“You’re not just a kid with a really good aim anymore,” he said. “You’re front-line adjacent. You do press. You’re in photos. You get fan art, God help you. At some point, someone is going to start digging harder. When that happens, I want us to be very clear on two things: one, what we’re doing to keep you safe. Two, what you want.”

She felt suddenly very young and very visible, like someone had turned a spotlight on her.

“I don’t… I haven’t really thought about it,” she admitted, then grimaced. “That’s a lie. I think about it all the time, I just don’t… know what I think.”

“Welcome to being an adult,” Tony said. “It’s mostly that.”

He pushed away from the workbench and crossed to a console near the wall, tapping a few commands. A holographic window bloomed in the air between them, text scrolling down too fast for her to read. Her name appeared at the top, followed by lines of redacted information.

“This is what the average security clearance sees,” he said. “Name, age, abilities, training. Nothing about your medical history beyond ‘fit for duty, cleared by Dr. Levin & co.’” He flicked his fingers, and more black bars appeared, covering sections. “This is what I see. What Barton sees. What the head of medical sees if they squint.”

He let the display hang there for a moment, then made it vanish with a swipe.

“I can keep it that way,” he said. “Tight as a drum. If some tabloid goes fishing, we send the lawyers and the bots at them, bury them in cease-and-desists until they decide chasing alien lizard rumours is more fun.”

“Can you… actually do that?” she asked.

He gave her a look. “I’ve erased myself from Google before,” he said. “I can keep one line about you from trending. I’m not promising perfection—people are nosy and the internet is a hellscape—but I can make it hard to find anything you don’t want found.”

Her fingers curled on themselves. “And if I… don’t want to keep it a secret?” she said quietly.

He studied her for a long moment, all the flippancy gone.

“Then we do that,” he said. “On your terms. Not because someone forced your hand, not because some journalist wants a Very Special Episode. If you ever decide you want to talk about it publicly—interview, op-ed, TikTok dance, I don’t judge—we will set it up properly. Lawyers on your side. PR people who actually listen. Media training if you want it, bodyguards if you need them. And anyone who tries to spin it into a circus gets the full Stark Industries death glare treatment.”

She let out a breath, shaky at the edges. “That sounds… huge,” she said. “And terrifying.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It would be. Which is why I am not here to pitch you on the Brave And Inspiring Coming-Out Story. I have seen enough of those to last a lifetime.”

He hooked his thumbs into his pockets, posture loose but eyes intent. “Here’s the important bit, and I want you to hear this part very clearly: you don’t owe anyone any of that.”

She looked up, startled. “I—”

“I mean it,” he said, cutting her off. “You existing as you are, walking around this building, doing your job, annoying Barton, missing exactly two shots a month—that’s already more than enough. You have nothing to prove to the public. You are not a teaching moment. You are not a diversity initiative. You are my archer, and your primary obligation is to not get killed and not let anyone else get killed if we can help it. Full stop.”

He spread his hands. “If, on top of that, you eventually decide you want to use your story to help someone, we’ll figure it out. But that’s a bonus round, not a requirement.”

A knot she hadn’t realised she’d been carrying slid down a little from her chest to her stomach. It still sat there, heavy, but it wasn’t crushing her lungs anymore.

“I keep thinking about… kids,” she said, the word tasting awkward. “Like I used to be. On the internet. Reading articles and watching clips of… people like me. Thinking ‘oh, okay, I’m not alone.’” She stared at her hands. “Part of me feels like I’d be… selfish? Not to be one of those people one day.”

“Part of you also likes not having your childhood medical records dissected by strangers in the comments section,” Tony said. “Both parts are valid. It’s called a dilemma, and unfortunately I do not have a widget for that.”

“You have a widget for everything,” she said.

“Not for feelings,” he said. “Trust me, I’ve tried. They don’t scale.”

He walked back to the workbench and picked up her bow again, turning it over in his hands.

“When I was your age,” he said, “if I’d had the kind of… information trails we have now, I would have been a walking disaster. Every stupid decision, every bad haircut, every regrettable quote preserved forever on someone’s server. You, on the other hand, are growing up in that world with a target already painted on your back because you stand next to people in funny costumes during crises.”

He looked at her over the top limb of the bow. “So we’re going to be careful with you. Not because you’re fragile, but because you’re valuable. To the team. To me.”

Her ears went hot. “You’re really bad at compliments,” she muttered.

“I’m great at compliments,” he said. “You’re just bad at receiving them. We’ll work on it.”

He set the bow back into the clamp and picked up a new module, a tiny piece of gleaming metal no bigger than her fingernail.

“So,” he said. “Option A: Fort Knox mode. We lock your file down as tight as we can, and I go full rabid raccoon on anyone who tries to pry it open without permission. Option B: at some point in the nebulous future, you decide you want to say something, and we do it on the highest possible Kate-controlled setting.”

He snapped the module into place with a satisfying click.

“Either way,” he said, “the decision point is you. Not me, not the team, not the algorithm that decides who gets trending topics. You.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, thinking. The idea of the world knowing—really knowing—made her stomach lurch. She pictured headlines, her old name splashed across screens, talking heads debating whether she should be on missions, the way people already argued about who got to be a hero.

She also pictured a kid scrolling on a library computer somewhere, heart hammering, feeling alone.

“I don’t know what I want yet,” she said. The admission felt like failure.

“Great,” Tony said. “That means you’re not making a rushed decision to please anyone. That’s good. We like that.”

“You really don’t mind?” she asked. “If I… don’t know?”

He tilted his head. “Bishop, my entire brand is built on pretending to know what I’m doing and then figuring it out in post,” he said. “If you told me you had a five-year plan and a TEDx talk topic ready, then I’d be worried.”

She couldn’t help it; she smiled. It came out small but real.

Tony’s mouth quirked in response. He turned back to the bow, tightened a final screw, then unclamped it and held it out to her.

“Try not to break this one for at least a week,” he said. “New actuator, adjusted spool, smarter software. It should deploy smoother. If it doesn’t, you come back here and yell at me, not at yourself.”

She took the bow, fingers closing around the grip. It felt the same and different all at once—familiar weight, slightly altered balance.

“In exchange,” he added, “I expect you to keep doing what you’re doing. Shoot straight, don’t die, correct idiots politely, and remember that HR is your friend.”

“HR hates you,” she said.

“HR has a complicated relationship with my process,” he said. “But they are very clear on one thing: nobody on my team gets harassed on my watch. I’ve made it explicit. If anyone gives you grief about your history—teammate, staff, contractor, uninvited alien—they’re gone. No debate. That’s not up for a vote.”

“Even if they’re… important?” she asked.

“So are you,” he said, without hesitation.

The words landed with more force than any explosion.

Her throat tightened. She looked away quickly, pretending to examine the bow.

“Okay,” she said, voice rough. “I’ll… think about everything. The file. The options. All of it.”

“Good,” he said. “In the meantime, if some reporter or random TikTok account starts sniffing around and you get that oh-no feeling in your stomach, you loop me in. Early. Don’t wait until there’s a trending hashtag with your name in it.”

“Understood,” she said. It came out sounding more like mission acknowledgment than she’d intended.

He seemed to approve. “That’s my girl,” he said, almost absent-mindedly, already reaching for another tool.

The phrase—the same one Jack used, different tone, different history—hit in a different part of her chest this time. Less like an ache, more like a note harmonising with one she’d been holding for years.

She adjusted the strap of the quiver on her shoulder, the familiar weight settling against her back.

“Hey, Tony?” she said, pausing near the door.

He glanced up. “Yeah?”

“Thanks,” she said. “For… all of that. Not just the bow.”

He waved the screwdriver in a vague circle. “Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t. I have a reputation to maintain. If word gets out I had a heartfelt conversation, there will be paperwork.”

She rolled her eyes. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Good. Now go bother Barton. Tell him I said he owes me three coffees and a new actuator.”

She started to turn away, then hesitated, something else pressing at the back of her mind.

“And Tony?” she said.

He sighed, theatrically long-suffering. “You’re cutting into my brooding time, Bishop.”

“If I do… decide,” she said, fighting through the knot of fear and possibility in her stomach, “about… being open. You’ll really… be there?”

