Ian took Monday off work while he finished recovering. He figured he probably actually could force himself to make himself presentable and show up, but he was actually legitimately sick and what were sick days for if not to be used?

The doubts began creeping back into his mind. How was he going to explain this to his superiors? Um, well duh. He just happened to get sick over the weekend, like that’s legitimately what happened. But last week his productivity tanked while he was busy flirting with Claire. That left a bad impression. Maybe they thought he was blowing off work?

He thought Lillian could actually go eat dirt.

But Lillian didn’t want him to call him by that name, he realized. She would be happy for him to call her Lilly. That way, their names put together—‘Lilly’ and ‘Ian’—spelled Lillian. They were two halves of a greater whole that inhabited their body.

He felt sick. He hated that thought and he hated that he came up with it. No, she had come up with it. It was hard to separate his own thoughts. She didn’t want that. She wanted Lillian to be a whole person, and separating her mind into two personas was only a convenient way for him to rationalize his own thoughts. Did he really believe what Claire had spouted yesterday about plurality crap? He was an idiot if he thought he was actually two people in the same head. It was just her, just Lillian taking the seat.

Lillian wasn’t a lazy sack of meat like Ian was so she actually got up out of bed to make herself some breakfast.

As they ate, thoughts kept running through their head. Ian kept getting confused and wondering what thoughts were his own while Lilly was being intentionally difficult and pretending like he was just one person arguing with themselves in their head.

Then suddenly Ian had an idea. Oh no-no-no, Lilly thought, don’t think of doing that. But it was too late. He knew what he had to do; it was a really simple thing, and his willpower was obviously equal or greater to hers. He calmly finished up breakfast, cleaning up everything before treading back to his bedroom. All the while, Lilly was trying to make things difficult. It was exhausting. Actually exhausting because he was fighting off a torrent of confusing thoughts. A few times he actually stopped in the hallway, convinced he was making a terrible mistake, or confused about what he was doing, before recalling his goal and continuing forward.

Then his mind fell blissfully silent as he placed his hand on the door handle to his closet. He sighed a breath of relief and went in, hurriedly moving to the back and searching the boxes.

Ah, there it was. He pulled out a thin rod of silvery metal, slightly tapered at one end, about ten inches in length. It had tiny runic engravings covering the length of it, the designs wrapping around and connecting up in odd, geometric and mystical patterns. She held the mirror wand once again.

The truth was, she was too afraid to touch it again after the last time because… it was just too dangerous. She had been reckless by using it on her closet mirror, and when it revealed a universe where her behavior failed to match, it had suddenly spiraled out of control. It was already enough dealing with Lia, who had quickly veered off course and adopted a lifestyle that was beginning to affect Lillian’s mind. But if she opened more portals, then what? She might become overwhelmed with split personas to deal with. She already had to cope with Lia’s influence and the stubborn brat who wouldn’t listen to her own thoughts. And it risked one possibly breaking loose and wreaking terror upon the world. The kind of terror that would bring their timeline to a swift end once authorities became involved.

She knew what she had to do. She had to destroy the wand.

But that’s not what he was going to do. Not yet, at least. It was a useful tool, and there was just one thing he needed at that moment. Because, he swore: if he had to deal with another minute with Lilly, he might scream. Or punch a hole in the wall. Or both.

He pushed down the urge he felt from Lilly pulling him toward the door and instead dug through more boxes. It took a little while, but when he opened one particular box of old junk, he knew he’d found the one. He went ahead and dumped it across the floor. Sure, it may be a mess he’d need to clean up later, but it was at least better than ruining another perfectly functional mirror in his house. He picked up an old, dusty hand mirror and wiped the surface off with the hem of his shirt.

He held it up in front of him and beheld his reflection. He grinned. It still looked better than ever before in his life. His short, scruffy hair was a far cry from the utter mop it had been, a weight off not his shoulders but his scalp. It felt like freedom and Lilly couldn’t take it away from him without waiting years for it to grow back.

Actually, Lilly didn’t want that. What? Yeah, she was never opposed to this, because it did legitimately make them happier. The butch look was fine, and she could actually pull it off.

Why hadn’t she fought those changes? What made this different from being a trans man?

Well, they’re simple changes, she reasoned. They had been achieved in the span of only a week. And it was in pursuit of a lifestyle that had a well-defined code to it. She was reinventing her style because she wanted to woo Claire into becoming her girlfriend. Well, unfortunately that had failed—but it was no fault of her own.

So one queer identity is more valid than another?

No, of course not. She had never questioned Zeus as a trans man, or even Lia as a trans woman. They had both clearly figured out their identities and they were better for it. But she knew that Lia being Lillian’s gender-bent replica said nothing about her own gender identity. Because back when she had made it happen, she had no idea what gender identity even meant! It was Claire and Lia herself who taught her about it on Friday. She didn’t know what it really meant to be transgender. So, she reasoned, she’d made a replica of herself who was a man on the outside because that was what her whims had demanded at the time, but on the inside she was the same as herself.

