Headquarter blog for an original work, rooted in French culture, with a huge character focus: explanations, logs, etc. OC-friendly, ask-friendly. (mobile icon by Eriseas)
Summary: Séverine lost her shit when she thought she had lost her best friend and her girlfriend in a single blow.
Ships: Séverine/Lucie/Juliette (established Séverine/Juliette, past Juliette/Lucie, implied past Lucie/Benoît and Séverine/Benoît)
Notes: AUC where Juliette worked at L’Esplanade instead La Morinie (and Ribot), and started dating Séverine, who isn’t dating Benoît.
AO3 version available here.
She had almost lost her friend and girlfriend in the most stupid argument she had ever gotten herself into.
It had all started on a giant misunderstanding on her part. She had spotted Lucie, whom she thought was her best colleague and friend, with her girlfriend, Juliette, talking about… less than orthodox matters. At first, when she began overhearing them in an attempt to either join the conversation or discover something dirty, their tone was playful and humorous, neither of them taking the conversation seriously.
It all seemed like friendly banter when she realized they were speaking about past acts and deeds. That was the point where Séverine utterly lost her shit and barged into the conversation, furious, lost and heartbroken for the first real time of her life. She had known Lucie for a few years now, having met her in a previous training session and then becoming her colleague, but she did so after Juliette and she had started dating. What the hell were they talking about?! Was Lucie cheating on her since the beginning?!
Wait, that had come out the wrong way. Lucie and she weren’t dating… albeit the option seemed pretty damn neat.
“Can I know what the fuck that bullshit’s all about?!” was all she could scream without wanting to kick something in the nuts with her heels.
“Uh ho, seems like we got eavesdropped,” Juliette deadpanned back, turning her head towards her own girlfriend.
“W-wait, Sév, I can explain!!” Lucie instead slightly panicked, before getting herself back together. “It’s all a giant misunderstanding, I promise.”
“My ass it is!!”
Before she knew it, Séverine was pinned to the ground by Juliette’s hands pressing on her shoulders, forcing her to stay where she was and not kick someone in the goddam stomach. That was the most radical way to get her to shut up and listen to what she’d be told, so she indeed shut the fuck up and got ready to bark back at the first occasion. Her blood was already boiling inside her veins, so it’d better be clear or be a real good reason to discuss past smut together.
“We were talking about our previous relationship. Juliette and I used to be friends in middle school, and we met again in college when we started dating… I was her tutoress in middle school, if I’m not wrong,” Lucie started explaining in this calm tone of hers that never betrayed her emotions, ever.
“Yep, that’s exactly how it went”, Juliette added, her hands still firmly on Séverine’s shoulders.
“So, that was before or after you dated Benoît?”
“That was before. We dated in high school, and then it kinda fell apart, as you’ve gotten to know, and it was before you dated him too.”
“Ah, yeah, thanks for clarifying that. And that means…”
“We were talking about what we used to do in bed, yeah”, Juliette replied with an ounce of amusement at her girlfriend’s bewilderment.
“…oh.”
She felt lost in the stream of things and, as such, felt very fucking dumb. Seemed like she wasn’t tired of embarrassing herself for stupid reasons.
“However…” Lucie’s voice trailed off in uncertainty and her turquoise eyes looked away, light source changing.
“However what?”
God, she kept getting lost in what the hell this was all supposed to be about.
“We may have some explaining to do, you see, Séverine.”
“And that means?”
Juliette’s hands let her free, finally, and she walked up next to Lucie’s side, positioning herself with a solemnity rarely seen around here. There was something serious going on, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but the vibe this was giving out was awful and she hated it very much, thank you.
“Hang with us for a second, Sév,” she then told her, as if she needed to be reminded not to be a savage bitch.
“What we want to tell you is that,” Lucie gulped in a rare glimpse of uncertainty, “we have an issue, and that we seem to both love each other and you at the same time.”
“Come again?!”
Okay, that didn’t make sense, at first. How could you be crushing on two persons at the same time? Was that a lame excuse for Juliette to cheat on her? C’mon, that didn’t make sense… until it did. It… really kind of did, the more she thought about it. It made a lot more sense than she had first thought, even, if it didn’t make it suck any less. It was even the opposite.
“Sooooo… We’ve got ourselves in a tricky love triangle, right?”
“Right,” Lucie’s voice replied with more assurance.
“And your solution to that issue is?”
“Polyamory,” Juliette responded with no hesitation, no flinch, her brown eyes starting right inside her official girlfriend’s.
“Oh. Yeah, makes sense, I guess.”
Lucie stepped forward, giving Séverine a steady hand. Not even an ounce of trembling. This woman truly was a strong and stoic one, wasn’t she.
“The only thing missing is your agreement,” Juliette commented as she looked at the two other women in the room.
“Well, huh, lemme think this through before I decide to do anything stupid…”
Séverine stared at the hand in front of her, mind flooding with a thousand ideas by the minute. While it was true she loved Juliette, she really did, she couldn’t see herself without her at her side and without being by her side, she had remaining, lingering feelings for Lucie which were oddly and intensely similar, as if she, indeed, was crushing on two persons at once. She wanted to kiss Juliette, but she also wanted to wrap her arms around Lucie and peck her, and sleeping with the two of them was an idea too good to pass up. Maybe this could, indeed, be the best solution and the better way out of their stupid, farfetched love triangle.
“Guess that could work,” she finally answered as she picked the hand.
“Glad to have you on board for this epic twist in our relationship, then,” Juliette concluded.
In a sense, Séverine felt strangely sound and afloat when her fingers intertwined with Lucie’s and Juliette’s, and everything became natural once again. She, really, could get used to getting twice as much attention.
Summary: But what is her favourite colour?
The question keeps ringing in her mind as she stares at a bunch of roses in some flower shop she has literally never walked in before. Hell, she doesn’t know anything about flowers and especially not flower language, but she knows she loves to wear pinks, purples and reds. That’s it. Her lipstick’s always red or dark pink, her nails in these hues, her clothes in these tones.
Ships: Clémence/Amandine
Notes: N/A
AO3 version available here.
But what is her favourite colour?
The question keeps ringing in her mind as she stares at a bunch of roses in some flower shop she has literally never walked in before. Hell, she doesn’t know anything about flowers and especially not flower language, but she knows she loves to wear pinks, purples and reds. That’s it. Her lipstick’s always red or dark pink, her nails in these hues, her clothes in these tones. And she loves flowers.
But is giving her pink roses too cliché of a thing to do for a first real date as lovers and not just friends-with-growing-romantic-feelings?
So, what is her favourite colour?
Eventually, starting to see the time running out, Clémence buys a bunch of pink roses and gets out of the flower shop before the cashier can say anything more than “thank you for your purchase, have a nice day”. Clémence has no time to lose, she doesn’t want to be late at her first real date in what feels like ages. Granted, she hasn’t dated anyone since Corinne from high school, but that was before the latter met Rémy, and that was before medical school stole her time away in one big swoop. Her heart is beating too fast for her to make her wait for her in front of the fountain they decided to meet to.
The bouquet in her hands smells terribly good. Come to think of it, her date always fills the air with a pleasing floral scent. It reminds her of her lover she’s so excited to see, reminds her of how happy she was when she accepted her date offer, how happy she is to finally be her girlfriend and how much she looks forward to introducing her to her family. The mere thought of putting a rose in her short strawberry blond hair, complimenting her sparkly brown eyes and pink glasses… It all seems too perfect to be true, and yet she is sure it’ll be fine. Everything will be fine with her, she knows this, so she jogs with her eyes focused on the bouquet in her hands.
When she arrives at the fountain, whose water is still pouring into its basin, Clémence notices with unhidden surprise that her date is already here, and that despite not supposed to be here for the next fifteen minutes to come. Huh, weird. Well, at least, she isn’t late, and the date in question is as beautiful as ever, clad in a pink dress and subtle reddish-brown highlights. It may not be considered fashionable by some people, but as someone who doesn’t care about fashion, Clémence loves it and thinks it fits her date, so it all that matters.
As soon as she hears her footsteps, the date in question turns around, brown eyes as luminous as ever, hands behind her back and a smile plastered on her face. The amethyst earrings she wears match perfectly with her luminous aura, everything in her shimmers under the gentle and warm sun of June, light reflecting in her fair hair curling at the end, bangs almost covering her eyebrows.
“Here you are, Clém!” she spins around and runs to her before throwing herself at her in a warm, close hug.
Clémence manages to keep her balance, put the bouquet away on the fountain’s border and enlace her girlfriend in her arms, her tan muscled arms allowing her to almost throw her in the air and catch her back. Their height difference – about two heads – makes her look even more adorable in her eyes, and that’s all that matters. They kiss before any of them could react they’ve done, it’s become an automatism surprisingly quickly, but is it a flaw or a default? Of course not.
She puts her girlfriend back on the ground and picks her bouquet again. Luckily for her, the latter doesn’t seem to have noticed the flowers yet, allowing her to hide them behind her back again.
“How come you’re this early, Am?” she asks, genuinely curious but relieved she won’t have to wait for her date to arrive.
“Ah, uh…” She looks away, blushing. “I was just too impatient to wait at my place any longer… So I thought I’d arrive in advance. I’m usually late too, so… I really wanted to arrive on time, for once!”
“Mission accomplished,” Clémence comments by leaving a peck on her forehead. “Oh, by the way,” her turn to turn away, “I’ve got something for you…”
“You do?!”
The excitement in Amandine’s voice makes her hope very, very strongly that she hasn’t gotten the wrong colour back in the flower shop. It’d be a real damn shame if it turned out her actual favourite colour was purple, or red, or anything else. The only real way to fluster Clémence is when girls are involved; and Amandine really is no exception. She gets her sporty heart beating in a single glance and her skin to redden in a smile. That’s an incredibly superpower to have over someone…
“Here you go,” Clémence tells her as she hands her the bouquet. “Got this for you. I don’t know anything about flower language, but the cashier guessed I was buying for a date, so that’s good, right?”
Amandine’s eyes shimmer even more as soon as she sees the flowers, which she picks immediately and pecks her girlfriend on the cheek right afterwards.
“Of course it’s good sweetie!! These are beautiful, thank you so much!! You even remembered pink was my favourite colour!”
Another kiss on the cheek, another urge to blush like a middle schooler discovering a pretty girl for the first time.
“Pink roses symbolize grace too… It’s an honour to be considered gracious by your heart, sweetie.”
“Glad to know that’s what these flowers mean, then, because it’s totally what I think.”
“Let me return the complement then!”
And it’s at this moment that Clémence must have become as pink as her girlfriend’s favourite colour.
Summary: They were on opposite sides of the Caribbean Sea.
Ships: Magdalena/Roxanne
Notes: Pirate AUC.
AO3 version available here.
Magdalena Kubrisky was no ordinary ship captain on this dire, dire Caribbean Sea. In rough times, she was manlier than her men, facing tempests and filibusters in the name of the King, a letter of trust in her personal belongings and one upmost mission to accomplish: stop the filthy pirates from stealing the resources from the Sugar Isles rightfully belonging to the Kingdom of France.
Indeed, she was the most threatening corsair in the entire sea, feared by pirates and foreign corsairs alike, and she wasn’t about to let her reputation get the best of her.
She had sworn under the oath never to be in a relationship, public or private, with any of the men on-board, per decency laws she intended on following to the end. However, not being able to share anything beyond professional relationships or friendships didn’t bother her in the slightest: she was only attracted to the sensitivity and beauty of women, their feminine charms and their girlish strike. She could only dream of finding other women sailing seas in such dangerous conditions, obviously, but a girl could dream and pray to one day find a lawless love the lack of authority around here could give her.
When staying in taverns or inns, Magdalena made sure to check out girls and see if any of them noticed the violet embroidered onto her hat, but none had ever winked at her. Her right-hand had even grown a habit of roughly, but playfully, making fun of her for this eternal solitude and lack of success with women of her kind, of her side. She wouldn’t have minded secretly embracing a civilian in the dark of the night, in the back of her husband and the law, maybe bring her on board would she be unhappy with the man.
“Vice-captain Drapé,” she’d pretend calling him out, “I wouldn’t make fun of me if I was ye, ye don’t have much success with other men as well.”
“Touché,” he’d reply brushing the green rose on his coat.
But one day, someone had winked back at her. It was on a night of storms, where her crew had been obligated to stay on land because of the waters causing their ship to encounter the rocks dramatically, putting an end to their marine adventures. They were staying in an inn, their letter of trust being enough to convince the owners to let them sleep the night there in exchange of very little money and staying calm. Most of her crewmen were already trying to “court” women around the inn, and she enjoyed herself watching them either fail or succeed with various degrees of courtoisie, until her eyes came across someone who winked at her.
A someone who had a violet embroidered on her vest.
Immediately interested, Magdalena rose to her feet and walked up to the much smaller woman who had picked her interest. She seemed to be a feisty little one: short on her feet, light brown hair, greenish hazel eyes, a scar on her left cheek, and a bandana hiding the upper half of her scalp. Her appearance alone was enticing, albeit Magdalena had her suspicions up: her new target of interest was dressed like a pirate, and as opposed to her crew, didn’t wear anything on her that could indicate she was a corsair like she was, and especially not for the same crown as hers. As it stood, they were opposites, and most likely enemies. Ha, tragic.
“So, ya the famed captain of the Saphir, ain’t cha?” the stranger asked her, her voice not letting any doubt as to her knowledge of who the other was.
“And I get that ye’re some pirate stealin’ away from my kin’dom’s ships.”
“Most indeed. So what? Ya gonna kill me now, Captain?”
This provocative tone almost made her bit her lip. She had always liked a challenge, and this woman seemed more than happy to provide.
“It’d be too easy. And, most importantly…”
But she could play too. She could let her words trail down the page and make herself waited.
“…didn’t I strike yer eye, milady?”
They were both sober, but a reddish tint appeared on the pirate’s face.
“Guess that happened. Also seems like it’s on both sides.”
Magdalena gave her a hand. It’d be too bad to kill someone like this, a rough pearl found in a shady tavern in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.
“It’d be my pleasure to get knowing ye, milady,” she accompanied the gesture with flirt-filled words.
To her upmost surprise, as her left hand was about to grab her sabre, the other woman took it and put a kiss on it.
“It’d be my pleasure too. What about we take this outside? Don’t want smelly men around me and my love for the night, y’know?”
“Ye most welcome.”
And outside they went, staring at the moon up in the night sky, surrounded by thousands and thousands of small white dots. The air was warm, obviously, but still more comfortable than around noon and embracing their skins. Still holding hands, as if not to lose each other and show they weren’t about to backstab the other once she’d have her back turned, they exchanged words again.
“What’s yer name, milady?” She asked with the most genuine curiosity. She, admittedly, didn’t seem them walk away from each other so soon.
“Roxanne.”
A short silence followed.
“What about yours?”
“Magdalena.”
“That’s a pretty name. I like it.”
“I like yers too.”
The silence settling between them was comfortable, soothing in a way. A rare moment of calm in the storm, as it had stopped raining outside, giving a false sense of tranquillity to this island whose rain had become an advantage for its cultures.
“Roxanne, what ‘bout we do a secret alliance?”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Ye don’t attack my ship, and I don’t attack yers. And we continue to see each other. I like yer face already.”
“I like the sound of that. Let’s do it, and seal it properly…”
The kiss they exchanged on that night was quick, but most delightful. Words weren’t needed to set a promise in stone.
Dandelion - Chapter 6: In the Field of Anemones and Peonies
Dandelion Directory
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Summary: I wish I had to words to truly thank Henri and Chris for everything, but I suppose they’d call me sappy for thanking them again.
Notes: Yes I love flower symbolism in my titles even if I forget to actually put flower symbolism inside the chapters themselves around 50% of the time.
This chapter was meant to be the end of the Lakanal Arc but I got carried away again, so instead you can have scenes I really wanted to talk about for a while.
AO3 version available here.
His second year of college starts on a much different note. Instead of a long yet tranquil year of learning methods and base knowledge to build solidly on top of, this year begins under the reign of rush and hurry, a short nine-month period leading to the most difficult entry exam in the country. It is but a race against the clock to see if someone, anyone will be able to enter Ulm on the following year.
Right when he thinks he is not as ambitious as people make him out to be, Florian realizes he is striving for this school, for its paid studies, for its idealistic environment for intellectuals like him. It feels like a need, a hunger that has just woken up because he has gotten more confident.
When he gets his dorm room assigned on the third floor rather than the second, hands filled with suitcases because of his trusty computer, he meets up with this year’s roommates putting their previous room’s decoration back on. As he realizes the reality of everything, noticing the number of beds going from four to three (their fourth roommate, supposedly an ECE student, never showed up), there is that dumb smile forming on his face.
“Oh Chris, look who’s back and grinning like a complete idiot,” Henri says, a smirk on his face as his eyes turns from the poster in his hands to the doorway.
“Welcome back, Flo!” Christian greets him with a less hidden excitement. “Glad to know we’re back together for this year too!”
As much as he wants to hug his closest friends in times where seeing Roxanne is close to impossible, Florian simply tries to brush his dumb smile away and shakes hands with both men, barely able to contain the intense relief pulsing through his nerves. It is a known territory. They are people he feels safe with. They are friends, they are close, and he can trust them. Everything will be fine, he repeats inside his thoughts as if trying to convince himself there was no way it could turn sour.
To say I was glad to share a room with Henri and Chris is an understatement. I was deadly afraid of being in other men’s rooms, especially if they were other second-years from Lakanal I didn’t know at all. There were some people I had grown to dislike too, if not despise, and finding myself in their rooms would have put me on a serious edge when I didn’t need it. I partially attribute my eventual success in life to being in this specific room with these specific persons.
I wish I had to words to truly thank Henri and Chris for everything, but I suppose they’d call me sappy for thanking them again.
