Chapter 3
Vic doesn’t actually go back to Cornelius.
He runs, same as Logan.
Does mercenary jobs– all the same work, all what he’s good at, but with less of the sheer helplessness that came with being under Wraith’s thumb. He hires a telepath to fuck his shit up when the memories get too much, and indulges in pretty clothes and pretty girls with the money he now has to spare.
It’s in the aftermath of one of Birdy’s psi-blasts, when Vic’s lying down on the couch and Birdy’s in the chair next to him, that Vic decides to start talking.
“I think I’m gay,” he tells her, staring off at nothing.
“Okay,” Birdy says in response, focused on the book in her lap. Vic turns his head to look at her, head still buzzing.
“I think I’m a girl.”
That gets more of a reaction. Birdy looks up, closing the book to focus on Vic.
“Really.”
“I mean.” His head swims, and he starts to feel the same stupid way he felt during the Great War when he’d stare at the nurses for too long and it’d stop feeling like lust and start feeling like longing. “I haven’t thought about it all that much. But maybe.”
Birdy doesn’t say anything else. She just hums noncommittally, turning the page in her book like it’s more interesting.
Three days later, a box with a dress in it arrives at the flat.
Vic sits with it for a while. It’s silky-smooth, a soft dusky purple, cut low and long and very obviously his– her– their size.
Birdy watches as they put it on, sitting on Vic’s bed as they come out of the bathroom with it on. They look in the mirror and
Oh.
Oh, there she is.
Vic stares at herself in the mirror for a while. And then her face is wet, and oh, she’s crying.
“I can do your hair,” Birdy offers quietly. “It’s long enough.”
Vic wipes at her face, nodding. “Yeah. Okay.”
She sits on the floor and Birdy sits on the bed, carefully doing her hair into a braid. Birdy takes her own hairtie out of her ponytail to finish it off, and then they look in the mirror again.
Vic can’t help but stare. For a long time, it feels. Birdy reaches to put her hand in Vic’s, small and thin and dwarfed in Vic’s, and
and he can’t do this right now.
He takes his hair out of the braid and forces Birdy out of the room and takes off the dress, and puts himself in jeans and a shirt and heads out onto the streets of New York to find people to fuck up.
He gets into a barfight. And then when he’s kicked out, another. He comes home drunker than he’s been in a while, drunker than he can normally get, and Birdy watches with a completely unreadable expression as he stumbles his way into his room and slams the door.
His reflection watches him from the mirror,
and Vic stares at himself, and
puts his fist through
The mirror.
She doesn’t stop looking at him.
His hands are bloody
And then so is his face
And his fingertips and his jaw sting.
Pa stands over him, pliers in hand and crotch unzipped, and something deep in Vic aches as he coughs up blood that isn’t real onto the ground.
“You’ll never be a man,” Pa spits at him. “Just a fuckin’ devil. Not even he wants you. Can’t even die.”
Clara and Saul watch from behind the door. I’m not a man, Vic wants to say, and not in the way you want
Leave me alone I don’t want to hurt like this
Leave me alone I’m the hunting dog you wanted me to be
Leave me alone I just wanted you to love me.
And when he comes to properly, he’s in his bed and the dress is folded carefully on the dresser.
–
Birdy doesn’t say anything about it and Vic doesn’t ask.
The internet isn’t really helpful, but she feels better than he and she doesn’t give a shit past that. She doesn’t need to think about it, nobody needs to know about it except for her. It doesn’t matter.
(it does.)
She buys dresses, sometimes, and wears them nowhere but her room. Looks at herself in the mirror and pretends it fits right. She doesn’t care about the way it fills out, she doesn’t care she doesn’t look like Birdy, but it would be nice to look more like a woman. Would be nice for people to just think she was a girl off the bat.
“If you were a girl, her mother told her when she was little, “Your name would have been Victoria. After me. So we named you Victor instead.”
Victoria.
It’s good enough.
She writes it down, once. Stares at it. Crumples it up and stuffs it into the back of her closet, under the box full of her dresses.
–
When Birdy finds it, Vic’s sure it’s over.
Birdy sits her down.
“Is this what you want?” she asks, and Vic resists the urge to run. “You want to be…”
“I don’t know what I want.” Her head is in her hands, and the box of dresses and makeup is sitting on the table, and she’s shaking a little. “I just– I like those. I just want them. I like it.”
Birdy looks at her. “Okay.”
Vic looks up. “Okay?”
“Okay.” She nods. “I don’t care, Victor. People think we’re weird as it is. It’d be… hypocritical.”
“Victoria.”
“Victoria,” she echoes. “That’s a good name.”
“Yeah.”
Vic doesn’t really know what to say. She stands back up, gathers the box into her arms, and disappears into her room again.
The next day, there’s a pretty pink skirt draped over the chair, and a little note.
For some wardrobe variation –Birdy
Vic can’t help but smile at it.