But Ian still thought that was flimsy reasoning. It still didn’t rule out that there was a chance that he himself was transgender. He hadn’t known what the difference between sex and gender were at the time, so he might have just conflated them. And besides: that wasn’t what he was wondering. If she was so convinced that he wasn’t trans, then why was she afraid of it?

Because if he really, actually began to transition, and several months pass and have irreversible effects on his body, he will suffer the consequences. Gay people were accepted and normal now, but a transgender person—especially in the beginning stages of transition when it was nearly impossible to really look the way you wanted—were ridiculed. If he decided to start on this path—

No, okay. She was wrong, but it didn’t matter. If he really, actually turned out not to be trans, then he could stop. It apparently took around three months before testosterone began to have truly irreversible changes, so he had plenty of time to change his mind… if he had to.

But if he really was trans, it would be worth everything to him to be able to do it. Beyond the presentational changes he’d already begun to explore, from his brief look online earlier he knew that trans men took supplementary testosterone to change their bodies. Everything that he had read that testosterone changed appealed to him. Deepening his voice, growing body and facial hair, having stronger muscles and tougher skin, an increased libido; it all just felt right. Screw whatever social consequences there were. Screw the uneasy feeling he felt when he saw his face and thought he might never look like a grown man with the squishy little girl face he sported now. Pushing things forward was better than living forever in pain. Doing it right now, if it was possible, would be better than spending a single day longer in a body that was not meant for him.

And yes, okay, he had to admit that this intuition was not vindicated. All he knew was that some part of him resonated when he saw that Lia wouldn’t settle for her own body. Something felt good about her and Claire affirming him as a man, even though he’d never asked for it. And these things all compelled him to want to find out for certain if he was right. Similar to how he’d been compelled a week ago to see Lia for the first time.

He raised the wand in front of the mirror. He had a way to find out if he was trans or not.

She was scared. Anything could go wrong, she felt. What if what he found was something he didn’t like?

He let out a long sigh. To see oneself for how they truly are was scary, but it wasn’t a bad thing. It just meant that they were on the precipice of change. He couldn’t imagine what he would find. Maybe the person on the other side of the mirror would look similar to Lia, before she began her transition, but he doubted things would be exactly the same. Since he couldn’t picture it, he let words do the work instead. What did he truly look like on the inside?

He projected the thought at his reflection and tapped the surface of the mirror.

It let out a horrid, screeching ring, as before, making him wince. He watched the small surface of the mirror ripple for just a split-second, transforming much faster, then it was over before he could blink.

What he saw was unexpected. He was totally, one-hundred-percent certain he’d just see his own reflection modified like all the previous times. But, appearing through the small handheld portal was a different scene. Wait, he wasn’t supposed to see this! Huh? Nevermind.

What he saw when he looked in was a large room with walls constructed of ornate brickwork. The only lighting came from huge arched windows, which was a bright orange, almost but not quite like a sunset. It was as though the place was stolen straight out of a medieval castle.

He brought the mirror up to his face to get a wider view of the room, and found—peculiarly—that the other side followed his orientation, so he could turn and look at everything like a VR headset.

The room was a bedchamber of sorts and the central feature was a king-size bed atop which lay a kid wearing a tunic and a cloth over his eyes. A boy, from the looks of it. And if he squinted…

Suddenly he had the distinct, unnerving feeling like he was being watched. He pulled away from the portal and looked around the closet. There was nobody there, obviously. The feeling went away. That was strange.

He looked back inside. There was something oddly familiar about the place but he had no words for it. Like a dream he’d had years ago and forgotten about. And when he looked at the boy again, he felt eyes on him and he realized they were his own eyes because he was empathically connected to this kid for some strange reason. He wanted to know who he was but he couldn’t get a closer look.

And then, the door to the chamber slammed open with a crash that made him jump. He turned around and beheld a tall figure marching forward. She was dressed in full plate armor, which obscured most of her body but was shaped just so to suggest a feminine form. Her auburn hair was held in a french braid and she scowled angrily at him with his own face.

“You were not meant to see this place,” her voice boomed. It was not particularly loud but it had a strength that reverberated inside his skull. “Set the mirror down and leave. Do not dare to return.”

He scowled. No. “No,” he said aloud.

The woman unsheathed a short sword from a scabbard at her hip and pointed it at him. “Yes. You will leave. Back away.” She moved forward until the sword came through the portal and he was forced to take a few steps back. He dropped the mirror and it hung off the sword. It looked odd being suspended in mid-air from the woman in the other dimension.

