Bodily Reconstruction, part two
Aug. 25th, 2014 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeI decided to put Bodily Reconstruction up for free, because I feel like it. Part One is here; you want to read that first, because I've added a lot of extra words since last time!
Bodily Reconstruction
Word Count: 14,658
Summary: Biff wants top surgery, but he can’t get it in Vaygo. Luckily for him, M.D.’s junior healer.
Notes: This is REALLY late in the timeline; M.D.’s been junior healer for a few years now, turns nineteen over the course of this story, and is by all accounts a functioning adult. Biff turns twenty-eight. Medical grossness towards the end. Also, this is all Lee’s fault.
Month Two
It went fine.
Hard to believe? Not really. Biff and I had shared quarters numerous times before without killing each other. This time, at least, we were doing it of our own free will. Besides, Biff was a jerk, but I was doing him a huge favor, and he knew it. He didn’t miraculously transform into Prince Charming, but he at least put forth some effort.
The mornings settled into a routine fast. I’d wake up and, weather permitting, watch the sun rise while I ate my breakfast of leftovers. (For all of Biff’s abrasive traits, I had to give him one thing: the six months he lived with me were the most nutritionally lucrative of my life.) Roughly halfway through my meal, Biff would stagger past. I’d say good morning; if he was feeling energetic, he’d grunt at me. Then he’d collapse over his food and sleep until he had to get up and start it all over again.
I wasn’t surprised. Having been Scorch and Flame’s flunky for years, I can testify as to the amount of grunt work required to keep a healing practice going, and Ribbonblack’s was way bigger than ours. Lugging hot water and soap, sterilizing everything over and over in a society without Lysol or rubbing alcohol, disposing of medical waste—oh, it was bad. And that wasn’t even including the usual abuses one went through restraining juveniles or accessing remote patients at the tops of trees or deep underground. Being a healer was like being a combination doctor, shrink, nutritionist, and veterinarian, and I was positive that Ribbonblack saved the worst of it all for him.
Biff was lousy at Pidgin Sign, and worse with telepathy, but he knew when he was being hazed. One rainy day, after shedding his wet jacket and toppling onto my mattress, he mustered the power to mumble into my pillow, “She trying to get rid of me?”
“Mm?”
“Ribbonblack.”
I chewed and swallowed my dumpling. “Testing you. By local standard, you’re asking for the Hummer stretch limo of surgeries; she’s making you earn it.”
The pause was so long, I thought he’d fallen asleep. It turned out he was just stockpiling energy for a tirade, and he still couldn’t quite manage the required volume or energy. “I’ll show her. Fuck her. Fuck this whole fucking town.”
His face was buried in the pillow, so he couldn’t see me smile, or toast him with my water bottle. “Fight the good fight, Biffy.”
“Fuck you too,” he growled, and fell asleep.
…
Throughout our association, I’d never known Biff to be passionate about anything—unless you counted anger, in which case he was passionate about everything. Considering what Ribbonblack was putting him through, I expected him to explode after a month or two—or just give up. But nope, that one complaint was it. After that, he settled into a fierce, silent perseverance I’d never seen before. He hurled himself into the endless swarms of biting insects, the herds of furious juveniles, the mud and the blood and the filth. He got trampled, blistered, and bitten. But he kept going.
He never became much of a polyglot, but he started badgering me to teach him more Pidgin Sign. “How do I say, ‘Where?’” Or, “How do I say, ‘What’s this?’” And, of course, “How do I say, ‘Fuck off?’” (He had to settle for ‘go rot.’) He even started being able to put together his own short sentences, though his grammar was still appalling. (“Give shovel go rot busy.”)
When he finally put together that I had to go through the same menial work as a junior healer, that Ribbonblack wasn’t just inventing horrible jobs, he started badgering me for tricks of the trade. “How do you keep them two-legged triceratops things from kicking you?” Or, “You got something for these bites?” As time wore on, I even started giving him straight answers. (Though I never did get him to stop using dinosaur names.)
And he started to bounce back. First he managed to eat before hitting the sack. Then he started having the energy to clean the dishes and put them away. Finally, he started rising in the evenings to cook, as though determined to pay me some form of rent, even if it was by the calorie. Eventually I started letting him have his way with the groceries, because even though he didn’t have a clue what he was getting half the time, his choices invariably turned out better than mine. I finally started putting on a little weight, much to Raige and Thomas’s delight.
Still, Biff was usually asleep when I got home. So when I came home from work to find him awake and cooking, I knew something was up. When I smelled the food, and saw his face, I knew it was going to be a humdinger.
“You need a favor, don’t you?” I said.
He looked pained. “Ribbonblack needs shit on the surgery. Articles and crap.”
“Ah, she’s sending you out for that, huh? Congratulations; means she thinks you’re going to make it. So you need me to go library diving for you?”
“They got shit like that?”
“Libraries have everything, Biff. Especially when they’re for schools of medicine. Raige goes to VU, so I could probably get in with him.”
“Well, you wanna do that, sure, but I was going somewhere else.” His expression made it apparent it wasn’t Disneyland.
I tossed my apron over a hook, leaned back against the wall, and gestured at him to get on with it.
“There’s a tranny support group every Wednesday at the faggot health center. I’m gonna have to go.”
“You know, I think everyone there would be grateful if I went instead.”
“The fuck’d you need books on chopping off your tits for? You don’t got any. You’re already going book diving for me, so let me do some shit myself, Jesus.”
“Okay, okay. But let it be on record that I think this is a lousy idea, and you have to promise me you won’t insult anyone.”
Month Three
The Harry Benjamin Health Center looked no different than any of the other blocks of concrete around it, but the closer we got, the further Biff withdrew into his jacket until the brim of his cap almost touched his collar.
“Will you relax?” I said. “These people are just like you.”
“No they ain’t,” he snarled.
I rolled my eyes and warbled, “‘There was a man who had a hippo and Crissy was her name-oh…’”
“I been here before.”
That got my attention. “I thought the whole GLBT population of North America had a restraining order on you.”
“I was a stupid kid then, okay? I thought I could do it legal.” His eyes went glassy with horror. “Hippie college queers. All of ‘em, hippie college queers.”
“You say that like you’re so much better.”