His joy downgrades when he discovers his new professors. Some of these names are unknown, some are familiar, so he gets happily surprised by his new History professor but turns bitter when he sees his main one for the year. His specialty professor, the Modern Literature one, is an old woman who looks like she dates back to the previous century, with her grey hair tied in a bun and faded red glasses on her wrinkled face. Compared to their charismatic, if not handsome, professor from the year before, this is a serious downgrade in aesthetic, he thinks.
Anne-Lise Bouquinerie was my tenth Literature professor. Needless to say, she remains one of the worst figures I’ve seen in my life, from her unjustified cruelty to her complete lack of humanity towards students. Nobody knew how despicable it could get until I got hit by it.
Between two classes and study sessions, Florian spends time with classmates. Julian and he strengthen their bonds over their common misfortune in specialty classes and shared opinions on the books they had to read this year. These classes feel far less long when they manage to sneak a few unauthorized words written on bits of paper, slipping under the strict figures as they find a way to make what is an exhaustingly unpleasant time, an enjoyable one.
In a way, this is what this second year feels like to him. The hurry of the year and the timer ticking, towering over their heads in terror make him afraid of the future. The main goal is not to break under the undeniable pressure on everyone’s shoulders. There are results to provide at the end of the year as to have the shimmer of the hope they keep getting fed by the professors and administration. As such, friends try to make it good for each other: after all, none of his friends’ objectives overlap with his.
In October, after reading the dorm’s rules for the third time, Christian proudly tells his roommates they can get a plant in the room to add some colour. Even if he does not see how much this could add, Florian agrees: a flower cannot hurt to have, after all, as long as they all take care of it. Henri scoffs at the proposition and accepts with a grin, telling Christian to run to the flower shop before it closes and pick something great. “We’ll repay you after the fact, well, if Flo still has money,” he adds. Before they knew it, Christian has already run off the room and outside the dorm.
Barely thirty minutes afterwards, he comes back with an orchid in a small plastic white pot. Its pink with lilac tones, in bloom, looking almost eternal seen like this. There is something about this flower inspiring something inside Florian, igniting an inspirational fire he has not felt in a long time, and he keeps his hand from rushing to the nearest pen and writing down some verses he knows he is going to find awful merely hours after the fact.
“Here she is!” he says with a wide smile on his face as he introduces them to their new companion. “She needs a name, what you think?”
“Hmm…” Florian muses aloud, trying to come up with the best name he can. “Roxanne?”
Henri snickers at his answer before going through with his own. “I’d go with Elizabeth.”
“I was thinking of Catherine…” Christian mutters, looking at the orchid he has put on an unoccupied desk from when the room was for four people.
I couldn’t be able to exactly describe what I felt when hearing that name again. I should have been over it a long time before this, considering I had officially been called Florian for almost two years at that point, and yet… I felt shivers run down my spine and my face lose all its colour. I didn’t want to hear it again, in a stubborn will to forget about the past. To this day, I still hate to hear that name again, but I eventually learnt not to associate bad memories to it as soon as I got students named this way. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t mine either, probably.
Florian freezes on the spot, staring at the plant, trying not to feel the dysphoria washing over him like waves crashing on the shore. He cannot betray these feelings in front of them, so he swallows his pride in and prepares himself for a straining conversation.
“I like it more, actually,” Henri says. “You can even pronounce it with an English accent. Catherine sounds like a queen’s name. Almost regal, in a way.”
“And you, Flo? What do you think?”
They both stare at him as he tries to collect himself.
“Flo, you’re okay?” Christian asks again, worry appearing all over his face. Henri does not look much more serene about it.
“I…” Florian stumbles on his words. “I don’t like it per say… I find it a bit… generic…?”
It is only half a lie, if he can remember when he was both unaware of what he was and still dislike his name. Half-lies are better than full lies, right?
“I mean,” Christian stutters, “it’s fine if you don’t like it, Flo! You looked ill the moment we mentioned it, so… it’s fine, okay? You have any other idea?”
“Chris is right,” Henri adds with his usual snarky smirk gone. “It’s just a plant’s pet name, nothing major to get this sick about. We’ll talk about it if you want us to. Do you have another proposition?”
Florian takes a breath out as his brain remembers the novel he is currently reading.
“What about Corinne? It sounds old school, I know, but…”
“I like it,” Henri interrupts him. “We can even spell it with circumflexes and Ks in case we want it to be khagne-like, if you see what I mean.”
“Corinne it is then, right?”
“Yeah. Let’s go with it.”
This is when I got to know how much I could truly trust these guys.
They take turns for most things, as they need to take care of the cleaning and the plant now. Usually, they make it so the one who has the most presentations to make is exempt of most tasks, except watering Corinne as she requires little water to begin with. However, Florian insists on taking care of his own part of the bedroom: he needs to keep everything hidden away from the naked eye. When he really cannot, either because he is too busy with classes and homework or with work, he takes care of the most glaring on the weekend.
Just like the previous year, Christian and Henri do not stay on weekends, leaving Florian alone for a couple days where he knows he has full control over his secrets. He spends most of the Saturday at work anyway, only being in the dorm in the morning and the evening, and takes care of some Sunday shifts when he has an incapacitated colleague (this happens more often than he wishes it would, but at least, he earns additional money he can take into consideration for future spending). There is the lingering void left by the two friends, almost his brothers-in-arms, but he gets over it by focusing on books and working.
The future is always uncertain, so he starts looking into what it could all entail for. He needs to think about the surgeries he needs: he is fully aware he will have to get his ovaries removed in the next couple years if he wants to avoid hormonal issues, but he lacks the money to do so at the moment. Getting a top surgery seems like a nice offer too: as much as binding helps to alleviate dysphoria, and with the help of having a multiple of these, his ribs are not a fan of it as much as he is. It would be nice to truly walk around shirtless like he sees so many guys in the dorm do.
I always checked my back because, as it turns out, I never had anyone to support me financially. I was earning my own money through allocations, student money and part-time jobs. I needed to spare money in case it was going south for me. I truly wished I wasn’t this greedy, back then, but it felt like a necessary evil. It’s always easy to look back and judge one’s actions as anything but good: it’s harder to judge these fairly.
The future is always uncertain, so life starts giving him lemons again. After months of stability and being stealth, not a single person even doubting he once was called anything else, threats come back again. His menstrual cycle has broken through his hormones multiple times by now, and he only gets more and more concerned. Does this mean he can get…? No, he is a mere virgin. This cannot happen to him. He shakes his head and delves back into his poems.
Winter rolls around when he feels pressure and stress start to take physical tolls on him. Frequenting sometimes sick clients as part of his job, making presentations in front of sick professors and being around sick classmates do not help with his health already weakened by the harsh cold of January and the constant weight over their shoulders. The more missing people there are, the worst it gets.
Florian knows he has gotten sick when his voice starts to break again during a presentation. His voice stopped changing what feels like years ago, so he is not used to it cracking this badly anymore. His roommates notice later than he thought they would: Henri is fresh out of his own case of the flu, Christian is busy putting together a presentation. This is great, he thinks, because this way he cannot worry them.
Being ill prevents him from binding much. This feels like taking three steps backwards, going back to a place he did not want to be in anymore, and it keeps getting worse. His congested noise turns into a morbid cough, a few shivers turn into waves of chill wrecking his frame at times hourly, a migraine is settling in, louder and louder.
Eventually, people start asking questions. It is Henri and Christian first, noticing he is far colder than they are, asking if he is really fine. Florian lies: he is just fine. Then it is the History professor, after a presentation where he could not keep the cough inside for long periods, urging him to go home if he feels sick. Florian lies: he is just fine. Then it is Julian, during a specialty class, trying to check if his neighbour has a fever after feeling abnormal heat coming from the latter. Florian lies: he is just fine. He swears to everyone he feels good enough to be here, not to “go home”. Then it is his employer, giving him an illness leave before it gets too awful, and even if he wants to refuse he is forced to accept. Florian still lies: he is still not fine.
And yet, he succumbs to the illness after a week of feverishly fighting against it. On a Monday afternoon, his Modern Literature presentation in class turns sour, the professor barking insults at him for how “disappointing” and “incompetent” his commentary is, the travesty that his voice and “incoherent speech” are, other words flying right over his head. His throat hurts and his head spins even when he is sitting. He knows Christian and Henri are outside, hearing against the door and peeping through the windows of the classroom as they are waiting for him to finish, Julian sitting in the back and watching everything unfold before his very eyes. When he thinks he has most things in control, he cannot retain the most violent coughing fit he has had in days, eyes shutting and the wet feeling of viscous matters sitting in the back of his trachea getting out.
When his eyes open again, he sees Mrs Bouquinerie covered in red splatters and feels his consciousness run out. He gets up suddenly, gathering what little he has left on his table, and tries to run off, but all he does is getting dazed and dizzy. Soon enough, he feels Julian’s arms catch him and everything turns black.
This has to be one of the most embarrassing memories of my life. As much as I despised her, I hadn’t planned on coughing up blood on her. Looking back on it, I suppose she deserved it for pushing me when I was clearly unwell and everyone else was insisting on me postponing this oral, but it was still impolite of me, don’t you think?
What follows is a blur of events. Definitely bedridden for a few days, he notices his roommates panicking over the situation. The haze of his brain prevents him from understanding much of their words, but he knows for sure he has bronchitis and that they are not willing for him to “go home to a place that doesn’t exist”. In a fever-induced comatose state, coughing up blood and bacteria alike, he cannot think of much when he is conscious: the lonely dorm room, the constant change in temperatures, the feeling of wasting time by being this badly sick.
And the dysphoria.
I’m not sure how most people would experience fever dreams in these cases. Mine were filled with getting stuck into a feminine body, reliving the day my parents disowned me, imagining everyone and everything say I was someone else entirely. Even when I was conscious and almost aware, I was plagued with delirium-like symptoms, seeing things that weren’t, hearing sounds that had never been.
Needless to say, my spirit was mellowed down enough to let everything pass through with ease.
One stance of delirium, a symptom Henri and Christian did not know about yet, appeared on the Wednesday afternoon following. When they came back from class, at around quarter past three as usual, they find their roommate trapped inside the delirious vision of his parents on the day he left, the day he decided to live as a man once and for all. The unfortunate incident forces his brain back into his closet and his female persona, reacting to the wrong name, forgetting his current life was soon to be.
When he comes to, Florian is plagued with questions by Christian’s worried mouth and Henri’s concerned eyes. They want to know why he was saying so many strange things, mumbling about someone they did not know, why he was only reacting to the name they previously wanted to give to the orchid. New questions come up as they notice he tried to inject himself his hormones on the wrong day, syringe having rolled but not broken in the drawer of his bedside table, remembering all the other peculiar things they could not explain with anything but “Florian did it”.
Eyes tearing up, unable to read his roommates’ faces with the water and the glasses missing from his face, he takes a breath in, a breath out, wipes his tears, gets his glasses back on his nose. Florian sets out to explain everything, hoping his terrible cough and fevered brain will not hinder his intentions. He described dysphoria as he feels it, images flying across the room, links it to his artificial orphan situation, clarifies the syringe situation by stating this is for his hormonal treatment, that the drops of blood they found the other day in the bathroom were from him changing one evening. This was all his, and he is so sorry for this, pleads for their forgiveness and their acceptance.
Christian and Henri stare at each other for what feels like centuries with perplexed expressions, before turning back to him with unhidden smiles.
“Listen, Flo. I’m not sure I understand everything –hell, I can’t even know what it feels like to disconnect that way – but it doesn’t change anything to how we see you,” Christian says as he puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder from his chair. “I’m just glad you finally told us about it and trusted us enough.”
“Christian’s right,” Henri chimes in as he sits on the bed next to them. “We don’t really care what you were named before, or what body you’re born in, as long as you’re careful. We’re supposed to be intimate friends, aren’t we? We were wondering about all of this, but we never asked. I’m glad we’re getting this sorted out.”
“Guys, I…” The words struggle to come out of his throat, and he wants to thank them with every word in his vocabulary, but the relief of a year and a half hiding is taking a toll, so he settles for something simple. “Thank you so much, guys…”
Henri pushes him back into lying on his back as Christian puts back the wet washcloth dipped in their trusty bucket (as Florian actually owns it), Serge.
“Go back to sleep, we can tell you’ve had a rough time over there,” Christian tells him with the softest tone he has heard from him. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of this while you recover. The profs know about your family and housing issues already.”
“You can’t recover if you don’t rest anyway, and since we don’t want to catch your death of bronchitis, you better recover quickly,” Henri scoffs before smirking.
“Don’t mind Henri’s comments, you know how he is,” Christian sighs with a faint smile. “It’s his way to tell you to get well soon.”
Speechless from the exhaustion, the lack of voice and the relief of the situation that has just unfolded despite the misfortunate circumstances, Florian cannot respond to them despite all the feelings going through his head, so he better do what he was told to and simply let go of his current concerns and focus on what he usually does not give himself the time to: himself, his health, what book he could read purely for his own pleasure with no background thought about the exam or what presentation he is going to have soon, and how nice his roommates… friends are.
Dandelion - Chapter 5: Watching the Orange Lilies Bloom
Dandelion Directory
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Summary: If I want to feel special, it’s not because of something I didn’t choose.
Notes: Damn, this chapter is much longer than I expected (and much longer than the rest of this story). I hope you'll enjoy it nonetheless.
I planned it to be the end of Lakanal Arc, but I guess this won't be happening today. Oh well. More story the better, right?
It doesn't have as many flowers as I wanted it to be, so expect more flowers to come soon.
Also holy shit, warning for intense depictions of dysphoria in this chapter. I don't guarantee you'll have a nice time going through Flo's dark thoughts.
AO3 version available here.
His first year of college goes by peacefully, as he is passing it with flying colours. He is one of the best elements of the class, the quantity of books he reads finally paying off when it comes to Literature essays. Latin is less glorious, as he does not put much effort into it, but it still convinces the professor responsible for it to grant him the points he needs to pass the year in the end.
The almost-tranquillity allows him to perfect his fake Parisian accent and speech. He has been copying his professors ever since the year started in the scope to remove every bit of his origins as possible. He needs to erase everything he once thought he was: a low-class girl with dreams too big for her little life. Removing his Lorrain accent, the one he got commented on by a few classmates upon arriving in Lakanal, is a way for him to get rid of his filthy past. For someone who was almost homeless and in the dirt of the situation, Florian sure looks fine.
However, the tranquillity is never whole. His dysphoria is nibbling at him any way it can through the testosterone he has set up against it. The more his body changes, the closer he gets to be himself physically and socially, the more his anxiety rises in his veins. What if someone discovers he has been faking his crotch from the beginning? What if his roommates think he is a drug addict by finding the syringe and his hormones in his bedside table? What if they all find out he is not “like the other boys”?
The more he advances, the more he gets impatient. It always feels like it is not quick enough, not soon enough. The changes are slowing down: his voice is starting to get stable, not very low but still sounding genuinely masculine, his acne outbreak is on the slow side, his silhouette includes less and less hips. His new ID card, which he has painfully received through exploiting a few loopholes, is showing the right picture and sex. Finally.
Inside the dorm room, everyone is slowly unveiling their secrets to each other. Henri confesses he dislikes his parents and decided to live in the dorms not because it was complicated for him to go to Lakanal every morning, but because that way he would get rid of them for most of the week. Christian tells them about his strained relationships with his former classmates who decided to either attend regular college or other Parisian preparatory classes, and Sceaux was a way to escape from them. Henri struggled with depression during high school, Christian has skin diseases still preventing him from having the confidence to engage in relationships.
Florian is surprised to learn both of his roommates are single. Henri comes out to them as homosexual, thus why he is struggling to find a partner: he is afraid of homophobia, remaining mostly closeted around their classmates, having difficulties finding someone to share his life with. Christian is plagued with a previous abusive relationship leaving him feeling like a broken boyfriend, and he is taking his time to heal. Florian himself has the issue of being transgender and not open about it. Who would want that?
At times, his hand is about to write that name he used to have instead of his on tests and homework he needs to give back, but his wrist always spasms out of it and he writes the right thing instead. His professors are aware of his shady background because he had to explain before why it was impossible to get in touch with his parents, but he knows very well this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is better if everyone remains blissfully unaware.
Honestly, I still stand by this. Nobody but my close friends and family know about it. From everyone I currently know, I can make a full list of everyone who is aware: Chris, Henri, Rox, Eudes, Lilian, Julian… and you, of course.
He adapts to it all habit by habit. He takes off his binder on the weekend, as told by his doctors, when Christian and Henri go back home for a couple days to see their family once the test is over and everyone who actually has a place to stay in goes back to. Going “back home” has become a foreign feeling, in fact: he has not gotten a real place to call home ever since he realized his parents were going to rob him of one someday, of the one he had always known. The flat in Colombes was at best a temporary solution, his dorm room just does not feel like home because of the restrictions and public nature of it all. It just does not feel intimate, knowing someone has been there before and that someone will be there after, every year, until the end of this dorm room.
He gets used to living on the weekend entirely on his own. He takes advantage of the breakfast on Saturday mornings and the dinner Sunday evenings the dorm’s cafeteria serves as two actual meals he does not have to worry about. The rest is split between groceries stocked in his closet and ready-to-eat lunches he can buy here and there. After all, it is a rare moment of almost complete serenity, the dorm barely inhabited during the weekends and especially the school holidays they get. It would be a waste of an opportunity not to profit from the odd silence.
As such, his first year of college is split between a few different types of days. There are the class days, the presentation days, the weekend days and, most of all, the mock exam days. They are especially exhausting and, well, his weekend job does not make it easier. By the end of December and May’s mock exam sessions, he is glad to know he will be able to sleep off exhaustion once his Sunday shift is finished. The professors look either sympathetic or downright condescending whenever they stare at him and his dark rings during presentations, stuck between admiring a young boy’s efforts to maintain himself afloat in a difficult condition and despising the mere thought of a student of his kind having this piss-poor of a situation in the first place.
