Casey had driven to the office this morning — wait, no, it was afternoon; regardless! Casey had driven here, but was in no state to drive. And while I could count the number of times I’d been behind the wheel of a car in the last five years on one hand, I did still know how. It was just uncomfortable, with the discomfort shifting to outright pain the longer I had to spend behind the wheel.

  But, again: Casey was in no state to drive. And given what had just happened, I couldn’t allow a return home like nothing had ever happened. That would have been stupid, reckless, and possibly even dangerous.

  So I used a bit more of the leeway I had with the firm to give us both the afternoon off, drove Casey to my townhome, and used the driveway for its intended purpose for the first time in… I didn’t remember, actually.

  Gorou had felt my concern through the connection we shared, and while I hadn’t exactly been able to send a proper text or email while four stories below ground, the pulsing kernel of foxfire at my spiritual center broadcast my worry, concern for another, and desire for solitude. I knew the instant we pulled into the driveway that Gorou wasn’t home, and would stay away until sundown or I asked for him to return, whichever came first.

  Casey was… worryingly pliant. It took almost no effort to coax the poor bean out of the car, into my townhome, and onto the couch, complete with both of us leaving our shoes by the door. It wasn’t helping that I hadn’t heard so much as a single proper syllable for the last twenty minutes.

  Casey was either catatonic, dissociating, or caught in a rather nasty panic attack. I wasn’t sure which of those possibilities was the worst option, though. I had to try to get the poor dear to communicate, but there was a very real chance that I was about to step on a minefield from the word ‘go’.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do but… well, try.

  “Casey?” I kept my voice quiet and tone soft. I had my ears held low, but not back — concern, worry, and fear, but no anger. “Do you… am I okay to keep using that name?”

  I held my breath as a second passed, then two. Three.

  But then, a nod. Slight, small, but still clearly deliberate.

  “Okay,” I sighed, the first threads of relief leeching the tension from my shoulders. “How do you want me to…” I trailed off, realizing I was about to blunder if I kept going that way. “Actually, which would you prefer? They? She? He? Something else?”

  Casey shifted, but didn’t say anything. Even a few seconds of silence stretched seemingly into eternity, and every heartbeat worsened my worry that I was going to fuck this up, that I’d somehow say something that would send Casey spiraling; or worse, that the damage was already done, and I hadn’t even—

  “They,” Casey said suddenly. I perked my ears back up and listened, hopeful for more. “They’s fine. O-or she. Just not… not h-he.”

  “Okay!” I exclaimed, then winced at my own volume. Shoot, that might’ve been too much. Uh… okay, think, Naomi; how do we defuse the tension? Bring things down a notch? “Casey, hun? I’m gonna get myself something to drink; can I get you something? Water, tea, coffee? Maybe a light snack?”

  “Just water.”

  “Y—” I cut myself off, not wanting to do something so stupid as ask if they were okay when the answer was so clearly ‘no’. I sighed softly, my ears dipping down the tiniest bit. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  I extricated myself from between the sofa and coffee table, careful not to toss my tail in Casey’s face by accident, and made my way down the hall to the kitchen… whereupon I noticed that Gorou either hadn’t put away the eggs and his cheese, or more likely, those feelings of “be anywhere but here” I’d sent had interrupted him mid-task. The little bit of day-to-day busywork also just… gave me a short opportunity to put my thoughts in order.

  First: Casey was trans. Second: they were almost certainly transitioning on the down-low, and either this was all very new, or they’d been incredibly hesitant to explore or experiment. That bralette I’d caught — no, no Naomi, not caught, caught implied some level of malice… okay, correction: the bralette Casey was wearing when I burst in on them looked at least slightly necessary at this stage, which suggested… fuck.

  With the cheese in its drawer and the eggs on a shelf, I grabbed a bottle of tea for myself, a second one in case Casey decided it sounded better than water, and pulled the filter pitcher off its shelf. Then I let the fridge close, reached to the cabinet just left of the fridge, and grabbed a glass for Casey.