“When they weren’t fighting each other over shit I don’t care about, they kept telling me to find a good shrink.” He snorted. “Cuz, y’know, I was rich and shit.”
“I can’t imagine why they would tell you that.”
“Fuck you. I just kept my mouth shut, hands in my pockets, and ran like hell soon as it was over.”
“Self-control? From you?”
“Shut up, I was seventeen.”
“That was a long time ago, Biff,” I cooed. “I’m sure things have changed since then and the college kids have all grown up now.”
He grunted and slunk into the building, steadfastly staring straight ahead and ignoring the HIV test posters. I followed and swiped a few condoms from the freebie bowl before Biff grabbed my arm and yanked me past.
Up the stairs, past a bunch of rainbow flags, (Biff was starting to look like a turtle in his jacket shell) and we came to a door with a sign in front saying, ‘Trans Support Vaygo Meeting.’ The door was open and a few people were in chairs chatting to each other, and standing out front was someone with purple hair and a big bright smile.
“Welcome to Trans Support Vaygo! My name is Lisa, my preferred pronouns are ‘she,’ ‘her,’ and ‘hers,’ and I’m the group moderator.” She grabbed my hand and began vigorously pumping it. “How might I refer to you?”
Hey, this didn’t sound bad. “M.D. I don’t care about pronouns; use whichever you want.”
“No problem.” She turned to Biff. “And you are?”
She reached for Biff’s hand, but Biff had his hands crammed deep in his pockets and was standing as far away as he could get away with and still be affiliated with me. He made a sound that communicated nothing but extreme discomfort. I jerked my chin, trying to get him to come over, but he didn’t appear to notice.
“He’s… shy,” I said, and glared at him.
She laughed. “Oh, that’s okay, we get plenty of nervous parents the first time.”
Biff and I hastily jerked back.
“Wait, naw—”
“No, no, no—”
“We ain’t—”
We stopped. Looked at each other. He gave me a pained, questioning look. I spread my hands, shrugged, and grunted. If he wanted to play bumbling cousin to my transgendered whatever, I could live with that.
But Biff sighed and said, “We ain’t related.”
“And I’m age of majority, thanks.” I added.
“Oh.”
Awkward silence. She looked back and forth from me to him, like she was waiting for an explanation, but I didn’t feel like one was required, and Biff didn’t say anything, which was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, my job was to keep him from offending as many people as possible, and having him silent sounded like a good start.
Finally, she chuckled uncomfortably and said, “Well, I’m very glad you came, and sorry that you took all this trouble, but this is a trans safe space, so for the emotional safety of my members, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
I blinked. “Oh. Uh, okay. I’ll just…”
“Oh no, sweetie, you’re fine, we’re totally welcoming of genderqueer, genderfluid, and questioning youth here.” There were words for what I was? “But this space is for trans people to feel safe in a cis world, and…”
I realized she was looking at Biff when she said it, and before I could stomp on his instep, he snarled, “I’m a fucking tranny, okay, now can I come in or not?”
…
“Wow. Two sentences. Color me impressed; I thought it’d take at least a paragraph before they kicked you out.” I sat down on the curb next to him, heavily laden with a sturdy stack of pamphlets, articles from the Southwest Transsexual Summit, and a book.
“Fuck ‘em,” he said, tossing ash off his cigarette and crossing his arms. “Didn’t want to be part of their damn group anyway.”
“You know, you might’ve made it through the door if you hadn’t gone off and said ‘tranny.’”
“That’s what I am. They the ones who asked. What, I need to show ‘em my degree in PC ‘fore they let me in? Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.”
I sighed. “Well, I can definitely see why you’re going to Ribbonblack. Just as well, really; the hippie college kids are still there.”
“Told you.”
“They weren’t so bad. Just… academic. Speaking of which, do you know what ‘deconstructing the gender binary’ means?”
He gave me a long look, then flatly: “No.”
“Unclench, would you? I don’t know, I thought maybe there was some manual or something they gave you when you first came—”
“Nah, they just act like it.”
“Bitter, bitter. Anyway, I just smiled and nodded and pretended I knew what the heck they were talking about.” I smacked him on the back. “Come on. Time to raid the pharmacy to pay your medical bills.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, got up, and we headed down the street.
“So how was it?”
“The meeting? All right, I guess. Like I said, I didn’t understand what they were going on about half the time, so I didn’t say much. It was nice to be called all sorts of pronouns, but they seemed way too interested in my ethnicity.”
He snorted. “They guess right?”
“Please. They were far too well brought-up to ask. It was fun watching them try, though. They kept talking about how nice it was to have some ‘diversity,’ and then they started fighting for the title of Coolest White Person.”
“Who won?”
“You of all people should know that winners don’t compete.”
He shook his head. “Hippie college queers.”
“Can’t say you didn’t warn me. At least I got some reading material for Ribbonblack.” I flipped through a brochure with a smirk. “With your language skills, she’ll need to contract me to read them for her, which means Raige and Thomas are getting Christmas presents from me this year, yipee-ki-yay.”
Biff didn’t share my enthusiasm. He kept up a brisk pace until we crossed under I-10, which marked the invisible Vaygo cultural line to the south side. Only when we were surrounded by the crumbling brick dollar shops and Russian liquor stores did he relax.
…
“Hey, Raige. Can you get into the VU medical school library?”
Until then, I had never taken advantage of Raige being in college, but the moment I walked through the big double doors, I realized the error of my ways. My fingers twitched. My pupils dilated. I began to salivate.
Raige hitched his backpack up his shoulder. “I guess you’ll need me to work the computer catalog, huh?”
I cackled maniacally.
I was so distracted by the cornucopia of books that I didn’t realize the obvious until Raige sat at the computer. Of course I needed his help. A seven-story library wouldn’t be amenable to my usual strategy of browsing, and putting me next to a computer was a surefire way to destroy it. (Downside of manipulating electricity.)
“So, what’re we looking for today?” Raige asked, flexing his hands.
It occurred to me that I should’ve worked this out beforehand.
“Kid?”
I could’ve ditched Raige and asked one of the librarians, except (A) awkward, and (B) I’d sound like a prankster, especially considering (C) nobody ever believed what an electronic menace I was until I demonstrated with hundreds’ of dollars’ worth of damage. Not my idea of a good time.