He didn’t roll his eyes this time. He just looked at her, the lines around his mouth deepening.

“Kid,” he said. “If you decide to do this, I will be right there next to you. On-camera, off-camera, in the comment moderation trenches. I will stand between you and the worst of it as long as my very expensive heart keeps beating. You have my word.”

There was no joke in it. No deflection. Just a simple, iron-backed promise.

She nodded, throat too tight to answer.

“Go,” he said, softer. “Get some sleep. The world will still be a mess tomorrow. No need to tackle all of it tonight.”

She stepped out into the corridor, the hum of the workshop door closing behind her, her bow solid in her hand.

The compound hallway was quiet, lights dimmed to evening mode. Somewhere upstairs, she could hear distant voices—Clint, probably, arguing with someone about movie night; Yelena’s sharper tone cutting in. Normal noise.

She glanced down at the bow, at her own name etched neatly along the riser: K. BISHOP. No initials of the name that had come before. That name existed in sealed files and old paperwork and the memories of a few people who loved her.

Out here, in this building, on this team, she was Kate.

Her history was complicated. Her future was terrifying and wide-open. But she had a mentor who trusted her aim, a girlfriend who threatened to throw bigots off metaphorical cliffs, parents who were trying, and a billionaire in a workshop who was willing to go to war with the internet for her.

For now, that was enough.

She adjusted the strap on her shoulder and headed toward the elevator, already thinking about the next training run, the next shot, the next small choice in a long line of them.

Behind her, in the workshop, a new line of code executed quietly on a secure server, tightening access protocols on a sealed section of her file.

On Kate’s side of the door, all she felt was the bow in her hand and the knowledge—unsteady but real—that when the time came to decide, the choice would be hers.

The rooftop of the compound felt like a place someone had tried to make romantic after the fact.

The original Stark design was all clean lines and helicopter pad practicality, but somewhere along the way someone had added things that didn’t fit the blueprints: a couple of mismatched lounge chairs, a low table with chipped paint, a string of solar fairy lights that flickered unreliably along the railing. Tonight, a heavy wool blanket was spread near the middle of the roof, just far enough from the edge to satisfy Security’s blood pressure.

Kate lay on her back on the blanket, hoodie zipped up to her throat, the chill of the night air prickling any skin left uncovered. Above her, New York’s sky was a muddled grey, stars drowned out by city light. The view made up for it: skyscrapers stabbed holes in the darkness in every direction, windows glowing, traffic tracing lines of light down below.

Next to her, Yelena lay on her side, propped up on one elbow, chin in hand. A takeout container of fries sat open between them, two plastic forks stabbing out of it like flags planted on conquered territory. The smell of salt and grease cut through the colder, cleaner air that lived this far above street level.

A shared set of earbuds snaked from Yelena’s pocket to both of their ears, a low, undemanding playlist humming along in the background. Something acoustic and melancholy, the kind of song that sounded like walking home alone in the rain if you didn’t listen too closely to the lyrics.

Kate should have been relaxed. She had a blanket, fries, her girlfriend, and the illusion of privacy carved out of a building that never fully slept.

Instead, her thumb wouldn’t stop moving.

She held her phone above her face, the glow washing out everything else, scrolling through an endless column of text. Comment threads, quote tweets, blog posts. Some with little rainbow or trans flag emojis in the usernames, some with profile pictures of eagles and flags and aggressive dogs. Opinions, arguments, “thinkpieces.” Words like agenda and grooming and real women thrown around with the casual cruelty of people who never expected to meet their hypothetical targets.

The latest discourse vortex was not about her. Not yet. It was about a rumor—half-confirmed, half-denied—that one of the newer, younger heroes on the West Coast team was trans. Someone had posted “receipts,” grainy yearbook photos and legal documents that may or may not have been real. The hero in question had made a vague statement about “privacy” and “working it through with my family,” and the internet had done what it always did: exploded.

Part of Kate had stayed away for as long as she could. Then someone had tagged her in a thread—If Bishop is trans too that explains the whole PR diversity push—and curiosity had yanked her in like a rip current.

She knew better. Every therapist and every older hero she trusted had told her the same thing: do not read the comments. Under any circumstances.

She’d lasted until midnight.

Now it was well past that, and her eyes were starting to sting from the bright small text.

“You are making your ‘I’m fine’ face,” Yelena said.

Kate blinked. “What?”

Yelena’s accent always carved the edges off English in a way that made it sound both drier and more affectionate. She shifted, bracing her weight on her elbow, and peered at Kate’s profile.

“You have three faces,” she said. “Happy, murder, and ‘I’m fine.’ This is the third one. It is very annoying.”

“I have more than three faces,” Kate muttered.

“Not to me.” Yelena plucked one of the earbuds gently out of Kate’s ear and let it dangle. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing,” Kate said automatically, thumb still moving.

Yelena did not sigh, exactly. She made a small sound in her throat that meant, In thirty seconds I am going to fix this myself if you do not cooperate.

Kate’s thumb hesitated long enough for Yelena to lean over and snatch the phone from her hand.

“Hey—” Kate protested, rolling onto her side, reaching.

Yelena stretched her arm out to full length, easily keeping the phone away from her. Being trained as a superspy assassin came with very useful reflexes.

“No,” she said. “You had your chance. Now I see what is making your eyes do this.” She pointed two fingers at Kate’s face, mimicking the way her brows pinched together when she was trying not to show she was upset.

She looked down at the phone. The screen lit her features from below, turning her eyes into pale chips of reflective glass.

Her expression went flat.

“Ah,” she said. “Internet.”

“That’s a very broad category,” Kate said weakly.

“Yes. Like ‘war’ or ‘terrible food.’” Yelena flicked her thumb up, scrolling. “This is about that West Coast kid.”

Kate made a face, half-guilty, half-defensive. “I just wanted to see… what people were saying.”

“People are saying the same thing they always say,” Yelena replied. “‘This is good.’ ‘This is bad.’ ‘I read one blog post and now I have moral authority.’” She snorted. “Very boring.”

She scrolled further, jaw tightening at some comment Kate couldn’t see from this angle.

“They are also saying shitty things,” she added, voice flattening. “Which is not new. People have been saying shitty things about everything since someone invented writing on walls.”

She tapped the screen twice, then flicked it dark with an economy of motion that made it feel almost like a threat aimed at the device.

“No more of this,” she said, tucking the phone into the pocket of her windbreaker and patting it like a misbehaving pet. “You are not allowed to feed your brain to the raccoons tonight.”

Kate flopped onto her back, staring up at the washed-out sky again. Without the phone, the rooftop felt suddenly bigger. The cold air bit at the edges of her eyes.

“It’s not about them,” she said, knowing that wasn’t entirely true. “Okay, it’s kind of about them. But also… it’s about me. That could be me. Someday. If someone decides to… go digging.”

“In your garbage,” Yelena said. “Yes.”

She lay back down too, shoulder pressed lightly against Kate’s. The shared body heat took the worst of the chill out of the blanket.

“They already are thinking it,” Yelena added, more matter-of-fact than unkind. “You see, yes? In comments. ‘Maybe Bishop is, too.’ ‘Bishop is too good an archer; something is weird there.’”

“That’s not how being trans works,” Kate muttered. “It doesn’t come with a buff to dexterity.”

“You know that. I know that. Internet raccoons do not.”

Kate swallowed. Her chest felt tight, like a hand was pressing down just under her collarbone.

“I keep thinking about… if they found out,” she said. “Like really found out. Name, file, medical history, everything. Not just rumours. If they put it all out there like they’re doing to… to her.”

The pronoun stuck in her throat. She didn’t even know the West Coast hero’s name; she’d only seen grainy photos and an alias. But the look on the girl’s face at a press conference clip—a carefully controlled smile not reaching her eyes—had lodged under Kate’s skin like a splinter.

“I know Tony’s put a lot of locks on my file,” she went on. “And Clint’s… Clint. But nothing is un-hackable, right? If someone really wanted to—if they bribed the right person, broke into the right server, whatever—they could.”

“Yes,” Yelena said. Always honest. “They could.”