  Unfortunately, that ended my little kitchen run… wait, no, a snack. It was getting close to lunchtime, and while I doubted either of us had the motivation or wherewithal to grab something more substantial, an empty stomach would make this harder. But I only had two hands… actually hold on, that worked better.

  I squeezed the two bottles of tea under one arm, grabbed the glass for Casey in that hand, and picked up the pitcher with my other. Then I walked back out to the living room, and plunked all that down on the coffee table.

  “Sorry, one more moment,” I offered by way of apology as I disappeared right back into the kitchen before Casey could so much as offer a murmur of protest. I had some snacks in the fridge, edamame and baby carrots immediately came to mind, but I had a feeling some sugar therapy would be needed, so I opened the freezer and got out the mochi ice cream: green tea, strawberry, and mango flavors. Then, while I busied myself making sure we wouldn’t just eat out of the bags or containers, I let my mind drift back to what I’d been thinking about before.

  Okay: trans, bralette says physical transition, what else… work and family.

  Fuck.

  BV&S was a rather open and accepting workplace, in at least some small part due to my presence helping inure everyone to people with less, ah, ‘standard’ physical appearances, but the legal world as a whole was still very much a boys’ club. That boys’ club attitude was fairly common among typically ‘white-collar’ fields of work, and if my brief meeting with Casey’s father in particular was anything to go by, he was almost the archetypal example of what they were looking for.

  And here Casey was, just… rejecting everything that man probably wanted for and expected of him: refused to go to his alma mater, had the grades for Big Law but decided on something else, almost certainly responded to being pressured towards conservative student action groups with the middle finger, and now was happily tearing up the ‘Man Card’ their father expected them to display proudly…

  I understood all too well the kind of fear and anxiety that could create, the desire to keep things quiet, take things slow, not make any big moves until there was no other option. Hell, I had noticed that Casey seemed rather glum about the haircut they got in prep for graduation, I just… didn’t remark on it. I felt like it wasn’t my place to say something.

  But I didn’t exactly have much choice now. Or rather, Casey didn’t have much choice in that now, because my haste and concern, though eminently justifiable, took away something that couldn’t be given back: secrecy, privacy, and the agency to decide who got how much of either.

  And all of this put me into a difficult, uncomfortable position, because I didn’t know what to do. It had dragged back out old insecurities and anxieties that I’d long just set aside as something I wouldn’t be able to resolve for myself, and demanded I resolve them anyway. Because I could empathize with Casey, could understand what they were going through, could provide my personal perspective and assistance born from my experience and all that, but…

  But at the same time, I couldn’t.

  I’d taken enough courses in gender studies at Oxford that I’d have graduated with a minor in the subject from an American university, and I’d read quite a few accounts of transgender life. I didn’t have the normal experience, and I’d wanted to get a better understanding of what was, of how I could relate to that, and — and I came away from it thinking that I couldn’t. So much of the literature I’d read focused very heavily on the performance of gender, on the steps needed to go from being seen as your assigned sex at birth, to being recognized as your preferred gender. It went deep into the struggle of recognition, of the difficulties inherent in learning societal blocking and choreography, of putting forth just the right image, of projecting a self that resisted attempts to just brush away the presentation to find the painful lie that called itself ‘biological truth’.

  But I didn’t have that. If somebody were to map out my genome, they’d find some weird fox stuff in there, yes, but they’d find two X chromosomes. If somebody went into my bathroom, they’d probably balk a bit at the wire-bristle fur brush, but they could also find the box of tampons under the sink. No matter how hard somebody looked, no matter how deep they scanned, how many pieces they separated me out into, they would find that my body held no trace of the boy I’d been forced to be.

  And that was just… impossible. I was impossible. My situation was the fantasy, the pipe dream, the ‘maybe in a hundred years’ vaporware. And with the way your average person already expected, already pressured more ‘normal’ trans people to hew to their expectations of what a man or a woman should be, only to heap hate and abuse upon even the slightest deviation from some imagined exemplar?

