Ranger HQ Ranger Union HQ

[Jackie Cat]

Leona gave Gladion a grin that was somewhere between a smirk and a look of sincere sympathy. She clicked her tongue in a commiserating sort of way at appropriate moments, and nodded approvingly at others.

"Thought you said being earnest would kill ya," she deadpanned, with a grin. "That's a hell of a story – I feel like talking about the identity stuff is almost like missing out on the espionage thriller-drama stuff. But I bet you get asked about that shit enough already, so let's go back to me being damned right, heh. Figured you were definitely somethin', I can clock 'queer kid' pretty reliably, just wasn't sure about trans, gay, or both. Hey, maybe we're a double match – my ten bucks says you like guys."

The Lycanroc shot Gladion a look with hooded eyes and a waggle of her brows – quite challenging to do as a canid!

Gladion didn't take the bait.

"Double match?" he asked, his face saying 'do say'.

Leona snorted, nodding. "Took me a while to figure it out properly. Rui kinda helped me with that, actually – part of the whole 'reinvent yourself' kick she got me on. I started off just being vague with people, I always had a kinda bishie look anyway so I just let people think whatever they liked. Then she asked me this question one day, something like... 'if you could've been born as someone else, what kind of person would you have liked to be?' – y'know? Anyway, I, uh..."

The Lycanroc wrinkled her nose as she wrestled with a mental stoppage. This wasn't something she usually said to anyone, save maybe for her girlfriend.

"I don't really know that I was 'born in the wrong body' or whatever. That doesn't feel right to me. I think of li'l Leo, I think of a boy. And it's not like I'm girly, either – I kick ass, I fix hoverbikes, I got dyke hair. Even so, I... Guh, this sounds so fuckin' stupid, but until I got to imagining myself as someone else, I was terrified to even touch her. Rui, I mean. Like I was afraid I was gonna break her, or, uh, something. I'unno, man. I just felt like shit all the time, on edge, like I only knew how to break noses, win pokémon battles and hit engines with a fuckin' spanner and if I tried so much as kissin' someone I'd fuck it up somehow. Didn't lose the jitters until... well, she'd say I took off one mask, I sometimes feel like I just put on another. Do I have to pick one gender? Can't I be both, if I want?"

She took a deep breath, and chuckled under her breath, glancing about herself to the Soja' desert.

"Well, whatever the truth is, this planet seems to think I'm a girl. Gave me the body you'd expect and everything. Not that it really, uh, makes much of a difference given I've not been raring to try it out."

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Gladion took one beat to guess at whether Leona's degree of confidence in his gayness should be measured in commonwealth dollars or a homeworld currency while counting himself lucky that sheet metal couldn't flush red, then another processing what she'd actually said. That was a lot to take in. He'd kinda assumed for a moment that she was better with this shit than he was, but she was still really figuring her own shit out. Should he feel bad for dragging that out of her? She sure didn't seem comfortable right now, but maybe it'd work out. She sure didn't really sound like she had many trans people to talk to before.

"You ain't got to choose one. Gender shit's all improv anyway, wouldn't be the first non-binary person I've met." Sure, the others all instinctually hated his guts 'cause they could sense he was some rich bloodline's incursion on their space, and he couldn't tell them he was also trans without them figuring out exactly which rich bastard's he was dangerously quickly, but that detail was incidental. He'd definitely met them.

"Just gotta figure out what makes you most comfortable. Which, uhh, easier said than done, I guess." His mind wandered to the fact that he'd started wearing mascara again, after years of being scared to touch the stuff. But if Leona thought he was former-edgy he wasn't gonna prove her wrong by offering that detail up.

"I got more license than most people to go around saying I feel like I was born in someone else's body. But even if I was pretty violently not a girl, even if I now know that was literally predestinated for me, it still feels weird to think of my kid self as..." He waved a talon dismissively. "Well, I just try not to think about it! Look to the future, or whatever. Not like it's really something I ever talk about with people back home, lest they catch onto 'the espionage thriller-drama stuff' and get me into shit on that front."

Without really giving it much consideration, he'd operated so far being pretty sure he was trans in every world, but also thinking of Leona as the (probably) trans Lycas. But he was pretty sure neither of the other Lycases had a Rui they were on good terms with, so if she was the impetus for all this... Well, it wasn't his place to spectulate.

"For what it's worth, my 'soul' apparently decided I ought to be a sexless cyborg chimera and not a guy," He shrugged. Performatively so, to help sell the bit. "So I wouldn't say you gotta be bound to whatever it chose to make you. Probably just means it was better than the alternative."

 

[Jackie Cat]

"Non-binary? Like, flesh-and-blood as opposed to computers 'n' shit, or—?" Then after a moment, the autotranslation seemed to kick in. "Oh, like, not one thing or the other. People can do that? Huh... Neat."

Gladion would be able to see Leona neatly file that one away in the back of her head to think deeply about later on. Hopefully it'd be one thing that carried over back to her world, when she left Forlas.