“And if they did…” Kate stared at her own hands, fingers curled loosely on her stomach. “I’d be on every screen in the world as… not just ‘Hawkeye’s protégé’ or ‘that girl with the purple arrows’ but ‘the trans one.’ Full stop. People would argue whether I was allowed to be on the team. Whether I lied to everyone. Whether I ‘took a spot from a real girl.’” The last phrase came out bitter, bile-coated.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“And I can’t stop thinking that some kid in a library somewhere would see that and think, ‘Okay, cool, I’m not alone,’ and that’s… good,” she said. “But also they’d see all the comments, and all the hate, and I’d be… example A of why it’s dangerous to be honest. And I don’t know how to be both. I don’t know how to be… useful… without feeling like I’m being thrown to wolves.”

The words tumbled out faster now, years of half-formed worries finally clearing their own path.

“What if I mess it up?” she whispered. “What if I become some symbol and then I screw up a mission or I say the wrong thing in an interview or—God—I fall off a building on live TV, and then it’s not just ‘Kate Bishop messed up,’ it’s ‘look, the trans one messed up, we gave them a chance and see what happened.’”

The thoughts had been banging around in her skull for weeks, maybe years, like bees in a jar. Saying them aloud felt like unscrewing the lid and hoping they didn’t all sting her on the way out.

Yelena was quiet for a moment.

The wind picked up, sweeping a loose strand of hair across Kate’s face. She pushed it back impatiently.

“You know what my name was, when I was your age?” Yelena asked.

Kate blinked, thrown by the shift. “Yelena, right? I mean, that’s—”

“That is what my mother named me,” Yelena said. “The last time anyone in charge of my life cared what she thought.” She made a small, unimpressed sound. “The Red Room did not like that name. Too soft. Too Russian. They tried out a few things. ‘Number this.’ ‘Asset that.’ ‘Black Widow,’ sometimes, as if we should feel special to earn someone else’s old code name.”

Kate turned her head, watching her profile in the dim light.

“I answered to all of them, because if I did not, they hurt me,” Yelena said, voice flat and dry, as if reciting a fact about the weather. “They changed my clothes, my haircut, my voice. My file. All of it. The point was always the same: you are not a person, you are what we say you are today.”

She rolled onto her back, staring at the same blank sky Kate had been watching.

“When I got out,” she continued, “I decided: never again. I pick my own name. I pick my own clothes. I pick my own people. If someone tries to overwrite that, I kill them.”

Kate made a small noise that was half-horrified, half-knowing she wasn’t entirely joking.

“Metaphorically,” Yelena added, after a beat. “Most of the time.”

She turned her head to meet Kate’s eyes.

“So when you tell me, ‘What if they find out and decide who I am for me,’ I understand,” she said. “Very much. But here is the thing, Kate Bishop.” She reached out, tapping two fingers lightly against Kate’s temple. “They do not live in here. You do. They can write anything they want on screens. It does not change the print inside your skull.”

“That’s… not how that feels,” Kate said quietly. “Most days it feels like the print is… erasable. Like if enough people say it loud enough, their version wins.”

“Then you need better people,” Yelena said simply. “Louder ones. Closer ones.”

She tapped Kate’s chest next, over the zipper of her hoodie, then her own.

“I had a lot of versions of myself,” she said. “Yelena the Asset. Yelena the Weapon. Yelena the sister who came back too late. None of those were my choice. You know what changed? It was not… some grand speech. Not a file being rewritten. It was… a dog. A cheap apartment. A dumb American TV show. The first time my sister called me just ‘Lenochka’ and it did not sound like an order. The first time you looked at me like I was… not a mission.”

She shrugged, the movement small but weighted.

“I built a new version,” she said. “Not because the world decided I deserved one. Because I decided, and then I found people whose decision mattered more to me than any file.”

She reached for the takeout container, grabbed a fry, considered it, then pointed it at Kate like a tiny, greasy knife.

“So. Internet can scream ‘not a real woman’ as much as it wants,” she said. “They did not watch you at ten years old, hands shaking, telling your very scary mother at a very shiny table, ‘I am a girl.’ They did not see you on a rooftop with your crazy stepfather learning to trust your shoulders again. They did not sit with you in a doctor’s office while you tried to explain something you barely had words for.”

Kate’s eyes burned. She focused on the fry hovering in front of her nose.

“I did,” Yelena said. “Clint did. Tony did. Your parents, in their own… complicated way.” She made a face. “They count. Our vote is heavier than some idiot in a comment section who gets angry when his cartoon has two women holding hands.”

She popped the fry into her mouth and chewed, as if that settled it.

Kate stared at her for a long moment, then let out a breath that felt like it came from somewhere below her ribs.

“It still scares me,” she said. “All of it. The idea that someone could just… rip my old life open and display it. Or that I’ll… decide to do it myself and regret it. Or that I won’t and then I’ll regret that. There’s no… option that doesn’t feel like it costs something.”

Yelena nodded. “It does,” she said. “There is always cost. You do not get to be a person in this world for free.”

She rolled onto her side again, supporting herself on one elbow so she could look down at Kate properly.

“But listen to me,” she said. “I did not fall in love with a brave public figure or a secret tragic symbol. I fell in love with the idiot who ordered three desserts on our first date because she ‘could not choose’ and then ate half of mine. I fell in love with the girl who argues with arrows and with me and with the television. With the one who knocks on my door at two in the morning because she cannot sleep and wants to watch bad movies.”

Her voice softened.

“I fell in love with Kate,” she said. “The version sitting on this blanket. Not a file. Not a birth certificate. Not a hashtag.”

Kate swallowed around the lump in her throat. “What if they print my old name?” she asked, the question she tried hardest not to think about spilling out anyway. “Everywhere. What if that’s the name people remember. The one they chant at protests or whatever. What if they talk about ‘Calvin Bishop’ more than they ever talk about Kate.”

“Then they are wrong,” Yelena said, without a flicker of doubt. “And I will correct them. Loudly.”

“How?” Kate asked, the image half-ridiculous, half painfully tempting.

Yelena shrugged. “Press conference. Instagram. Spray-paint on Stark Tower. There are many options.” A corner of her mouth curled. “You want a quote now? I give you one free.”

She cleared her throat and switched into a mock-serious announcer voice.

‘Her name is Kate Bishop,’” she intoned. “‘She is very good with bow. If you use wrong name, I will throw you off a metaphorical cliff.’”

“Metaphorical,” Kate repeated, catching the word.

“Most of the time,” Yelena said, deadpan. “Journalists bruise easily.”

The laugh that burst out of Kate was wetter and more broken than she wanted it to be, but it was a laugh all the same. The knot in her chest loosened another fraction.

Yelena reached over and brushed her thumb under Kate’s eye, catching a tear before it could slip all the way down.

“You do not have to decide tonight if you are going to be… poster child,” she said, voice gentle again. “Tony told you this, I know. Clint, too. You can take your time. You can change your mind. You can say ‘no, I will keep this piece of me for myself and my people only.’ That is not selfish. That is survival.”

“And if I decide ‘yes’?” Kate asked. “If I… do something. Someday.”

“Then I will be there,” Yelena said simply. “On the stage. In the photo. In the background, holding the dog. In the front row, glaring at anyone who looks at you wrong. Whatever you need.”

She shifted closer until their shoulders touched, then until it was easy to let her head rest on Yelena’s shoulder. The contact was solid, familiar.

“This is trust fall, yes?” Yelena said quietly. “You lean back, I am there. Not metaphorical. Very literal.”

“That’s not how trust falls usually work,” Kate said, voice muffled against her jacket.

“Trust falls are stupid,” Yelena replied. “This is better. You fall very slowly. I get fries.”

Kate huffed another shaky laugh. “You stole my phone.”

“Yes. For your own good.”

“I wasn’t done doomscrolling.”

“Yes, you were,” Yelena said. “You just needed someone to take the jar of bees away.”

The image was so exactly right that Kate couldn’t even argue.

She let her eyes slip closed, leaning more weight into Yelena’s side. The steady rise and fall of Yelena’s breathing under her cheek was as good as any lullaby.

For a while, they were quiet. The city moved below them, sirens and engines and a distant shout from a neighboring building. The fairy lights along the railing flickered, a few bulbs winking out entirely.