I’m pretty sure this would be called “classicism” in today’s times, but back then, we had no word for it. Perhaps I should have gone against these judgements, but it wasn’t really worth the added effort.
And yet, Florian rises to the top of the class. His readings from high school to ignore the hard truth of his life and the way he winds up after shifts pay off. Serious, disciplined, mature, remembering easily, always open to criticism despite how hard it can get. He is defined as a model student on his semester bulletins, despite rising concern about how tired he looks. Most of them point out a lack of personality: a solid A-student, but without the punch needed to get into the prestigious ENS of Ulm Street.
I think it was the ever-growing idea that I was too bland and expectable at the entry exam that pushed me even further. My second semester’s appreciations were already more in my favour on that field, even if they kept pointing even more at a poor physical, and perhaps mental, condition. They weren’t wrong.
The first year of college ends in a hot summer season, at the end of June. It is saddening for the three roommates to leave each other’s company next year. After all, it has a surprising good experience to him: he feels understood and respected, although privacy was scarce and limited on the weekends. When filling his dorm papers for next year, he gets asked by Christian and Henri if he would mind being with them another year. The usually secretive Florian answers with an overwhelmingly happy cry, an “of course I don’t!” his soul pours into his mouth.
It is just a goodbye. They promise to spend time together next year, even if they do not share the same room next year, as they put away their own belongings and leave with the help of their families. Christian has his siblings, Henri has his newly-found boyfriend and younger sister. Roxanne has come to help him too, but because of traffic jams in the region, he is left all alone for a few hours in the almost-empty room.
He feels empty too, now, but he shakes his head and think of summer.
The summer break goes by in a heartbeat. This time, Florian has found himself a better holiday job for the next two months: instead of being a cashier, he is helping at a library during regular employees’ vacations. Being surrounded by old and newer books feels like paradise. People call him the right way: even if it would get old for anyone but him, the way mothers tell their children “Say thank to the boy right there!” or ask him “Excuse me sir, could you help me with something please?” makes him swoon on the inside. Perhaps the badge he wears on his shirt, given to him to signal the clients he is a helper at the library and not just a student reading something there, is also giving this out.
The fact he works there also allows him to read during his breaks and study right after work is done on the books for the next year. It almost feels like home, when he has to rent a flat for two months because Lakanal’s dorm closes for the two-month break. The other staff members are kind and helpful, giving him advice for his student life inside and outside of school, express how they are going to miss him and how much they would love to see him visit them from time to time if he ever has the opportunity to do so. Among these tips are some about reducing the cost of life, mostly about groceries.
Despite the happiness he feels when working at the library, his summer break is also reminding him of what he has postponed for most of the school year: his medical appointments. Aside from the therapist he sees every month on a Saturday afternoon, he has to go to a few other specialists and doctors. Included in these is his gynaecologist, the very symbol of his condition.
The very idea of having to see a gynaecologist and not a proctologist is making him nauseous. Every time he puts a foot inside that waiting room, with its pinkish-purple chairs and pastel blue linoleum floor, he feels sick and out of place. It reminds him something is wrong inside of him, something he wants to get rid off but does not have the funds to go through with it. Since he has to wait, he remembers the sentence his Latin professor always tell them and which he cannot deny but applies to so many elements in his life: abstinere et sustinere, “abstain and endure”. He breathes in, breathes out and wait.
In itself, waiting for the gynaecologist to take him in for his appointment should not be this difficult. After all, it is easy to wait for anything as long as he has a fascinating book to read and take notes on. Usually, in a waiting room like this, he reads casually, with no notes taken. However, this is not any waiting room: it is a waiting room that asphyxiates him. He is surrounded by pregnant women, single or accompanied, all speaking among themselves about pregnancy, how many pregnancies they’ve had before this one, commenting on pregnancy-themed posters on the walls, complaining about pregnancy-related issues. And this is always the last streak before Florian feels like crying, rushing to the men’s bathroom to spill tears.
“Young man,” one of these women asks him this year, “what brings you here?”
She is rubbing her stomach. He feels nauseous again.
“When there’s a boy this young here, it’s to accompany his girlfriend. Where’s yours?” a second woman adds.
He tries not to stare at them in disgust, hides his uneasiness behind a façade.
“Perhaps she’s in the bathroom,” the first woman says, realizing he is alone at the moment.
Florian hesitates on either lying, considering the opportunity given to him, or tell the truth. They arrived after him: he was on page two-hundred-and-five when he arrived, on page two-hundred-and-forty-two when they did. They will know the gynaecologist will not call for any girl, but for a “Florian Moinot”. Maybe he will see them again.
“I’m… I’m here for myself,” he replies earnestly, ready to delve back into his book and pray the MP3 player in his pocket his roommates bought him for his birthday works properly.
The two women stare at him as if he has just said some irrational nonsense. To be fair, they have probably never met someone like him, someone with the wrong genitals having to suffer the consequences of having these. He is just “a man with a vagina”. This is not too difficult to comprehend, right?
“How come?” the second woman asks, either fascinated or disgusted.
“I just need to…?” he sputters back, hoping the doctor is going to call him in soon.
The first woman almost glares at him, eyes squinting shut enough to seem like they are analysing his entire body.
“Oh, then you can have kids too, right?” she says, a smirk creeping its way on her face as her eyes fixate on his abdomen.
“I wish my man could do that. It’d be easier,” the other woman comments with a similar glance.
A sudden wave of nausea takes a hold of him, from his unwanted parts to his mouth, eyes watering beyond reason, glasses blurring. Those women are sickening, vile and disgusting. What they said was wrong to the point of bringing him to the limits of bearable dysphoria. He feels lightheaded from all the thorns suddenly appearing all over his body, squeezing the air out of his chest as if his binder was suddenly too tight. He hates getting reminded of all of this mess. He wants to be a normal boy. He wants to be anywhere but the one place to remind him of how bad this all is.
The door opens.
“Florian Moinot?” a masculine voice calls for.
If he could have, the boy would have taken the hand and ran with it.
Why I feel like this should be told? I know this sounds very cliché and unnecessarily overblown, but I also feel like this needs to be said. I want people not to look at us and think, “oh, this person has the wrong set of genitals, that means they can do this thing and it’ll be exotic!”. It needs to get out there. I want it to get out there and spread the right information.
The discomfort of this visit made me realize something: I’d never be fully safe from being thought off as “exotic” or “special” by people who didn’t understand what it felt to be me. Despite all the supportive people I’ve known in my life, it’s always these two women who come to my mind whenever I get asked why I’m not openly transgender. This is why.
If I want to feel special, it’s not because of something I didn’t choose.
He gets his driver’s license, but he does not have a car, so he just slips the little piece of pink paper in his wallet and hope to get a car soon enough, probably used, probably after he is out of khagne class. He lands a small job as a cashier again in a small shop near the school on weekends. His library job is too far for him to get it again just for days where he does not have classes, but he still knows it is better than having no money on hand.
This all feels like the “adult life” the teachers were speaking about in high school. The life they would not want later, why they should be enjoying being young and free, if not just to stop complaining about the lack of freedom given to teenagers more and more aware of the liberties of adults. Turning eighteen was an Eldorado to reach back then: the possibility to own a car, drink alcohol, buy whatever they wanted, partying hard and maybe vote.
Inside his temporary place to call home again, yet another flat he will forget about next year, he feels like he has matured too quickly. He is merely nineteen and he senses most of his classmates are still happily unaware of how difficult living on their own can be. He cannot blame them: in fact, he envies them. He, too, wants to come home to a loving family on the weekend and being able to hug someone instead of a plushie he has kept ever since he was a child. No matter how much he loves Soleil, a pastel brown stuffed rabbit with a sunflower clipped to her left ear, she will never have the human heat of a sibling, a parent, a friend could have.
Roxanne is too far, Juliette even further, Lilian has stopped responding and all his college friends are now on vacation, so Florian just crashes onto his bed after work and tries not to cry from the loneliness. He will just satisfy himself with the relationships he has with temporary workmates, hoping it will be enough.
It wasn’t enough.
The issue is, when he gets lonely like this, his mind often loops through negative thoughts. Studying all the books for next year, reading essays, writing notes and scribbling hearts whenever he likes something, working at the library, staring at himself in the mirror and realizing he will never be a “real boy” unless he seriously mans up in the eyes of an unforgiving society. He cries in his bed, whenever there is no author or thesis to be thought about and all is left is the toxic cocktail of solitude, blank-page syndrome and dysphoria.
There was always this part of me who was screaming to be soft and feminine in a time where I couldn’t afford being so. I would use being in a literary field as an excuse to be feminine, to excuse it to myself in a way I could brush off the feeling of “you’re not manly enough” as just societal codes. It really was society’s gender roles speaking against me, against the type of boy I was. In these moments, I almost thanked dysphoria for reminding me I was an actual man: just not a manly-man like so many people would want to be.
In an attempt to calm down, Florian thinks of how far he has come ever since he realized it. He went from a girl not getting taken seriously, ignoring his true nature, to someone actually gendered correctly most if not all of the time. Moving to Sceaux, trading everything for something else, changing social spheres helped with it: his current classmates and professors have not known her at all. To them, he has never been her. To them, he has always been Florian; and that is what should matter beforehand. Not the past, but the present and the future.
He stares at his medical papers, disguised bills, as he calculates his August spending to determine a better trajectory for September. He has refused freezing his eggs before starting HRT a year ago: looking at a reminder of that is pleasing in a way he cannot describe properly. He gets reminded he needs to get some parts removed if he does not want hormone disbalance in three years at most. He does not have the money to afford it, so he writes it on a special diary he has kept hidden from anyone but Roxanne.
I almost threw the diary away, once I was finished with most surgeries, if not all. Yet, I kept it because you told me it would matter whenever I would feel like I’ve not made any progress. You were right. It is a keepsake for all these times of despair I’ve overcome.
When the summer break ends, Florian is sure he is the only one happy to go back to school, as he tidies up his belongings again, ready to move back into the dorm and perhaps, just perhaps, find himself grouped with Christian and Henri in the same room. Books under the arm, head full of idealistic thoughts about the year to come and the end of his pitiful loneliness, he enters Lakanal’s campus with a smile and finds himself strangely, yet warmly, happy to see what is a prison to so many of his classmates.
Summary: Meanwhile, Florian still does not know what he wants to do with his life, apart from finishing his transition and not think about all this feminine stuff again. Perhaps landscapist is not too late to pick now.
Notes: Hello yes I live for these three dorks' friendship so get ready for more of it.
The "Lakanal arc" is going to be a tad longer than the first "arc" (which was high school) because I have a lot more things to introduce with Henri and Christian, but the arc after this one is going to be even longer than that.
AO3 version available here.
Starting class in a new place, with a whole new group of people, means Florian can live as such, as Florian, without having to explain he just has not “become a boy”. To them, he will be a boy, so he feels less anxious around the girls and boys of his class. Without a surprise, just like his high school classes, his comrades are mostly female: a norm in the literature fields, overwhelmingly dominated by women. Seeing them does not make him too dysphoric anymore: he feels separated enough from them when the teachers call him by his name, when it is featured on his new cafeteria magnetic card.
When he thinks back on how he is in the boys’ part of the dorm, he still wonders on how this is possible, how far he has come, and the anxiety of passing is back again. He does get some suspicious stares from other people in the class, perhaps because he still looks effeminate for a guy his age despite the growing facial hair and his voice sounding deeper by the day.
His timetable is messy because of the disparate options his classmates have taken. He is pained at the idea of having to go through Latin classes yet again, but he has resigned himself because he knows he will know the language for a few more years before he can stop attending classes for it. Otherwise, it does not seem to bad, leaving him enough free spots to place his mandatory oral tests there. However, it is better than he was getting himself ready for, so he goes back to the dorms happy and thinking of whether or not he is going to settle his desktop computer tonight or tomorrow. He will have to ask his roommates.
This a whole new concept to him. He is an only child and he lived on his own for a few months when his parents kicked him out. He has never had to share his room with someone for more than a couple nights at a friend’s, where he was the guest anyway. He hopes from the depths of his heart that they will get along nicely, ready to do all the efforts to be their friend and… hide everything he cannot show them.
I truly realize I was lucky there. I didn’t realize fully how much my social spheres had changed in a single blow, but I was still terrified in case what had happened with whatever I had known of my family was going to happen.
As soon as he realizes he will also have to hide his real identity, Florian panics slightly. Before now, everyone around him knew he was assigned female at birth, that he had a female body, that his previous name was feminine. This is not the case now and, while it opens so many different possibilities, it means he has to conceal his shameful secrets anywhere he can.
As such, Florian writes down a mental list of all things he can and cannot hide. He can hide his binders, his hormones, his menstruation equipment (as much as he does not need these anymore, considering they are slowing down with the testosterone injections), perhaps even the fact he is essentially homeless once he steps outside of the dorm. He, however, cannot hide the desktop computer already settled there, his appointments with the therapist, the fact his body looks so… odd. When he looks at himself in the mirror of the small bathroom they have, he cannot help but notice how teenaged he looks compared to everyone else. He looks younger because of the tiny spots of zits which have resurfaced, the badly-tamed facial hair he is so proud of, his lowering voice he tries his hardest to make sound natural despite the sudden changes it does.
It was a difficult time to look at my own reflection, to be entirely earnest. It was finally me, of course, so it had this comfortable feeling of “this is really who I am on the inside showing” rising inside my chest every time I looked at myself for the day, but it also resonated with how ugly teenage years look, except I was already supposed to be an adult.
His roommates are two guys from his class, which means he gets to share the room with people he already has to share classes with. Their names are rather blurry, the fault to having a class packed with thirty-or-so people all hand-picked by professors, but he knows he already plans on befriending some people from the future Modern Literature majors. From all the specialties available here for second year, his favourite clearly is Modern Literature and he feels like he will already pick this one. Perhaps it is too soon, too early in the year to speak this boldly, but he is already certain he will not pick English, German, Spanish or Classic Literature. Perhaps History, it does not sound too bad on second thought, but it is still less interesting than recent literature.
The first guy has said he wanted to be a History specialist in class earlier, Christian Coulombel. He is tall, auburn-haired, brown-eyed, he wears glasses and seems to like buttoned shirts. As such, he is a man of style and taste: there is this bias of looking at a man and thinking, “this is what I want to look like once I’ve fully transitioned”. He seems to be a man of factual reading, considering the very pragmatic books piled on his personal desk, which is not surprising coming from who seems to be a historian-to-be.
The second one is, if he remembers correctly, a future English specialist, Henri Drappé. His hair is short and blond, his eyes are blue, he wears contacts and buttoned shirts with bowties. Another man of taste, with a deep passion for British literature judging by the books he has settled on his personal bookshelf. He has said out loud he saw himself as a translator or an interpret later in life.
Meanwhile, Florian still does not know what he wants to do with his life, apart from finishing his transition and not think about all this feminine stuff again. Perhaps landscapist is not too late to pick now.
Their first nights as roommates feel a bit awkward. He has never really learnt to talk with boys: aside from Lilian, whom he hopes to remain in contact with, he was stuck with being a girl speaking to girls, “gals being pals” as Roxanne would have put it. He does not know where to start, really: books? Where they come from? What they think of their professors? Perhaps he should let them speak first. Perhaps they know socializing better than he does.
His instincts do not seem to lie: Henri is the one who starts the conversations. One of the first things Florian learns is that his two roommates have known each other ever since high school: they were attending the same place, just not the same classes. Christian is an Economics and Sociology major and is taking the confirmed Latin classes. Henri is bilingual, lived in Britain when he was younger and loves British culture to the point of having Earl Grey tea and a clandestine boiler inside his closet. Compared to them, Florian is just a timid Literature graduate from a not-so-prestigious school in a city mostly unknown it seems.
“Oh, I used to live in Colombes,” Henri says. “It was before I lived in Dover. I don’t remember much from it.”
While he was afraid of being unable to befriend anyone, Florian surprises himself when he thinks of how relatable his classmates actually are. He tries to get closer to the other future Modern Literature specialists he attends Latin classes with. They discuss novels and poetry, bringing back his love for Hugo’s Contemplations to the surface. Some of them stare down at him for being so “casual”, so he tries getting into other poets to see if it is better somewhere else. Instead, he finds himself falling in love with Aragon’s style and life story, but also gets attracted to even more of Hugo’s writing.
He gets along with another Modern Literature specialist on that topic: Julian Forgeron, who comes from deeper in the country. Florian can tell by his accent: it sounds northern, for the lack of a better term, with contract syllables and slightly deformed vowels. They discuss these poems, promise to have a session where they will read their favourite pieces from The Contemplations at least once during their two years here.
Christian and Henri do not question the presence of his desktop computer, so he allows them to use it for research and miscellaneous purposes. Christian comments on how the beast is starting to grow old and tired: after all, it got bought when they were in their early teens, so it shows signs of aging. Florian makes a note to himself to buy something far less space-consuming next time. They lend their books to each other, tell the others about the books they have read so it is more knowledge and less work for everyone else.
What is originally sessions to help each other with their personal difficulties (Christian’s is German, Henri’s is History and his is Philosophy) eventually becomes a fun time between friends. Compared to their classmates also living in the dorm, especially the four girls who keep getting into arguments inside their room according to what he can hear from his fellow Modern Literature specialists, they get along especially well. Perhaps it is because of their different yet compatible personalities: neither of them is prone to fighting or arguing, and they all respect each other’s differences. There is little to no tension in their room.
And yet, Florian feels almost paranoid at times. Whenever he sees either of his roommates get a bit too close to his closet, he feels his heart beat faster, almost as if trying to warn him against the potential dangers. He does not have a lock on it: he does not have the money to do so. His therapy sessions, dorm costs, weekend food, book budget and his testosterone shots cost him too much to allow him even the slightest outside spending. The school’s library is not enough, so he is willing to sacrifice a lock for them. Maybe he will try buying one when he has less money to spend on books.