“Couldn’t we just find where the medical journals are?”
“Kid, this is the medical library. They probably have a couple floors for those alone. Come on, I’m not Thomas, I won’t wisecrack if Scorch and Flame need stuff on… I don’t know, priapism or something.”
I almost asked how Raige knew what priapism was. Caught myself just in time. “It’s sexual reassignment surgery.”
Raige hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he said, “Sure, okay,” and got to work like nothing was amiss.
This was why I loved the guy.
There was exactly one medical journal in the entire library that looked at all useful. I arrowed in on that, while Raige parted ways with me so as to replenish his stock of fantasy romance novels in another building.
I was almost done with the photocopy machine when Raige caught up with me, purple paperbacks under his arm. “Find what you were looking for?”
“Good enough.” I pulled the journal out from under the lid and removed the fresh warm copies of ‘Improvements in the Nipple Pedicle Method’ from the tray. “Ready?”
As we exited down the stairs into the sun, he halted, expression serious
“Hey. If… if something’s going on with you, you know I’m here whenever you need me, right?”
I sighed, then went and hugged him. “I know. It’s not for me.”
Raige was silent a moment, then I felt him stiffen. “Oh. That, uh… that explains a lot, actually. Should I say anything, or…?”
“No. So far, I think, Biff’s managed to avoid committing homicide. Let’s not make me his record-breaker. Say nothing, do nothing, remember nothing. And don’t tell Thomas.”
“I’m his boyfriend, I love him, and I wouldn’t dream of it. Will Biff be recovering long?”
“Seven weeks Treehouse, if he’s lucky. Likely more like ten.”
Raige gave a low whistle. “Thomas will flip.”
“Thomas isn’t the one stuck being Biff’s caregiver, so he can just deal.”
“Yeah, well, if you need some extra help while he gets better…”
I grinned. “And you wonder how you got yourself two people who adore you.” He blushed. “Now that you mention it, though, could I borrow a recliner from your place? Biff’s not going to be able to sleep lying down for a while.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
…
I’ll spare you the ordeal of getting a La-Z-Boy through interdimensional customs. Suffice to say, if you ever get the genius idea of trying to move an enormous heavy chair over dimensional borders, for the love of mercy, don’t do it yourself. Having never owned a recliner myself, I’d forgotten just how big and heavy American engineering could make a chair, and even Raige’s patience wore thin after a while.
Which was why Biff was the one I strong-armed into helping me move it the rest of the way.
Hauling it up the hill and down the slope wasn’t too bad; Scorch came to help, and he had the towing power of a rhino. Getting it down to my room, however…
See, my room was underground. It had two entrances: a spiraling tunnel outside, and the dumbwaiter. The La-Z-Boy was far too big for the dumbwaiter, so we had to wrestle it down the tunnel, which was too small for Scorch. It was also round.
Have you ever tried to circle a square?
“How the fuck you get shit in here?” Biff complained as we tilted and twisted around a curve.
“Willpower, geometry, and avoidance of squares.” I banged my hip into a root and hissed. “Look, not my fault the USA and Treehouse have different base principles of design. And I’m only doing this for the sake of your post-surgical carcass, so shut up and push.”
In my little round room, the monster took up about half the available space. I wasn’t thrilled about having it around, but at least Biff would be able to sleep comfortably after the operation. Plus my sheets would stop smelling like cheap cigarettes.
I rubbed my back, wincing. “Ugh. When the time comes, I’m just going to tie it to Scorch’s tail, put it on wheels, and have him drag it out. No way am I hauling that thing out of here on my own.”
Biff had already parked his rump. “How you get this thing, anyway?”
I tried to stretch. “Ow!” Bad idea. “Raige. His dad has five; he won’t miss one.”
Biff snorted, then said, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
I paused in rubbing my back and looked up. He was studiously looking at the rope of garlic hanging from my ceiling.
I grinned. “Biff, you learned a social skill! I’m so proud of you!”
He threw garlic at my head.
Month Four
As the surgery date neared, preparations got more and more underway. The next one Biff needed me for was buying a compression vest—the very garment I’d mentioned months earlier that had set the whole surgery in motion. Even though it’d be a moot point soon, I was relieved to know that the Ace bandages would be gone.
Now, were he in Vaygo, Biff likely would’ve spent his immediate post-operative period in ordinary bandages, but Ribbonblack was less certain. She wanted everything to heal in place as best as possible, but she also wanted to be able to get in there if anything went wrong, and cleanliness was more of a problem. She was willing to shell out for a garment custom-made for the purpose.
Which was how Biff ended up half-naked with a giant arachnid, getting plastered with goo coming out of her hind end.
“Never said your clothes came out of spider ass,” he remarked.
I rolled my eyes at the corner I was facing. “Spinnerets. Totally different. Also, I can’t afford her. There’s a reason her name is The Best Weaver.”
“That’s really her name?”
“You have to admit, it’s a genius marketing move.”
“How much this shit cost, anyway?”
“It’s on Ribbonblack’s dime and believe me, it’s worth every cent: as long as you’re willing to wash it by hand, you can probably wear this for a decade, easy. Much better than that junk you’ve been using.”
“Huh.” He sounded uncomfortable, but I couldn’t blame him. He’d probably been groped more in the past four months than he had in the prior four years, and besides, though The Best Weaver wasn’t actually a giant predatory spider, she certainly resembled one enough for it to be unsettling. Especially since she was webbing him up.
“Kid,” his voice was getting decidedly edgy. “I can’t move my arms.”
“That’s normal. She’s making a custom mold of your torso; the webbing has to be hard. Just relax; she hasn’t lost a customer yet.”
He made a wordless sound of extreme discomfort. I decided a distraction was in order before he freaked out and did something stupid like try to kick The Best Weaver in the pedipalps.
“You know, I promised I wouldn’t ask you stupid questions about… that.”
“Yup.” Well, at least the aggravation was directed towards me now.
“Does it qualify as a stupid question if I ask how you kept it from the pinheads?” He didn’t swear at me immediately, so I continued, “I don’t know about you, but they strip-searched me pretty thoroughly for giving them a hard time.”