Kate’s mind still spun, but slower now. The worst of the jabbering voices had faded, replaced by the memory of Tony’s flat, unflinching promise and Clint’s matter-of-fact acceptance and her mother’s hesitant, effortful “she.” Layered on top of those now was Yelena’s blunt certainty, a bedrock under all the noise.

“You know,” Yelena said eventually, voice softer, “when I first started… being a person, instead of weapon, I had no idea how to do it. I kept thinking, ‘I will mess this up and then it will be taken away.’”

She brushed a bit of hair out of Kate’s face. “So I decided: I will mess it up with people I trust. That way, if I fall on my face, at least someone is there to laugh and help me up.”

Kate smiled, eyes still closed.

“That’s your plan for me too?” she asked. “Messing up with people I trust?”

“Yes,” Yelena said. “And you are doing very well at it.”

She pressed her lips briefly to the top of Kate’s head, the kiss light but decisive. “When the time comes, whatever you choose—silence, speech, something in between—you will not be alone. You have an archer, an assassin, a rich man with too many toys, and a very scary mother. This is good squad.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Kate murmured.

“It is my way,” Yelena said. “And my way is correct.”

Kate let the last of the tension seep out of her shoulders, the cold air nipping paint-fresh at her cheeks. The fear didn’t vanish. It was still there, a lurking shadow at the edges of her mind. But it no longer felt like something she had to wrestle alone in the dark.

She pictured that hypothetical kid in some faraway library, scrolling on a beaten-up computer, maybe hearing her name one day, maybe seeing her face. Maybe seeing this version—not the file, not the birth certificate, but the girl on the rooftop wrapped in a too-big hoodie, leaning against her girlfriend, talking about trust and choice and metaphorical cliffs.

If that ever happened, she wanted the kid to see more than the jar of bees.

She wanted them to see the people around her, too.

“Okay,” she said softly, not sure which part she was agreeing to. “Okay.”

Yelena shifted, tightening her arm around Kate’s shoulders.

“Sleep,” she said. “Or at least stop reading idiots. That is first step of any revolution.”

Kate let herself drift, the hum of the city and the warmth of Yelena’s side blurring together.

The world below would keep yelling and arguing and misnaming. Files would stay locked and maybe, someday, be opened. Choices would have to be made.

But up here, for this slice of night, she was simply Kate Bishop, head on Yelena Belova’s shoulder, held in a grip that promised: if you fall, I am here.

For now, that was enough.

The debrief room had never felt small before.

It was a windowless rectangle on one of the quieter levels of the compound, walls painted a neutral, forgettable grey. A long table sat in the middle, scarred from years of laptops, coffee mugs, and the occasional impatient fist. A big screen dominated one wall, usually reserved for maps and mission footage. Tonight, it showed something else.

Kate sat halfway down the table, chair pulled in so close the edge of the wood pressed into her ribs. Her hands were flat on the polished surface, fingers splayed, as if she needed the contact to keep from floating off.

Across from her, Clint sat sideways in his chair, one arm draped over the backrest, the other cradling a mug of coffee he’d probably forgotten to add sugar to. His posture was loose, but his eyes were sharp, tracking every twitch of her shoulders.

At the head of the table, Tony was half-sitting on the corner rather than using a chair, suit jacket unbuttoned, tie hanging askew. A tablet lay next to him, lit up with the same page that filled the wall screen. His jaw had that locked, too-still quality it got when he was hanging onto his temper by his fingernails.

Yelena leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, one boot hooked over the other. She looked like she’d been dragged in from the gym—hair pulled back in a messy knot, black tank top, faint chalk dust on her fingers. She hadn’t stopped staring at the screen since Kate walked in.

The headline at the top of the wall display screamed in red letters:

IS THIS AVENGERS’ “SECRET” TRANS HERO?

Below it, a photo of Kate from three months ago, bow in hand, hair pulled back, eyes narrowed at some off-camera adversary. Someone had circled her face in lurid yellow and added an old yearbook photo next to it—short-haired, younger, in a boy’s uniform. The caption beneath: THEN AND NOW?

Most of the text in the article was exactly what Kate had feared and predicted weeks ago on the rooftop with Yelena: speculation dressed up as concern, euphemisms wrapped around intrusive questions, quotes from “anonymous sources” talking about “identity politics” and “public right to know.”

It wasn’t the official file.

But it was close enough to send a cold, crawling sensation up her spine.

“Okay,” Tony said, breaking the oppressive quiet. “Ground rules. No one panic, no one punch a hole in anything I paid for, and no one reads the comments.”

His eyes slid to Kate on the last rule. She didn’t quite manage to meet them.

“Too late,” she said, voice rough. “I already did that part.”

Clint grimaced. “Kid.”

“I know,” she said quickly. “I know. It was stupid. I wanted to see how bad it was, and then I couldn’t look away.”

She stared at her hands. Her fingers looked pale, the knuckles scraped raw from training that morning.

On the wall, her own face stared back at her from two different points in time—one current, one almost unrecognisable. The kid in the yearbook photo had hair cropped awkwardly short and a collar that swallowed his neck. His smile was tight and lopsided, like it had been talked into being. If she blurred her eyes, she could see the outline of who she was now in that picture. But the article had not blurred anything. It had drawn arrows and circles and lines, connecting her old features to her new ones like she was a puzzle to be solved.

“We can take it down,” Tony said. “That’s the first thing you need to know. It’ll never be perfect—the internet is a hydra—but we can get this particular head under control. Legal’s already drafted letters. We have a very scary woman at the hosting company who lives for this kind of call.”

He tapped the tablet with one finger. The article shrank, replaced by a list of legal contacts and action items.

Clint shifted in his chair, leaning forward. “How much do they really know?” he asked. “Is this just, you know, gossip, or do they have actual paperwork?”

Tony’s mouth flattened. “Gossip with teeth,” he said. “They’ve got that yearbook photo, which I’m guessing came from someone’s drawer or a hacked school archive, and they’ve got a couple of lines from your pre-transition medical records. Enough to sound authoritative, not enough to stand up in court without someone getting fired for violating about twelve privacy laws.”

He looked at Kate again. “What they don’t have is your current sealed file,” he added. “That’s still locked. This is all pre-Stark data. Old names, old pronouns, old physical exams. They’re trying to connect dots they don’t actually understand.”

Yelena made a low, sharp sound, like a growl that hadn’t quite made it to her throat.

“Who gave this to them?” she asked. “Name, please.”

“Working on it,” Tony said. His tone suggested that once he had that name, the answer would not be pleasant for the person attached to it. “Right now, what matters is that this is out there. Somewhere between ten thousand and a few hundred thousand people have seen it already. It’s getting traction in the corners of the internet that like to build bonfires out of other people’s lives.”

Kate swallowed. The room felt too warm and too cold at the same time.

Her old name was in the article. Not in the headline, not in the lead, but in the third paragraph, as if it were just another fact—like her height or hair colour or school.

She’d skimmed it once before forcing herself to close the window.

Seeing it there, printed in a font she associated with celebrity gossip and scandal, had made her skin crawl.

“Can they… can they do that?” she asked now, directing the question at the table, the wall, the room, anyone. “Legally, I mean. Just… post my medical stuff?”

“Technically, no,” Tony said. “Realistically, they just did. HIPAA, privacy statutes, whatever alphabet soup you want to invoke—none of it means much until we find the person who leaked and the platform caves to legal pressure. Which they will, eventually. But ‘eventually’ is not the same as ‘before this does damage.’”

His gaze softened, just a fraction.

“Which brings us to why we’re all here,” he said. “We have two choices.”

He held up a finger. “One: we go scorched earth on this site and anyone else who picks it up. Lawyers, takedown notices, bots pushing it down the search results. You do not comment. We do not confirm. We treat it as violation of privacy and shut it down as hard as we can. That’s the Fort Knox plan we talked about, version 2.0.”

Second finger. “Two: we use this as a trigger to do what we were going to do eventually anyway—which is let you speak in your own voice, on your terms, before the narrative calcifies around someone else’s version.”

The words hung there, heavy.

Kate’s stomach lurched. “Right now?” she asked, hearing the panic in her own voice. “Like… this week?”

“No,” Clint said immediately, before Tony could answer. “Not unless you want to. There is no ticking clock that says ‘offer expires in 48 hours.’”