  If those bigots and gatekeepers and feckless idiots knew that I was trans? It wouldn’t matter to them that I was the exception to end all exceptions. It wouldn’t matter what I thought about anything, how I wanted to interact with the community. All they would do was say that the impossible wasn’t and hold up my results as the new, truly unreachable standard to which all other trans people would be held, use me as a cudgel with which they could hurt other people.

  And I couldn’t live with that inevitability.

  So I hid that truth. I wasn’t open about that aspect of myself. Because it was safer, I reasoned. Because that way, I didn’t have to cause harm just by existing.

  Except, well… now I might have to.

  If I told Casey that I was trans… there was a measure of cruelty to it. I’d be dangling the impossible in front of them, and then viciously taking it away. And I didn’t want to hurt them by doing that.

  But if I didn’t tell Casey that I was trans, then what would happen if they found out later? If they learned that I’d torn away their veil of secrecy, their ability to keep this private or reveal it on their own schedule, and then refused to balance the scales? There was a hypocrisy to it, and…

  And I knew that if it were me in Casey’s shoes, and I only found out something like that later, I’d have felt hurt, angry. Betrayed. But that was me. That was how I’d react. There was no way to know whether Casey would respond the same way, but even if I were to assume one or the other, try to base the decision on that…

  God damn it! What the hell was I even supposed to do, here!? I — I didn’t know. I’d have to just go on instinct, take a leap of faith.

  And that terrified me.

  By the time I pulled myself out of my thoughts, I realized that I’d been just standing there in the kitchen for a couple minutes now. I’d left Casey alone, after saying I would be right back… God, what was wrong with me right now?

  I took a deep breath, shook the cobwebs free, flicked my ears, and stretched all five limbs. I was still a far cry from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it would have to do.

  Arms full of food, I headed back out to the living room, and placed everything down on the table before sitting on the other end of the couch from Casey. Their water glass was half-empty, and one of the bottles of tea had found its way into their hands, which made me glad I’d thought to bring two. And in the scant few seconds between me sitting down and getting my tail situated comfortably, they’d already snatched up the baby carrots and started chomping away on them, not quite mechanically, but definitely more for comfort than sustenance.

  Regardless, the ball was in my court. And there was only one way I could really begin.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them. “Reasons and explanations and justifications, none of them excuse the fact that I… I intruded on your privacy. Forced myself in on something I should only have ever seen with your explicit permission and consent. And I can’t undo that. All I can do is…” I sighed, my ears as limp and glum as my tone. “I’m sorry, hun.”

  “Mmph.” Casey raised a finger in the exact ‘please wait’ gesture I used while eating. They finished off the carrots in their mouth and took a swig of tea while I waited expectantly. “Why… why did you? Barge in, I mean?”

  “The visible emotional response to your parents was a lot more visceral than I’d anticipated when I gave you access to a room filled with weapons. And, well, when you combine that with barring the door, I got… I got scared that you might have hurt yourself, or been about to,” I admitted. “I’m glad to have been wrong, I really am, I just — I wish I hadn’t inadvertently taken something from you in the process.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Casey cut in the moment I stopped speaking. “F-for making you worry. I should’ve — I could’ve asked for your help making an excuse to get away from them, maybe I would’ve been—”

  “Casey, no,” I interrupted. “You have nothing to apologize for here — you don’t owe anyone any apologies, least of all me, okay?”

  “But—” I shot them a very slight glare, my ears folding back to prove the point. “O-okay,” they agreed, finally. “Um. Naomi?”

  “Hm?”

  “How, um.” Casey fidgeted on the couch, fingers repeatedly opening and closing the green tea bottle bouncing in their grip. “How did you know? With my parents, I mean.”

  Oh, dear. I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what was probably about to be a very difficult, uncomfortable discussion. Well… I guess these chickens were finally coming home to roost.