His voice sounded like it was shrugging, but at least the itchy tones in his voice went down. “Yeah, well, I didn’t fucking bite them.”
“Eesh. Bite one immigration official, and nobody ever lets you forget it…”
“No shit. I didn’t, so they didn’t tranq me.”
And his illusion had taken care of the rest. Once again, I found myself envying his skills—while at the same time being glad I didn’t need them. The PIN had been puzzled by my anatomy, but at least they didn’t expect me to look fully human; Biff, they would’ve keelhauled.
“Surely you were off your hormones while in a prison cell with me.”
“Y’think?”
“I mean, I don’t know much about testosterone, but I do know you have to keep taking it or your body starts to revert.” I remembered what Biff had been like during that initial stint. “Wow, no wonder you were so cranky; your organs must’ve…”
“Y’think?”
I caught the edge in his voice. “Right. Sorry.”
The Best Weaver skittered towards me on the wall and signed, “Tell my honored customer that the webbing needs to harden for a little while. It should be snug, but not uncomfortable. Let me know if he has trouble breathing.”
I relayed the information, and Biff muttered, “Great.”
Not knowing the verbal or the body language, The Best Weaver began cleaning up, chittering cheerfully to herself as she worked. I’d been around her enough to know it was the equivalent of someone humming, but it probably sounded a little more ominous to Biff, especially since he was the one who couldn’t move from the waist up.
“She eat people too?”
I resisted a sigh and rubbed my forehead. “Biff, Treehouse has a very broad definition of ‘people.’ By local standard, I eat people, you eat people, the trees outside the fence eat people. Ethics here are complicated.”
“So… what? Eating people’s okay here?”
“Complicated. Just scream if she starts biting you and I’ll zap her. The Best Weaver, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know, is highly susceptible to electricity.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Hey, don’t blame me, you asked, I answered.”
Pause. “How you know that shit about hormones, anyway? They got trannies like me out here in Dipshit, Nowhere?”
I hesitated a moment. Then I admitted, “For a while, there was talk of putting me on estrogen.”
I could hear his eyebrows go up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. So I know a bit, just all the opposite direction.”
Silence. I decided to let him off the hook.
“Come on, Biff, I don’t associate with you in expectation of tact. Spit it out.”
It still took him a moment. “How come they…?”
I shrugged. “You know my creators fixed me.”
“No tits, no fucking, no babies. I know.”
“I really don’t know that me being asexual is because of that, but whatever. On Earth, I was able to pass myself off as a late bloomer, but the Jaunter’s League was less laissez faire about things. I wasn’t quite age of majority, by their arbitrary standard, and since I was technically their ward, they had the authority to medically normalize me. They saw it as undoing my ‘mutilation,’ not adding to it.
“I won’t go into the ridiculous fight that ensued over whether I was mentally competent to refuse or withstand treatment, but for a while, I seriously considered it.”
Anyone else would’ve taken that as a given. But Biff was silent, waiting for the punch line.
“Obviously I was not at my sanest at the time,” I said wryly, and he made a knowing sound. “But everyone seemed to think I was missing out on something amazing, and I guess I started to worry I was missing out on some sage adult wisdom or something. Like by refusing to go through puberty, I was refusing to grow up.”
Biff snorted. “I been through two,” he told me. “You ain’t missing shit.”
“Yeah, eventually, I came to the same conclusion. I mean, it’s not like I won’t age. I’ll just be chronically short, flat, and hopeless at energy manipulation. To me, it really isn’t that big a deal, but… I don’t know, your culture really loves its puberty stories, you know? From everything I’ve read, it’s an unpleasant, awkward, embarrassing stage of development, but it’s almost this weird biological hazing ritual that most of your people can’t imagine foregoing.”
“Nah, it’s shit. You fine missing it.” Pause, then, “It bad for you, not doing it?”
I shrugged. “Enh, I need to keep an eye on some aspects of my health, bone density and electroplaque leakage kind of stuff, but I’ve been fine so far, and anyway, those can be managed without life-altering metabolic upheaval.” I shrugged. “You know the anticlimax. I squirmed my way out, the statue of limitations expired, and now I’m age of majority and legally in charge of my own medical destiny and that’s the end of it.”
“You never said.”
“Yeah, well, neither did you, so I guess we’re both liars, aren’t we?”
It came out sharper than I intended, and Biff had no response.
“Look, it’s fine with you and Raige, you don’t give me hassle, and it’s fine in Treehouse, where I’m the only full-time humanoid in town. But as I get older, I make more people uncomfortable. They don’t know what I am. You saw the folks at that support group; they thought you were my guardian or something. Biff, you’re not that much older than me! And even the people who do know, like at the League, they look at me like I’m some biological error, like, ‘oh, poor thing, she doesn’t know what they’ve done to her.’ Like I’m some stupid five-year-old or something!”
Silence.
I rubbed my face. “I mean, I’m not complaining, all right? I chose this. It’s not like I see Earthlings much. Just you and Raige, who’re fine with it, and Thomas. And sure, back before we knew how deep it ran, he kidded me about it a little, but not once the blood work came back. Now, I think he just feels bad joking about it. Even though he respects my decision, I don’t think he’ll ever get why I did it.”
The silence hung. With my back to Biff, I couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see mine, and it was best that way. I just stood there until The Best Weaver, oblivious to the content of the conversation, came down the wall to sign to me to let Biff know that she was going to cut the web off him now.
Turned out the process acted like an incompetent waxing, which for someone like Biff became quite a production. After much cursing and yelping and, “Tell my honored customer that I will cut him if he doesn’t hold still!” the cast came off successfully, but it served to shove the whole conversation (monologue, really) under the rug.
I was glad. The whole business had been years ago, and it was humiliating to find it still upset me. I didn’t feel much like eating or talking through dinner, despite Biff’s cooking, and he was still sulking over his partially depilated back, so it all worked out. I figured that the whole thing would just join the rest of things we’d never speak of again.
But as Biff headed out to leave for his shift, he halted and hung in the doorway awkwardly. He looked like he was attempting social grace, but the effort didn’t leave him with enough left over to actually say anything.
“What?” I prompted after a bit.
He shuffled, rubbed his neck, and mumbled, “’M glad you didn’t cave.”
