Lillian sat down on his couch in a slump. The movie was still paused in front of him, but he wasn’t in the mood to finish it anymore. He reached forward and turned off the TV’s power with the remote, leaving the room in darkness. He took another big bite. Sitting in the dark like that—owowow! Brainfreeze!

He sat there sulking while he waited for the pain to pass. He was such an idiot. Everything was going wrong. First he ruined the night for Claire, who seemed to really want to get things on with him. He was willing to laugh it off and try to enjoy the night anyways but then. Then things had to get worse. She had to stumble into the portal and it pulled off the bandaid, painfully. For him to discover that his alternate self was much better at being a lesbian than he was, that she was getting what she wanted, and he was still floundering, as confused as ever. He took another bite.

Suddenly the lights were on in the room and he winced, grumbling under his breath. When his vision finally adjusted, he looked up to see, ugh… Liam was standing there, now clothed and wearing one of his dresses, awkwardly holding her own bowl. “Mind if I join you?”

His shoulders slumped. “Fine. Whatever.”

She sat down to his right and he had to adjust his weight to avoid shifting closer to her.

“So, it looked like you had a bit of a shock there…” she said.

“Yeah. It’s pretty shocking to find out that my alternate self was able to realize she’s transgender and she got the better outcome. Seriously, you make a way better lesbian than me! Congrats on getting the cute girl in bed with you!” He drooped his head in defeat. “I’m just worthless at all this.”

“Hey, don’t put yourself down like that.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “You obviously put in a huge effort. And just look at you! I almost didn’t recognize you,” she was wearing a little smirk on her face.

He frowned at her. “Don’t say that. You probably think I ruined my looks.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because,” he gestured at her with his spoon, “Look, you’re literally a dude in a wig and a dress. You look like a clown.” He took another bite of ice cream.

“Ow,” she intoned, pulling back from him. Oh, she looked genuinely hurt by that. “Okay, well, you’re sort-of right. I mean, I was really really envious of your looks last week, and maybe I’m not so much anymore.” She cocked her head to the side. “But, well, you are totally passable as a lesbian chick now. But you know what I think? I think that’s also the sort of look a trans man would have.” She peered at him with this contemplative half-lidded expression.

Ah, so the other shoe finally drops, he thought. He left that comment hanging in the air for a few minutes while they both ate. He was nomming down large, grumpy spoonfuls while she delicately worked at hers, glancing at him questioningly once in a while. He ended up giving himself another brain freeze and decided to set his dish on the coffee table for the moment.

He sighed wearily. “Alright, yeah. Okay. I’m trans. There, I said it.” He threw his hands up in the air. “He / him and all that. And you can call me…” He rolled it around in his head for a moment. He wouldn’t take Liam’s name, that would be unfair to her, and he wouldn’t appreciate it if she—“Wait, you didn’t call yourself Lillian, did you?”

She shook her head. “Amelia, or just Lia for short. I figured you wouldn’t appreciate it if I took your name.” She giggled. Darn it, he didn’t want to be reminded how closely her thoughts kept reflecting his own. It was creepy. “This was a name that I always kinda liked. It’s what I used for my Skyrim character back in high school.” That suddenly jogged a memory loose in his own head.

“Alright, then in the same vein, you can call me Ian.”

Lia smiled genuinely back at him. “That sounds good. I like it, Ian.” He couldn’t suppress his own smile at the feeling of being called that name. He guessed it did fit. “Wow, that was actually surprisingly easy. So you’re just on board with being trans, now?”

Ian coughed. “Well, you are, so it only makes sense that I am too. Isn’t that just the way it works?”

She shook her head. “No, Ian. Like, this isn’t something you just decide because someone told you so. We’ve been told for our entire lives that we’re not trans! Not directly, but sort of by association. And, heck, it was hard for me to dig past that. I had to have several long conversations with Claire and Zeus to… to fight past my internal transphobia, realize it’s who I can be because it’s who I want to be, and…” She looked down at herself. “It took a lot of guts just to come to work today wearing this. Like, I seriously almost freaked out, but they were there to support me.” She smiled fondly. “Meanwhile, I look at you and like, no offense, you still pass as a totally normal girl, albeit one who’s making a bit of a fashion statement. Girls get away with more varied gender presentation. You’re not gonna risk the same harassment before coming out, or at least before getting a binder, packer and hormones.”

“Wait, what are those? How do you know about all that stuff?”