“Actually,” Tony said, exhaling, “there’s a media clock that says ‘the longer we wait, the harder it is to wrest control back,’ but Clint is right about the important part. We don’t do this on adrenaline. We do it when you’re ready—or not at all.”

Yelena finally pushed off the wall and came to sit in the chair beside Kate, pulling it closer with a squeak of metal on tile. She set her forearms on the table, hands clasped loosely.

“You look like you are about to throw up,” she said softly. “Start with breathing.”

Kate let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, then dragged another one in. It stuttered. She focused on the feel of the table under her palms, the faint vibration of the compound’s ventilation system humming through the floor.

“I don’t know what I want,” she admitted. The words scraped on the way out. “Half of me wants to lock it all down, sue them into the ground, pretend this never happened. The other half keeps thinking about… that kid in the library we talked about.” She glanced sideways at Yelena. “And about how it might help if… if someone like me, who’s… here… said something.”

She waved vaguely toward the ceiling, meaning the tower, the team, the fact of her current life.

Clint watched her with his head tilted, eyes narrowed in the way that meant he was listening on more levels than she could see.

“You don’t have to settle the ‘help the kids’ versus ‘protect yourself’ debate in one night,” he said. “That’s a long-term problem. Right now, we have an immediate one: what do you want us to do about this?”

He jabbed a finger toward the screen, where her yearbook self stared out from under the headline.

Kate looked up at the two images of herself—then and now. The boy everyone thought she was. The girl everyone saw.

The world had decided it wanted both.

“Can we… really make it go away?” she asked.

“Define ‘go away,’” Tony said. “Can we erase it from the internet completely? No. That’s not a thing. Can we make sure it doesn’t stay on the front page of every search result for your name? Yes. Can we scare this particular site into a grovelling apology and a retraction? Also yes. Can we make other outlets think twice before they touch it without a lawyer’s note stapled to their forehead? Absolutely.”

“But the people who already saw it…” she began.

“Will see other things too,” Yelena cut in. “Cats. Recipes. Whatever new scandal Stark creates to distract them.”

Tony spread his hands. “I can arrange that, by the way. ‘Billionaire Does Something Stupid’ is very reusable.”

Despite herself, Kate huffed a short laugh. It hitched at the end, but it was real.

“What if we… do both?” she asked slowly. “For now. You send the letters, you take it down, you make it hard for them. And I… think. I don’t commit to an interview or a press conference or… whatever yet. But we start… planning, maybe. In case I decide I want to… say something. So it’s not a rush job if… when… I do.”

Tony nodded, approving. “That’s option one-and-a-half,” he said. “Totally viable. We treat this as a dry run for our worst-case scenario. However you eventually choose to handle it, you’ll be going in with your eyes open instead of being shoved in front of a camera on a day like this.”

He tapped something on the tablet; the wall display flickered to a standard Avengers logo. The article vanished. Kate exhaled, the absence of her own face on the wall giving her a sliver of space to think.

Clint leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. His coffee had gone cold; he pushed it aside.

“I want to say something that has nothing to do with legal strategy,” he said. “Is that allowed?”

Tony gestured. “By all means. The floor recognises the distinguished archer from Iowa.”

Clint ignored him.

He looked at Kate, really looked, the way he did on the range when he was about to give her a piece of advice he knew she’d throw back at him someday.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

The words landed like an arrow in her gut—not painful, exactly, but enough to knock the breath out of her.

“You were a kid,” he went on, “who walked into the worst conversation a kid can have and said, ‘This is who I am,’ even though you didn’t know if your parents would hear you. You kept saying it, to doctors and administrators and bureaucrats and now to a world that, frankly, doesn’t deserve that level of honesty most days.”

He shrugged, the motion as much about diffusing his own emotion as anything. “Whether or not you ever do a single public thing about this, whether or not you decide to talk to a camera, you’ve already done the brave part. Everything after this? Logistics.”

Her eyes stung. “It doesn’t feel like just logistics.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why you’re in this room with three of the most stubborn people on the planet. We’ll fight the logistics while you catch your breath.”

Yelena nodded, tightening her folded arms. “He is right,” she said. “It hurts to admit, but occasionally he is.”

Tony spread his hands again. “You see the support you have? An assassin, a broken archer, and a man with a very expensive caffeine habit. That’s a dream team.”

He sobered slightly. “Seriously, though. I meant what I said in the workshop, and I’m going to repeat it for the cheap seats in your amygdala: you do not owe anyone an explanation. But you are also allowed to give one if you want to. That’s the axis we’re spinning on.”

Kate rubbed her thumb along the edge of the table, feeling the slight imperfections in the varnish. The panic was still there, coiled tight, but there was something else braided into it now: a thin strand of purpose. Or maybe just stubbornness.

“If we… ever do this,” she said slowly, thinking it through as she spoke, “it can’t be like… a Very Special Episode, you know? Sad piano music and me crying in a chair for ratings.”

“Already vetoed,” Tony said. “I have a strict ‘no exploitative piano’ policy.”

“It would have to be… on my terms,” she said. “No deadname. No… before and after photos. No ‘born a boy’ headlines. I don’t want to be… used to prove some point about how inclusive the team is. It has to be about… me. Being me. Doing my job.”

Yelena’s mouth curled. “Make it boring,” she said. “Boring is powerful. ‘Trans hero eats breakfast and complains about paperwork.’ People will not know what to do.”

“And if they ask for a sob story,” Clint added, “you give them the short version. ‘It was hard, I survived, I shoot arrows now, next question.’”

Tony held up a hand. “You’re getting ahead of yourselves,” he said. “But, yes. Those are exactly the terms we’d set if and when we get there.”

He picked up the tablet again, fingers flying over the screen. “In the meantime, we’re implementing an internal protocol. Security’s going to flag any data access on your file that doesn’t come from the same three IPs we’ve whitelisted. Legal’s drafting a memo that will give certain people ulcers. HR will remind everyone that misgendering a colleague is a career-limiting move.”

He glanced up at her. “You don’t have to worry about the inside of this building,” he said. “That’s my jurisdiction.”

“What about outside?” she asked. “School. Streets. Missions.”

Clint answered that one. “On missions, you worry about targets and safety,” he said. “If anyone—ally, cop, whoever—gives you grief or pulls that article out, you refer them to me. That’s why you have a handler. On the streets and at school…” He hesitated. “We can’t bubble wrap the world. But we can make sure you’ve got numbers in your phone you can call, routes you can take, people who know what to do if something happens.”

Yelena leaned a little closer, shoulder brushing Kate’s. “And you have me,” she said, almost too quietly for the men to hear. “Anywhere. Anytime. Someone looks at you wrong, you text. I will come and stare at them until they melt.”

Kate’s throat closed up briefly. She nodded, unable to form words.

The room fell quiet again, but the silence had shifted from shock to something more focused.

“We don’t have to decide everything tonight,” Tony said after a moment. “Right now, I need one thing from you.” He held up a finger. “Permission to go after them. Full Stark.”

Kate blinked. “What does ‘full Stark’ entail, exactly?”

“Strongly worded letters, targeted ad buys, and possibly buying their parent company and turning their office into a very ugly Starbucks,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Clint barked a short laugh.

“Do it,” Kate said, surprising herself with how quickly the answer came. “Please.”

Tony’s mouth twitched. “Music to my ears,” he said. “Consider them on notice.”

He slid off the table, straightened his tie half-heartedly, and picked up the tablet. “I’ll start the legal stampede,” he said. “Clint, you walk her through the ‘how to ignore reporters shouting your old name at you’ drill. Yelena…” He paused, eyeing her. “Maybe don’t actually throw anyone off anything. Yet.”

“No promises,” she said.

He pointed two fingers at Kate. “If you change your mind about talking, about anything, you tell me. There is no window you can miss with one bad night’s sleep.”

She nodded.

He headed for the door, then stopped with his hand on the panel. “Hey, Bishop,” he said without looking back. “Whatever they print, whatever they think they know—you’re more than their headline. Okay?”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

The door hissed open and closed behind him, leaving the three of them in the muted hum of the debrief room.