Then he left so I wouldn’t have to say anything. Which was just as well; I didn’t want him to see me cry.
--cont. in Part Three
Bodily Reconstruction
Word Count: 14,658
Summary: Biff wants top surgery, but he can’t get it in Vaygo. Luckily for him, M.D.’s junior healer.
Notes: This is REALLY late in the timeline; M.D.’s been junior healer for a few years now, turns nineteen over the course of this story, and is by all accounts a functioning adult. Biff turns twenty-eight. Medical grossness towards the end. Also, this is all Lee’s fault.
Month Two
It went fine.
Hard to believe? Not really. Biff and I had shared quarters numerous times before without killing each other. This time, at least, we were doing it of our own free will. Besides, Biff was a jerk, but I was doing him a huge favor, and he knew it. He didn’t miraculously transform into Prince Charming, but he at least put forth some effort.
The mornings settled into a routine fast. I’d wake up and, weather permitting, watch the sun rise while I ate my breakfast of leftovers. (For all of Biff’s abrasive traits, I had to give him one thing: the six months he lived with me were the most nutritionally lucrative of my life.) Roughly halfway through my meal, Biff would stagger past. I’d say good morning; if he was feeling energetic, he’d grunt at me. Then he’d collapse over his food and sleep until he had to get up and start it all over again.
I wasn’t surprised. Having been Scorch and Flame’s flunky for years, I can testify as to the amount of grunt work required to keep a healing practice going, and Ribbonblack’s was way bigger than ours. Lugging hot water and soap, sterilizing everything over and over in a society without Lysol or rubbing alcohol, disposing of medical waste—oh, it was bad. And that wasn’t even including the usual abuses one went through restraining juveniles or accessing remote patients at the tops of trees or deep underground. Being a healer was like being a combination doctor, shrink, nutritionist, and veterinarian, and I was positive that Ribbonblack saved the worst of it all for him.
Biff was lousy at Pidgin Sign, and worse with telepathy, but he knew when he was being hazed. One rainy day, after shedding his wet jacket and toppling onto my mattress, he mustered the power to mumble into my pillow, “She trying to get rid of me?”
“Mm?”
“Ribbonblack.”
I chewed and swallowed my dumpling. “Testing you. By local standard, you’re asking for the Hummer stretch limo of surgeries; she’s making you earn it.”
The pause was so long, I thought he’d fallen asleep. It turned out he was just stockpiling energy for a tirade, and he still couldn’t quite manage the required volume or energy. “I’ll show her. Fuck her. Fuck this whole fucking town.”
His face was buried in the pillow, so he couldn’t see me smile, or toast him with my water bottle. “Fight the good fight, Biffy.”
“Fuck you too,” he growled, and fell asleep.
…
Throughout our association, I’d never known Biff to be passionate about anything—unless you counted anger, in which case he was passionate about everything. Considering what Ribbonblack was putting him through, I expected him to explode after a month or two—or just give up. But nope, that one complaint was it. After that, he settled into a fierce, silent perseverance I’d never seen before. He hurled himself into the endless swarms of biting insects, the herds of furious juveniles, the mud and the blood and the filth. He got trampled, blistered, and bitten. But he kept going.
He never became much of a polyglot, but he started badgering me to teach him more Pidgin Sign. “How do I say, ‘Where?’” Or, “How do I say, ‘What’s this?’” And, of course, “How do I say, ‘Fuck off?’” (He had to settle for ‘go rot.’) He even started being able to put together his own short sentences, though his grammar was still appalling. (“Give shovel go rot busy.”)
When he finally put together that I had to go through the same menial work as a junior healer, that Ribbonblack wasn’t just inventing horrible jobs, he started badgering me for tricks of the trade. “How do you keep them two-legged triceratops things from kicking you?” Or, “You got something for these bites?” As time wore on, I even started giving him straight answers. (Though I never did get him to stop using dinosaur names.)
And he started to bounce back. First he managed to eat before hitting the sack. Then he started having the energy to clean the dishes and put them away. Finally, he started rising in the evenings to cook, as though determined to pay me some form of rent, even if it was by the calorie. Eventually I started letting him have his way with the groceries, because even though he didn’t have a clue what he was getting half the time, his choices invariably turned out better than mine. I finally started putting on a little weight, much to Raige and Thomas’s delight.
Still, Biff was usually asleep when I got home. So when I came home from work to find him awake and cooking, I knew something was up. When I smelled the food, and saw his face, I knew it was going to be a humdinger.
“You need a favor, don’t you?” I said.
He looked pained. “Ribbonblack needs shit on the surgery. Articles and crap.”
“Ah, she’s sending you out for that, huh? Congratulations; means she thinks you’re going to make it. So you need me to go library diving for you?”
“They got shit like that?”
“Libraries have everything, Biff. Especially when they’re for schools of medicine. Raige goes to VU, so I could probably get in with him.”
“Well, you wanna do that, sure, but I was going somewhere else.” His expression made it apparent it wasn’t Disneyland.
I tossed my apron over a hook, leaned back against the wall, and gestured at him to get on with it.
“There’s a tranny support group every Wednesday at the faggot health center. I’m gonna have to go.”
“You know, I think everyone there would be grateful if I went instead.”
“The fuck’d you need books on chopping off your tits for? You don’t got any. You’re already going book diving for me, so let me do some shit myself, Jesus.”
“Okay, okay. But let it be on record that I think this is a lousy idea, and you have to promise me you won’t insult anyone.”
Month Three
The Harry Benjamin Health Center looked no different than any of the other blocks of concrete around it, but the closer we got, the further Biff withdrew into his jacket until the brim of his cap almost touched his collar.
“Will you relax?” I said. “These people are just like you.”
“No they ain’t,” he snarled.
I rolled my eyes and warbled, “‘There was a man who had a hippo and Crissy was her name-oh…’”
“I been here before.”
That got my attention. “I thought the whole GLBT population of North America had a restraining order on you.”
“I was a stupid kid then, okay? I thought I could do it legal.” His eyes went glassy with horror. “Hippie college queers. All of ‘em, hippie college queers.”
“You say that like you’re so much better.”
“When they weren’t fighting each other over shit I don’t care about, they kept telling me to find a good shrink.” He snorted. “Cuz, y’know, I was rich and shit.”
