Work Text:
Names had power. Andrew had read it once in a mythology book back when he stole hours at the library with a stolen library card with his name on it, but not his face and age.
According to the book, the Gods could be summoned with the utterance of a mere title. Celestial beings enormous enough to be named after planets and stars could be listening in, observing, or just pop up the moment the last syllable stumbled off your lips.
The books were complete bullshit. So were the Gods. Andrew hated Zeus, and everyone had motives too petty for beings with their power. He’d seen the Spider-man comics and he liked those better, but the library’s copies were always wrecked and were missing pages.
But the sentiment of the myths stuck to him.
Names had power.
There were many people in his childhood that only ever called him by name, all of them virtual strangers, all of them unforgettable.
(To be fair, none of them were forgettable. That was just how it is.)
The five police in five different counties in California he met at ages seven, eight, ten, twelve, and thirteen. Batrina, Sullivan, Daley, Morris, and Higgins. All of them called Andrew by his name, and it was all the more power to them.
The first time he felt like himself was when he was seven, in the small town of Hollister, San Benito, California. It was a rough time to be himself, but he had managed to wrangle someone, Officer Batrina, into calling him by his name. She would feed him food, information, hang out with him all day. She would be the only one who would call him the right name.
It was funny what one word could do to a person.
Renee had a different tale to tell. She didn’t begin feeling like herself at the utterance of a word. She was less of a celestial being in the sense of the Greeks and more like Spider-man, which made Andrew like her more, troubling as it was.
Andrew usually hated nice Christian girls.
Nathaniel Shields was little more than a blip in her story, one that Andrew had asked to hear about once and kept hearing about afterwards. Andrew often heard tales of Renee’s boyhood when they sparred in the basements of Fox Tower: her brutal time with the gangs in Detroit, her escapades in the foster system, each story punctuated with a punch and a kick.
“I only started feeling like myself when I got approved of the operation before first year,” she said. Andrew didn’t respond, grinned through an arm hitting his neck. He didn’t understand operations and the need for it. He didn’t approve of hospitals and doctors and scalpels and some things removed and some things added.
Therapy and shots were all he had and needed.
“I look a proper woman now.”
Andrew huffed out a laugh, struggling to get barely a whisper after the last hit. He ducked, this time, then shot a leg out but Renee dodged and moved back. “A proper woman doesn’t need a look. A proper woman needs enough conviction to be one.”
“You didn’t have it?” Renee teased, rushing in and striking at Andrew’s left shoulder.
“I didn’t want it. Being a guy is way too easy. Just spread yourself and be an asshole.”
Renee laughed, and barely even grimaced when Andrew returned her jab with an elbow to the side. His elbow hit rock solid muscle, and it was unfair. Fights were unfair.
Andrew couldn’t wait until the muscle mass part of second puberty came in.
“That’s the gist of it.”
Deal: Andrew would get to be sober in games.
Forty-five minutes of sobriety every Friday night. No full games, just quarters and halves to keep the court comfy on his supposed medicine-induced lucidity.
Deal: Andrew would get to have his brother and his cousin with him for five years.
Goalkeeper, back liner, back liner.
It’s a solid deal, Coach.
He knew. Coach was the one who told him. (Andrew was beginning to turn into such an airhead these days.)
Deal: Andrew and Aaron would get Betsy Dobson.
Okay, that wasn’t much of a deal because Betsy Dobson was the Foxes’ official team therapist. It was a deal, though, because Wymack had to insist that Betsy Dobson would conduct one interview before summer practices started to see if the twins could get hormone replacement.
Andrew walked out of that apartment building with three deals and whiskey sloshing around his tummy.
Aaron.
(It took time to get used to that name. It sounded too much like the name Andrew had before.)
Aaron was the first time outside of juvie he felt truly like he was himself. Safety, presence, and existence: those were his solaces after juvie. It wasn’t the newfound smoking habit, wasn’t the permanent home he had to constantly remind himself was his own now.
It was just the fact that he had a sibling who needed and wanted him there.