  Ironic.

  “You were practically a mirror image of me and my parents at my high school graduation,” I answered. “Our relationship was already, ahem, strained even before I became Moonshot. And…” I swallowed heavily, and licked my lips. Well, if they didn’t pick up on it, I at least had an excuse to say I’d given them a hint? “And for much the same reasons as your own, really.”

  Casey reared back in surprise ever so briefly, eyes flying wide. But then their eyes narrowed, and they huffed in clear disbelief, a bit of anger creeping into it.

  “Really? Much the same?” they scoffed, some real venom creeping into their tone. “Try having to hide who you are and what you need to be happy, just because someone would ‘disapprove’ of your ‘lifestyle choices’, and make your life hell for it! Try having expectations put on you that you can never fulfill, because they feel wrong, but nobody would believe you if you said that! It’s, it’s, it’s — it’s like, being stuck wearing nothing but clothes that don’t fit, even when everybody says they’re supposed to, and it’s your fault that something isn’t right somehow, or—”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Or like you’re trapped playing a role written for somebody else,” I interrupted, keeping my voice calm to contrast with the increasing ire that had been in Casey’s. “One where nobody will tell you the blocking or lines, because you’re just assumed to know them already, but any script that exists may as well be a foreign language. Or having people compare you to something that you know should be a compliment, should make you feel good, but instead just… sits in your mind like a rusty nail, bleeding into and taunting everything.” I looked down at my hands, brushed my fingers through my tail. “A fine son, a good brother, a strapping young man, and each one just pumps more of that poison into you, tainting and corrupting and corroding everything that you were once proud of by mere association.” I looked up and looked Casey in the eye. “Sound familiar?”

  “Wha…?” Casey’s eyes had gone wide in shock, jaw hanging loose as they visibly tried to process what I was saying, the implications therein. “That, but — what?”

  I briefly stood from the couch, went over to the bookshelf next to the TV stand, and pulled out the leftmost photo album on its bottom shelf. When I sat back down on the sofa and set the album on my lap, it was right beside Casey, as opposed to on the other side from them.

  “I have very few photos left from before becoming Moonshot,” I told them as I flipped through the album, starting at the back. “My parents disowned me while I was still in Japan, not even three months after getting powers, so any photos I may have had back at their home were… well, I wasn’t going to be able to get them. I only have one family photo predating it, which I kept for one reason.”

  I pointed to a photograph of myself and my cousin Satsuki, both of us kneeling before a simple shrine within their home, which housed the picture of a teenage boy.

  “This shrine is for my cousin, Tatsumi. He died when I was just sixteen, and I… well, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the last family photo taken of us Moriyama and Ziegler kids with him in it.”

  Casey didn’t say anything, and just eyed the photos as they flipped by: Satsuki, Kimiko, Keiko, and me at their high school graduation; Satsuki helping tie the obi on my first kimono, fitted with a tail hole and everything; Kimiko and Keiko boggling at all the fur that the bristle brushes in their hands had pulled from mine and Gorou’s winter coats; Satsuki and me asleep under the kotatsu, using Gorou’s tails as pillows. The memories went on and on, until I stopped at the earliest photo of me as a Moonshot — hugging Ambrose for dear life, tears threatening to spill out as I held that first pastel pink hoodie he’d gifted me in an iron grip. Whichever embassy staffer had kept a Polaroid on hand deserved a raise… but I digress.

  With one last swallow, and a fair bit of trepidation, I flipped the page.

  “I was fifteen when this photo was taken,” I said, then slid the photo album from my lap to Casey’s. They took it without a word and began scouring the page… then frowned.

  “That can’t be right,” they murmured, eyes glancing to and fro. “Is this photo edited?”

  “Digital cameras only barely hit widespread consumer use in the year 2000,” I answered, pointing to the date in the corner. “This was from a film camera in 1999. The only editing it saw was getting developed and printed in a darkroom.”