"As for species, well... I guess the thing is that you were bound to end up as an ARK, but ARKs are all sexless, or something, so... Like, it's a prioritisation thing. Species chosen first, sex later, whoops you don't get any fun bits as this species, sorry, no refunds."

Leona made herself chuckle, trying to pave over the weirdness of the topic.

"Having said that... I wonder if the difference between me and, say, Seth is that my first partners were girls...? The, uh, eeveelutions, I mean. I got my girls, Seth had his boys. I spent a lot of time just me and them, and maybe... Maybe that did something? Calling my only two friends 'she' and 'her' all the time, instead of 'he' and 'him'... Fuck, I don't know if that even makes any goddamn sense. Obviously having female pokémon doesn't fucking turn you into a chick. That's dumb."

Some part of her thought there was some truth to it, though. Sure, it wasn't rational, but since when was anything about gender rational, anyway?

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Getting the idea of the gender binary over to Leona was the first time he'd ever seen translation take enough time to be visible. So when a dumb pun occurred to him the second she suggested the ‘prioritization thing,’ he had to try it: "The system was too busy giving me binary components to give me binary components." Have fun translating that one...

He hadn't known her 'vee matched her gender. That was... an interesting theory. He didn't know what to make with it, because it didn't line up with any of his base assumptions about the situation, but he also couldn't quite convince himself to discard it.

"You know, they do say that people come to resemble their partners," Gladion offered. His delivery had a faux-sagely tone that couldn't be read as entirely serious, but he'd also used the same phrase about himself with only his baseline ambient level of sarcasm just a few minutes ago, so it wasn't entirely a rejection of the idea either.

"It's a pretty improbable coincidence, if it is one. Especially on your end, given their whole bizarre karyotype situation." (Gladion held many opinions on the viability of Eevee as a species in nature, which tied into myriad further opinions subjects like cuteness bias in conservation. If Leona was wise, she would not get him started on it.) "Might not be the only confounding variable, though. I... wasn't of the impression that that was the only difference between your and Seth's lives. And there's similar variability among versions of my partners. Maybe it's randomness. Maybe there are versions of me who're trans women out there, and I just haven't recognized any references to them 'cause of course I wouldn't." Even among his own very limited sample, he didn't know the name of Laura's Null thief, so that one might not be a 'Gladion' per se. The idea that any of the Gladions in his sample might be cis men was one he didn't to consider.

 

[Jackie Cat]

Leona snorted. Yeah, Gladion really did resemble his partner right now. That one earned another light thump on the shoulder.

"I dunno what else is different. Probably all sorts of stuff, honestly – eevee gender is just the main one I know about. Also the thing with Rui, obviously – fucking sucks to be him, I guess. Dunno why that went so differently for each of us, but the impression I got is that he was more... defensive about it. Maybe I was ahead of the curve on growing the fuck up? Also, uh, we have differently-coloured trenchcoats, that too. His was red, mine was some kinda gold-y orange-y colour, I guess that's another difference, technically?"

Leona laughed a little awkwardly, self-conscious about noting petty distinctions between herself and her counterpart.

"It's not like we sat down and made a big-ass list or anything. And like, even if I am more open than he is, or whatever, who's to say why that is? Tiny differences in our DNA? Someone gave me one extra hug on a bad day when I was seven? Someone else was different, and that affected each of us differently? Honestly, it's crazy enough that things are so similar between our worlds in the first place."

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Gladion tilted his head at Leona’s explanation, not quite sure where she was going with it. The thing with Rui sounded like a way bigger deal than Eevee genders to him, especially given it sounded like dating Rui played a part in Leona’s transition. But Leona didn’t think that, and she probably knew better than he did. It was her life, after all.

“Could be anything. Or any combination of things. I start to feel like I’m going a little insane when I get too into the weeds on the convergence stuff.”

Although, he’d felt fine talking about it so far today. Maybe because Leona was in the same boat. Or just that she hadn’t killed a version of him nor… the Odette stuff. (He’d honestly forgotten whatever she’d said to piss him off. Except for the Gyarados ass part, because it was anatomically inaccurate.)

“I guess if the Coven was tryna find Seth and missed, it kinda checks out that it’d find a Lycas with a pretty high degree of similarity? ‘Cause I know it doesn’t necessarily have to be that similar.”

He laughed, but this was one of his pained laughs and not a product of genuine amusement. “You wouldn’t know it now, but Nova and I got off to a rough start. ‘Cause the only version of me he remembered meeting at the time was… Uhh, not the best guy. Nova kinda had to deal with him. So there’s gotta be a pretty wild degree of variability there.”

He averted his gaze over the course of the last few sentences. If he could recognize that the version of him Nova’d killed had it coming, then surely becoming that guy wasn’t a possible future for him. He just had to trust Leona would draw the same conclusion.

“Still definitely glad I met him, in the end, just… Whatever. Veering off topic.” (He’d just needed to clear up that it had been worth it to get to meet Nova. Unequivocally.)

“Was meeting Seth… worth it? For all the people who know me running around, I’ve never actually met another Gladion.”