The anxiety rushing through his veins when he is in their room is mostly about the secrets he is hiding from them. He needs to get his testosterone shot every Thursday in the afternoon in a fear to deregulate his levels which are finally stabilizing, but he cannot do that at school where the nurse would try to control it and not when his roommates are around either. He does not want to explain… no, he does not even want them to know about it all. He just wants them to believe he is an ordinary guy with no defect.
He will not let them see he is a “boy with something missing”.
When he gets some leftover money from his expenses, he decides to start on getting a driver’s licence. He will need to drive himself in places once he is out of Lakanal and his first year is not as busy as he thought it would be, so it makes it the perfect timing to get it. It is expensive and he knows this, but he decides to balance it out with less money going to his books and sessions, which he needs less of anyway. His roommates support him in his decisions, albeit they do not hide their worries about how much he seems to be running himself to the ground at times.
I’ve always been a hardworking man. Work was what got me into the selective Lakanal: work is also what got me out of my parents’ misery, my original misery. My physical health has never been the greatest, and I suffered the consequences of that way quicker than I would have liked to.
Wearing a binder and attending this many classes with barely any break is tiring for his chest. He has to stop wearing at some point during the day and, as such, opts for a baggier wardrobe in case he has to take it off for any given amount of time in public. Presentations with professors require him to look pristine, so he makes an effort for these and wears button-up shirts, but otherwise he prefers his hoodies over these shirts. Both are lifesavers: he can even wear some of his “girl” ones, those he never sold because Juliette pointed out they still made him look male if put on correctly, reducing the cost of having to renew his wardrobe. Sparing summer job money was not a bad decision.
Because of the shame his chest represents, he is careful around his roommates. He knows he cannot go shower at the same time as them in case his binder slips under the door and that he cannot allow them to see him shirtless. It would require too many explanations. They could reject him if they knew who they were actually talking to. He is already lying about going through late puberty: they do not need to know it is his second one, that he aborted his first one, ditched oestrogen for testosterone because it is who he has been. He wakes up first and showers last to avoid coming out again. Better be safe than sorry… even if it is tiring.
It wasn’t that I distrusted Chris and Henri. I was loathing myself for what I looked like, not wanting to admit this acne and ever-changing body was the result of what I considered to be a birth defect. I didn’t want anyone but me to endure this, looking at that disfigured body belonging to someone who wasn’t me and which I was trying to make mine. Maybe I would be more open about it later, I thought.
At times, Henri comments on how he seems breathless. Even if he hates lying, Florian finds an excuse for it which does not involve giving away his secret: it was a hard day. He knows he will have to take off that binder sooner that he would have wanted, but he tries consoling himself by focusing on how his chest has grown smaller with all the dead tissue from binding. It has been more than a year, and even if the reason why everything feels less dysphoric is rather disgusting to think about, he cannot help but feel a bit nicer from this.
It turns out it is not because of his binder. Winter came in far earlier than he expected and, like every year, he falls ill around this time. Usually, it is nothing more than the common cold congesting his nose and voice for a week or so, at worst it was a pharyngitis tiring his voice out, but that year, it is the influenza. He hates feeling this drained and the sensation that he is this close to losing his voice. He has presentations, he has homework, holidays are not close enough yet. His roommates notice and urge him to go home. Henri threatens to warn the nurse if he does not go back home, Christian tries to reason both parties by making sure their sick roommate is not dying yet.
The circumstances force Florian out of his zone of mysterious comfort and step up. Even when his voice is almost gone, the mere action of talking threatening to rip apart his throat in coughing fits, when the fever makes his brain feels like it is boiling inside his skull, he finds the strength, or rather the lack of, to tell them he has no home to go to. No parents to take care of him, no way to go back to Colombes. If he stays in this dorm room, attending class so nobody knows he is sick and exhausted, it is because he does not have the luxury to go home to get nursed back to health. He tears up when he is over with his sob story, trying to hide the most pitiful details of it to retain a little of dignity.
He is ready to get glared at for what is objectively a reckless move, but instead, Henri softens up and Christian almost falls from the chair next to the bed. They exchange a concerned glance, one Florian can still distinguish the aura of despite his glassy eyes and the glasses fighting against his myopia absent from his face as he falls back into his pillow, coughing. Christian puts back the cold washcloth on his friend’s forehead, Henri gets some medicine from his personal pharmacy.
“You should have told us before, Florian,” he says as he puts a glass of water on the bedside table along with fever reducers. “We could have helped you sooner.”
“Tell us next time, okay? We’re here to help each other. If there’s nobody to help you, we will.”
The guys made me spill the first happy tears of my life. I was so thankful for them, to share this room with such kind souls who preferred helping me out instead of giving me a stern lesson and giving me away. This sickness was the moment I realized I could trust them way more than I originally thought.
I simply wish it didn’t come up the way it eventually did.
Summary: His objective is clear: make a name for himself and see if he can make a couple friends, especially in his dorm room.
Notes: A bit of a shorter chapter, mostly serving as a sooth transition from high school life to the first type of college courses featured in this story.
I'll probably name this one by its actually most common name, hypokhâgne/khâgne, in the future, so I hope it won't bother people.
I'm way too excited to show Florian's roommates.
(sorry for the lack of trans-related matters in this chapter, I promise the focus will be back on these in the near future)
AO3 version available here.
Outing himself as a transgender man without saying the exact term was only the first step in a journey Florian knows is going to be long and tedious. He knows he will have to move out of Colombes sooner than he would like: there is no university in the town, and he does want to be better than his now-gone parents and have an actual diploma aside from his Baccalauréat. Moreover, he has graduated in Literature, as opposed to Roxanne and Juliette with their respective Sciences and Economics and Sociology majors, so he cannot really pretend this is going to make him go very far in life aside from maybe, just maybe and by sheer luck, work as a cashier or something alike.
He has had a number of these “let’s take an hour to find everyone’s dream career and paths!” classes in the past two years. Of course, his ears have always been at least half-opened, so he knows he wants to set his life in the great sea of literature… but how? College feels like it will be too expensive unless he goes to the other side of the country. Most of his classmates seem already set on Paris’s numerous universities, including the prestigious ones (to that he laughs a bit, considering some of these same classmates cannot spell properly), but him? He does not know what he wants exactly.
His Literature teacher, the old and soon-retired Mrs Paris (a name that would have fitted would have she not been born and raised in Nanterre, the nearby prefecture), tells him he should think of preparatory class. Apparently, it will give him the ability to shoot for the stars and rise to the top of the intellectual society of the country if he ever goes to the end of it. Ambition is not something he has been known for, so this surprises him, but the description of this multi-course class to replace the unforgiving first two years of traditional college tempt him. Moreover, if he can find one with a dorm, he can pay less than if he had to have a flat and necessities to buy on top of it.
A student, from when I was a professor in Brest, once asked me why I allowed myself to be concerned about her finances because I was just paid so much. I came clean to her that I once was an almost-homeless disowned boy. Her face’s expression immediately softened.
However, there are a lot of different literature preparatory classes he could attend, and as such he needs to pick his favourites. He discovers Henri IV and Fénelon in Paris are the most prestigious ones, but their reputation and proven efficiency make it so they are the hardest to get. Instead, and thinking of living costs beforehand, Florian finds a far more interesting offer in the Hauts-de-Seine themselves, reducing the costs of moving in case he does need to rent a flat for the holidays. He talks about it with Roxanne and Juliette who are moving to Paris for their studies, the logical course of action to take in these cases, but they wholesomely support his decision and wish him good luck.
Post-secondary orientation is one of the toughest trials a teenager has to go through. I myself hesitated over my future job, there and after, and I suppose attending Lakanal helped me stall by thinking of potential competitive exams and great schools I could attend later. Who could guess I ever thought about becoming a landscapist by looking at where I am now?
In the end, and with the help of his main teachers, he fills a demand for two schools. He still caved in for Mrs Paris’s requests for him to request Henri IV, but his main objective is in his first wish, the school which seems to call for him: Lakanal, in the city of Sceaux. It is the closest school he could think of, and yet the few pictures he has seen of this campus-sized middle-high school hybrid resonate with his want for education. There are results in there too, with a few graduates from the prestigious ENS of Ulm Street amongst its former students. To be exact, he has two wishes, and his very first one is the one with the dorm.
He is about to go into his Latin exam, a supplementary oral exam he wishes he did not take back in freshman year when he had to decide if he wanted to continue with that language, when the results are announced with the classic boards he has grown to known for miscellaneous information. Despite the obvious questionable character of displaying everyone’s results publicly like that, he cannot help the grin forming on his face. He allows Roxanne, who discovers his results near him, to hug him despite the discomfort she may feel from his binder and the one he feels from his chest in general. For the span of a few minutes, everything seems all right, everything seems like it cannot go wrong anywhere down the line.
The finals arrive quicker than everyone ever expects. On his side, his class still has not finished the philosophy program, his English classes are still a mess to decipher, and it seems like he may be running out of time for studying. As such, he allows himself to read his learning sheets in all the waiting rooms he ever is in (mostly Mrs Flamand’s, he has to admit), recites some parts of his lessons when he cooks or showers. Before he knows it, before the entire school knows it, the finals have rolled around and have finished almost as soon as they have come, leaving behind them only the bittersweet taste of predicted subjects and others who completely threw him off guard. He is still sore over the travesty that was the Literature exam.
The day the results are announced is a blessing. He is graduating and it feels so good to have managed to land the “Very Well” general mention on it once he gets to see his grades. Roxanne and Juliette share his joy, to their own extent and personal results, and the three of them realize the downsides to all these: they will not see each other again once this is over. They are parting ways, them to Paris, him to Sceaux, them to college, him to preparatory class. And yet, Roxanne keeps a smile on her face, tells them it is not over for their friendship as long as they can remain in contact. She gets her phone out, smiles as she points at it, reminds them of their email addresses they all have by this point. Juliette dries the beginning of tears in her eyes, agreeing with another smile. In the end, Florian is the last to get over it, but he does not cry, and instead he gives them his address from way back home on a piece of paper.
Needless to say, I did my best to remain in contact. I’ve eventually lost Juliette, due to her changing phones and having her email address unresponsive after a few years, but Roxanne and I are still best friends to this day.
The summer holidays start on the note that they need to see each other as much as possible while working to spare money for college. As such, they try to have workplaces near each other, but Florian is left out by his much earlier preparations. Instead, he has opted for a place near Mrs Flamand’s office, just in case he needs to see her in a hurry. It is not the most fulfilling activity he has ever had, but it pays decently and he needs this money, so he shrugs off the boredom and soreness at the end of the day by thinking of the pay check and his future studies.
In fact, he gets great enjoyment from following the instruction he got sent early in the summer as a confirmation for his enrolment in Lakanal. He has bought most of the books required for the Literature and language classes, got far more lenient on Philosophy and especially on History. He has nothing against the latter –in fact, he was a great fan of his former teachers on this – but they are the most expensive books for what seems to be a limited use.
He starts class back in early September, so when he tells Roxanne about it, she almost pleads him to let her drive him there. To be fair, Florian did not have the time or money to get his own driver’s license: he made sure to have his road code before it, but he cannot drive a car himself and it is otherwise very difficult to get from Colombes to Sceaux, so he accepts what she calls an “impromptu road trip!”. It is the best day he has spent in a while, laughs shared and remembering old stories from their previous years.
“To think I dated a boy!” Roxanne seems to tell herself aloud as she tries to keep her calm in the middle of a traffic jam. “Now that’s something I didn’t expect. To think you were still closeted a couple months ago… How has it been?”
“To be honest, it feels so much different. I get stares and some people still call me ‘miss’, but I suppose that’s to be expected. Tell me, does my voice sound bad?”
“No, you sound like… a normal dude? Well,” she seems to correct herself, “a guy whose voice is changing, but that makes sense considering it’s like a second puberty or something. Don’t worry, you’re doing great Flo!”
He blushes slightly at the compliment before replying “thank you”.
There still are formalities to fill when they arrive to the school. Its grandeur is not reflected in most of the pictures he has seen of it: imposing buildings carved in stone, surrounded by the green of the grass shining in early September’s summer sun. This truly looks like a dream school, one with a rather expensive dorm and lifestyle, but he has the money for it. His summer job and his financial helps for being a student living on his own are all going to this and he hopes the part-time position as a cashier he has found not too far from Lakanal itself will help his finances.
When they arrive to the desk to fill in the last-minute details, such as exact option classes and installing in the dorms, he is the first surprised when the secretary calls him “Florian” without a shred of hesitation. She does hesitate when glancing up to them, hesitating between the short-haired Roxanne and the assigned-female-at-birth Florian, but she has otherwise no difficulty continuing the process.
It is when they are en route for the dorm that Roxanne fully expresses her surprise about this. She has been used to administrations calling him by his obsolete name that she is perplexed now that he does not. To this, Florian replies with the proudest smile that his enrolment in Lakanal’s preparatory class is the first step of his “administrative transition”.
Even if Roxanne is his closest friend and the one who has seen him at his most vulnerable, he still tries to hide how soothing it was to hear the secretary call him anything but a female name. He has worked on changing his name legally ever since he turned eighteen and got disowned, steadily writing his actual first name on everything, from his bank account to his identity papers. He has stalled on his driver’s license so it could have this, the real way he refers to himself, with a photo of his actual face.
Once at the dorm, he fills a bit more paperwork, mostly focused on medical information and who to call in case he feels ill. He writes down the number of Mrs Flamand, even if she lives in Colombes, because she is the closest he has to a parent nowadays. He gets the key to his room and another for the post-secondary-only door to the dorm, granting him access to where he is going to sleep. He makes sure to check if it really was remembered that he lives there on the weekends and holidays, to ensure any paper is sent to Roxanne’s home, list goes on. His parents do not need to know where he has actually gone.
When they arrive to his room, on the second floor’s boys building, he is the first to arrive to his room. He says hi to the boys and parents he comes across in the corridor, wondering if they will be in his class or if they are either second-years or in the other similar courses to his. In any case, most if not all of them refer to him as a young man, calling him “sir”, not even noticing how weird his changing voice sounds like. He can see Roxanne winking at him every time he gets called a boy.
Classes start in the afternoon, so they quickly unpack everything. There are three beds, a small working space and a tiny bathroom with two sinks, clearly meant to just be a quick place to brush one’s teeth (and shave, in men’s case) because of the main bathrooms being collective showers and toilets. A classic, he thinks, considering this seems to be the overwhelming norm in every dorm in the country. He picks the bed closest to the desks, filling his dresser with clothes and some space in the bathroom with a few things here and there. Unpacking his razor reminds him of the seemingly silly joy he feels to finally be able to shave something other than his developing body hair.
Before they part for the afternoon introductory classes, Roxanne wants to go through the “moving list” she has prepared before they left with him. He has made sure to have found a new therapist in Sceaux, a nearby doctor, a supermarket to buy anything he could need… Keeping the note in his belongings, he hugs Roxanne one last time as she leaves the premises and he goes to attend his very first class. His objective is clear: make a name for himself and see if he can make a couple friends, especially in his dorm room.
Summary: She gives him a bouquet of daffodils before they drive off, telling him these are his favourite flowers and that he now needs to move on. Isn’t this the meaning of daffodils? I think you once told me that when you picked them as your symbol or something.
Notes: I should precise beforehand this story (just like all my original work) is set in an alternative France where technology and society are more advanced than their IRL counterparts. This is why Florian has access this early to hormone blockers and hormones, when this story is set in anno domini 2003 for the moment.
AO3 version available here.
Finding a name to refer to himself is a life changer. Roxanne calls him “Flo”, Juliette, who is still struggling coming to terms with this but is trying her hardest, calls him insists on “Florian” because she is still not used to it. And yet, she gives him some advice to look more masculine, basing herself off things she has seen among male soccer players: how to make his voice sound lower, how to present as confident and self-assured when he truly isn’t, somehow provides him with brand-new male clothing and underwear he could not have wished for more.
Juliette once told me, when visiting me in this hospital years later, that her mother was a cashier at a local Carrefour, and that she could easily access unsold products that way. Barely legal, but I doubt much of my early transition was condoned by most of societal conventions.
Mrs Flamand tells him, during a session where she finally realizes this has been illegal all along, that she will only give him the green light for the next step once he is an adult in the eyes of the law. This makes Florian realize a few things, starting with what legally being an adult is going to allow him to do. He will finally be able to change his name to the eye of the world, go on what seems to be a dangerous therapy, stop being himself only around Roxanne and Juliette, stop being “Catherine” around the teachers and the classmates who know he is supposed to be a girl.
Florian makes a third friend who does understand who he is, but he is an online buddy. He lives in the south of the country, kilometres upon kilometres away from Colombes, living under the Mediterranean heat, near the Rhône’s delta. Their friendship is unlikely, considering this friend is already in college, yet feels natural: Lilian is trying to understand his little sister, Florian is just trying to get his voice somewhere where he won’t be targeted by the crude remarks of people reminding him, “you looked better when you weren’t pretending to be a boy”.
Yet, anxiety remains in his veins. The more his birthday nears closer, Roxanne swearing to buy him the best she can for this important occasion, Lilian thinking of a thousand ideas for a drawn present, the worst it gets. His dysphoria is rushing him to finally take the goddamn hormones before it threatens the remainder of his mental health, so he focuses on books and flowers to pass the time until it gets better.
He remembers an old thing his eighth-grade Literature teacher said once during a class, that there are birth month flowers just like there are birthstones, albeit there is no universal version of it. Searching in the local library on a free Wednesday afternoon where he does not feel like going back “home”, he finds out his assigned flower would either be a narcissus or a daffodil. The latter resonates so much, once he looks into the symbolism behind it: new beginnings, unrequited love, respect. The daffodil quickly becomes his personal symbol, the flower he likes to draw on science lessons instead of actually listening.