  “But, then…” Casey pointed at the Japanese teen. “That’s gotta be Tatsumi.” He pointed at the eldest, tallest person next. “That’s your brother, the one who’s married to the SJA.” I nodded, and Casey pointed at the fourteen-year-old, then the nine-year-old. “She’s too Japanese, and she looks more Asian than you.”

  “My cousin Satsuki and sister Miriam, though we all called her Mira.”

  “But who’s this, then?” Casey pointed to the remaining unnamed person in the photograph: a fifteen-year-old boy, brown hair in a ragged cut, green eyes looking almost hazel in the shadow his poor posture cast. His clothes were loose and baggy, in contrast to the well-fitting outfits of his brother and sister, and unlike the other four present, his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Your other brother? Were you the one who took this photo?”

  “No,” I shook my head, tapping the photo. “My father took this photo.”

  That seemed to be the last piece of information Casey needed to put the pieces together. They flipped the page with wide, wild eyes, looked at the photo of Satsuki and me, then flipped back to the Moriyama-Ziegler photo.

  “But…” Casey glanced at the photo, then over at me. “That’s — that’s you?” Their voice was barely more than a whisper, but I nodded all the same. “But you can’t — your powers aren’t… but then, how?”

  I could hear the frisson of hope in their voice. It was there, beneath the incredulity and curiosity, an undercurrent of something between desperation and desire. This was the part I was most afraid of — I’d dangled the impossible in front of Casey, and now, I had no choice but to snatch it away.

  “… my brother Eli thinks I’m dead,” I began with what probably seemed to be a non sequitur. “And if you really stretch the definitions involved, he’s not entirely wrong. Getting my powers was… volatile. Casey, this isn’t — getting powers didn’t change my body to look like this. I don’t have my original body anymore.” I raised a hand, and gently laid it over Casey’s to point at the photo of my false self. “That body, Joshua Ziegler’s body? It’s gone. Nothing but ash in a Japanese mountain forest.”

  Casey brushed my hand off and flipped through the photo album again. I didn’t protest, even though there were definitely some embarrassing photos in there, like the time Satsuki accidentally broke a brush’s head off in my tail fur and left it there. And that one definitely wasn’t missed, given the barely suppressed snort when Casey flipped onto that photo.

  “Still doesn’t explain it,” Casey murmured.

  They turned the page again, landing on the largest photo in the album — a picture taken at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, in which I’d been stuffed into a miko outfit and posed alongside Gorou so that we were staring up the mountain with looks of carefully-crafted forlorn longing. That was the photo op for my big nationwide reveal to put all the rumors coming out of Tokyo to rest. They made sure it came paired alongside a nationally-televised interview from Gorou confirming that yes he was in fact a kitsune of legend, yes this gaijin girl was in fact of Japanese descent, yes she was also a kitsune now, so on and so forth. It was a major revelation, yes, but it was also just another tactic in the negotiations between the US and Japan; that reveal both made me known to Japan, and got almost the entire damn country behind me, which forced the US’s negotiators to put away most of their sticks and try to remember how to speak softly.

  And even all these years later, even knowing how it was just a political stunt… I still remembered how pretty I felt while posing for those photos. Being a stunt didn’t make it any less real.

  Now, Casey looked at the photo, running their fingers over it… and landing on Gorou.

  “I don’t… your powers don’t explain it,” they murmured again. “A new body? You can’t do that, or you could just, give yourself a body without the fox parts, right? So how?”

  Ah. That’s what was going on — Casey had a puzzle with missing pieces, and even though it wasn’t important, they still wanted to fill in the blanks.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I deflected, gently taking the photo album from Casey’s hands and flipping it closed before I retreated back to the other side of the couch.

  “Naomi, you’re a teleporting foxgirl who lives with an old wise talking fox, and who thinks a magic blowtorch is the best way to reheat her coffee.” They crossed their arms and scowled, brows furrowing in growing annoyance. “Try me.”