She flung it up into the air, and as it descended—“Hya!”—it shattered with a warbling pop, sending shards of glass and making a mess of the floor. He felt something twinge inside his head at the same time, leaving him with a piercing headache.

He groaned and walked away from the mess, clutching his head. He’d clean up later. For now, he settled on heading to the kitchen, grabbing two tablets of ibuprofen from a cabinet and downing them with a glass of water. Thankfully his mind was empty, and he figured Lilly must not be around, for some reason. He padded his way back into bed, and crawled back under the covers, shivering slightly as he waited for the sheets to warm up.

Had he… peered into his own mind? Was that possible? It would explain the strange familiarity, but he wasn’t sure what the boy and the woman represented. Whoever she was, she didn’t want him to know what was going on in there. Heh, that was sort of like…

Lilly? His eyes opened and he stared at the ceiling. Did Lilly—the culmination of all his own doubts and anxieties personified—march up to him and attack him with a metacorporeal sword?

Yes, she did, she admitted. Well, it wasn’t attacking so much as it was warding. She wouldn’t let him try that again. She was very protective of their inner world.

She left him with that simple message and he had nothing but his own racing thoughts to lead him to a fruitless sleep. He wished he had more answers, and he wished his own brain would just be cooperative for once.

Thankfully or not, the rest of the week passed uneventfully, and then the week after that. Ian went back to work and he didn’t end up coming out. Lilly knew how to stay at arm’s distance until Ian was about to veer off course, then she would oh-so-subtly nudge him in the direction she wanted. She ended up telling people that she had discovered she was gender non-conforming. It was a close enough lie to do the trick. She would also sometimes take over when Ian began to feel overwhelmed, well-practiced in masking and saying the right words to get through meetings or get people off her back. Ian had never realized before what she contributed to his life, and now that he knew what to look out for, he started to appreciate her as more than just a thorn in his side. She was his protector, for better or worse.

Even if he wanted to fight her influence, it wouldn’t be feasible. She could be sneaky and get in a snide remark or pointed gesture before he realized what was happening. He would’ve had to be on guard all day to maintain autonomy but that simply took way too much energy. So he would lean on her for help, and he actually felt better knowing he could rely on her, as it took some of the weight off his shoulders as the days passed. He relented and allowed her to handle the difficult social aspects of life so he could coast and focus on the parts he enjoyed.

Since he began to understand her role in his life, her worries and fears about transition suddenly didn’t seem so irrational. It was just a difference in perspective. She had blunted the weight of all of the worst things he had seen in his life, as he understood it. He still didn’t quite understand how that worked. He now knew that she had hidden memories from him of his parents visiting. She was reluctant to tell him more. Even the knowledge of what memories were hidden could cause him distress, so it seemed.

On Wednesday Lia asked for his help. She just needed a bit of support, she said. So he watched as she pulled up a number on her phone, and she asked him to hit the call button, which he did. She looked constipated as she took the phone back. What he heard of the call sounded like she was setting up an appointment for HRT.

She told him that Zeus had recommended a local clinic that would do informed consent, and they even had a nurse there who was quite knowledgeable on it. She offered to help him make the call too, if he wanted, but he decided not to.

Lilly assured him that the option was still well on the table but they should do a bit more research before committing.

And research they did. Him and Lia decided to start collaborating on the workload they got at their job, each focusing on their strengths—her with the javascript portion and him with CSS and design sense—to get their work done at twice the speed. He now had time at work to do a little surreptitious internet surfing, learning more about transgender and plural people. It was quite confusing at first, he found. He was reading about experiences from people who were already sure of their identities and could describe things in confidence that had never even occurred to him. It gave him pause to reflect on himself and wonder whether he related. When he read about others who were also questioning themselves, he discovered that people’s situations could be vastly different. None of them were quite similar enough to his own that he could say for sure if it was comparable. He was certainly in a very unique position, having used magic twice to sorta ‘cheat’ his way through his self-discovery. Now he was trying to find solid ground to stand on aside from the magical coincidences that led him to this point, but it was slow-going.

He got to talk to Zeus once in a while when they were on break, but he was a difficult guy to track down, at least without Claire’s help. But Claire had started avoiding him for some reason and he couldn’t fathom why. They had been on totally good terms over the weekend and suddenly she just decided to disappear. The Claire on Lia’s side of the portal, however, became a quite familiar face. On the weekend after their first date together, they ended up spending most of the three days together, and then Claire just didn’t end up leaving. Well, she did leave for a bit to grab some essentials from her apartment then she basically moved in with Lia. That meant the two of them would spend a lot of time together and only occasionally invited Ian over for some ‘family-friendly activities.’

So apart from that and collaborating with Lia on work, Ian got a lot of time to himself. It was funny how some of the circumstances changed but his life remained the same for the most part. At least, they did until the next weekend, when Lilly decided that it was time for him to see their inner world.