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The first thing Buddy noticed, before he understood what it meant, was that something was wrong with his body.
Not the usual wrong. Not the ache behind his sternum where the key sat, not the old, bone-deep wrong of being a person shaped incorrectly that he'd carried since before he could put words to it. This was a new wrong, low and cramping, and it took him three full minutes of sitting very still on the edge of his bed before he worked up the nerve to check.
He checked. He wished, immediately and with his whole chest, that he had not checked.
For a long moment he just sat there, staring at his own hand like it belonged to someone else. His first thought, absurd and unbidden, was: I'm dying. His second thought, closer to the truth and somehow worse, was: I know what this is.
He did know. Vaguely. The way you know about a country you've never visited — a rumor of a place, secondhand and half-formed. He'd heard the word whispered by women he'd shared alleys and doorways with, back when he was young and starving and hadn't had the flesh on him to spare for something like this. He remembered a woman named Odette pressing a folded rag into another girl's hands without a word, the two of them not meeting anyone's eyes. He remembered being grateful, at the time, that his body had never bothered him with it. He'd assumed — young, stupid, half out of his mind with hunger most days — that it simply wasn't going to be his problem. That he'd been spared.
No one had ever explained why it happened, or what he was supposed to do, because no one had ever thought he'd need to know. And then he'd stopped being entirely human at all, and the question had seemed permanently, blessedly moot.
Apparently not.
He sat with his head in his hands for a while, doing the kind of furious, useless math where you try to out-think a problem instead of solving it. He was a hundred and thirty-some years old by the calendar and had the practical knowledge of a Victorian street urchin, which was to say none at all. He knew how to pick a pocket. He knew how to disappear into a crowd, how to lie fluently, how to survive a winter with no coat. He did not know what he was supposed to put in his underwear.
There was exactly one person he trusted enough to ask.
---
He found Chase on the back porch steps, throwing a tennis ball for absolutely no dog, because Chase liked the idea of having a small task to focus on even when there was no reason for it. He looked up when Buddy's shadow fell over him and grinned, the easy, sunshiny grin that Buddy still hadn't gotten used to not resenting.
"Hey— You look like you saw a ghost. Which, given our track record, might not even be a figure of speech—"
"Can I talk to you?" Buddy asked. "Privately."
Chase's grin faltered into something more careful. He set the tennis ball down like it had suddenly become a serious piece of evidence and stood up. "Yeah. Yeah, of course."
Buddy walked him around the side of the house, out past the hedge where no one would wander by, and then stood there with his arms crossed tight over his chest, working his jaw, trying to find an opening line that didn't sound insane.
"I think I started my— " He stopped. Started again. "There's blood. In my— I checked, and there's blood, and it isn't a wound, and I think I know what it is but I don't actually know what it is, or what I'm meant to do about it, and I have looked this information up exactly never in my entire existence because I did not think it would apply to me."
Chase blinked. Processed. His face went through several stages — alarm, concern, and then a dawning, careful understanding — before settling into something gentler than Buddy expected.
"Okay," Chase said. "Okay. That's— Yeah, that tracks, actually, that you never got The Talk. Nineteenth century, right, and then—" he gestured vaguely at Buddy's general existence, the Key, the centuries of not being strictly human. "Nobody sat you down for this."
"Nobody sat me down for anything!" Buddy scoffed, more sharply than he meant to. "I raised myself in a gutter and then I turned into furniture for a story cult! There wasn't exactly a curriculum!"
"Hey. Hey, it's fine, it's... okay, this is fine, I can help." Chase held up both hands, the universal gesture of nobody panic, which Buddy found intensely aggravating given that Chase himself looked two seconds from panicking on his behalf. "It's your period. That's all it is. It's not— Nothing's wrong with you, it's just blood, your body does this every month, it's normal, it's just... really unpleasant and nobody warns you how unpleasant."
"Every month." Buddy said this the way another man might say forever.
"...Yeah."
"Every month, for the rest of my—" He stopped again, because he didn't actually know if this applied to him for the rest of anything, given the specifics of what he was. Wonderful. One more mystery to add to the pile.
"Okay, breathe," Chase said, and put a hand on his shoulder, which Buddy allowed only because his brain was too busy short-circuiting to object. "First things first, we need to get you something to actually deal with it, because I'm guessing you don't have supplies just lying around."
"I have never in my life owned a single item intended for this purpose."
"Right. Okay. Pads are the easy version, they just kind of... sit there. External. Tampons are the other option, they go—" Chase gestured, somewhat helplessly, "—inside. Some people prefer one, some people prefer the other, it depends on the person."