“Well, like I said, long conversations. Seriously, ask Zeus about transmasc stuff, he’ll get you sorted.”

“Transmasc? Wait, so Zeus is transgender too?”

Lia shook her head ruefully. “I mean, yeah, duh, just look at him. Wow, you’re pretty clueless, huh bro?” She leaped forward and ruffled his hair, giggling.

“Agh! Stop!” He pushed her off but couldn’t help his own smile. It felt kinda nice to be treated like that.

They finished eating in a more comfortable silence, then washed up. It was a little funny to Ian when they both by habit went to do the same thing, but they wordlessly figured out how to do it in tandem. They cleaned up their bowls and the dishes from Ian’s dinner.

When they were done, Lia dried her hands on a towel and draped an arm over his shoulders. “Hey, are you feeling okay? You still seem kind of down.”

He shrugged his shoulders, stepping out from her embrace. “Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks for talking with me about that stuff.” In truth, he was still feeling like crap on the inside, but he was used to masking his emotions. Especially in a strange situation like this it helped to suppress his own personal desires and wear a confident facade to fool others into believing he was strong and reliant. Except, of course, he hadn’t considered that this wouldn’t fool Lia, who knew him better than probably anyone else in the world. So it should have come as no surprise when she saw through his little tactic.

“Look, I know all the trans stuff is a lot to deal with at once. It was difficult for me, too. But hey, I’m here if you want to talk about it, always. I just got a little head-start on it is all.” She smiled kindly. “Heck, if you can think of any questions for me about it right now, we have time. The Claires are probably gonna be busy for a while. I mean, they were really worried about you but I insisted on being the one to talk to you. Then they gave eachother a weird look and closed the door behind me.” She shrugged in that way that says ‘what are ya gonna do?’ He didn’t wanna think about what those two were up to.

“Yeah, I do have one, actually. How did it first come up for you, but not for me? You weren’t still thinking about it after the first time we met, were you?”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t, no. I agreed with you at the time that it wasn’t worth worrying about. But then…” She sighed and cocked her head in thought. “The rest of that night was honestly, pretty lonely and boring. It was getting to me. The next morning I woke up and drove to work super early, for no good reason.”

Ian nodded. “Same for me. So we’re still on the same page.”

“So that was the mood I was in. Just feeling all thoughtful like something wasn’t right with my life. On Monday morning during the break, I met Zeus and him and Claire were trying to push me out of my comfort zone to do something more fashionable. And, since I was in an impressionable mood…”

“Let me guess,” he interrupted. “You saw the way Claire looked at you, that flirty look she always has in her eyes, and you could get a piece of that if you turned into a girl and gave yourself to her?” He chuckled with a lopsided smirk.

“Ew! What? No.” Lia looked at him strangely. “Maybe it was like that for you, but in my case, I—” She gestured at herself with both hands, “—was the one who had a crush on her.” She jerked her thumb back in the general direction of the portal. “I’ve had feelings for her for a long time… I wanted nothing more than to ask her out on a date. But I never thought I could before. Because she was only interested in lesbians.” She leaned against a counter and smiled, looking off into the distance. “After meeting you, though, I realized that maybe things aren’t so set in stone. I didn’t think that transitioning could ever be an option for me, but if I truly act as girly as you seemed to think I did, then maybe she could see past my outward appearance and love me for who I am on the inside. So I took her out for lunch that day and confessed. And that’s pretty much exactly what happened. For the rest of the week, she started looking at me differently. And I had several long conversations with her and Zeus, learning about what it meant to be transgender. I spent a lot of my free time looking for more information online. Stuff like that.” She giggled. “Funny how I figured out that I’m a lesbian before figuring out that I’m a girl, but things work out that way sometimes.” She gave Ian a sober look. “What about you? Did you figure anything out about yourself?”

He hung his head, looking down at his clothes. “Well, I guess I also ‘figured out’ that I’m a lesbian too.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know anymore. In the end, it didn’t feel right. It sucked, actually.” He looked her in the eyes. “Even more than that Anton guy I slept with. Do you remember him?”

Lia nodded. “Yeah, he was really nice, and with the way he treated me—I guess I thought I might be gay. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t end up sleeping with him because everything about the situation felt wrong. No, I’m a lesbian, and that’s something I’m absolutely sure of!”