“I can’t imagine why they would tell you that.”
“Fuck you. I just kept my mouth shut, hands in my pockets, and ran like hell soon as it was over.”
“Self-control? From you?”
“Shut up, I was seventeen.”
“That was a long time ago, Biff,” I cooed. “I’m sure things have changed since then and the college kids have all grown up now.”
He grunted and slunk into the building, steadfastly staring straight ahead and ignoring the HIV test posters. I followed and swiped a few condoms from the freebie bowl before Biff grabbed my arm and yanked me past.
Up the stairs, past a bunch of rainbow flags, (Biff was starting to look like a turtle in his jacket shell) and we came to a door with a sign in front saying, ‘Trans Support Vaygo Meeting.’ The door was open and a few people were in chairs chatting to each other, and standing out front was someone with purple hair and a big bright smile.
“Welcome to Trans Support Vaygo! My name is Lisa, my preferred pronouns are ‘she,’ ‘her,’ and ‘hers,’ and I’m the group moderator.” She grabbed my hand and began vigorously pumping it. “How might I refer to you?”
Hey, this didn’t sound bad. “M.D. I don’t care about pronouns; use whichever you want.”
“No problem.” She turned to Biff. “And you are?”
She reached for Biff’s hand, but Biff had his hands crammed deep in his pockets and was standing as far away as he could get away with and still be affiliated with me. He made a sound that communicated nothing but extreme discomfort. I jerked my chin, trying to get him to come over, but he didn’t appear to notice.
“He’s… shy,” I said, and glared at him.
She laughed. “Oh, that’s okay, we get plenty of nervous parents the first time.”
Biff and I hastily jerked back.
“Wait, naw—”
“No, no, no—”
“We ain’t—”
We stopped. Looked at each other. He gave me a pained, questioning look. I spread my hands, shrugged, and grunted. If he wanted to play bumbling cousin to my transgendered whatever, I could live with that.
But Biff sighed and said, “We ain’t related.”
“And I’m age of majority, thanks.” I added.
“Oh.”
Awkward silence. She looked back and forth from me to him, like she was waiting for an explanation, but I didn’t feel like one was required, and Biff didn’t say anything, which was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, my job was to keep him from offending as many people as possible, and having him silent sounded like a good start.
Finally, she chuckled uncomfortably and said, “Well, I’m very glad you came, and sorry that you took all this trouble, but this is a trans safe space, so for the emotional safety of my members, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
I blinked. “Oh. Uh, okay. I’ll just…”
“Oh no, sweetie, you’re fine, we’re totally welcoming of genderqueer, genderfluid, and questioning youth here.” There were words for what I was? “But this space is for trans people to feel safe in a cis world, and…”
I realized she was looking at Biff when she said it, and before I could stomp on his instep, he snarled, “I’m a fucking tranny, okay, now can I come in or not?”
…
“Wow. Two sentences. Color me impressed; I thought it’d take at least a paragraph before they kicked you out.” I sat down on the curb next to him, heavily laden with a sturdy stack of pamphlets, articles from the Southwest Transsexual Summit, and a book.
“Fuck ‘em,” he said, tossing ash off his cigarette and crossing his arms. “Didn’t want to be part of their damn group anyway.”
“You know, you might’ve made it through the door if you hadn’t gone off and said ‘tranny.’”
“That’s what I am. They the ones who asked. What, I need to show ‘em my degree in PC ‘fore they let me in? Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.”
I sighed. “Well, I can definitely see why you’re going to Ribbonblack. Just as well, really; the hippie college kids are still there.”
“Told you.”
“They weren’t so bad. Just… academic. Speaking of which, do you know what ‘deconstructing the gender binary’ means?”
He gave me a long look, then flatly: “No.”
“Unclench, would you? I don’t know, I thought maybe there was some manual or something they gave you when you first came—”
“Nah, they just act like it.”
“Bitter, bitter. Anyway, I just smiled and nodded and pretended I knew what the heck they were talking about.” I smacked him on the back. “Come on. Time to raid the pharmacy to pay your medical bills.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, got up, and we headed down the street.
“So how was it?”
“The meeting? All right, I guess. Like I said, I didn’t understand what they were going on about half the time, so I didn’t say much. It was nice to be called all sorts of pronouns, but they seemed way too interested in my ethnicity.”
He snorted. “They guess right?”
“Please. They were far too well brought-up to ask. It was fun watching them try, though. They kept talking about how nice it was to have some ‘diversity,’ and then they started fighting for the title of Coolest White Person.”
“Who won?”
“You of all people should know that winners don’t compete.”
He shook his head. “Hippie college queers.”
“Can’t say you didn’t warn me. At least I got some reading material for Ribbonblack.” I flipped through a brochure with a smirk. “With your language skills, she’ll need to contract me to read them for her, which means Raige and Thomas are getting Christmas presents from me this year, yipee-ki-yay.”
Biff didn’t share my enthusiasm. He kept up a brisk pace until we crossed under I-10, which marked the invisible Vaygo cultural line to the south side. Only when we were surrounded by the crumbling brick dollar shops and Russian liquor stores did he relax.
…
“Hey, Raige. Can you get into the VU medical school library?”
Until then, I had never taken advantage of Raige being in college, but the moment I walked through the big double doors, I realized the error of my ways. My fingers twitched. My pupils dilated. I began to salivate.
Raige hitched his backpack up his shoulder. “I guess you’ll need me to work the computer catalog, huh?”
I cackled maniacally.
I was so distracted by the cornucopia of books that I didn’t realize the obvious until Raige sat at the computer. Of course I needed his help. A seven-story library wouldn’t be amenable to my usual strategy of browsing, and putting me next to a computer was a surefire way to destroy it. (Downside of manipulating electricity.)
“So, what’re we looking for today?” Raige asked, flexing his hands.
It occurred to me that I should’ve worked this out beforehand.
“Kid?”
I could’ve ditched Raige and asked one of the librarians, except (A) awkward, and (B) I’d sound like a prankster, especially considering (C) nobody ever believed what an electronic menace I was until I demonstrated with hundreds’ of dollars’ worth of damage. Not my idea of a good time.
“Couldn’t we just find where the medical journals are?”