Buddy stared at him. "You are telling me that women — that people — willingly insert a foreign object into their body on a monthly basis, and this is considered the convenient option."
"...When you say it like that it does sound insane, yeah."
"Where I come from," Buddy said, very slowly, working himself up into what Chase was starting to recognize as a full historical grievance, "they used to lace the cotton with cocaine. To help with the — I don't even know what, the discomfort, I suppose, though frankly I cannot imagine that improved anyone's judgment about shoving objects into themselves on a schedule—"
"Wait, that's — okay, that's actually true, that's a real historical thing, that's not you being dramatic—"
"I am aware it's true, I lived through it, that's rather my point! And you're telling me the modern version is— what, exactly, an improvement?"
Chase opened his mouth, closed it, and had the grace to look genuinely uncertain. "I mean. It's better than cocaine. Marginally. There's, uh— there's actually been some stuff in the news about what's in some of them, chemically, that isn't great, so honestly your instincts aren't— entirely wrong to be suspicious—"
"So the state of the art, one hundred and fifty years later, is still 'we're not totally sure what's in it but please put it inside your body anyway.'"
"...When you put it like that— Well, actually, they know what they're putting in tampons, but the metals make it more expensive."
Buddy pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathed out, long and slow, the particular exhale of a man who has survived several genuine catastrophes and finds himself undone, instead, by fabric technology.
"I hate this decade," he said, muffled, into his own palms.
"For what it's worth," Chase said, gentler now, "you get to pick. Nobody's making you use either one if you don't want to. There's other stuff too, cups, period underwear — I don't know all the details, but Deacon would."
Buddy's hands came down. "Absolutely not."
"Buddy—"
"I am not discussing the contents of my underwear with your cousin."
"He's trans too, babe, he's literally the person who'd actually know what he's talking about, more than me—"
"That is not the point. The point is my dignity—"
---
The point, as it turned out, was moot, because Deacon had already noticed.
He didn't say anything at first — just appeared in the kitchen doorway some twenty minutes later with a box in one hand and an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and mostly succeeding, except for the corner of his mouth, which kept twitching like it wanted to smile and knew better than to try.
"Chase has the subtlety of a brick through a window," Deacon said, by way of explanation. "He asked me where the pads were 'hypothetically for a friend' and then looked so guilty about it I solved the mystery in about four seconds."
Buddy, still standing by the porch door with his arms crossed and his ears gone hot, considered several dramatic exits and discarded all of them as beneath him.
"I don't need—"
"You do, actually," Deacon said, not unkindly, and set the box down on the counter between them like a peace offering. "First time's always the worst. You don't know your own body yet, doesn't matter how old you technically are." He tapped the box. "Pads to start. Nobody should be shoving anything up there on day one when you don't even know what your own cramps feel like yet. You can graduate to whatever works better for you once you've got a baseline."
Buddy stared at the box like it might detonate.
"I've been on testosterone for two years," Deacon went on, leaning against the counter, arms crossed in an unconscious mirror of Buddy's own posture. "Still get it, every couple months now, lighter than it used to be, but it doesn't just vanish because you want it to. Chase gets it too, obviously; he hasn't started T yet. So — for what it's worth — you're not the only guy in this house dealing with a body that didn't get the memo."
Something in Buddy's chest loosened, fractionally, at that. Not comfort exactly — he wasn't built for comfort, hadn't had the practice with Deacon quite yet — but something adjacent to it. The specific relief of not being the only strange thing in a room.
"I don't know how to feel about any of this," he admitted, low, like the words cost him something to produce.
"Nobody does, first time," Deacon said. "You're allowed to be furious about it. I was. Threw a whole trash can once, sophomore year, don't tell Chase, he thinks I'm the mature one." A ghost of a smile. "You'll figure out what works for you. That's kind of the whole deal, being one of us. Nobody hands you a manual. You just — build one, as you go."
Buddy looked at the box. Looked at Deacon, who was watching him with none of the pity he'd braced for and all of the plain, unhurried patience of someone who'd been exactly this lost once and had simply decided not to make anyone else navigate it alone.
"There had better not," he said finally, with as much dignity as he could scrape together, "be cocaine in these."
Deacon blinked, then huffed out something that was almost a laugh. "...No promises on the chemical transparency front, but no. No cocaine."
"Small mercies," Buddy muttered, and picked up the box like it might still bite him — but he picked it up.