Clint pushed his chair back, stretching his legs out. “So,” he said, in the tone he used to lighten things without dismissing them. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do you want to never leave this room again?”

“Eleven,” Kate said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That tracks. Unfortunately, we do have to go upstairs eventually. There’s leftover pizza in the kitchen, and I promised I’d steal a slice for you before Stark eats it all.”

Yelena snorted. “He cannot eat carbs after seven p.m. His trainer will kill him.”

“His trainer can take it up with me,” Clint said.

Kate let their bickering wash over her. The panic was still there, but it had been edged out by a strange, tired clarity.

“Clint,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“If someone… shouts my old name at me,” she said, the words tasting foul, “what do I do? What’s the… ‘drill’ Tony was talking about?”

He considered for a moment, then stood, rolling his shoulders.

“Okay,” he said. “Draft one.” He moved to stand beside her chair, looking down as if he were a reporter on the street. His voice took on a sharper, more aggressive tone as he mimed the question: “‘Hey, isn’t your real name—’”

“Don’t say it,” she said quickly, flinching.

“I’m not going to,” he said, gentle again. “You already heard it enough tonight. Point is, when that happens, you have options. You can ignore. Walk past, no reaction. You can shut it down—‘That’s not my name’—and move on. You can let your team run interference while you keep walking. You never, ever owe anyone a conversation they ambush you into.”

He angled his body slightly, placing himself between her and the imaginary reporter. “My personal recommendation? You let me be the wall,” he said. “You stay behind it. If I think it’s safe for you to talk, I’ll ask. If not, I’ll say, ‘No questions today,’ and we leave.”

Yelena’s mouth curved. “I like this plan,” she said. “You and Stark can handle the cameras. I will handle anyone who tries to follow.”

Clint nodded. “Between us, we’ve got all the angles.”

Kate absorbed that. It still scared her, the thought of cameras and shouted questions and old names flung like weapons. But the image of Clint literally stepping between her and the noise helped. So did the idea of Yelena at her shoulder, giving the kind of look that made trained assassins rethink their life choices.

She pushed her chair back, legs shaky, and stood.

“I’m tired,” she said, which felt like the smallest part of the truth but the easiest to say.

“Good,” Yelena replied, also standing. “You will sleep. We will make plan in the morning when you are less likely to stab someone by accident.”

“I don’t stab people by accident,” Kate said.

“Exactly,” Yelena said. “We keep it that way.”

Clint picked up his mug, grimaced at the cold coffee, and dumped it in the bin. “Come on, kid,” he said. “I’ll walk you out. Yelena can glower at anyone who looks at you funny on the way.”

“That is my specialty,” Yelena agreed.

They headed for the door together, Kate in the middle. As it slid open, the hallway beyond looked the same as it always did—sterile, lit, anonymous. Somewhere out there, people were already arguing about her life. Somewhere on a dozen screens, her old and new faces were being compared like a puzzle in a magazine.

But in this small perimeter—one archer at her back, one assassin at her side—the noise felt a little farther away.

She stepped out into the corridor.

They flanked her without discussion, moving in easy synchrony.

For now, that was enough.

The lights in the compound’s media room were down low enough that the big screen felt like a window.

On it, Kate’s own face stared back at her, frozen mid-blink: hair pulled into a neat ponytail, minimal makeup, the faintest sheen of studio sweat on her skin. At the bottom of the frame, a caption bar read:

KATE BISHOP
AVENGERS FIELD LEAD · ARCHER

The timecode in the corner ticked 00:27:43:12.

Kate sat on the edge of a plush, overstuffed chair, elbows on her knees, hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were white. She could feel the phantom imprint of the microphone tape still on the back of her neck, even though makeup had peeled it off an hour ago.

“I look like I’m about to cry for twenty-seven minutes,” she said.

Her voice sounded small in the large room.

“Correction,” Tony said, perched on the arm of the sofa behind her. “You look like you’re being honest for twenty-seven minutes. The crying is optional, and also, frankly, very good television.”

He had his tablet balanced on one knee, the rough cut pulled up in front of him with timecode and notes. His tie was stuffed into his pocket, shirt sleeves rolled up; he looked like someone at the end of a long day, clinging to the last bit of business on his list.

On the other end of the sofa, Clint had his feet up on the coffee table, ankles crossed, arms folded loosely across his chest. A half-empty bag of pretzels sat between his knees. He had watched the entire interview in silence, only shifting when she did, like he was trying not to crowd her from across the room.

Yelena had claimed the spot directly to Kate’s right on the floor, back against the chair, one knee up, the other leg stretched out. She’d kicked her boots off somewhere by the door; one sock had a hole in the big toe. She’d spent the rough cut with her eyes fixed on the screen and one hand wrapped around Kate’s ankle, thumb moving in small circles against her sock almost without interruption.

On the screen, the frozen Kate looked fragile and determined at once. The real Kate wanted to throw a blanket over it.

She dragged a hand over her face. “It feels… cheesy,” she said. “After-school special. ‘Very Special Episode of Avengers Confidential.’ I keep waiting for the dramatic piano.”

“That was in the first pass,” Tony said. “I vetoed it. You’re welcome.”

“That whole part where I talk about being ten and telling my mom and Jack…” She shook her head. “It sounds like I’m auditioning for a trauma award.”

“That whole part where you talk about being ten and telling your mom and Jack sounds like what actually happened,” Clint said, finally speaking up. “Which, for the record, was a trauma, so.”

“I know,” she said quickly. “I just—” Her fingers tightened on her knees. “I don’t want people to think this is… propaganda. Or that I’m some kind of… inspirational lesson.”

“You’re not,” Tony said. “You’re content.”

She shot him a look.

He lifted a hand. “Kidding. Mostly. Look, Bishop, every talking head on every network has been building their own little narrative about you for months. All we’re doing here is giving you a chance to put something in front of them that isn’t a freeze-frame from a raid or a blurry shot from a gossip blog.”

He nodded at the screen. “It’s not a sermon. It’s you saying: ‘This is who I am. This is how I got here. If that helps you, great. If not, I still have arrows and a day job.’”

Yelena squeezed Kate’s ankle. “Also,” she said, “you did not cry. I watched very closely. Little watery at one point, yes, but no tears escaped. Very impressive.”

“That’s what we’re proud of now?” Kate muttered. “Dry eyes?”

“Yes,” Yelena said. “Is major achievement for you.”

Clint snorted, then sobered. “You okay?” he asked, tone turning gentle. “That was a lot to sit through. Twice.”

Kate exhaled slowly. It had been. The interview itself, in the small, carefully lit studio upstairs, had felt surreal but manageable. It had been just her and the friendly, pre-briefed journalist and three cameras she pretended were potted plants.

Watching the cut, with lower thirds and B-roll and pauses she hadn’t realised she took… that had been harder. That had made it real.

“I don’t know,” she said. “As answers go, that’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Valid,” Clint said.

Tony shifted on the sofa arm, the leather creaking under him. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “We do not have to push ‘publish’ on this tonight. Or tomorrow. Or ever. We can shelve it, lock it, and I will send our lawyer hydra to finish mauling that tabloid from last month. The world can go on getting their trans education from whatever screaming match is trending on cable.”

Kate looked up at the blanked screen. She could still picture every segment: the slow push in when she said I knew in my bones; the cut to her younger self on archery footage; the wide shot when she said I’m not a symbol, I’m just stubborn.

“And we’re back to ‘you don’t owe anyone anything,’” she said softly.

Tony spread his hands. “Because it keeps being true. Very annoying, I know.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. The taste of salt from the popcorn they’d eaten earlier lingered.

“What if I regret it?” she asked. “If we put this out there. Once I say it on that scale, I can’t… take it back. My old name, my medical stuff, all the bits I don’t mention—people will go digging. Even more than they already have.”

Yelena made another low, displeased sound. “We will break their fingers,” she said.

“Metaphorically,” Clint added, almost out of habit.

Yelena rolled her eyes. “If it makes HR happy.”

Tony watched Kate, the usual flippancy dialled down. “You might regret it,” he said. “That’s the fun thing about big decisions. There’s always some version of you in some timeline who would have picked the other door. But you have to weigh that against the regret of doing nothing and letting the worst version of the story win by default.”