“Kid, this is the medical library. They probably have a couple floors for those alone. Come on, I’m not Thomas, I won’t wisecrack if Scorch and Flame need stuff on… I don’t know, priapism or something.”
I almost asked how Raige knew what priapism was. Caught myself just in time. “It’s sexual reassignment surgery.”
Raige hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he said, “Sure, okay,” and got to work like nothing was amiss.
This was why I loved the guy.
There was exactly one medical journal in the entire library that looked at all useful. I arrowed in on that, while Raige parted ways with me so as to replenish his stock of fantasy romance novels in another building.
I was almost done with the photocopy machine when Raige caught up with me, purple paperbacks under his arm. “Find what you were looking for?”
“Good enough.” I pulled the journal out from under the lid and removed the fresh warm copies of ‘Improvements in the Nipple Pedicle Method’ from the tray. “Ready?”
As we exited down the stairs into the sun, he halted, expression serious
“Hey. If… if something’s going on with you, you know I’m here whenever you need me, right?”
I sighed, then went and hugged him. “I know. It’s not for me.”
Raige was silent a moment, then I felt him stiffen. “Oh. That, uh… that explains a lot, actually. Should I say anything, or…?”
“No. So far, I think, Biff’s managed to avoid committing homicide. Let’s not make me his record-breaker. Say nothing, do nothing, remember nothing. And don’t tell Thomas.”
“I’m his boyfriend, I love him, and I wouldn’t dream of it. Will Biff be recovering long?”
“Seven weeks Treehouse, if he’s lucky. Likely more like ten.”
Raige gave a low whistle. “Thomas will flip.”
“Thomas isn’t the one stuck being Biff’s caregiver, so he can just deal.”
“Yeah, well, if you need some extra help while he gets better…”
I grinned. “And you wonder how you got yourself two people who adore you.” He blushed. “Now that you mention it, though, could I borrow a recliner from your place? Biff’s not going to be able to sleep lying down for a while.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
…
I’ll spare you the ordeal of getting a La-Z-Boy through interdimensional customs. Suffice to say, if you ever get the genius idea of trying to move an enormous heavy chair over dimensional borders, for the love of mercy, don’t do it yourself. Having never owned a recliner myself, I’d forgotten just how big and heavy American engineering could make a chair, and even Raige’s patience wore thin after a while.
Which was why Biff was the one I strong-armed into helping me move it the rest of the way.
Hauling it up the hill and down the slope wasn’t too bad; Scorch came to help, and he had the towing power of a rhino. Getting it down to my room, however…
See, my room was underground. It had two entrances: a spiraling tunnel outside, and the dumbwaiter. The La-Z-Boy was far too big for the dumbwaiter, so we had to wrestle it down the tunnel, which was too small for Scorch. It was also round.
Have you ever tried to circle a square?
“How the fuck you get shit in here?” Biff complained as we tilted and twisted around a curve.
“Willpower, geometry, and avoidance of squares.” I banged my hip into a root and hissed. “Look, not my fault the USA and Treehouse have different base principles of design. And I’m only doing this for the sake of your post-surgical carcass, so shut up and push.”
In my little round room, the monster took up about half the available space. I wasn’t thrilled about having it around, but at least Biff would be able to sleep comfortably after the operation. Plus my sheets would stop smelling like cheap cigarettes.
I rubbed my back, wincing. “Ugh. When the time comes, I’m just going to tie it to Scorch’s tail, put it on wheels, and have him drag it out. No way am I hauling that thing out of here on my own.”
Biff had already parked his rump. “How you get this thing, anyway?”
I tried to stretch. “Ow!” Bad idea. “Raige. His dad has five; he won’t miss one.”
Biff snorted, then said, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
I paused in rubbing my back and looked up. He was studiously looking at the rope of garlic hanging from my ceiling.
I grinned. “Biff, you learned a social skill! I’m so proud of you!”
He threw garlic at my head.
Month Four
As the surgery date neared, preparations got more and more underway. The next one Biff needed me for was buying a compression vest—the very garment I’d mentioned months earlier that had set the whole surgery in motion. Even though it’d be a moot point soon, I was relieved to know that the Ace bandages would be gone.
Now, were he in Vaygo, Biff likely would’ve spent his immediate post-operative period in ordinary bandages, but Ribbonblack was less certain. She wanted everything to heal in place as best as possible, but she also wanted to be able to get in there if anything went wrong, and cleanliness was more of a problem. She was willing to shell out for a garment custom-made for the purpose.
Which was how Biff ended up half-naked with a giant arachnid, getting plastered with goo coming out of her hind end.
“Never said your clothes came out of spider ass,” he remarked.
I rolled my eyes at the corner I was facing. “Spinnerets. Totally different. Also, I can’t afford her. There’s a reason her name is The Best Weaver.”
“That’s really her name?”
“You have to admit, it’s a genius marketing move.”
“How much this shit cost, anyway?”
“It’s on Ribbonblack’s dime and believe me, it’s worth every cent: as long as you’re willing to wash it by hand, you can probably wear this for a decade, easy. Much better than that junk you’ve been using.”
“Huh.” He sounded uncomfortable, but I couldn’t blame him. He’d probably been groped more in the past four months than he had in the prior four years, and besides, though The Best Weaver wasn’t actually a giant predatory spider, she certainly resembled one enough for it to be unsettling. Especially since she was webbing him up.
“Kid,” his voice was getting decidedly edgy. “I can’t move my arms.”
“That’s normal. She’s making a custom mold of your torso; the webbing has to be hard. Just relax; she hasn’t lost a customer yet.”
He made a wordless sound of extreme discomfort. I decided a distraction was in order before he freaked out and did something stupid like try to kick The Best Weaver in the pedipalps.
“You know, I promised I wouldn’t ask you stupid questions about… that.”
“Yup.” Well, at least the aggravation was directed towards me now.
“Does it qualify as a stupid question if I ask how you kept it from the pinheads?” He didn’t swear at me immediately, so I continued, “I don’t know about you, but they strip-searched me pretty thoroughly for giving them a hard time.”
His voice sounded like it was shrugging, but at least the itchy tones in his voice went down. “Yeah, well, I didn’t fucking bite them.”