It is every time he goes home from school that he remembers why there is still so much fear inside his heart. He is not afraid of the decision to start HRT: it only feels like the next step on his journey. However, he is terrified of the reactions he will get when he will have to eventually come clean about it, about the fact he is a he and not a she, about how his parents are going to disown him quicker than lightning. Considering their rampant racism and internalized classicism, there is no way they will accept their daughter to actually be a son.
Phrased like that, I almost sound like I’ve once enjoyed being born to them.
Even then, Florian presses on. He has no time to lose worrying about his parents’ reaction when he can spend said time researching where to live in case the worst happens and he gets kicked out from home. He has no real way to gain money until he is out of high school, but he still tries: he applies for holiday jobs for the Easter and summer breaks, he sells some old belongings like most of his female clothes, he still abuses of his parents’ lack of concern and constant arguing to steal a few bucks every week after school. All flats he could possibly get in at the last minute are too expensive for him to afford until his first jobs, so Roxanne finds a solution of him: he can live in an abandoned flat the owner, a man living in Calais named Norbert Leeht, has forgotten he was still paying for.
When she brings him there for the first time, he discovers why someone that guy has forgotten they he was paying for it until it was rented: it is incredibly small, just enough for one person with a ridiculously tiny bathroom and barely any other furniture than a bed that was left there years ago and a small kitchen. It is still much better than he expected to get: at least, he does not have to pay for anything not additional furniture or food.
The premise being this eerily advantageous, Florian looks more into it and into its owner. Norbert Leeht is known online for his abandoned flats people love to occupy illegally when in a pinch, flats he has forgotten he owned and had not rented, too busy counting the amounts of money he gets from villas he actually cares about. In order to receive his mail properly, he decides to make his address Roxanne’s, the easiest option he has considering this flat will never have his name on it.
Furnishing the flat is harder than he wishes it was. He needs to move most of his room’s furniture without being spotted by his parents, for which the ideal time is on Wednesday afternoons where his father is at work and where his mother is out shopping for groceries. Roxanne, Juliette and he always strike around his time and, soon enough, only the bed and a dresser he plans on replacing anyway are out of there. After a while, the flat feels more like home than his supposed house has ever done. Everything is in place for the final revelation.
On March 20th, 2003, a warm Thursday where spring is just around the corner, he decides to let his plans finally play out, hoping for the best like the young and optimistic boy he has been ever since seeing things go forward. His therapist hands him out a strange box after his session of the week. Upon opening it, he sees a small recipient and a syringe. He does not need to read the label on the former to have a smile invade his face and his eyes tear up.
“I figured you’d be mature enough to handle these by yourself, Florian,” she tells him as she looks at the box. “And since I know you’re rather shaky on your finances, I’ve paid you the first dose and the syringe with it. You told me you didn’t mind needles, right? I can provide you with pills if you do.”
His voice catches up in his throat, and even he wants to be a man and not cry, his thankfulness eventually explodes.
“I… Thank you so much, I… I don’t know what to say…”
Dr Flamand then spends some time explaining him how to inject himself, and even if his fingers are shaking around the syringe as if it could break under his touch, it feels like the best piece of news in the latest year. It is finally in his hands, the way to break away from womanhood even more, to provide his body with what he is missing: his facial hair, a lower voice, a better repartition of his body fat.
Of course, he does not go blind into hormone reassignment surgery. He has researched its symptoms, asked high-school science major Juliette if she can clear up things, eventually blesses Lilian for being a medical student in an internship. He knows he will look very… teenage-y for a while, with a lowering voice, potential skin issues, possible hair loss, a risk to get excessive body fat he does not really want. After all, he is wearing a binder to hide his chest, no need for it to get bigger. And yet, he feels more than ready for it, already eyeing the syringe in desire.
I remember being terrified of this decision, when I first found out about HRT and what it was about. I kept asking to the mirror, “What if this isn’t what I am? What’s going to happen to me?”. I have to say, I regret not having started it before, even if I know I had to be mature to handle it correctly.
Everything is set in stone in his eyes when his eighteenth birthday rolls around. It is a time of truth, his moment to come out, to tell everyone “Catherine” is dead, to welcome Florian, the one he has been all along. It is exciting, it is terrifying, like his first rush of injected testosterone, the fear of the needle and the euphoria from the hormone he has craved for years. He already thinks of all the pros and cons of coming out, having studied the matter for the past months and having talked about it with Roxanne and Juliette for days on end. He prepares himself for school, gazes into the mirror wishing for facial hair to come soon, puts on his needed outfit and heads to school, both terrified and ecstatic.
I’d define myself as a careful and prudent man, but it wasn’t the same when I was a boy. It’s difficult to see what discrimination you are about to face when it’s invisible to most people due to how rare this all is.
For the first time ever, Roxanne and Juliette call him out by his real name instead of “Cat” as they are used to around his class. They help the anxious, now tetanized boy to ask his homeroom teacher, the Literature one, if he can make an important announcement. Of course, this makes the old lady be suspicious, but she accepts nonetheless, and he mentally prepares himself to break Catherine’s shell once and for all, never to be seen again, so ready to reject her for the last time and never look back on it. Looking at his entire class, all there for once, taking his proudest stance despite the sheer terror stacking in his throat, he takes one deep breath in, one out, and stares at everyone though his clear, “enticing” irises.
I remember by heart what I said on that day, fifteen years later.
Everyone, listen. It’ll sound weird, I know, but I’ve never been a girl. I’m a boy, a boy in a girl’s body. It’s a rare case, a mental disorder if you want to call it that. Please, even if you don’t believe it…
Don’t call me Catherine.
Call me Florian.
The surprise it drops onto everyone’s shoulders is mind-blowing. Most of them stare at each other, bewildered, and the fear rises inside his chest at an alarming rate. Roxanne is not in his class, and so is Juliette, so he is all alone in a class who barely knows him anyway. Some start to laugh, others seem to remember some sex education lessons provided by Planned Parenthood during their earlier school years, or by that one Biology class from last year, and in the end he is torn between people not taking him seriously and others trying to understand. The teacher stares at him, at loss for words, so she gulps and just politely, almost quietly, tells him “please take your seat again, Ca…” and she stops herself.
Acceptance does not come easily after this announcement. The mockeries start even more, saying he is just “playing pretend” and “a tomboy who takes it too far”. The jokes are common and start almost immediately, but some classmates really show empathy and a will to understand, so it is all fine. Well, the mockery does remind him of the risks he has read about online all that time and how dysphoric they all are, but it is nothing compared to the last straw.
His parents.
For the first time in years, Florian goes up to his parents as he wants to be, rather than what they would have him rather be so they would have no more issues.
It may sound strange to the outside ears, but I was an undesired child. They were just against getting an abortion for me and too uneducated to know they could put me elsewhere, although I have to give them kudos for trying to raise me and always feeding me. I suppose routine and familial allocations helped me being more helpful than they had expected.
In fact, he almost shows it heavily on purpose, binder on, hair freshly cut by Roxanne’s sister Solange, dressed in all dark blues and men’s apparel, in a spirit of provocation and spite he did not think he had before this day and preparing it for it. His heart still tries to break out of his ribcage, smashing itself against the bones in his chest, but he keeps it together and mans up.
The reaction he gets from them as soon as he says “Mom, dad, I’m a boy” is baffling at best. They stare at him, asking him why he is saying that, how it is “just a phase” and how “he’ll see that he’s gonna know he’s a girl soon again”.
What a joke.
Florian arguments back, pulls together all the ideas and explanations he has ever done, while not even hoping to get their approval. It seems counterproductive, he knows how this is all going to play out. He has nothing to lose, so he puts between his parents and him the paper officially diagnosing him with gender dysphoria, another with all the actions he has taken to “fix” the issue. The eyes of his father shoot through his irises, rage burning in that stare, barking following.
“You’re no daughter of mine.”
“And I’m no girl,” he replies.
“Fuck off, get out of here, you fuckin’ crossdressing fuck!”
“I guessed you’d ask me to do just that.”
“Why did you tell us then?!” his mother asks him through tears he can tell are fake, the way to bribe her way out of divorce threats.
“Because I’m no dishonest man. I waited for this day for so long.”
“Fuck off.”
“Farewell.”
Taking the remainder of his bedroom’s things, Florian sets off, leaving nothing behind him but a few unsold girly clothes and a rotting flower which died before seeing spring come back. Roxanne is waiting for him outside, a warm smile and welcoming arms he still loves despite the split-up. Despite how ready he felt he was before, tears come to his eyes and he abandons himself in his best friend’s embrace.
Eighteen-year old me would have liked to know how painful being rejected by your own family can be painful, even if you know the end result isn’t going to be pretty.
Roxanne invites him to come in her car, saying she would drive him back home, putting the last of his belongings into the chest of the vehicle. She lied: minutes later, she tells him she is paying him a good dinner in a not-so-expensive restaurant, “because he deserves only good things when he’s been that brave with this”.
She gives him a bouquet of daffodils before they drive off, telling him these are his favourite flowers and that he now needs to move on. Isn’t this the meaning of daffodils? I think you once told me that when you picked them as your symbol or something.
“Thank you so much” escapes in a sob from his mouth before he takes off his glasses and wipes them with his arms. To all the preparation he has made for this day, and to all the better days to come.
Catherine Moinot is born on March twenty-first, nineteen-eighty-five in Colombes, France. Her father is a low-wage worker in a factory of the city, her mother is a housewife who gave up on finding a job once her daughter was born. Her father comes from a low-class Lorrain family, her mother is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. A childhood in the middle of the thick urban fabric surrounding Paris, trapped between the roads and the concrete, in the outskirts of the outskirts without the pros of the richer parts of Colombes and the better landscapes of the rest of the country.
I should know that. I once was this girl.
Catherine is an ordinary child. No peculiar health issue, no learning disability, right-handed. The only con to her life is when she gets diagnosed with myopia, when she is learning to read and write on her last year of preschool. This is noticed not by her parents but by her teacher at the time, Mrs Doline, who then informed her parents about it. She likes various things as a child: reading, with a preference for children’s poetry; sneaking in her parents’ bedroom to see if she can find any books like her classmates say about their parents but she never finds their bookshelf; going to school, playing with her friends, helping her mother cook and watching her father talk about “adult stuff” to his friends.
In hindsight, this wasn’t the truth. Mr and Mrs Moinot would always threaten the other over a divorce, but in the end, they never went through with it.
Catherine is an only child, and so are her parents. Because of this, she often gets lonely and seeks playmates in the street. She lives in a suburban part of the town, allowing parents to let their children safely outside because only a few people have any interest coming there. However, there are barely any children her age in the street, and most of them are boys. She wants to play with them, she is not bothered by being a pirate for a day and an astronaut the day after. She is a prodigy student at school. She learns to talk, walk, read, write and count very quickly, albeit mathematics never is her forte. Her teachers is always impressed: she gets best grade after best grade, with a showing preference for literature-related homework and drills. Reportedy, she does her homework on all her own: her parents are unable to help her.
Who am I kidding? Everyone knows Mr and Mrs Moinot didn’t know anything. They weren’t willing to learn.
Catherine has few friends in school. She always finds herself unlike the other girls, despite their common tastes: she does not enjoy sports nor cars, she would rather read La Bibliothèque rose stories and draw flowers on a small notepad she always has on her, and yet it feels difficult to get along. The teachers tried to keep both genders apart, thinking boys were too bothersome for the girls. She wishes she could stay with the boys, play cop-and-thief with them, but she is forbidden to do so and she spends her breaks watching flowers and insects instead. During the winter, she reads in the classroom.
Catherine has, as such, mostly one friend she meets in middle school: Roxanne Roturier. They are in the same class from sixth to ninth grade, bonding over something Catherine never thought she would ever be feeling: romantic feelings for another girl, this girl being her own best friend. Luckily for her, these unwanted feelings are reciprocated: eventually, only her parents do not want to hear about their daughter’s love for girls, so she plays pretend and say Roxanne is just a very good friend, that she does not fantasize about her at nights after reading some questionable teenage novels in her bed.
I apologized extensively for being such a let-down to Roxanne.
Catherine begins high school under the best of favours: she has the top grade of her middle school at the finals in French, has a loving girlfriend and is promised to a great future, has made a friend I the person of Juliette Soissons, soon to get rid of mathematics and physics she dislikes so much. Yet, this is the time where her doubts begin to grow to an undeniable intensity: something is wrong with her, is it not?
In retrospect, I wonder how I didn’t notice it earlier.
Indeed, Catherine feels like she still does not belong with the other girls, aside from Roxanne she has a privileged relationship with and her friend Juliette, a sworn tomboy who plays in a soccer team on Wednesday afternoons after class. It is not an unusual feeling for teenagers her age, in a way, but it keeps nagging at her about her body. Whenever she looks into the glass, trying to stare at herself, she cannot.
She cannot see herself in this reflection of a fair-busted, long-haired girl. This has to be someone else, another girl whose looks are pleasing to her eyes as a lesbian, but it cannot be her. This is not her.
This is when she realizes it has never been her.
Thinking back on everything she has ever felt since puberty has started, sixteen-year-old Catherine starts researching on the computers in the school library, trying to sneak past adult eyes watching over all of the students’ online activities and past her own classmates, just in case this is all a giant lie she has fed herself because she feels like cutting her hair. Her mother would never allow her to have a “tranny cut”, so she always shakes her head at this strange want to look like someone else.
In the end, she wants to be her own person, someone she can recognize as such in a mirror. Short hair, less visible breast, dressed in pants and over dresses and pinks. She does not like this light pink her mother has tried to make her wear ever since her daughter was born. It just is not her colour, herself. She seeks for herself, pleaded a divinity she does not believe in to give back her identity.
Lost in her thoughts, her first idea is to speak about it with Roxanne. The latter tells her girlfriend to see a therapist she knows from her relatives, mentioning how she has her little idea behind why Catherine is so uncomfortable with her identity. On that day, she asks a question which gets stuck in Catherine’s brain, unable to leave her thoughts:
“Have you thought about how you may not be a girl?”
This is a question that, frankly, Catherine has never thought about. It is October when she decides to get the help of this therapist, sneaking behind her parents’ back by pretending she is simply staying at Roxanne’s or Juliette’s after school to do some homework with either of them, all the while she steals her father’s credit card to pay for the expenses as she knows his credit card code. Question after question, Internet search after Internet search, it starts to become clear to her mind, until one day it falls over her like a spotlight would blind the unprepared actor.
It is a rainy Wednesday of November. They are staying inside the building during the morning break, as Catherine is sick with yet another cold and Roxanne has insisted for them to not get wet anyway. Juliette speaks about her soccer companions and how she wants to date David, her coach’s younger cousin who is in the boys’ team. Roxanne asks if Juliette has ever thought about joining a professional team once she’s older, but the latter replies soccer is just a hobby, a passion even, but that she would rather do something great for society like becoming a teacher. When asked about what subject, she still says she wants to be a PE teacher. Unconsciously, as she looks though the window sniffling, Catherine mutters “I wish I was this David”. Juliette laughs, Roxanne gets almost offended, until she sees tears running down her girlfriend’s cheeks.
It’s all clear and she hates it, because there is now a fact in her mind she cannot remove.
Catherine Moinot is a boy.
His world shatters in front of his eyes. That first name, “Catherine”, is no longer his: he is no longer someone anyone knows. His friends stay quiet when his eyes tear up and nausea climbs out of his oesophagus, his heart’s cry. He never vomits, but the tears gets out anyway, and he apologizes to them before he can say anything. Everything starts to fall apart almost as soon as the realization happens, the meaning of any term used to refer to him lost in the sands of time. Without Roxanne and without his therapist, Mrs Flamand, he’d have definitely been lost in translation. They give him a list of things to do so to preserve a sense of identity in a time of change.
Once again, I don’t really know how that never crossed my mind earlier. It all made so much sense.
As such, the boy picks the first male name he is pleased with: Victor. Rather unoriginal, as it simply comes from his favourite author, but it does the job when “Catherine” does not. He is faced with a time where nobody calls him by this chosen name, instead continuing to refer to him as a girl. It is only natural, he thought: he had not been officially diagnosed yet, leaving him unable to press forward with making everyone adapt to his true nature. He decides to “man up”, to endure, and seeing his therapist telling him with a newfound certitude “you have gender dysphoria” should not make him this happy. It comes with all flavours of struggles to prove himself and the world this is so much more than a mere delusion, but he is going to do it.
He is going to show them he is a man.
Once the diagnosis is in, Victor is close to turning seventeen. The first step of his journey is to take hormone blockers, as he os still young enough to take these with a certain effect despite the advancement of his puberty and adolescence. He was a late bloomer, the first periods coming much later than intended, but he is thankful for it once he finds out he can block the growth of his unwanted breasts. He now has to make his body his, get rid of the girl in the mirror, and this will take a few aesthetic changes.
Victor also knows it is barely allowed to fake a parent’s signature to get such medicine as hormone blockers. He splits up with Roxanne, convinced she would not love a man and that he has other things to focus on. She is incredibly tolerant yet refuses to split entirely: she wants to be there, so he accepts her presence, because she is the only one who calls him Victor.
He sneaks behind his parents’ uncaring backs yet again to get a haircut. When he has started doing some dirty work on the Internet from the only good things he got from his parents, a computer in his bedroom so he “would stop bothering them with that computer school shit”, taking commissions for some basic writing online, Roxanne still manages to give him a way to get his hair cut for free at her sister’s hairdressing saloon. Said sister refers to him as such when she asks what he wants, to which he replies he just wants something to look manlier for the time being. His long, dark brown locks fall on the floor one by one, uncovering his shoulders without needing to be tied in a bun, he even gets small sideburns. When he looks at the end result in the mirror in front of his chair, it finally feels like looking at himself.
I remember the wide, bright, colourful grin Roxanne had on her face when her sister was finished with me. Perhaps she had always seen me as a boy when I hadn’t noticed, too caught up in trying to be a girl I would never be.