He nudged the tablet with one finger. “Right now, the world has Rumour Kate. Conspiracy Thread Kate. ‘Is This Avengers’ Secret Trans Hero?’ Kate. This”—he gestured at the frozen image on the screen—“is Actual Kate. Not complete—you couldn’t fit that in half an hour if you tried—but closer.”

“I hate that headline,” Kate muttered. “Secret trans hero. Like I’m a twist ending.”

“You are not secret,” Yelena said. “You are private. Big difference.”

“Most important difference,” Clint agreed.

Kate sank back against the chair, letting her shoulders touch the cushion, Yelena’s arm pressed warm against her leg.

“What if I mess it up?” she said. “What if I’m… not the right kind of trans person for people? I keep thinking about all the different ways to be, and that I won’t say the right words, or I’ll forget someone’s experience, or I’ll make it sound like the only way is my way. And then some kid will watch it and feel worse.”

Clint’s brows lifted. “You think very highly of your power,” he said. “One interview does not define a whole community. You’re not engraving the One True Trans Experience onto the moon.”

Tony nodded. “Exactly. You’re adding one data point to the chart. ‘Here is one way this can look.’ That’s it. If anyone tries to turn you into The Representative, we correct them loudly and often.”

“And if some kid watches and feels worse,” Yelena said, “it will not be because you were honest. It will be because adults around them are assholes. That is not on you.”

Kate let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh. “You’re very confident.”

“Yes,” Yelena said. “Someone in this relationship has to be.”

“Confidence aside,” Clint added, “remember what you actually say in this thing. It’s not ‘here’s how to be trans correctly.’ It’s ‘here’s what helped me, and here’s what I wish people had done sooner.’ That’s useful. That’s not prescriptive.”

On the screen, the frozen Kate’s lips hovered half-parted, like she was about to say something. In the cut, this was the moment where she said, My parents needed time, but time plus love is still love. In the room, she swallowed, throat tight.

“I keep thinking about… that kid in the library,” she said. “The one we keep talking about like a ghost. Reading some garbage in the comments and thinking ‘I guess that’s all there is.’”

“Exactly,” Tony said. “Which is why I dragged my PR department into this. I am a man of action. And impulse. And regrettable haircuts. But mostly action.”

He slid down off the sofa arm into an actual seat, elbows on his knees, tablet balanced between his hands.

“Let me lay out the practical bits again, because I know the anxiety goblins have eaten your short-term memory,” he said. “If you green-light this, here’s what happens: we release it as a pre-taped piece through an outlet we trust, with editorial control baked into the contract. We embargo it, we coordinate with the press office, we have follow-up statements ready. We flood the zone with accurate information so the first clip people see is you saying ‘Hi, I’m Kate, I’m a woman, I’m also trans, and I shoot bad guys for a living,’ instead of whatever circus headlined you last time.”

He ticked items off on his fingers. “Legal is already on standby. Security has protocols ready for any increased threats. HR has messaging for internal staff. Social media has filters and blocklists in place. You don’t look at your mentions for at least seventy-two hours. You don’t do live TV. You don’t go near a comment section. You do eat, sleep, train, and annoy Clint as usual.”

He spread his hands. “You would not be walking into this alone. That was the condition. Remember?”

She did. The workshop. The rooftop. The debrief room. All the times he’d said: if you ever choose this, I will be right there next to you.

She looked at Clint. He’d gone quiet again, watching her with that narrow, evaluating gaze he used on the range.

“You told me once,” he said slowly, “that every time you pick up your bow, you’re reminding yourself you exist. That sound about right?”

She nodded, surprised he’d remembered her own words back at her.

“This is another arrow,” he said. “You don’t have to shoot it. You can set it down. No harm, no foul. We’re not short on targets. But if you do shoot it, you only have to aim it at one thing: your own story. Not at the whole world.”

Yelena snorted. “He is getting better at metaphors,” she said. “Very proud.”

He ignored her, eyes still on Kate. “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you something you already know: they’re going to talk anyway. They already are. You can’t stop every idiot with a keyboard. What you can do is make sure, in all that mess, there is at least one clip where you are looking into the camera and saying something you actually mean.”

He gestured at the screen. “That’s this.”

Silence settled for a moment. The hum of the projector filled it, a low, steady sound.

Kate stared at her own frozen face again. She tried to see it the way a stranger would: a woman in her early twenties, nervous but composed, talking about a part of her life most people would rather keep private. Not an icon. Not a symbol. Just… a person.

“I wish I could tell her something,” she said quietly.

Yelena glanced up. “Who?”

“Her.” Kate nodded at the image. “The me from two hours ago. The one in the studio. I was so sure I was messing up every sentence.”

“You can tell her now,” Yelena said. “She will listen. She is very impressionable.”

Kate huffed a weak laugh.

“I’d tell her… she did okay,” she said. “That she didn’t… break anything. That the world didn’t end when she said ‘I’m trans’ into a camera.”

She took a breath. Let it out. The decision did not arrive as a lightning bolt. It came like the slow, inevitable settling of a stone into deeper water.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my career flinching every time someone says ‘secret’ and ‘trans’ in the same sentence,” she said. “I don’t want my origin story to be a leak and a headline I hate. I want there to be… something else out there. Something I chose.”

She looked at all three of them in turn. Clint. Tony. Yelena.

“I think…” Her voice shook and she forced it steady. “I think I want to do this. Not tonight. Not live. But… soon. With… all of you backing me up. And a lot of filters.”

Tony’s shoulders dropped a fraction, tension he’d been hiding easing out. “Okay,” he said. “That’s a yes with conditions. The best kind.”

Clint nodded once, a sharp, satisfied motion. “We’ll be there,” he said. “Front row. Throwing metaphorical tomatoes at anyone who asks a stupid question.”

Yelena’s thumb pressed harder into her ankle, a little grounding pulse. “I am very happy I get to threaten people on camera,” she said. “This is dream I did not know I had.”

Kate let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for years.

“Okay,” she repeated. “Then… we fix the parts I hate. And we make sure it doesn’t sound like I think I’m doing charity work just by existing.”

Tony brightened. “Ah, edits,” he said. “My true love.”

He jumped up, gesturing at the screen. “Let’s start at the top. Segment one: ‘Hi, I’m Kate Bishop.’ Great. Strong. Segment two: ‘I was born…’ which we are absolutely not touching with a ten-foot stick. We’re going to change that language.”

“Yeah,” Kate said quickly. “I wanted to say ‘I was born a boy’ at first and Dr. Levin gave me the look. So I tried ‘the world called me a boy,’ but I think I tripped over it.”

“We trim it,” Tony said. “You don’t need to narrate the birth certificate. You say: ‘When I was a kid, everyone thought I was a boy, but I knew I wasn’t.’ That’s the important bit. The rest is paperwork.”

“Good,” Yelena said. “Paperwork is boring. You are not paperwork.”

They moved through the cut together. Tony scrubbing back and forth, making notes; Clint occasionally suggesting they cut a question altogether if it felt too prying; Yelena ruthlessly vetoing any shot that lingered on her tears a second longer than necessary.

“This part,” Yelena said, pointing at a bit where the camera zoomed in as Kate talked about puberty blockers, “sounds like pharmaceutical commercial. Cut half.”

“Done,” Tony said. “We keep the line about ‘this gave me time to breathe’ and lose the brand names and dosage talk. The kids need to hear there are options, not a tutorial on endocrinology.”

“At the end,” Clint said, when they reached the final minutes, “where you talk about being an Avenger… you could add something.”

“Like what?” Kate asked.

“Like, ‘you do not have to throw yourself off buildings to prove you’re valid,’” Clint said. “So some twelve-year-old doesn’t think the only way to be okay is to wear purple and punch aliens.”

Tony nodded. “That’s good. We don’t want ‘Be trans, get a bow, join a paramilitary supergroup’ to be the takeaway.”

Kate snorted. “Yeah, we really don’t.”

She slumped further down in the chair, staring at the closing shot: her looking straight into the camera, the soft studio light catching the scar along her jaw, the one from last year’s Hydra débâcle.

“What do I say?” she asked. “In that last bit. If not ‘hey kids, come join the Avengers.’”

“Say what you needed to hear,” Clint said simply.