  “... fine,” I sighed. Well, if they insisted… “I mentioned that we A1 Moonshot need to be ‘compatible’ with the sources of our powers, if you recall?” Casey nodded. “The nature of my compatibility with Gorou is, well… genetic.”

  “... huh?” Casey blinked. “But, but he’s a fox.”

  “A magic fox,” I retorted, “whose mommy is a goddess who loves and misses her son very much, so much so that she bent the rules to lend him and her greatest-grandkid a hand.”

  Casey didn’t respond immediately. Seconds ticked by, until they finally just… chuckled. It was a bit of an odd, rueful huff, but a chuckle nonetheless.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know,” I grimaced, hugging the photo album to my chest. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, utterly unbelievable, and yet I’m living it! Which is just—ow!”

  I briefly got up to reposition myself, flopped back down onto the sofa, but clearly landed funny because something hurt when I landed, and I leapt right back up with a pained yelp. I took one hand off the photo album to rub at the base of my tail for a moment, then pulled the limb around to my front and carefully, delicately, sat back down on the couch without causing any additional spinal distress.

  “Uh, you okay?” Casey asked around their slight chuckles at my misfortune.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, just, landed funny,” I grimaced.

  Unless it was another instance of that weird recurring back pain I’d been having for the past few weeks, but that was just… not likely. Too much of a coincidence. Probably just some lingering muscle aches from having had to drive, or a recurring sign of getting old, galling as that latter one was to consider.

  “Anyways, I, um.” I paused briefly, trying to figure out how best to word this. “Obviously, things in the office will only change if you want them to. If you choose to be more, ah, open, any ‘issue’ someone might have would get brought to me as your direct supervisor, at which point I can tell them to—”

  “Were you ever gonna say something?”

  “I—” Whatever I was about to say died on my lips as Casey’s interjection finally filtered down from twitching ears and into my brain. “I’m sorry?”

  “About any of that,” they said, pointing at the photo album in my arms. “Being trans. If… if this hadn’t happened, if I’d just — gotten to come out the normal way. Would you ever have told me?”

  I didn’t respond immediately, because my knee-jerk reaction was to just answer that obviously I would have, but… but that wouldn’t have been true. And I didn’t want to lie, here. So I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and admitted it.

  “I don’t know,” I told them honestly, and though I was throwing caution to the wind here, I found it… hard, to meet Casey’s eyes. “I want to think that yes, I would, but at the same time? I’ve been doing everything I can to not say anything about it for eighteen years now.”

  “How many know?” Casey asked, tone held so strongly neutral that I couldn’t even begin to guess what they were thinking from it. “Told, specifically?”

  “You’re the fifth.” I held up a hand, and started counting them off. “My two best friends. The one truly close friend I made in law school, before she… passed, when Dirksen happened. A fourth person I don’t have permission to tell you about. And now you.”

  “That’s it? Five people, in eighteen years?” I nodded. “Why?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair to any of you. Because so many trans people are already stuck trying to meet these stupid, unrealistic transition goals, pressured and forced into going for something that just isn’t possible, whether due to time or genetics or any number of things. And if that’s how it is now, I don’t even want to imagine how much worse it would be if it became known that I’m… well, the exception to end all exceptions, there.”

  “... I’d rather have known,” Casey said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s impossible, I’d rather have known. Hell, I think… I’d bet most of us would.”

  “You don’t know that,” I protested, but it was weak even to my ears.

  “Maybe not, but I at least would’ve asked!” they snapped back. “Did you? Did you ever ask people in the community, or did you just assume?”

  “I — I never thought I was allowed to,” I forced out. “Every time I tried to think about what it’d be like for the old me to know someone like the new me existed? It just… always seemed like mockery, almost. Like my existence would be a cruel joke.”

  “Really? Really?” Casey asked, a sort of sarcastic disbelief in their tone. “You think you’re unique in that? What about all the people who knew early enough to get puberty blockers? Who got to have the right puberty, who don’t have to try to pass because of it? Do you think they’re being cruel, for getting to have what most of us won’t? For skipping some of the hardest parts of it all?”