In the end, his mother screams at him about cutting his oh so beautiful hair, but Victor does not give her the attention she wants. Instead, he continues his therapy sessions, still faking his parents’ agreement, borrowing unchecked bank accounts, ordering online what he is not allowed to get in real life. His father almost spots him measuring his chest for an order, but he manages to dress up quickly again and look like he does not have the measuring tape behind his back. A couple weeks after, around the time of his seventeenth birthday, in mid-March, arrives the solution for his chest. He obviously knows he cannot wear this all-day-long, his therapist insisting heavily on him not having it on him during sleep, showering or even sports, but that’s fine. It is still much better than not having it at all.
Eleventh Grade then becomes the year where he finally gets called a man by strangers. His classmates still call him by what other people like him call his “deadname”, and yet people from other classes may refer to him as a boy. This makes his heart flutter more than he would like to admit, but Roxanne can read it perfectly on his face. He wears men’s apparel, puts on a masculinizing makeup when he rides the bus to high school, thinks about getting his driver’s licence once he is in college and continues reading Victor Hugo’s poetry.
I still have my first binder. It’s white and fitted over my chest like a tight bra, easy to hide under my clothing.
The first name “Victor” does not really fit him anymore. Spring is finally here with its flowers and just like nature gets reborn around this time of the year, he feels like he needs to find something that fits him more. He tells Roxanne about it, Roxanne who knows all his dirty secrets, when she stops before a lone flower, a misplaced daisy drowning in a sea of concrete. She glances at him, beams him a smirk and tells him with her smiling eyes: “You ever thought about a name related to flowers? You love these. I think there’s… Florian?”
Something ticks inside of him, but he cannot say what exactly. At first, he dismisses it as a light-hearted joke she has the recipe for, and it seems like she was saying it on a whim. And yet, it sticks inside his mind: when the Biology teacher tells his class about flowers, which he half-pays attention to just because it is about flowers and clearly not to study how they reproduce, he thinks back on what Roxanne said. Another light shines upon him, and it all becomes clear.
Summary: Catherine Moinot is born on March twenty-first, nineteen-eighty-five in Colombes, France. Her father is a low-wage worker in a factory of the city, her mother is a housewife who gave up on finding a job once her daughter was born. Her father comes from a low-class Lorrain family, her mother is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. A childhood in the middle of the thick urban fabric surrounding Paris, trapped between the roads and the concrete, in the outskirts of the outskirts without the pros of the richer parts of Colombes and the better landscapes of the rest of the country.
I should know that. I once was this girl.
Status: Ongoing
Notes: My notes are pretty lenghty, but please don't turn away from this story just yet because of it!
I originally planned this to be a very long oneshot, but It'll probably be a multi-chaptered fic, albeit it's probably going to be somewhat short.
I projected for a very long time on Florian without thinking I did. I just thought it was because I was intrigued, almost enticed to something I wasnt't. It all started last year, very early in the school year, when I started to think making a character out of my new Modern Lit prof was a good idea (no regret there, tbh), but it also kept crawling in the back of my mind. "Hey, maybe he's trans, even if that's probably just you ain't gonna lie. Making your character trans can't hurt if you do enough research, right?"
I still stand by that, but it's been weirder and yet more intimate to do it once the sour-ass realization of "you're not a girl" hit me like a truck in the middle of an English class.
As to the story itself, it's essentially one of Florian's backstory, but told in a weird prose.
Summary: This is the first allergy season on which he feels comfortable going to to nurse's office for his medication. He's one lucky dude.
AO3 version available here.
The worst with starting his year as a minor (when everyone else was over eighteen, to make it even better) was that the dorm still considered him underage, so he couldn’t keep most of his medicines in his dorm room. He knew service ladies would tell the dorm staff about it, and he would get problems. And he didn’t have either time or energy for problems.
Instead, he has to entrust the nurse with his most of his medicine. He’s allowed to keep his most vital pills, like his medication for asthma because that’s how severe that beast is. It’s been different, ever since the day he got an attack in front of the lunch ladies for breakfast because they had forbidden him to have his medicine with him and he forgot about going to the nurse because the night-time one was never there when you needed her.
She still isn’t.
While this hasn’t bothered until now, sadly for François, spring has rolled around. He does prefer having a warmer air around him, it’s better for his breathing, the issue isn’t there. The issue is with something spring brings to him: strong scents, unidentified particles flowing in the air, pollen. That stuff everyone is either happy to see or absolutely despise.
He’s part of the second group, because these things. These things. They get under his larynx so easily, it’s almost a joke.
The corridors are empty, because it’s only half past seven. He’s sneezed the entire night and since he’s been up, and sometimes he coughed, but it’s mostly sneezing. How many times has his head jerked back already? His roommates got worried for him, so he hurried to eat his breakfast (he wasn’t that hungry anyway, and food doesn’t taste like much when you’re afflicted with a constantly runny nose) and get downstairs and to the infirmary.
Usually, François dislikes going to the nurse’s office. He feels like he’s been there for a large part of his education. He’s always been easily sick, maybe too much, and most of the time his school didn’t allow him to have his medicine on him, so he would go there to take it. That’s how it’s always worked, even as he’s eighteen. That last part kind of sucks.
He knocks gently at the door, then opens it. He sneezes in his elbow once, twice, several times and enters, closing behind him. A middle-aged, short, greying woman dressed in whites and pinks welcome him with her warm smile. That’s why he feels a bit more comfortable going to the nurse’s office.
“Hello Edith…” he says as he sniffles, walking to her.
“Good morning, François. How are you feeling?”
“Huh… Good, but, huh…”
The nurse invites him, in a simple gesture, to sit on the examination bed. He follows through.
“You took your morning medication, right? I do not want you to have any kind of attack or nosebleed we can avoid in class.”
“I did…” He retains yet another sneeze.
Edith’s eyes mellow upon seeing him.
“Oh,” she tells him with a hint of worry in her voice, “it looks like you have a rather bad Scase of hay fever, am I wrong? Your nose is all red.”
The student simply nods in agreement, then sighs.
“I get it every year… I think it’s because I have asthma. I wish it wasn’t so bothersome.”
“It increases the chance of having it, it is sure, but the most important is to do our best to make your day better, is it not?”
He nods again.
“Then,” she answers with a smile, “let me get you your allergy medicine. They will really have to explain to me how you are still too young to handle this. I have heard that in other schools they allowed a student to keep a syringe and hormones in his room. I thought we were the most prestigious khâgne class in the country.”
After a few minutes, she hands François familiar-looking products, including a nose spray (which he knows too much by now, it’s like he’s wasting money on those more often than reasonable) and… essential oils? Why would there be oils?
“Edith?”
“Yes?”
“Why are there oils on this tray?” He asks as he takes said tray in his hands.
“Ah,” the nurse replies, “it’s a gift from the librarian. When she found out you had allergies, she wanted me to give these to you. According to her, they’re supposed to make it better for your allergies… Please take these with you, even if I get you may not want to use these in your room, especially for your roommates.”
He’s a bit embarrassed, but hey, maybe they do smell good. It’ll change from the typical smell of his medicine and whatever’s being cooked in the dorm’s cafeteria.
“Can you thank her for me then?”
“Of course.”
He takes what he has to take, slips the spray in a pocket of his coat, gets down and grabs his backpack.
“Do not forget to come back by lunch, okay?”
François beams the nurse the best grin he can pull out.
“Sure! See you later!”
He exits the room, still sniffling. Medicine takes a bit of time to act, but he's not bothered by going to the nurse's office anymore. Spring has rolled around, and he prefers the warmer air around him, and the nurse's office air smells like flowers.
Summary: It's when he sees that his student is only wearing a short-sleeved shirt and complains about the heat that he realizes he shouldn't be feeling so cold in the middle of summer.
AO3 version available here.
Man, that room sure changes temperatures very easily.
It’s a weird, weird Latin class. Well, if it wasn’t for the fact he only has one student in front of him. With her cold blue yes, Justine stares at him, waiting for the class to start. It’s their last class before the holidays, the summer holidays, and he doesn’t feel so hot. He’s even cold, you could say, which is weird because his student is only wearing a short-sleeved shirt and looks at him like he’s insane for wearing a sweater.
Honestly, what’s insane is how that region can be that cold in June.
“Huh, so… What do you wanna do, Justine? It’s not like I have much planned,” he tells her, as a way to break the silence.
She blinks at him, as if she didn’t understand.
“I have no idea… What did you have in mind, then?”
He browses his bag, getting only a few papers and a few books out, as he looks at the paper where there’s “Latin” written somewhere on.
“It’s mostly beginner-level stuff, I’m sorry. You’ll find this boring.”
A chill goes through his spine and body. That room is really, really cold.
“It’s that bad?” Justine asks back.
“Do you really want to see the future and imperfect tenses again? I’m sure you already know these already.”
“You’re… not wrong.”
He wants to smash his hand onto his face.
“I should have known you were coming… You didn’t even skip the French classes! I may have something if I dig up what remains of my stuff in the teacher’s lounge, but talk about a lame class incoming.”
“At worst, we can do what you were planning to do in French class now, right? It’s not like anyone else’s going to come anyway.”
François sits down at the desk, facing her directly.
“Hum… I didn’t have much planned for it either, haha…”
Justine’s face deadpans immediately.
“With all due respect, did you have anything planned for today?”
That’s embarrassing.
“Not really… I really thought no one was going to come. The workmates told me most of your class stopped after the class council, on Friday or on Tuesday. I thought you were going to profit off the weekend to leave the dorm too.”
“Hah, funny,” she scoffs. “The dorm isn’t open during the weekend. We weren’t joking when we said it was lame. Good riddance, by the way.”
He clutches his arms and rubs them, more and more furiously. He has to regain some warmth. He’s freezing his ass over there.
“Sir?”
“T-then… What about we just have a… nice talk? Clearly, we both don’t want to have that class together…”
“That’s about right…” Justine sighs. “Sir, what’s wrong?”
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong? You look like you’re cold over there, but it’s hot as hell in here.”
One of them is wrong, that’s for sure. He would say he’s the one wrong, especially now that…
“Sir?! Sir, you’re alright?!” she screams as he suddenly coughs harshly.
It takes a few moments for the teacher to go back to normal. Once he does, he can fully see her worried for him. Urgh, he hates that! It’s her last day of class, she’s not supposed to get worried of everything!
“Y-yeah, I’m fine… I guess I’m a little sick then, it has to be why I’ve been cold like that since I woke up…”
“Sir, with all due respect, maybe you should have stayed in bed. It’s not like you’re making an important class at the moment anyway, right?”
He scratches the back of his head, let out a small laugh, then a small cough. He did work a lot lately, to prepare the first-years for their second year with a neat little introductory lesson. But it’s not like he can give up on her altogether to go back home.
“Even if I could right now, Justine,” he tells her, “I can’t really do so when I have a student in class. It’s not how it works.”
“Sir. There’s fucking nobody in that school anymore. The halls are empty. The cultural space is empty. The yard is empty. There’s you, me, and some administrative staff. As long as I’m with you, and for the remaining of the classes, it’ll be alright.”
“I’m not going back home with you, Justine.”
She blushes instantly.
“I-I never said that!! I meant to say, we can exit the school and nobody would bat an eyelash! Well, I do have a suitcase to get back at my dorm at noon, but that’s it, really.”
“Why would we even… do that?”
Fuck. He feels a sudden rise of heat. He takes of his sweater, and adjusts his button-up shirt accordingly by opening the first button. Sweat floods his back.
“To at least buy you some medicine. You sound like you need some fever reducers, sir.”
“How do you know I have a fever?”
That really slipped out of his mouth, goddammit!
Justine’s face gets a shade paler.
“You’re… you’re really sick, sir…?” she mutters.
François takes off his glasses, rubs his face with his hand, and looks at her. She’s a bit too close for him to see him clearly, but that’s not that bad, really.
“I do have a tiny fever, but it’s nothing major. I’m sorry for worrying you that badly, Justine.”
“The pharmacy outing was mostly a joke, but I guess we could still go if you get worse.”
That gets a small laugh out of him, as he rubs his eyes and put his glasses back on.
“I’ll consider the suggestion, thank you… For now, we’re meant to chat a little on whatever’s on our minds, right? I promise not to pass out, if it makes anything better.”
Summary: Usually, it's magisters who help their trainees around.
But when your magister is sick, you have to help them, right?
Notes: Story dedicated to @taylortut aka Beef Mom (and a follower of this blog), based on this prompt by @toosicktoocare. These two persons have been a great inspiration for my work and me.
Alternate canon exploring the possibility of François being Florian’s disciple in a way.
AO3 version available here.
There are empty days, and there are full and busy days at college. Today is one of the busiest days they’ve got in ages, as they browse a hundred books a day in hope to find what they need for that one thesis his training period magister is writing. When everyone thinks he’s being a slave, François doesn’t think so: each book he opens up is a book he’ll probably remember when his time to write his thesis comes around. For now, he simply browses books, trying to find which one will suit his magister best. It’s simpler than it sounds, really.
He considers himself lucky that the magister lets his door open for them to chat easily. François really enjoys speaking with him: they share most of their opinions on literature, view on people, etc. He even got behind the magister’s Parisian façade, as soon as he spilled his cup of coffee on the ground and got help for cleaning.
The young trainee quickly glances at the half-opened the door, only to see the taller man drowning between two piles of books (he’s starting to feel guilty: he’s the one who found and brought those to him), then gets back to reading. He’s found some more books on Aragon which could be of some interest…
“François?” a familiar voice calls for him.
“Yeah?”
“Are you cold?”
Curious, if not puzzled, François gets up from his spot and walks to the door, only to see his magister leaning against the door frame, now that the door is fully opened. The latter seems like he’s freezing on the spot, desperately clutching his arms together in an attempt to heat up (he guesses so, at least? He’s not cold at all, and he’s in a plain shirt when his superior is wearing a sweater). Aside from that, he looks alright. And aside from the dark rings under his eyes, but that’s a given when you work a ton in a few days.
“No, why?” is all François asks.
His magister, a tall brown-haired man with a three-day beard and huge glasses, frowns and looks away. His hands seem to dig even deeper inside the tight embrace of his arms, clawing the fabric for even an ounce of warmth.
“Huh, this is weird. I cannot get warm, for some reason,” he replies. “Well, this is a minor thing. We need to get back to work, François.”
He turns his back to him, heading to his office, as his subordinate desperately try to keep him back.
“But…”
The frown intensifies as the magister glances to his trainee.
“I said, we need to get back to work.”
Usually, François is assertive. He obeys. But this time, as his training period master walks back into his office, he follows through, feeling himself frown. This isn’t normal. His “boss”, if he can call the other teacher so, isn’t doing as well as he would like him to think. So he follows. The pit in his stomach is not stopping him. The pinch of his heart doesn’t stop him either. So he follows.
He’s seen this office before. It’s pretty classic, with a wooden floor, wooden furniture, somewhere to hang hats, coats, gloves, scarfs on. A desk covered in books and paper sheets. The magister sits down in his chair again.
“You’re sick?” the trainee eventually asks, glancing over the book to see the tired face of the professor in the room.
He shakes his head as he sinks deeper into his chair, exhaling feebly.
“No, I am not. Do not worry for me.”
Now he doubts that statement. François creeps behind the professor and puts a hand on his forehead. There is a familiar warmth under his fingers, a warmth which is usually his, but for once he gets to be the one who serves a living thermometer. As unprecise as it would be.
“You’re sick!” he yells in the middle of the office. He’s trying his hardest to sound angry, no matter how hypocritical he’s being, but all he ends up doing is sounding worried. Which he is. And which he shouldn’t be.
“I am fine, François, really… Don’t stress over it…”
“No, you’re sick! You have a fever, Florian!”
…did he just say his first name out loud like that?
Did he just do that?!
He’s not supposed to do that!! He’s supposed to call him Sir, right?!
“I-I meant sir!! Prof Moinot, you’re sick, you’ve got a fever!!” François blurts out in high-pitched screams.
All Mr Moinot does is rub his head.
“Please calm down, François… I’ve already told you that you could call me by my first name, I don’t want that stupid hierarchy between us… Now please spare me your yelling because I’ll actually get a headache from those…”
The young man tries his hardest at calming down: breathe in, breathe out, resume with where he was before. After a few seconds, he’s back to a somewhat normal stature.
“Ahem… As I said, you have a fever, sir.
“That’s Florian for you,” the prof snaps back. “I also happen to have work, so while I appreciate your solicitude, I would like to…”
He looks up. François isn’t listening to him, at least not to his excuses, as he glances around the room, then points out the couch next to a small bookshelf.
“Look,” he says, “let’s give you medicine and let you take a small break, okay? I’m your assistant, lemme do my job, m’kay? Take a nap and we’ll see when you wake up.”
Florian raises an eyebrow. The usually assertive, submissive trainee is ordering him around like he was a bad child. A smirk creeps on his face. It amuses him so much, in fact, he’s going to do just that. He gets up from his chair and goes to lie down on the couch, grabbing his coat to serve as a blanket on his way there.
François can barely believe what he’s seeing. His boss has just accepted to go to sleep because he told him too. That’s surrealist! Is he dreaming? He would slap himself was he not taken by the situation and worried. Instead, he goes to get some ibuprofen (he can take it, despite his haemophilia) in his bag (he would lie if he said he never got headaches from working intensely), a glass of water and gives it to the older teacher.
Barely minutes after, Mr Moinot is completely out, snoring.
The trainee sighs in relief. That was much more stressful than he had thought it would be. Now that that’s out of the way, he goes on to work on whatever Mr Moinot was doing. Turns out it’s mostly taking notes on books in order to have a sooth writing once he turns out his computer. François exhales again: this is going to be easier than he thought, so he sits down in the boss’s chair, turns once or twice on himself just because it’s funny, and starts his work.
