Title: Stealth (A03)
Oneshot
Rating: T
Pairing: None
Tags: Trans Male Character, Character Piece, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Disordered Eating, Don’t Do What He Does, Really Don’t
Summary: In which Joey has never been anything but himself.
Serenity’s first word was ‘bwuvver’.
Joey’s fairly certain that’s when his mom started to hate him.
She insisted she didn’t of course, but she wouldn’t even look at him for days afterwards.
He never remembers Serenity calling him anything other than ‘big brother’, so he reckons he must have said it to her a lot. He distantly remembers whispering into her crib about how her brother was going to protect her, look after her, keep her safe. Even as she got older, no matter how often his mom tried to get her to say ‘sister’, she wouldn’t. Serenity was always his best friend.
Joey tried to keep those promises to her. He’d shoo away the dogs which startled her and made her cry; fix her knees if she fell over; eat the probably poisonous cabbage. But then the danger started feeling like real danger, not pretend. He can’t remember when the arguments turned to fights, but he remembers lying with Serenity, cuddled under the blanket in his bed. He’d tell her they were camping, playing make believe with her until she stopped looking scared and started giggling at his silly campfire songs in their little pink tent.
His parents could fight over anything, the chores, the drinking, the money. Him. He knows she blames his father maybe even more than him for how he turned out.
He knows it’s how he is that’s partly to blame for why he gets left behind. He looks ‘too much like his father’. Really, it’s because he’s a boy, and that’s close enough.
She takes Serenity and it’s like his heart being ripped from his body. He screams and pleads and cries until his father silences him. ‘They’re not coming back’. ‘It’s just the two of us now’. ‘I’m going out’. The same words he’ll hear in different ways for the next ten years, until he can tell exactly how much his father has drank just by the tone.
The creature in his belly - confused and angry - writhes when he thinks about it.
He’s spent his whole life telling her he’s a boy. Why did she have to start believing him now?
There’s a strange place where very supportive parents and very negligent parents meet. His father always wanted a son anyway and always treated him like a boy. He’s not supportive - he just doesn’t give a shit. The whole subject’s never been mentioned since the divorce. Joey’s fairly certain his father’s forgotten he isn’t cis.
Not even the local doctors know he isn’t cis. He’s never needed tests for anything. When they moved, his father registered him as a boy and said he didn’t have a copy of his birth-certificate, which was true. He was young, no medical history to speak of, so rather than chasing them up for the paperwork, they just accepted it. Registering at the school worked the same. Because both places believed it, anything else he ever needed came easy.
Even with puberty, he just automatically kind of adjusts to whatever he needs to do and somehow it all works out. Like everything else in his life, he somehow manages to be as unlucky as a broken mirror, while having the luck of the devil himself when he needs it.
Living with his father means he doesn’t eat anywhere near enough - his luck showing when he inherits his Dad’s height despite that. He sees a thing on TV about a girl who stopped eating. Most of it is just horrible stuff for viewing figures, but there is one useful bit. He uses the lack of food in the house as a way to not eat, and he’s always been active anyway: a runner, a climber, a puncher, even if most people wouldn’t call it proper exercise. It means puberty sees him growing toned and strong, but without the fat. And his plan seems to work - a passable chest even shirtless and none of the monthly side effects that would come from actually adequate nutrition. He’s fairly certain it’s going to fuck him up in the long term, but until he can see a doctor about it, it’s not going to change. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t love to eat though, and he gorges himself when he does. But he tries to balance it out later.
Ever since he was a kid, he’s tried deepening his voice to fit in and now it’s something he doesn’t even have to work at. Again, something that’ll probably fuck him up in the future and have him talking through one of those computers when his vocal cords are shot, but he’s not in the future, he’s in the present, and it works.
Everything else flows along with surprisingly little effort. By the time he enters high school, it’s been a long while since he’d considered himself as ‘not belonging’, and that confidence (combined with other people seeing only what they expected to see) works well enough that he never gets clocked.
He never thinks twice about pissing in a stall and no-one ever mentions it. It isn’t like he takes his underwear off when changing for gym; showers aren’t mandatory and he isn’t the only one who doesn’t; and a well-secured sock combined with the threat of people thinking you’re gay if you look at another guy’s junk, prove enough to head those issues off too.
Eventually he uses his height to his advantage and sneaks into one of those seedy sex shops and buys four ridiculous looking joke rubber dicks. He leaves three of them hidden around school, which makes his classmates collapse with laughter when old Mrs Okahara opens her desk drawer mid-test and screams blue murder.
Very very occasionally, his chest does fuck him up a little bit.
Nobody but him can tell, but some days it suddenly seems so obvious to him. It fills him with enough directionless anger to make him want to pick a fight with someone - kick the shit out of them, or them him, it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes he uses bandages and tape if he can’t face going out otherwise, but it only ends up making him feel more of a freak.
On his sixteenth birthday Tristan brings round a couple of presents (too nicely wrapped - clearly his mom’s doing), and one unwrapped one - a brown padded envelope. He chucks it on Joey’s bed and says it’s for later and doesn’t count.
The other two are second-hand video games that they stay up late playing, splitting a pizza and messing around rather than going out (it’s been one of those days). They finish the co-op section at 3am on monster difficulty and Tristan declares them bros for life. Even if it’s stupid and just the two of them, it’s definitely one of his best birthdays.
He forgets the other package until Tristan leaves and he finally heads to bed. He opens it up figuring it’s some kind of porn.
It isn’t. It’s a kind of tight white elastic vest. It almost kills him getting it on, but he manages and he checks himself out in the mirror.
He just looks like a guy in a vest. He looks like him.
He didn’t realise Tristan even knew.
Joey isn’t always able to control that urge to kick the shit out of someone though.
That’s where Yugi comes in.
Yugi is an easy target. Everybody knows that. You almost can’t help it. Quiet and insular; squeaky, alone and small. How no-one thinks Yugi is secretly a girl is beyond him - a fact Joey takes care to remind him of often.
Yugi is everything he feared he would end up being. Even when it becomes obvious he isn’t going to (brash and tall and Tristan at his side), messing with and beating up Yugi feels like controlling that possibility and keeping it at bay.
Then ‘the incident’ occurs.
Turns out Yugi thought he’d been trying to get him to ‘man up’, to be brave and stick up for himself. Twisted himself up in circular logic that they were his friends really, and just trying to help. When in reality he’d just wanted to beat the shit out of himself and Yugi seemed close enough to count.
Even the desperate rationalisation makes Yugi feel too damn familiar - Joey’s no stranger to trying to pretend that people give a damn about you, when really they couldn’t care less. It burns at him, and burns and burns until he has to find some way to extinguish it.
He hasn’t swam since he was about seven. Just him, his dad, Serenity and the sea. Wearing a pair of goofy dinosaur trunks that his mom didn’t know about and just barely getting out of his depth.
When he got older, he stopped swimming and claims he never learned how. He’s never wanted anyone to see him like that - only seeing what he lacks, not seeing him anymore.
He has never seen Yugi, not once.
Diving into the pool in the dark, he begins to blindly search for the missing piece of the puzzle. It’s the start of correcting one of many mistakes tonight.