  “What?” But… that wasn’t at all the same, not even close! “No, obviously, but that’s not—”

  “Then if they aren’t, why would you be?” Casey challenged. “How are their circumstances any different than—”

  “Because I cheated, Casey!” I yelled, throwing down the photo album as I felt my gorge grow hot with shame. “Because all of you did the work, and I didn’t, alright!? I… I didn’t have to go through years of work, didn’t have to beat and mold and cut and bleed to get the body I wanted! I just — I got to leapfrog straight from ‘boy’ to ‘girl’, get to be perfectly passing by even the most ridiculous, hateful, bigoted, or absurd metrics, and I didn’t… I…”

  I wasn’t sure when I’d gotten to my feet. I looked down at Casey, eyes hot, breathing heavy, and they just… sat there, eyes full of empathy and pity that I could do nothing but flop back down onto the couch, and hug my tail close.

  “I don’t get to claim that struggle,” I bit out, blinking back tears. “I didn’t live it. Not like you are.”

  I closed my eyes and buried my face in my fur, not wanting to even try and meet Casey’s eyes. I just… I couldn’t. I didn’t want to see the judgment in their gaze when what I said hit home, when they realized that I was only barely not an imposter fo—

  “Bweh—!?”

  A pair of arms surrounded me, and pulled me into an embrace. It startled me so bad that I basically whipped myself in the face with my own tail, and I also hesitate to call the sound I let out human.

  “You idiot,” Casey murmured.

  “What’re you—”

  “Fine, you skipped the hard work. That’s like coming to college with AP credits. You still had to learn how to act like a girl, didn’t you? How to be one?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Then congratulations, you’re as trans as the rest of us.” Casey let go of me and flounced back onto the couch, sitting cross-legged and almost in my face. “You,” they pointed a finger at me, “need to actually talk to your clients instead of making a decision on their behalf, right?” I nodded. “It’s the same thing here! No more assuming your silence is in the trans community’s best interest without talking to somebody, okay?”

  “Casey—”

  “Okay!?”

  “Okay, okay!” I yelped, backing myself into the corner of the couch when Casey suddenly loomed further in.

  “Good!” With that, Casey turned away from me, grabbed the edamame, and plunked back down next to me on the couch to snack on them, which left me blinking at the sheer whiplash of it all.

  “... you were having a panic attack earlier,” I murmured, staring at Casey. “How are you so calm already?”

  Without missing a beat, Casey set the bowl down on their lap, then grabbed my tail out of my own hands and shook it a little. Which, by the way, was a delightfully weird sensation.

  “Therapy fox.”

  Then Casey retreated to the other side of the sofa, and took the edamame with them.

  “... you’re right,” I murmured, sitting back up straight on the sofa. “I shouldn’t have just assumed.”

  “Mmph,” they mumbled around a mouthful of edamame, which they swallowed before saying anything more. “So what’re you gonna do now?”

  “As far as the bigger picture? Not a damn clue,” I muttered. “In the short-term? That’s up to you. Just… I’d understand if you wanted to work under someone else, after today. Trust once lost and all.” I sighed, my ears falling low. I didn’t want that to be the case, but I still had to put the offer forward.

  “... I’ve got the Barbri course tomorrow,” Casey said. “Could you… give me the weekend? To think about it?”

  I nodded. Casey clearly took that as some kind of cue, because they set aside the bowl of edamame and stood up from the couch, heading towards the door.

  “Casey?” I called, getting their attention as they put on their shoes. “I’m sorry about all this. Wish that it hadn’t been so…” I paused, thinking of the right word. “Indelicate.”

  “... yeah,” they murmured. “Me too.”

  Then they were gone, and I was left there alone, hoping I hadn’t just destroyed the best mentor/mentee relationship I’d ever had.