Ian sighed. “I’m not sure of anything anymore…” His legs were feeling stiff from standing in place, so he began pacing across the kitchen. “You spent all week thinking through your problems and you actually came up with a good answer for yourself. Meanwhile I spent my free time getting a haircut and piercings. And these nice butch clothes.” He tugged on his duster. “But now I’m not even sure if this works for me anymore. I just don’t know. Would it work if I actually tried passing myself off as a man? Is that something I want to do?”

“Ian…”

He ran his hand through his short hair. It still felt weird; this was the first time he had ever had it cut so short in his life, and it was totally different than he was used to. It had this soft, ticklish texture to it like running his hand on a fluffy blanket. It was totally unique. It was the first change he’d made when he decided to start presenting butch and he loved it. It was a cute look that made him look young and punk.

Now everyone thought he was a transgender man. It would’ve been the obvious conclusion for Lia, and when the Claires saw him and understood what she represented, they projected the same feelings onto him. That wasn’t fair. He was never given a choice in the matter, and deep down he didn’t even really believe he was trans. He was just playing along because everyone thought so.

Now that Claire saw him as a man, that would be the end of their relationship. She was a lesbian so she would decide that she wasn’t interested in him anymore. That wasn’t fair. That—that just wasn’t fair at all!

Then, suddenly he found himself wrapped in the taller girl’s arms and also that his cheeks were wet and oh God he was crying. Of course. In a moment of weakness, lost in his own thoughts, he had failed to be vigilant and crumbled under his own emotional weakness. He was pathetic. He didn’t understand the caring, supportive shoulder of his twin but she was there to offer it and refusal would make things awkward, so he let himself be held and waited for the tears to settle.

Was he really trans, after all? Did he deserve to let fate decide for him what he should do? Was the mirror universe merely preparing him for what was to come? Why? The Mirror Wand was the item that caused all of this. It was his own thoughts that were the basis for Lia’s creation. His random whim to see what he would’ve been like if he’d been born a man.

If he’d been born a man. That was the inception of who Lia was, the starting point from which her universe grew. He thought back to Sunday night. The Mirror created a universe based on his whim, his imagination, only changing details where needed to make it plausible. That had to be it, right? Otherwise, you couldn’t explain everything being so damn similar. Their conversation back then seemed totally in sync, almost like he really was talking to his own reflection. It had only been a week since then and Lia had changed drastically. Well, so had he, to be fair. They no longer seemed to be on the same page, as she kept talking about things that he was only now learning about, about Claire and what it meant to be transgender.

The point is—he was responsible for everything about who Lia was because he’d made the choice to open the portal and it was the image in his mind that had created her. The image that wasn’t ever an image in the first place, merely a concept.

If he’d been born a man. He hadn’t thought anything of her gender identity, of her sexuality, of her personality or her dreams and desires when he’d performed the magic. The two were basically the same, as far as he could tell. She had realized she was a lesbian because she was in love with Claire, and the same thing had also happened to Ian. She had realized she was trans because she shared her gender identity with Lillian. Who was a girl. Meaning she wasn’t trans.

She pulled back and smiled up at Lia. “I’m fine,” she said. She looked over her twin’s appearance and held in a laugh. She must have been playing it up super femme to make up for her masculine body type, but with a few years of transition she’d realize she was also a butch girl. It was the only thing that made sense, and her reasoning was flawless.

Actually that wasn’t true. Lia would totally poke holes all over her argument. She decided to keep quiet about that little detail, as she could tell Lia was doing her best to pass as a girl right now. Maybe it would be best to keep quiet about realizing that she wasn’t trans, too. She’d done enough talking for the evening.

“Hey, why don’t you join the other two now?” Lillian said. “I know we kind of um, interrupted you, and I feel bad about that. So I’m making it up by letting you have both of them tonight. You three do your gay, lesbian thing and I’ll just… hang out here.”

She crossed her arms. “Hey, you don’t get to make that decision for them. Are you sure you won’t get lonely by yourself?”

“I mean, I’ve slept alone for years. I can manage another day. And now that Claire knows I’m a man, well… she probably isn’t interested anymore.” Lillian scratched her head.

“Well, alright, Ian. Just don’t beat yourself up. You know where to find us if you change your mind~!” She couldn’t hide the excitement on her face as she moved toward the hall.

“Wait, Amelia—” She watched as her twin stopped and looked back at her. “Thanks. For everything. For looking out for me. You don’t know how much it means.”

She laughed. “No problem, bro! I hope you feel better soon. Please think about everything I said.”

And then she was gone, leaving Lillian to stew in her own thoughts.