She thought about that. About the library, the bathroom, the penthouse. About the rooftop with Jack, the gym with Clint, the workshop with Tony, the compound roof with Yelena. About every moment she’d felt alone until she realised she wasn’t.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Then… maybe we reshoot that part. Not in the studio. Here.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Here, as in, in my tastefully appointed media room with superhero popcorn stains?”

She nodded. “Here, as in, with you three actually in the room instead of pretending you’re not. If I’m going to look into a camera and say I’m not alone, I’d like to be… not alone.”

Something flickered across his face—surprise, then something softer.

“We can do that,” he said. “We keep the rest of the interview as is, swap the last ninety seconds. More ‘Avengers documentary after-hours,’ less ‘PBS pledge drive.’”

He stood, clapped his hands once. “Everybody up. Yelena, put your boots back on, or don’t, I don’t care, but move your charming assassin self to the other end of the couch. Clint, you’re going to sit there and look supportive. It’ll be a stretch, I know.”

Clint rolled his eyes but shifted to make space.

Kate hesitated, then stood as well. Her legs felt a little shaky, but not in a bad way. In a the-ground-is-moving-but-I’m-still-on-it way.

Tony fiddled with the room controls. A discreet camera descended from a panel in the ceiling, lens swivelling to face them. The big screen went dark, replaced by a small red light near the camera housing.

“Okay,” he said, dropping back onto the sofa, tablet in hand. “Whenever you’re ready. No pressure. If you don’t like it, we toss it and go back to the studio version. This is just… an option.”

Kate sat between Clint and Yelena on the couch. Clint’s shoulder pressed against her right, solid and familiar; Yelena’s knee leaned into her left, warm through denim. They both angled their bodies subtly toward her without making a fuss of it.

She took a breath, feeling the weight of the day, the years, the decisions, pressing down and holding her in place at the same time.

The little red light glowed.

Tony lifted a hand. “And… when you’re ready, just start,” he said. “No intro. Talk to the kid in the library. Or the one in the bathroom. Your pick.”

Kate looked at the lens. For a moment, it looked back like an eye.

She thought of fluorescent library lights and school computers. Of fogged bathroom mirrors. Of rooftops and arrows and Yelena stealing her phone. Of Jack saying Enchanté, and Eleanor practicing she like a new language, and Clint reading the file and shrugging, and Tony tapping a line of code that turned a sealed record into something safer.

Her heart pounded. Her throat felt tight.

She started anyway.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Kate Bishop. I’m an Avenger. I shoot things that need to be shot. I also… used to be someone else on paper.”

The words came more easily than she’d expected.

“When I was a kid, everyone told me I was a boy,” she went on. “Forms, teachers, doctors, strangers on the street. It never felt right. I didn’t have the words for it. I just felt… off. Like someone had handed me the wrong costume and said, ‘This is you now.’”

She glanced briefly to the side; Clint and Yelena were blurs at the edge of her vision, solid presences, not distractions.

“It took me a long time to find the words ‘I’m a girl,’” she said. “And even longer to say them out loud to other people. It was scary. Some people didn’t get it right away. Some still don’t. But I’m still here. And I’m still Kate. That never changed. The world just had to catch up.”

Her voice steadied as she went. The camera didn’t feel like a threat now. It felt like… a target. Not something to kill. Something to hit cleanly.

“If you’re watching this and you feel… like I did,” she said, “like everyone’s decided what you are without asking, like there’s a you inside your head that doesn’t match what’s on the paperwork… you’re not broken. You’re not alone. You’re not a plot twist. You’re just… you. And that’s real, even if nobody else sees it yet.”

She swallowed, pushing through the tightness in her throat.

“You don’t owe the world your story if you’re not ready,” she said. “You don’t have to be a superhero, or an Avenger, or anything public to ‘count.’ Being trans doesn’t come with a job description. It just means you know yourself better than the boxes they put you in.”

She let herself look sideways this time, letting the camera catch it.

“I’m lucky,” she said. “I had people who listened when I finally talked. A stepdad who learned a new name. A mom who was scared but showed up anyway. A mentor who read my file and went, ‘Okay, cool, now about your shot grouping.’ A boss who rewrote security protocols because he decided my privacy wasn’t optional. A girlfriend who steals my phone when I read too many comments.”

Yelena snorted softly. Clint’s mouth quirked. Tony made a small, abortive gesture like he was telling her not to bring him into it and was secretly glad she had.

“If you don’t have that yet,” Kate said, looking back at the lens, “I’m not going to pretend everything’s fine. Sometimes it really, really isn’t. But you still deserve to be here. To grow up. To find your people. To be called by your name.”

She took a breath. The words felt like arrows leaving the string—once loosed, no taking them back.

“My name is Kate Bishop,” she said. “I’m a woman. I’m also trans. That’s part of my story, not the whole thing. I’m going to keep showing up—on rooftops, in missions, in stupid PR shoots like this one—because the ten-year-old version of me in that library deserved to see someone like her survive.”

Her voice softened on the last line.

“And so do you,” she said. “Whoever you are.”

She let the silence sit for a second, then nodded, a small, decisive movement.

“That’s all,” she finished. “The rest is just… arrows.”

She exhaled, suddenly aware of her pounding heart, the way her hands had clenched into fists on her thighs. She hadn’t followed any script; the words had come out crooked and raw.

“Cut,” Tony said quietly.

The red light blinked off.

No one spoke for a moment.

Then Clint said, “Yeah. That’s the one.”

Yelena made a satisfied noise. “Much better than studio,” she said. “Less fake plant, more truth.”

Kate realised she was shaking. Not with fear, exactly. With adrenaline.

“Was that… okay?” she asked, voice hoarse.

Tony looked down at his tablet, tapped a replay, watched the last few seconds with a concentration she usually saw only when he was aiming a suit at something explosive.

“It was terrible,” he said. “We’ll have to use it.”

She blinked. “What?”

“That’s how you know it’s good,” he said, finally looking up. His eyes were bright. “It’s a little messy, a little too honest, a little off-brand. It sounds like you, not like our PR department.”

He stood, stretching his back. “We’ll clean up the audio, color-correct your hoodie, and splice this onto the end of the interview. The rest we leave as is, with the edits we talked about. Then we sit on it for a week while you think about whether you still want it out there. If you do, we release. If you don’t, it goes in the vault next to all the embarrassing footage of me dancing at company parties.”

“You dance at company parties?” Yelena asked, intrigued.

“You will never see it,” Tony said. “That’s the point of the vault.”

Kate let herself sink back into the couch cushions. Her muscles felt like they did after a long practice session on the roof: tired, sore, and weirdly light.

“I’m still scared,” she said. It seemed important to say it out loud.

“Good,” Clint replied. “Means you understand the stakes. Do it scared, or don’t do it at all. Both are allowed.”

Yelena leaned her head briefly against Kate’s shoulder, just a brush, then stayed there. “Whatever you choose in a week,” she said, “we will be here. With dogs and fries and metaphorical cliffs.”

Tony pointed at her with the tablet. “If this airs and you threaten journalists on my network, I’m going to have to pretend to be surprised.”

“I will be very polite,” Yelena said. “In between threats.”

Kate laughed, sudden and sharp, and this time it wasn’t jagged. It felt like a release.

On the dark screen in front of them, their reflections were faint—four figures on a couch in a too-fancy room, surrounded by equipment. No headlines, no captions, no circles in garish yellow.

Just them.

Kate looked at her own reflection, trying to see the girl from the bedroom mirror, the library computer, the first clinic waiting room. She was there, layered under years of training and scars and press conferences.

She reached down, found Yelena’s hand, and squeezed. Yelena squeezed back. On her other side, Clint bumped her shoulder with his. Tony pretended to be engrossed in his tablet, but his posture had lost that tight, coiled edge of waiting for impact.

“Okay,” Kate said quietly, to all of them and to herself and to the kid in the library and the girl in the bathroom mirror and the woman in the studio chair. “Okay.”

Outside, somewhere beyond the compound’s walls, people were talking and speculating and typing her name into search bars.

In here, for the moment, the only story that mattered was the one she’d just told, in her own words, with her people around her.

Whatever happened when that story met the world, she would not be meeting it alone.