Aaron was safe from Drake.
The Spears told Aaron to never send anything their way again, and Andrew was content with that. He caught up with news in the other coast and found that the investigation with Drake remained cold.
Aaron was present.
Tilda Minyard always somehow found a reason to hit her obedient and obnoxiously subservient child. Andrew observed their behaviors every morning and evening and found that it was unforgivable to have to protect Aaron from Drake only to see this kind of shit again. He wasn’t in foster care anymore, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
Aaron existed.
Andrew existed.
They were born on the same chilly November fourth.
Tilda died, sixteen odd years later, on November seventh.
Andrew did not regret.
Andrew’s time in juvenile detention was when he began to look like himself. Cut his hair with a rusty pair of scissors, began wearing more and more tops to hide his chest. At first he told himself it was an attempt to look less like the powerless child that begged to make things stopped, but the more time he spent looking like it, the less he believed his reasoning.
The girls he roomed with respected him enough for it. He was quiet enough that he freaked them into eventually calling him the right pronouns and name.
He was used to that. Disapproval and prejudice and general animosity were his ABC’s.
What he had to get used to was the general approval of it. Girls twice his size and some with skin tones a darker brown than his eyes, all of them encouraging him to be who he wanted to be. Affirmations and compliments were… foreign concepts. He didn’t know how to deal with them, so he just ignored them from time to time.
The fact that being himself began feeling more and more like a reality the longer he stayed changed something. His body started belonging to him with every stroke of his hand and every kiss he dropped by necks and hips. The trills and crowing from bunk beds were, he’d admit, uplifting.
Half of the boys in the other wing looked and behaved well enough for his tastes.
None of those experiences wiped away the memories brought to light at times, the reasons why he ended up in the facility, the fact that he had a twin who wanted to meet him so bad that they sent a follow-up letter, but they did serve to distract him.
It was as therapeutic as goalkeeping was, if he had any say to it.
He did not fear coming out of that bubble of positivity inside juvie. The day he was let out, some of his roommates were tearful, though he couldn’t empathize with them.
He took his experiences, grabbed his twin’s hand, and moved, for the last time, to South Carolina.
It was ironic that Andrew felt the most powerful in the most vulnerable times. Neil would be fully sheathed underneath him, chest heaving with Andrew’s covered chest, mouth moving with bare breaths. He’s seen this man sneer and laugh at over fifty people twice his size and position, and here he was brought to squirming surrender under Andrew’s sweaty toned thighs.
“Andrew,” he would whisper, a constant mantra with the yes’s and the keep going’s and the you’re so good’s, and Andrew would feel like he was there, fully present for all of it. All his senses heightened as he leaned back and pinned Neil’s thigh down behind him and rutted forward.
Against all odds, Andrew is on the threshold of twenty-eight. So is Aaron.
They’ve been at it for a decade. Unlike Aaron , Andrew remembered the exact day he stopped feeling like he was just convincing himself that he was a guy.
An entire decade since he began taking shots.
When he was seven, he didn’t even think he’d get past age ten.
“How do you feel about it?” came Betsy’s most hated question. She said it was her most hated question. Andrew thought maybe she liked it but only because it was the question that made her patients squirm the most.
Don’t let the bumblebee costumes and soft cheeks fool you, Andrew thought.
“I feel good,” he answered. “I have been for a long time now.”
“Do you think it’s because you’ve stopped feeling dysphoria?”
“No.”
It was because when Andrew woke up in the morning, the bed was warm next to him, fresh from a body that had recently occupied it. A cat would be by the foot of his bed, and another cat would be on the pillow next to his, pinning his hand down underneath it.
It was because, once a week, when Andrew got up to take a piss and brush his teeth, his shots would be out on the counter already.
It was because when he got mail, when he was announced in public events, when he went out for a stroll to give the cats a breather, no one would call him by the wrong pronouns.
“Why do you think you feel better now than you have before, in the past decade?”
Andrew said, “They call me by my name now.”