Now if only Florian’s desk wasn’t entirely set up for a right-handed writer, that would be nice. Instead, he’s stuck with a tiny space for his actual writing hand. Moving a few books here and there should help…
The clock keeps ticking as he hears more and more coughing from his left. A few glances here and there, the only times he even breaks his focus, make him notice the shivers get more and more regular and the flush eats out his face more and more. Each time he looks, François feels his heart sink a little deeper, worry bubbling down his veins. He hates seeing his friend like this.
Did he just think they were friends? Man, they must be closer than he thought.
Eventually, time to go home gets around. That’s when François hears a wet cough sound and sees his workmate right next to him. He looks like shit.
“Did… did you do all of the work…?” he croaks out before coughing.
“Not all of it, but most of it, I guess… Don’t worry, all you need is to get home to your bed and rest!”
The younger man shines him his brightest, worried grin. He gets up from his chair, the prof already dressed in his coat and scarf.
“Yeah, let’s go home…”
As they go downstairs, François watches carefully for his magister not to fall in the stairs.
“Say,” the latter asks, “do you have a way to go home…? It’s already late around here…” Another cough rattles his chest.
“Usually I take the subway,” he replies, “but you sound like you’re the one who’s gonna need some help with that. I’ve got my driver’s licence, I can drive you home with your car.”
“I’m not against that…”
“I’ll just have to go back home from there. That’s no big deal.”
Florian’s face emerges from his brown scarf.
“Please be our guest, François…! I’m sure my wife won’t mind having you around…”
The trainee stops in his tracks, looks back at his magister, his face conflicted between happiness and concern.
“Really?”
Florian beams him a small smile.
“Of course… Now, if you don’t mind, can we get back as soon as possible…? She’s going to worry for me…”
Summary: They were right about self-care. He's terrible at it, but he tries his best, as he tries feverishly to prevent himself from going into deliriums.
AO3 version available here.
They were right about self-care. He’s terrible at it.
All alone in an untidy, messy flat is a student desperately trying to tame down what’s currently afflicting him: a powerful, ill-intentioned strain of influenza. Of course, he would catch it: he has been working a lot lately, hasn’t he?
The only reason he even knows why he’s sick is because Henri brought the doctor to him. Otherwise, really, he was barely able to get up. He’s still barely able to get out of bed as he speaks. Well, thinks, since his voice has gone out this morning. That’s painful, by the way.
His wobbly arm struggles to reach the washcloth which fell from his head not too long ago. He doesn’t remember when exactly, or how, but it fell off. That’s the issue with being sick: the fever is always the worst. It’s always what strikes him the most. Not the cough, not the stuffed nose, not even the muscle aches and the unending want to end it off once and for all.
No, the fever is the goddamn worst.
It’s the worst because, as he is, Florian tends to overwork himself. He knows that. He’s the only one who doesn’t have a problem with it around here. He explains it as passion, the absolute will to power through what fascinates him and encourages him to keep on going and going. He lives for this. He lives for literature, almost in a romantic fashion, wanting to know and master everything he has under his hands.
Other people would explain it as him being a stubborn idiot who can’t ever stop working or thinking about something not his books, or his girlfriend for all it matters. They treat it like he’s been with a girl for the first time: it’s the second, but it’s the first one who knows from the get-go what he really is. Roxanne is amazing and he’s grateful for her: however, she’s a lesbian, and he’s not a girl. That’s not how it works, but they remained great friends after their couple ended in deep respect and profound platonic bonds.
It’s also the worst because it messes with his brain badly. Constant headaches, a sharp pain behind his eyes and all around his head, deliriums, illusions, hallucinations. A real bane. He can’t even read when it’s at its paroxysm: it even hurts to open a book when that happens. He can barely open up his phone, actually. And he always wants to bury himself in his sheets, only to desire moving in a fridge two minutes later, then back to cuddling with the heater.
It’s annoying and counter-productive. How is he supposed to work on an essay or take notes on a fantastic book when there’s such a thing wrapped around his brain?
Fevers also remind Florian of one thing. He’s easily lonely when he’s sick. Back when he still had parents, his mother would stay at home when he was ill. Roxanne would visit after school. Chris and Henri took care of him after classes or on weekends they stayed at school. But now that he lives alone, in his own flat he pays by himself, he doesn’t have anyone to bother with his fevers and his frequent illnesses because he’s always tired.
His fault. His fault, so he doesn’t call anyone over to see him in wrecked state. A ship sunk in blankets.
His hand manages to grab the washcloth. With the tiniest footsteps, he manages to dip it in the bucket’s water. He has to bring the fever down, and fast. It’s not at forty yet, but if it reaches that stage, he’s good for dead. He never knows what to expect from his fever dreams and his deliriums, except either slipping back into his former selves and spewing his dirty secrets around, or get vivid nightmares and failing to access the sleep he needs to recover quickly.
As he wipes the sweat from his face, he thinks of one thing. It’s been a while since Chris and Henri had to guess why he wasn’t attending class, if they even noticed it. Annabelle would probably notice: they attend the same classes. He’s not so sure for Chris, but Henri was the one to bring him the doctor. They should had noticed he was missing, right? Or maybe he sent embarrassing stuff again…
He goes back into his fort of blankets and cushions. It’s freezing and burning all around him. When did he last take fever reducers? He should take his temperature. A thermometer, his mouth, a beeping sound, 39.8. It’s getting dangerous around here. He feels very uneasy, right now, his head is spinning… He can’t pass out now… Not when he’s alone and defenceless…
He hears someone rummage through the door. He has to get up, fast, tell them not to enter. Nobody can see him like that. He looks like garbage. He takes a fever reducer, not giving a damn about when he last took one, and attempts at getting up, but he just falls. His head smashes on the ground, his knees and elbows hurt, his glasses fell off his nose. His vision is blurry.
The door opens by itself, and enters a new character into the play. He wishes it wasn’t her, of everyone who knows where he lives.
“Florian, darling??” a familiar voice screams as she runs towards him on small heels.
He rises his eyes towards the source of the sound. It’s all blurry so he can’t distinguish much, but at least, he’s certain it’s her. The warm colours, the perfume, the voice…
“Anna…belle…?” painfully exits his mouth as he coughs immediately after.
It seems like she gets down to him.
“Oh my god, darling, you look awful… Let’s get you to bed, shall we?”
He just nods. He doesn’t have any energy left to refuse such a thing. She wraps her arms around him, get him up with some grunts and in an ending pant.
“You are burning underneath… You are lucky I was there…”
A few instants later, he’s back in bed, except he’s wearing different cloths and has a fully new washcloth on his forehead.
“You have such a high fever,” she sighs as she looks at the thermometer, “goodness gracious… You need to take care of yourself more, Florian.”
He loves her voice but he also hates the tone she’s taking. He hates hearing her worry in general anyway.
“I tried though…”
Annabelle stares at the nightstand next to her, with something between disdain and upset feelings.
“I see so… Fever reducers aren’t enough and you know it, honey. You also need to rest instead of panicking… You know only a few people have the key to your flat.”
“I guess I never learnt to…”
“Hush now,” her tone gets stern, “your voice is almost gone.” She strokes a hand over his exposed cheek (the other one being buried inside his pillow). “Do you need anything else?”
He just moves his head in a pitiful no.
No, instead, he just falls asleep because he’s more tired than he remembered, but he gets to fall asleep with her smiling to him and wishing him a good night. He can even feel her kiss before it all goes black.
Summary: When you fail to effectively tame a fever down, you get exposed to getting stuff revealed in your face. Christian and Henri happen to discover a well-hidden secret of their roommate and friend, just because he's that delirious.
And delirious Florian is also spewing his backstory like there's no tomorrow.
Notes: Warning ahead for transidentity discussion and I think dissociation?
I actually had that idea in mind since the day I mentioned it in Sollicitude chapter 4 and wrote out the prompts forf Fever February. I didn't know where to end it sadly, but nothing prevents me from rewriting it one day.
Except Chris or Henri mentions Florian said his parents were dead, but it was all metaphorical in literature nerd's mind. I guess.
AO3 version available here.
The small dorm room fills with the smells of sweat and blood as a stubbled young man is desperately filling a bucket of cold water. That implies rushing to the floor’s shared bathrooms as soon as possible, with zero care about running into someone as long as the bucket is empty.
Of course, that happens.
He runs into a familiar face from their class. Of fucking course.
“Christian?!” the other glassed man reacts, clearly upset by just getting smashed into. “Can I know what the hell you, Florian and Henri are up to, once and for all? You’re making too much noise for anyone to focus properly!”
“Don’t have time for you Thomas,” he blurts out as he needs to stop for the least amount of time possible, “I have a fever to bring down!”
As he rushes to the bathroom holding his trusty bucket (whose nickname is Serge because that’s how crazy the situation has become), he can hear his classmate wonder aloud about what fever he’s talking about. Too bad he won’t get to know for now, huh.
Once he’s back with a bucket which could freeze his hands, Christian carefully puts it down next to the only occupied bed of the room. Henri is still there, sitting on a chair, wiping their roommate’s face. Roommate whose face displays something like torture and agony, if his constant moaning and clenched teeth are any indication of how he feels like.
“Thomas’s wondering what the fuck we’re doing. What do we tell him?”
“I’ll take care of it when I get to go the goddamn bathroom,” Henri grunts back. “For now, go fetch me a towel.”
And so Christian does, until he realizes it’s either his or Henri’s. He sighs and grabs his, throws it at his other roommate, and goes back into the main part of the room.
“If you have to piss,” he tells Henri, “let me take care of Flo for a bit. You sound like you’ve been there all night,” he pauses, “which is a bit true, after all.”
Henri gets up, stumbling upon himself, then looks at his own roommate.
“Thanks a bunch, man. I’m coming back asap.”
He then leaves the room, sighing in relief, as Christian takes his place on the chair. For the first time of the day, he gets to see how their friend is actually doing.
And it’s a goddamn catastrophe.
Florian is clutching the sheets, panting and grunting at the same time, clutching his teeth as he contorts, maybe trying to get rid of the fever. It’s become impossible to take his temperature with the only thermometer they have, as he refuses to even open his mouth now. They can only guess the fever isn’t lowering in the slightest, considering he’s been that miserable for a full day now. That was the worst time to be Sunday, because they know for sure he can’t afford hospitalization, nor losing his side job. There’s also no nurse on Sundays because school nurses are the worst.
So instead, they’re stuck with a very ill and feverish Florian, because the guy is intelligent enough to be a literature master but dumb enough to overwork himself to a terrible fever which wants to destroy everything about him. That’s terrifying, in a way, how not himself he is when he’s afflicted with a severe ailment.
For the first time in what feels like ages, he creaks his eyes open. Christian is already grabbing his glasses, neatly folded on the nightstand, to give him because otherwise he’s blind as a bat. One time, he mistook Sophia for Bouquinerie, and while that was hilarious, it’s the moment for him to mistake him for whatever teacher they have he doesn’t like, no matter how far the stretch ends up being.
He can already see that his eyes, despite being mainly closed down, are bloodshot and unfocused. His friend probably won’t stay up for long enough for them to explain to him everything and why he shouldn’t worry about class. He’s been in-and-out so much, he probably thinks it’s either Friday or Monday.
The sick one of them stirs numbly, coughs, then stares directly at him with the weakest glaze Christian has ever seen.
“D-dad…?” he slurs before coughing again.
Uh-oh, seems like he’s in for a wild ride.
“No, I’m not your dad Flo. I’m Chris, your roommate.”
“I thought you were gone dad…”
Okay, he’s fucked to Jupiter and back.
Maybe calling him by his full name will work…
“Florian? Florian, you’re with us? Florian?”
Instead of a response, all he gets is shivers down his spine from how out of reality his friend is. It’s not just the eyes: it’s also the half-opened mouth, the pants, the frowned eyebrows… Everything in him screams fever: his deadly pale yet flushed face, the sweat pearling down his temples Christian wipes away in vain, his dark rings… It’s almost not Florian anymore.
“Florian…? That’s got a nice ring to it, dad…”
He isn’t even reacting to his own name. Great. That’s just great. How is a forsaken college student supposed to deal with identity-removing deliriums like that?!
“What do you mean? That’s your name. You’re Florian Moinot.”
“Dad… I’m supposed to choose my new name… Not you… I like it a lot though… Reminds me of flowers…”
Christian feels a drop of cold sweat going down his temple. Not only is Florian thinking he’s his father: he’s speaking like he isn’t even Florian in the first place! How is he also supposed to give back his identity so he’s… Oh, right, he heard one name completely stranger to both Henri and him, one time, when Florian had fallen asleep on his work yet again.
“Catherine?”
“Yeah…?”
Are you fucking kidding him. This is the name he reacts to? Christian needs an explanation, right now. And maybe a week worth of rest, because that’s some paranormal stuff.
Henri comes back into the room, looking refreshed.
“How’s it going with Flo, Chris?” he asks as he grabs a second chair and joins his roommates.
“Bad,” Christian replies, “very bad. He’s conscious, but he’s clearly not with us. He doesn’t even react to his first name, Henri! The only way to get his attention is to somehow call him Catherine.”
“Catherine? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know, right? He even said once he hated that name, when we wanted to name the orchid. That’s weird he would react to that.”
“Have you tried making him a little less hot in there? Like opening his shirt?”
“Mom…?”
Christian and Henri both stared at each other. Now that didn’t make any sense, it was twice the wrong gender.
“Flo… I mean Catherine, we aren’t your parents,” he said as a pitiful attempt not to be the mother, which would have made Christian laugh far more than his small snickers.
The glasses-wearing man went to unbutton a bit his friend’s pyjama top as Henri made diversion.
“I know your sight is probably garbage right now, but we aren’t your parents, at all. You’re in Lakanal, F… Catherine.”
“Lakanal… That’s not where I have class… Where’s the school…? Mom…?”
“Chris,” Henri’s voice shifts to worry, “I think he’s back in high school in his mind. No wonder why he doesn’t recognize us.”
“He’s got a weird undershirt. Do I take it off?”
“No!!”
Florian suddenly crawls back into a ball.
“Don’t touch that! Don’t…. touch that…”
It looks he’s going to pass out for a few seconds, then he’s back to… whatever the hell he’s in right now.
“I thought you were gone… Mom… Dad…”
Christian and Henri glance at each other and just keep quiet. There’s no way in speaking to Florian: he’s right now too far gone for them to bring him back to reason. Maybe they’ll get something if they let him babble his delirium away.
“You said you’d disowned me… That you’d never see my face again… I’m surprised you changed your minds about that… It’s too late though, I’m getting to Lakanal whether you want it or not…”
Oh, so the time has gone by in his mind. His voice trembles, which is quite the disturbing sight for both his friends, who’ve never seen him that way until that very moment.
“Don’t even call me Catherine again… I’m not Catherine… She’s your invention…”
That’s such a puzzle.
His eyes close down again as he inhales and exhales heavily, with labour, before they open up again. They look much more focused this time, and he grabs his glasses by himself. Henri puts a hand on his forehead: the small smile on his face can only indicate the fever has lowered for a bit.
“Florian, you’re back with us?” Christian asks. Urgh, the worry dripping down from his mouth is so cheesy.
“What do you mean, back with you…? I just woke up, right… You two seem like you’ve seen a ghost…”
Henri grabs the fallen washcloth, dips it in Serge, and wipes the sick guy’s face again, before repeating the process and just letting it there.
“Your fever got so high you started to hallucinate we were your parents,” explains Christian to the best of his understandings. “Your mind was stuck in high school, that scared the crap out of us!”
He blinks a few times, rubs his eyes and blushes. His eyes grow wide.
“W-wait, high school, you said?! Tell me,” he suddenly gets upset, “was I reacting to my own name? Florian, I mean.”
“That’s a very specific question there,” Henri replies, “but you weren’t reacting to it. You were reacting to another name, though.”
“Catherine.”
Henri and Christian don’t have to look at each other to know they wonder about the same thing.
“How did you guess?” Henri asks.
Florian’s eyes get dark, his glaze lowers, and he looks at his hands and chest area.
“That’s my given name.”
The cold, atone voice sends shivers down the two guys’ spines. This is completely out-of-character.
“Your given name isn’t Florian? That’s weird as fuck.”
“No, it was Catherine… And that’s a long story for another day, but I guess I should tell you something I’ve hidden for a while…”
Henri deadpans a bit.
“Will it explain the syringe in your nightstand and the used pads from the bathroom when we’re all single? Well, especially you and Chris I mean.”
“It does. Guys, I’m…”
His face distorts into sorrow as he seems to choke on his words.
“I’m… I’m… I’m a… I’m t… T…”
He buries himself in his hands, reddening by the second. He eventually spits out his response in a rush.
“I’m born female, I’m transitioning, please don’t ask, just call me Florian and we’ll get this over with!!”
The two friends look at each other in confusion, then glance at their roommate with the most compassionate look. That’s so fucking cheesy. Henri puts a hand on his left shoulder, Christian on the right one.
“Hey, Flo. You’ve always been Flo to us,” Henri says, “and you’ll always be Flo. We don’t care you were born a Catherine or whatever.”
“Henri’s right, Flo,” Christian adds. “Your parents may have been assholes, but we couldn’t care less. You’re our Flo, understood? We’ll not let you down for such a…” Maybe “trivial” is undermining the issue at stake. “Such a reason.”
Florian’s face radiates with a small but heartfelt smile.
Summary: Weird behaviours sometimes don't tell whether or not your GF has a fever or not. Especially if she denies the thermometer because she's stubborn.
That's a good thing Juliette is as stubborn as she can gets.
Notes: It's very short, but it's been ages since I last wrote these two so it feels nice.
AO3 version available here.
In her hand, a thermometer. In her girlfriend’s hand, a box of medicine and a washcloth. The latter has a slight, amused smile and frowned eyebrows. Who can tell what she feels right now, but there is one thing sure: Sarah is hating every bit of the situation, so bad.
“39.1,” her voice says as she reads the thermometer. Fucking plastic stick of hell. Pla-stick, in a way.
