Calliope

If you couldn't tell based on how the previous part ended, this part was supposed to be the transformation proper. However, I realized that I really wanted to do the I'm-a-girl part before the magical girl transformation sequence. An issue of plotting I suppose. No significant CW for this part, mild CW for dysphoria and dumbassery.

I looked up and started. That thing couldn’t give me a body I wanted, no way. It did that for Sam because she wasn’t a boy. I, on the other hand, was very much so male. I had to be. There was no other option.

I knew exactly what would happen if I downed that potion. I’d seen my “healed” body in magazines, on tv shows. The muscular lifeguards, ripped from head to toe. Misters tall, dark, and handsome. I shuddered, and drew away from the outstretched potion. My current body might not have been perfect or even acceptable, but I certainly didn’t want that. If anything, I wanted something like what Sam got.

Sam leaned towards me and placed one hand on the bed for support as she lowered her head to my level. “It’s a healing potion, it literally probably can’t hurt you… Casey.” She spoke the last word with a tinge of apprehension, as though it may not have been correct. 

“Samantha, I—” I paused, considering. Technically, she was correct. And logically, I knew that if I drank the potion, I’d get the manly body I was destined to want. I’d be done having all these weird feelings. I’d get on with my life. “I…” Goddammit. Why couldn’t I just say yes?

Sam leaned in further, her eyes meeting mine. “You’re worried about something,” she stated, “tell me what.”

I relayed my fears as best I could, making sure to explain that I knew they were stupid and I should just do what’s best for everyone and take my medicine, and that I needed to stop thinking these thoughts already and… 

As I spoke, Sam slowly sat up, getting more rigid and tense with each passing phrase. Clearly, something I was saying was making her uncomfortable. When she finally spoke, there was an undercurrent of sadness to her words. “Ca…” She stopped, then began again. “You know what you did to me, when I came out to you?”

I bowed my head sheepishly. “I denied your feelings and tried to force you to conform to outside pressures and societal convention?”

Sam paused, a bit taken aback by the wordiness. Then she nodded, keeping an edge to her voice. “Yes. And I really thought that you wouldn’t make that mistake again.”

“I… I’m thinking that too?”

She sighed. “You’re doing the exact same thing to yourself, and I really can’t stand to see you hurt yourself in this way.”

I what?

“Look, you’re having doubts, questions, about your—dare I say it—identity.”

I opened my mouth to say that I wasn’t, but she brought a hand up to shush me.

“Don’t say you’re not, it’s so blindingly obvious that only you could miss it.” Sam put her hand down, and continued, “Then, because you think you oughtn’t be doing something like that, you deny that you are and come up with other explanations for your feelings.” 

I closed my mouth. That… huh. Hm. Had I been doing that? Looking at it more closely, I conceded that at the very least, I’d done a similar enough thing that Sam felt it necessary to call me out on it. In any case, it felt nice to have words put to my feelings and actions, even if it was done so rather aggressively.

“And all that nonsense where you have to want to look all macho just because you’re AMAB. Who even told you all that anyway?”

“My mother?” I liked being called merely AMAB rather than male. Sam used the same expression to describe herself, so I figured it was maybe a bonding thing.

“Figures,” Sam murmured, “I swear, if I ever meet that lady she and I are going to have words.” 

“Would you?” I asked, worriedly, “I mean, I don’t want you to get hurt. My mom can be scary when she gets going.”

Sam stared resolutely at me. “That’s it. From now on, I’ll be your mommy.”

I blushed, not sure if Sam understood the undertones of what she had just said. Sam took one look at my expression and burst out laughing.

“Joking, sorry. But 'mommy' is advising you that the body you want, the one you deserve, is probably not the one you just described.”

“What do you think it would be?” I tilted my head to the side, mimicking an action I’d seen Sam do whenever she was questioning something or scrutinizing it. Like mother, like dau—like son, I suppose.

“You really want my opinion?” Sam asked, hesitant. I only nodded in response.

Sam pursed her lips for a moment. “From what I know of your personality, I think you’d be… smaller. And softer. You wouldn’t have to worry about body or facial hair most of the time, but I think you end up with quite a long head of hair. You’d be as wonderful to hug as you are now, but hopefully you’d feel more comfortable about it.” I smiled and leaned back, letting myself get lost in the fantasy. What Sam was describing felt like a dream come true. If only, right? “Oh, um, I know it’s not my place to say, but I think there’s also a pretty good chance that you’re a girl.”

I laughed, a short bark of surprise emanating from the back of my throat. “What?” There was absolutely no way that could be true. Couldn’t she just look at me and see? I knew that every time I looked at myself in the mirror, I was reminded of my male-ness. So how in the world did Sam arrive at her judgement? Or did she mean… “You think the potion is going to turn me into a girl?”

“Well… no, I don’t think it can do something like that. I mean that you already are one.” Sam cleared her throat, a small bit of awkwardness making its way back into her voice. “I definitely get queer vibes from you, you know what I mean? You could be gnc, of course, or some variety of non-binary that precludes calling you a girl, but from what I’ve seen I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a trans girl.”

Woah. That was a lot of words. I latched onto one of the few I recognized. “Trans? Isn’t that what you are?”

Sam perked up at that. “Yeah! That’s what it’s called when you vibe less with your assigned gender at birth and more with some other gender identity.”

“Well, I’m not,” I responded, shaking my head. “I’m… I’m male, unfortunately.”

Sam made a disgruntled noise. “The fact that you think being male is undesirable makes it incredibly unlikely that you’re male,” she stated, gesturing with her hands attempting to make a point. “Look,” she continued, “what is it about me that makes me trans? What makes me ‘different from you’?” She put air quotes around the last phrase, expressing her skepticism.