“Eesh. Bite one immigration official, and nobody ever lets you forget it…”
“No shit. I didn’t, so they didn’t tranq me.”
And his illusion had taken care of the rest. Once again, I found myself envying his skills—while at the same time being glad I didn’t need them. The PIN had been puzzled by my anatomy, but at least they didn’t expect me to look fully human; Biff, they would’ve keelhauled.
“Surely you were off your hormones while in a prison cell with me.”
“Y’think?”
“I mean, I don’t know much about testosterone, but I do know you have to keep taking it or your body starts to revert.” I remembered what Biff had been like during that initial stint. “Wow, no wonder you were so cranky; your organs must’ve…”
“Y’think?”
I caught the edge in his voice. “Right. Sorry.”
The Best Weaver skittered towards me on the wall and signed, “Tell my honored customer that the webbing needs to harden for a little while. It should be snug, but not uncomfortable. Let me know if he has trouble breathing.”
I relayed the information, and Biff muttered, “Great.”
Not knowing the verbal or the body language, The Best Weaver began cleaning up, chittering cheerfully to herself as she worked. I’d been around her enough to know it was the equivalent of someone humming, but it probably sounded a little more ominous to Biff, especially since he was the one who couldn’t move from the waist up.
“She eat people too?”
I resisted a sigh and rubbed my forehead. “Biff, Treehouse has a very broad definition of ‘people.’ By local standard, I eat people, you eat people, the trees outside the fence eat people. Ethics here are complicated.”
“So… what? Eating people’s okay here?”
“Complicated. Just scream if she starts biting you and I’ll zap her. The Best Weaver, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know, is highly susceptible to electricity.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Hey, don’t blame me, you asked, I answered.”
Pause. “How you know that shit about hormones, anyway? They got trannies like me out here in Dipshit, Nowhere?”
I hesitated a moment. Then I admitted, “For a while, there was talk of putting me on estrogen.”
I could hear his eyebrows go up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. So I know a bit, just all the opposite direction.”
Silence. I decided to let him off the hook.
“Come on, Biff, I don’t associate with you in expectation of tact. Spit it out.”
It still took him a moment. “How come they…?”
I shrugged. “You know my creators fixed me.”
“No tits, no fucking, no babies. I know.”
“I really don’t know that me being asexual is because of that, but whatever. On Earth, I was able to pass myself off as a late bloomer, but the Jaunter’s League was less laissez faire about things. I wasn’t quite age of majority, by their arbitrary standard, and since I was technically their ward, they had the authority to medically normalize me. They saw it as undoing my ‘mutilation,’ not adding to it.
“I won’t go into the ridiculous fight that ensued over whether I was mentally competent to refuse or withstand treatment, but for a while, I seriously considered it.”
Anyone else would’ve taken that as a given. But Biff was silent, waiting for the punch line.
“Obviously I was not at my sanest at the time,” I said wryly, and he made a knowing sound. “But everyone seemed to think I was missing out on something amazing, and I guess I started to worry I was missing out on some sage adult wisdom or something. Like by refusing to go through puberty, I was refusing to grow up.”
Biff snorted. “I been through two,” he told me. “You ain’t missing shit.”
“Yeah, eventually, I came to the same conclusion. I mean, it’s not like I won’t age. I’ll just be chronically short, flat, and hopeless at energy manipulation. To me, it really isn’t that big a deal, but… I don’t know, your culture really loves its puberty stories, you know? From everything I’ve read, it’s an unpleasant, awkward, embarrassing stage of development, but it’s almost this weird biological hazing ritual that most of your people can’t imagine foregoing.”
“Nah, it’s shit. You fine missing it.” Pause, then, “It bad for you, not doing it?”
I shrugged. “Enh, I need to keep an eye on some aspects of my health, bone density and electroplaque leakage kind of stuff, but I’ve been fine so far, and anyway, those can be managed without life-altering metabolic upheaval.” I shrugged. “You know the anticlimax. I squirmed my way out, the statue of limitations expired, and now I’m age of majority and legally in charge of my own medical destiny and that’s the end of it.”
“You never said.”
“Yeah, well, neither did you, so I guess we’re both liars, aren’t we?”
It came out sharper than I intended, and Biff had no response.
“Look, it’s fine with you and Raige, you don’t give me hassle, and it’s fine in Treehouse, where I’m the only full-time humanoid in town. But as I get older, I make more people uncomfortable. They don’t know what I am. You saw the folks at that support group; they thought you were my guardian or something. Biff, you’re not that much older than me! And even the people who do know, like at the League, they look at me like I’m some biological error, like, ‘oh, poor thing, she doesn’t know what they’ve done to her.’ Like I’m some stupid five-year-old or something!”
Silence.
I rubbed my face. “I mean, I’m not complaining, all right? I chose this. It’s not like I see Earthlings much. Just you and Raige, who’re fine with it, and Thomas. And sure, back before we knew how deep it ran, he kidded me about it a little, but not once the blood work came back. Now, I think he just feels bad joking about it. Even though he respects my decision, I don’t think he’ll ever get why I did it.”
The silence hung. With my back to Biff, I couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see mine, and it was best that way. I just stood there until The Best Weaver, oblivious to the content of the conversation, came down the wall to sign to me to let Biff know that she was going to cut the web off him now.
Turned out the process acted like an incompetent waxing, which for someone like Biff became quite a production. After much cursing and yelping and, “Tell my honored customer that I will cut him if he doesn’t hold still!” the cast came off successfully, but it served to shove the whole conversation (monologue, really) under the rug.
I was glad. The whole business had been years ago, and it was humiliating to find it still upset me. I didn’t feel much like eating or talking through dinner, despite Biff’s cooking, and he was still sulking over his partially depilated back, so it all worked out. I figured that the whole thing would just join the rest of things we’d never speak of again.
But as Biff headed out to leave for his shift, he halted and hung in the doorway awkwardly. He looked like he was attempting social grace, but the effort didn’t leave him with enough left over to actually say anything.
“What?” I prompted after a bit.
He shuffled, rubbed his neck, and mumbled, “’M glad you didn’t cave.”
Then he left so I wouldn’t have to say anything. Which was just as well; I didn’t want him to see me cry.
--cont. in Part Three