That pun totally wasn’t because she’s ill. She’s a natural punster, what do you mean? She loves puns. She really does.
“You’re sick,” is all she gets in return. Good answering skills her girlfriend’s got there.
“Yeah, so what? You’re gonna pin me to the bed and fuck me? You’d be the dom for once. Ain’t against that.”
Red pours all over Juliette’s face, just as her eye twitches.
“Y-you didn’t have to phrase it like that!!”
She has a giant smile on her face. It’s way too funny to tease her usual stoic and almost no-fun-allowed partner.
“Anyway,” Juliette gets back on track, “it means you’re staying here. No school for you, or else I’ll make sure your uncle knows about it.”
“As if Uncle Bernard would be able to do anything against me. You’re funny today.”
“Then I’ll tell Luc, and maybe Raphaëlle while I’m at it.”
“You sound like a brat who goes to her dad anytime someone refuses her something.”
“And you sound like someone who’s just asking to pass out in front of a class. It’s not like that’s how we first got together, am I right?”
That girl was the biggest hypocrite ever, but she was striking when she wanted.
“Like you’re in any good place to tell me to sleep a fever off,” Sarah responds. “The entire teacher crew nicknames you The Unstoppable for all the wrong reasons.”
“I never said you had to do that. I know you won’t anyway. You just stay home while I go face off unwilling students. That’ll be a nice change of pace.”
“I can’t object that. I get to stay in bed if I want while you go work your ass off and bear JR’s eternal rant on how things were better before.”
Juliette’s face deadpans instantly.
“Please give me whatever you have so I can skip work and not face him.”
“And miss work? You ain’t doing that, ever, Miss Work.”
“Oh my God even Luc doesn’t make puns that bad when he’s drunk.”
“You haven’t seen me drunk then.”
“I hope never to do so or I’ll die of punitis.”
Sarah gets up, throwing the thermometer on the bed.
“Joking aside, fuck that sick day bullshit. I’m going to work anyway, whether you want it or not. Either you’re the hypocrite, or I am, and right now I prefer to be the hypocrite.”
Two tanner hands land on her shoulders. She has class in an hour, and she would be very grateful for her girlfriend to stop annoy her and go to fucking work already.
“There’s one hypocrisy that’s better than the other for you, and I think that’s mine. You stay in bed.”
“Yeah, yeah, let me use my getaway card. I have Eleventh Graders and they have a final at the end of the year in my subject, so be nice and don’t make me repeat myself!”
Juliette slams a washcloth on her head and, in a moment of inattention, pushes her on the bed. Her dark rings finally complement her stare. Her playful smile is now fully replaced with an expression of anger, but Sarah knows better than that. She knows it’s worry.
“You stay here! No amount of denial will make you forget about that fever. That’ll just be dumb of you to go to work.”
Sarah isn’t the kind to resign, and her girlfriend knows it, but she prefers to give up for once. There’s nothing to gain in getting dizzy and pissing her off to the point of no-return.
“You gave up?”
“Yeah. What more do you want?”
Instead of replying to her with words, Juliette bends over and gives her a peck on the forehead. Now that’s weird. Maybe Sarah should check if her fever hasn’t risen since earlier.
“You’re sick too, right?” she asks.
“What do you mean?” replies Juliette, tilting her head in confusion. “I feel perfectly fine, for once.”
“You kissed me! Usually you’re lying around waiting for me to do that!”
It gets a loud, heartfelt giggle out of the coldest of them.
“That’s what got you worried for me?! I clearly didn’t expect that from you!”
It’s Sarah’s turn to be godawfully embarrassed.
“You just have to be less cold then!”
“Yeah, I’ll try, maybe,” she replies as she pops some headache medicine out of a box and put them on the nightstand.
She glances at her watch.
“I have to leave you, or else I’ll never get my photocopies. You know how the guys are. See you later, darling.”
Yeah, Sarah may have a fever, but she’s not the one being delirious of them.
Summary: New school, new job. Today is a lot of news for a newly-subbing teacher who doesn't really get everything that's going on. He does meet two peculiar persons, though... Including one who makes him discover he's probably not doing so hot.
Notes: This is an Alternate Canon, so it explores a bit an alternate timeline where Fran is a substitute at Rimbaud.
AO3 version available here.
It’s pretty cold outside, but it’s nothing surprising. It’s winter and it’s always pretty cold, most of the time humid too, but today the freezing and dry air hurts his throat and lungs more than usual. It’s okay: he’s taken his asthma medicine this morning. He tends to be forget about it often, but lately he’s been on a roll. He’s still expecting the visit of his monthly crisis.
From the other side of Gambetta Lane, the “pool side” as they call it (to be distinguished from the “library side”, sides which are separated by the building), he can see his current workplace: one of the most known public high schools of the region. Must be the Dance speciality they propose here, because otherwise, it’s ordinary.
The sign of the school reads “Arthur Rimbaud High School” in white letters over a black sign, looking at Gambetta Lane, fixated on the corridor linking the second stories of the main building and a smaller one usually nicknamed “the green rooms”. It’s thanks to their green linoleum floor. These guys have a really weird taste for floor colours, he first thought when he stepped foot inside the school,
He arrives in the teacher’s lounge just fine. There, he comes across a bunch of his workmates, most of them he still doesn’t know much. He’s only here for a substitution after all, and he wasn’t so happy to leave Italy for whatever that school was.
This is the first year he gets to be an actual teacher, not just some assistant who barely sees students. The city is a calm one with a swamp nearby. La Sorbonne and the rich part of Paris are very far from where he currently is, and that should sadden him, but he’s not that sad. He didn’t even cry when he realized he had to at least rent a place to live in.
The thing is that he’s an agrégé doing a certified teacher’s job. His former classmates would laugh at his “sorry ass” would they know. He doesn’t know, he lost contact with them years ago. As soon as he got to “graduate” from Henri IV, actually. He never wants to see most of them ever again, and the ones he wanted to keep in contact with remain his friends to this very day. It’s crazy how these people were hungry for fame and recognition.
The main issue he has with the school is how cold it feels. The school is badly isolated: a leftover from the different eras of building mixing in together. The walls of the lounge aren’t the oldest: the part of the school he has to teach in is the worst.
The Coste Pavilion is by far the part of the high school which is the most sensible to temperatures from the outside. It’s a square-shaped block of plastic, pre-built in the nineties because of the school’s growth spurt. They have their eyes on a to-be-abandoned building nearby of a professional high school (whose name he can’t remember), but for now, they have to with the “The Prebuilt”. That’s the name students have started to call the thing before he even joined.
He has few classes today. The teacher he substitutes for is about to retire he heard, and his niece is also a teacher there. Some say she’s a lovely lady, others say she’s fierce and terrible. While he’s sure it depends on whether or not people prefer looks over brains, it’s not much of his concern until he comes across her. Apparently, she has a deep voice and freckles.
“Oh,” someone calls for him, “you must be Bernard’s substitute… What’s your name already?”
If he remembers correctly, she’s an Ancient Literature teacher too. She may be called Rose, or Renée, maybe Raphaëlle, but it really doesn’t ring much to him right now.
“Bernard Leeht, you mean? That’s me,” he replies.
Her pale features soften up, to the point her eyes look like they’re made of turquoise cotton.
“My name is Raphaëlle Ralousse, and I’m in short the Latin teacher of the tenth graders. I also get to teach French and Literature here and there.”
“Don’t you have that weird… Literature-Society thing too?” he asks, remembering reading “RALOUSSE” on classroom timetables somewhere around the Prebuilt.
“It’s right. I’m paired with a History-Geo teacher you may have seen around… She usually stays by herself in a classroom, so you may not have…” Her face slightly changes, then goes back to her calm expression. “Oh, excuse me, I rambled. Can I get a small presentation of you?”
He clears his throat for emphasis and gives her his warmest smile (as warm as it can get when he feels an incoming headache).
“I’m François Bannaire. I’m a doctoring teacher in Ancient Literature, and I’m subbing for a guy named Bernard Leeht at the moment… Nice to meet you!”
His voice is hoarser than he remembers. That’s weird.
“I’m glad to meet you too, François. Have you been shown around already?”
“Huh, yeah, I visited a bit on yesterday… I think I have class in not too long though, so maybe I should get going…”
“I have class too. Have a nice day.”
“Have a nice day too!”
After this is done, he rushes to the Prebuilt, where a class of ES eleventh graders await him. That’s his first real class, ever, so he’s really nervous about that: he’s heard the 1ES1 kids weren’t exactly the calmest, nor the most attentive to French of all things. He doesn’t really know how these are: he graduated high school in Literature, not Economic and Social. He’ll get to know soon, he thinks.
When he gets there, he finds a bunch of students in a disorganized state and a cluttered corridor. Right. Somebody probably told him how awful the circulation was in these narrow passageways between classrooms. The only ones he can distinguish are Raphaëlle thanks to her waist-long red hair and one or two students here and there, including a blond girl on her phone with headphones.
François smiles to whoever is in front of the door, and the girl lifts her eyes from the screen in her hands. He opens the door after a bit of troubles unlocking it, then enters in a swift move, inviting everyone to come in. They follow, most of them with slow feet.
He has to wait for a few minutes for everyone to get installed and going. He sees their face as a large disappointment: for once that a teacher can substitute for someone, the students look like they’re the last excited about the ordeal. He should have expected that from ES majors, right? He still thought it could be okay because they have that anticipated French final at the end of the year, but they don’t seem that pressured to get a substitute for an old man who sadly injured himself.
There’s just that one girl staring at him as if he was from another planet. Maybe he is, to their eyes, after all.
“Hello everyone!” he yells so people calm down, and surprisingly enough, it does work. Now his throat just hurts, so he clears it. Oh well, now he can move on.
“I’ll be Mr Leeht’s substitute for at least January to April, as your teacher recovers from…” Oh, maybe he shouldn’t be so precise, “whatever happened to him, who am I to know. I hope we can get along.”
He grabs a marker from his bag, his worn-out blue backpack, and looks at the pristine white board. Now that’s something he hasn’t seen in years. He’s about to write his first name with his last name, but then remembers it’s high school, so he just writes “Mr” instead.
“I’m Mr Bannaire, and we’ll have class for that amount of time. I’m very happy to meet you all, but before we can start class, I have to see who is here and who isn’t. It’ll help me learn all of your names.”
He turns on the desktop, remembers how awfully old computers are (he’s used to his personal laptop he loves very much, thank you), enters the temporary login he’s been given (francois.bannaire, password 02121988, he has to change it though) and enters it yet again on that weird program he’s never used before.
Pronote, huh. The login interface is simple: enter F. BANNAIRE, enter the generic password he wrote down inside his agenda, profit. He goes to the rollcall section of the program and starts reading the list out loud, checking after each name if a hand is risen and the face associated to it if so. He gets to see the girl who started at him, who is now on the front row next to the door, is called Justine Lhotar. “Justine” will do. He finishes the rollcall, ticks “call over” and goes back to the class.
The class goes… alright. The students are not exactly proactive, albeit they look a bit less bored than he imagined them before. Thanks, temporary workmates. He knows some of them are on their phones, so he threatens them with a supplementary homework, and it works instantly. He can’t hide the smirk on his face when he realizes it actually works.
During the break, he sees most students go outside, except for some including the girl who struck his eyes. He doesn’t know what is so striking within her: maybe it’s her weird small bag where she seems to put everything from her pens to her cafeteria card (reminds him of that weird “confirm you’ll eat at the canteen today” system these guys have). It’s probably her loneliness within a class made out of happy, chattering teens. Maybe she reminds him of himself when he attended high school. Oh well. He’ll probably never see her again after the substitution anyway.
The break sounds very early (three minutes is very short for a mid-class break, damn), and he asks politely everyone to come in again to the people in the corridor. Everyone goes back to their seats, discussing random stuff here and there. He’s lucky he got the classes he was supposed to make because he would have never guessed he had to talk about Manon Lescault. In reality, he hadn’t read that novel at all before being called at Rimbaud. Pretty forgettable in itself, if he was asked about it.
Despite the fact the place is supposed to be freezing, he feels pretty warm. He asks a girl (her name might be Juliette, just like that one History-Geo colleague everyone keeps mentioning) to take off her coat, but all he gets is barking in the local accent, so he just sighs and keeps on with the class. It’s not that important anyway.
The second hour is far longer than the first one. He feels a bit lightheaded too now… Oh well, must be his stress. It’s his very first class since his… training period, which was like… three years ago, maybe? It didn’t exactly look like trying to entertain bored teenagers. There’s a difference between Parisian high-profile schools and ordinary northern schools, got it. He’ll have to sleep a bit more tonight.
Towards the end of the class, someone knocks at the door. In a tired voice (he can feel it himself, ouch), Mr Bannaire calls for whomever is asking to enter in an unconvincing “yes?”. It rings at the same time, so he tells everyone class is over and to have a nice lunch. Who can this be?
As people leave, only a few of them tell him goodbye, including the girl with the colourful bag. She seems happier than when he first saw her, right? Maybe it’s him. In the flood of students, one figure ends up imposing herself: a rather short woman, with long brown hair and piercing blue eyes staring straight at him.
Freckled face, foul mouth, short. That rings a bell to him, and he knows why barely minutes after: it’s the infamous Sarah Leeht he’s been told about. Now that’s someone he may not want to deal with.
“Huh… Hi? How may I help you?” he asks her as the remaining students leave the room.
“Ahem,” she clears her throat, “name’s Sarah Leeht. May have heard of me from everyone else in that school of ours. I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”
“It’s normal, I’m subbing for…”
“My uncle, got it. You’re his sub. Guess you just dealt with the 1ES1 twats.”
Her tone is very violent.
“Twats? They weren’t so bad… I guess it’s because I’m a sub or something?”
“They’re gonna eat you alive before you know it. I can tell you’re a naïve ingénue who doesn’t know what he’s just stepped in. Lemme guess, you had mutation points to gain, so you accepted a garbage sub in a not-so-bad school?”
Oh, she’s one of these disenchanted teachers then. Fair enough. That’s a shame, she’s very pretty… He gets to be both scared to death and enticed by these eyes.
“Actually, I’m writing my thesis. I was just called for the sub because Eleventh Grade finals or something… I haven’t introduced myself yet! I’m François Bannaire. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet ya too, I guess. You seem like a nice fella… Did you just say you were writing a thesis?!”
“Well, huh, yeah…? I graduated from La Sorbonne like five years ago.”
“You’re one bizarre thing to happen to this school. We’re not used to the top of the ladder, y’know. Usually we get shitty subs who can barely do their goddamn job.”
The sharpness in her words was the very exaltation of anger and frustration, goodness gracious.
“So, you’re from Paris, right? You’re probably freezing your ass down here,” Sarah asks as he closes the door from the outside.
“Actually,” he replies, “not really. In fact, I feel a bit hot in here. It’s just me?”
“It’s just you, really, dude. How can you even feel warm in the freezer that is the Prebuilt?”
“I don’t know… I was freezing when I arrived, but now I’m sweating a lot…”
“Now that I look at your face and under that invading beard of yours, you look pale as shit. You’re sure you’re not sick? That would be a shame, a hilarious shame but still a shame, if the sub was sick.”
“I guess I have a small cold? Nothing big, I’m sure. Just a bit of a throat…”
Her head is already under his bangs.
“What is it with people in that school and being sick idiots! You’re burning up, dumbass!”
“I do…? I’ll just sleep it off this afternoon, before the Latin class with the twelfth graders.”
A slight smile appears on her face. She’s prettier when she smiles.
“You’re a dork. I could get used to have you around though. Have you been shown around the nurse’s office? Because that’s where you’re going.”
“I don’t think so, but isn’t it reserved to students?”
It gets a scoff out of his workmate.
“Yeah, right. That nurse has seen some shit before you even were a thing. By that I mean Juliette Jonquille, our eternal stubborn workmate who doesn’t know what the word rest means. Seems like you don’t know it either.”
“I do! Well, I guess I learnt because of pneumonias here and there, but…”
In a move of her hand, Sarah cuts him off.
“You’re getting to the infirmary right now.”
She resumes her course and he simply follows. She’s one peculiar girl… He hasn’t seen someone so earnest in a while. She speaks her mind like she thinks. That’s amazing. He can swear he’s never seen such thing before. He’s fascinated, completely fascinated.
“Oh, that’s right, you mentioned Latin”, she suddenly asks him. “You’re an Ancient Lit major?”
“Yeah! I would have preferred having Greek lessons, but I guess you don’t always get what you want in life…”
“Greek lessons in a regular high school! Be lucky there’s more than five Latinists who made it to their last year of high school. My uncle spends his time regretting the good ol’ times where it was popular to learn those languages. Personally, I couldn’t care less.”
François’s the one to chuckle now.
“I really like your honesty, Sarah. You’re a great person.”
“We literally just met. Calm down. I know I’m single and attractive and whatnot, but hold your horses.”
“I didn’t mean it that way!” he stutters as he blushes. “I think it’s amazing to have such honesty! Being so honest means you can be trusted, because you’ll never pretend things are okay when they don’t!”
“And you’re the type to spill your heart, no matter how cheesy and stupid it could sound to other people. That’s cute.”
“Usually I’m getting told I’m dumb.”
“It’s dumb to spew everything out, sure, but I would lie if I said I didn’t want more people like you. People are so fake nowadays, I’m tired of the constant hypocrisy around, especially here. The students are vipers and the teachers are vipers.”
They’re now facing the infirmary, but he doesn’t feel like going in and maybe losing her track. He wants to discover her more.
“You don’t have to take a day-long nap, y’know,” she tells him. “You can just ask for some fever reducers and be done with your day. She’s used to us being brainless idiots, so you can go ahead. Just ask politely.”
“Got it. By the way… Thanks for walking me there.”
All Sarah does is smirk back.
“Take care of yourself, clever idiot.”
She promptly turns and walks away as he doesn’t know if the heat on his face is his fever getting worse or her. Maybe both. He should go get these reducers.