I mused to myself for a moment before answering, “I guess it’s because you just knew? There was never a point where you seemed unsure. You always understood who you were, and looking back it all just seems so obvious…” My voice trailed off as I stared at the corner of the bed, vaguely illuminated by scattered sunlight. “You definitely wanted to be a girl, so you were one. I get that now. There’s just really nothing comparable in my own past experiences.”

Sam’s gaze softened. “Oh sweetie, I was unsure of myself for so long. It took months of uncertainty before I got to a place where I was confident enough to come out. I spent so many nights crying myself to sleep because I couldn’t have just been born a girl.” 

I nodded affirmative. I could relate to that, having done it many times myself.

“You know I came out to you first?” I did a double take. Considering how poorly it had gone, I’d figured she’d saved me for last. “Because of all my friends and family I thought we were the most similar, and that you’d understand, if not come out as trans yourself.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just stared at my knees and listened to the soft sound of wind in leaves as it streamed in through the window.

“Okay, maybe you need an example,” Sam said, seeing my frozen state. “Do you remember when we used to play knights and princesses?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

 “And how we would fight over who got to be the princess?”

Oh yeah, we did do that a lot. “Well, I couldn’t help it if it was more fun to be a princess than a knight.”

“Of course not darling. I got past my princess phase anyway; I’ll be your knight if you want, though,” she said, winking at me. I blushed a shade of pink that almost matched the hoodie. 

“But still, that’s just one thing, early on in my childhood. I’ve changed since then,” I lamented.

Sam set her lips in a sardonic grin. “Yeah, I thought that about you too, especially since you completely rejected me when I came out. But from the things I’ve seen today, that part of you hasn’t so much gone away as been violently suppressed.” Sam didn’t linger on the matter but continued on, “Here’s another example. We used to share stories back and forth. There was a lot of generic fantasy, fanfiction, some horror…”

I swallowed. I’d forgotten this part of my past, but now that it had been dredged up I knew where this was going.

“But there was also a lot of… gender-bender stuff, specifically stories where boys got transformed into girls.” There it was.

“I liked the ones where they also got transformed into monstergirls,” I admitted. No harm in saying so, right? I mean, it was true.

“Yep, and I liked the ones where they also got powers or were put into video games,” Sam confirmed. It tracked: during our sleepovers, she’d always stayed up late playing on the console until it was 3 am, at which point she made sigils. “And you remember what we used to say about them?”

This was a shared memory that I couldn’t deny. “Sometimes we’d critique the writing or gush about a good passage. Mostly we complained that those things couldn’t happen to us.”

“Implying…?”

“Implying, I don’t know, that I could never be a girl?” I replied, more staving off the inevitable than in an actual effort to counter the point I knew was coming.

“Implying, dummy, that you wanted to be transformed into a girl!” Sam reached over and gave me a noogie so gently that it was more like scratching my head. I liked the feeling and leaned into it as much as I could. “Here, think about this. If there were a button you could press that would make you a girl, forever and irreversibly, would you press it?”

My heart leapt at the opportunity. “Duh, of course! Who wouldn’t?”

Sam chuckled. “A lot of people. Chief among them, cis men who are comfortable with being male. As opposed to you, who—”

“Okay, okay, I get it!”

“So, I hope you can understand where I’m coming from on this.”

I definitely understood. “So I want to be a girl,” I affirmed. As I said it, a shiver ran through me. I’d always pushed down these feelings. It felt nice to get them out in the open.

“You can be a girl,” Sam exhorted, putting both her hands on one of my own.

“I can be a girl,” I amended.

“You are a girl,” Sam confirmed, clasping her hands around my own, enveloping them in a miniature embrace.

“I…” I took a deep breath. “I am a girl,” I stated, honestly. And saying it, so much of my life clicked into place, as I was sure it had done with Sam. The skirts, the stories, it all fit. Being a girl fit me.

I glanced over at Sam, who had the dumbest smile on her face, one I knew was reflected on my own. “The cutest one I know,” she whispered, and I blushed. “Can I get your name?” She asked, still with her hands around mine. “Or do you wanna keep yours? Or keep a nickname, like I did?”

“Um, what about… Luna?” I squeaked out. “It’s a pen name I use.” Looking back, the fact that I signed all my works with a girl’s name probably meant something.

Sam’s grin got even wider. “It’s wonderful to see you come out of your shell, Luna!”

I felt much the same way. Unfortunately, someone in my head didn’t agree. Casey, you know that you can never— Shut up, I told it. I’m Luna, and I don’t need you anymore. The voice went quiet. Hopefully forever, I thought to myself.

 As great as it was to accept myself, there was an issue. It had always been a problem, but now that I’d fully come to grips with the fact that I was a girl, I found that the inherent wrongness of my body was prickling me even more than before. It went from a low-level awareness that faded in and out of consciousness to one that I felt on a visceral level. My misshapen torso, the hair all over my body, the rough feeling of my skin, all of it assaulted me at once. Luckily, I had a solution close at hand. Thank the stars for dubiously legal, bleeding-edge medical help. “Um, do you think I could…”

“Oh! Yes!” Sam exclaimed, and immediately released me as she turned away and scrounged around for the bottle.

“Here,” she said, offering the potion once more, “you deserve this.” She gently tossed it to me, almost flippant.

This time I accepted it. I took a breath in, then let it out. Okay, I’d talked for long enough. Time to do it. I unstoppered the flask, laying the cork and my hand on the bed. The myriad colors of silver, pink, and blue in the mixture were as chaotic as ever. I lifted it to my lips. Next to me, Sam took my hand in hers, expelling any worries I had remaining. As I downed the concoction, a feeling of calm overtook me.

Then a sensation like burning spread through my veins, and the changes began.