i.
You’re four years old and your mother just bathed you naked with your same-age male cousin. Afterwards, she asks you as she dries you whether you see now why you’re not a boy. You shrug and tell her confidently, “Mine’s still growing.”
ii.
You’re nine years old and you’ve just hit your cousin in the face so hard that his nose started bleeding. He deserved it, he took the toy truck away from you because girls don’t play with trucks. First you told him that you’re not a girl, then you told him that girls can play with trucks and when he wouldn’t give it back, you hit him with the doll that he’d expected you to play with instead. Your parents make you apologize but you mutter the insincere words with clenched fists.
iii.
You’re fourteen years old and you’ve just met the man you’re going to marry. He’s older than you by four years and something about the way he looks at you makes you feel hot with an anger that demands outlet. You’ve learnt it’s not appropriate to hit people so you scoop sugar into your tea and imagine gouging out his eyes.
iv.
You’re sixteen years old and having tea with an Elder. Your eagerness to learn has your parents discussing the possibility that you could attend the School of Transcendentalism. You don’t want to. Meditation bores you. What’s the point of sitting around thinking about your soul? Noxians don’t stop to discuss philosophy. They just slaughter. If Ionia’s to have any chance to defend itself, it needs weapons, not words. You tell the Elder that and he looks at your parents.
“Perhaps,” he says dryly, “She would fare better at Piltover’s Academy of Science.”
v.
You’re eighteen and you’ve told all your professors to call you Dev. You’ve practiced pitching your voice low ever since you arrived and found out about the wonders of binders, found out that there are options here that Ionia doesn’t offer because what does the body matter compared to the soul inside? In Piltover, you can swagger like a guy, you can spread out and take up space the way that men do. There were hijras back in Ionia but they had to leave their families and live apart from society. You don’t want that. You want to change society and you can’t do that as an outcast.
You hate your family but you need their power. You’ll be their daughter when you have to but in Piltover, you can be yourself.
vi.
You’re twenty and no longer as sure of yourself. Sometimes you want to be a girl, even when you aren’t dealing with your parents. Sometimes you like frills, sometimes you like camo but mostly you like arguing with people. The world changes when people change how they think and you need to get all the practice you can in changing people’s minds before you go back to Ionia. You only have one more year in Piltover and then it’s home for the wedding.
If they make you marry him, you will poison the wedding cake, you promise yourself.
vii.
You’re twenty-two and convinced that Zaun is even better than Piltover. You’ve heard the rumors about the mad scientist Viktor who changes people and sometimes, you think about getting help from him. Mostly you think about the weapons everyone wields, how there’s a time traveling teenager and how all you want is something to even out the odds. Something even the poor villagers can wield, something not too hard to manufacture, something that means they won’t have to rely on the Champions next time the Noxians come.
You are unmarried, you work so steadily on your projects that your nails are dyed black with grease, you are living alone in Zaun and you are happy.
You know this won’t last.