Did Cody want to be a girl? Well, sure, he’d had a few dreams and errant thoughts about that. Just waking up in a different body and the whole world adjusting to it. As if it’d never been different. But, like, everyone had those. It didn’t mean he felt wrong being who he was. Just, like, normal. That was how it’d always been.

But even so, that simple question had rocked him to his core. He’d always shot down such fantasies by dismissing them as just that—fantasies. In a practical sense, there’d never been a point in pondering such possibilities.

However, framing it as a question of wanting? A question of what he desired? It didn’t technically change anything, but it made a world of a difference to him. He’d been wanting to just… not be a guy for quite some time.

That only opened new cans of worms, however. He couldn’t just share those thoughts with Fionna. She’d always been a girl. He just wanted to become one. She’d probably think he was just being gross and weird.

So Cody lied. “Oh no, I totally love being a guy and not getting to be a girl, it’s great! I love it!” He gave his friend the biggest thumbs-up and smile he could manage. And he was probably only imagining the sweat beads running down his face.

Fionna just looked at him like she was holding back laughter and having trouble trying to comprehend his line of thought. Finally, her expression became more neutral, although still no less bewildered, and she sighed. “Alright, you say that, but come on. Both the way you’re acting and just… everything about what you said contradicted your statement.” She threw her arms in the air. “It looked like someone was holding a gun to your head. Is there a sniper outside, ready to shoot you at a moment’s notice? Like, I dunno, blink twice if you wanna be a girl?”

Cody blinked twice.

Then he realized that he had specifically promised to himself to not tell her that, and he started backpedaling. “Listen, it’s—it’s not what you think, I’m—”

Fionna sighed, looking incredibly tired of the situation. “What do you think that I think that this is?”

Cody’s face turned red as he tried to imagine what kind of taboo he was breaking here. Because clearly, there was some line he was crossing, otherwise he would’ve heard somebody else mention stuff like that at some point.

“I-I dunno, like, you’d think that it’s like, disrespectful to you?” he stammered out, trying his best to look at anything in this room but his friend. Unfortunately, his room was utterly devoid of anything of interest right now, aside from his friend being a concerned-looking sheepgirl.

Fionna raised her eyebrows. “And that would be disrespectful how..?” Of course, she had a good idea of what her friend was thinking—she’d felt quite similar when she first came to terms with her identity. But she really wanted him to realize these things himself. The last thing she intended was to force her own interpretation of things on him.

Cody really didn’t feel like explaining all of his internal guilt right now and making his friend think he was even more of a weirdo than she probably already thought. But at the same time, it felt like she was going somewhere with this. “Well, like, you’ve always been a girl, and I’m just a guy who wants to indulge in that as well, and, like, intruding, y’know?”

Smiling, his friend shook her head. “Listen, I thought I was a guy as well up until quite recently. And I had similar thoughts about wanting to be a girl.”

Cody was absolutely floored. An incredibly vital coping mechanism had been shut off, just like that. The fact that he hadn’t thought he was trans for most of his life kept him from admitting anything like that later on. But that barrier was now gone.

“So I can just… be trans?” Tears were starting to run down his cheeks.

“Lemme tell you a little secret,” Fionna said, getting off the bed and onto the mattress, putting her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “If you wanna be a girl, chances are that you are a girl. If you wanna be trans, chances are that you are trans.”

That was it. The dam had officially cracked, and years of denial were being flooded with the new possibilities that were suddenly open. Years of him gatekeeping himself, all the blockades that had been built up, they were no match for the euphoria this realization brought.

“So I can… be a girl?” Fionna’s friend sniffled into her shoulder.

“Of course. Should I use she/her pronouns for you?” Fionna slowly patted her friend’s head, wanting to help calm her down.

“Yeah, that sounds nice,” she replied, still staring ahead in shock. “I can be a girl… I am a girl! I am a girl!” Instinctively, she embraced her friend in a tight hug.

Fionna let out a surprised giggle between gasps for air. “Woah, easy there, C—actually, do you have a name picked out?”

Blood began flowing into her face. “Alright I know this is weird but I do actually… have a name picked out.” Steeling herself, she took a deep breath. “I’d like to be called Grace, if that’s okay.”

Now Fionna was hugging her friend really tightly. Grace enjoyed how warm the wool on her friend’s arms felt and could probably stay in that embrace forever. “I’m curious, though,” Fionna wondered, “how could you have such a name picked out and not know you’re trans?”

Grace looked at her friend like she’d just been asked what color the sky was. “In case a magic-related mishap and/or abuse of magic powers and/or other incident made me become a girl, duh.”

Frowning, Fionna backed up from her friend. “Is that, like, a thing that happens?” She really didn’t wanna get forcibly turned back into her old dysphoric body.

Grace just shrugged. “Not in real life, but I thought it was better to be prepared for that. Better safe than sorry, y’know.”

Her friend just nodded in bewilderment. “Yeah, sure. Wait, please don’t tell me that’s why you decided to get into magic to begin with.”

Grace just blushed, and to Fionna that was all she needed to know she was spot-on.

With a sigh, Grace let herself fall onto the mattress, just processing all these new revelations. It felt good, thinking of herself as a girl. As Grace. And having her friend be there for her was the cherry on top. It felt as though Fionna always knew exactly what she was thinking, all the ways she was doubting herself. And it made sense; surely her friend must have gone through something similar at some point, right?

Finally calming down from the high of this newfound euphoria, the ambient feeling of her body was starting to catch up to her. The facial hair that suddenly felt so much more scratchy than ever before. The gross hair on her limbs. Her entire figure being so wrong in so many places. It was as though that recognition—that she could be a girl, that she was a girl—made all the things she’d always just tolerated suddenly unbearable. She felt trapped in her body, and the one way out, the familiar spell, was now useless.

She couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down her cheeks. They came flooding down, and she felt herself curling up into a ball on instinct, just trying to get away from this feeling. Her sobs were so undeniably masculine that it only intensified her pain, leaving her unable to formulate any coherent thoughts. She just wanted this to stop.

Then she felt fluffy arms embracing her, and a steady breath on the back of her head. “It’s okay,” Fionna promised, “it’s all gonna be okay.” Not letting go even the slightest bit, she continued. “Dysphoria can be a real bitch, trust me, I know. But you’re gonna get through this.”

Between heavy breaths, Grace responded. “H-how did you ever get through this? Is this how you’ve always felt?”

“Well, at the beginning, yeah. But it got better. I did lots of little things for myself. Shaving regularly, growing my hair out, practicing my voice, that stuff.” Fionna started patting her friend’s head, trying to calm her down.

Grace’s eyes lit up. “You can do that? To your voice, I mean?”

Fionna nodded, then realized that she was currently behind her friend so that gesture was pointless. “Yeah, though I never really got to show anyone. It takes a while to get really going, but it definitely helped me a lot in feeling more like myself.”

“Alright, I’ll get to that as soon as possible,” Grace mumbled to herself. “And what can you do beyond that?” she asked her friend.

Changing her rhythm from headpats to ruffling through the young magic user’s head, she replied. “Well, most people use HRT—that’s hormone replacement therapy. You take the correct hormones, and you’ll basically go through a second puberty. That said, you do magic. There must be some other, more convenient way, right?”

Grace concentrated, parsing together all of her knowledge. “Well, there’s illusions, but those will still make you feel your old body—kind of like phantom limbs. I might look different then, but I would still feel gross. As for actual transformations, the familiar spell is the only one I know of.”

Frustrated, Fionna squeezed her friend a little too tight, leading to a defenseless squeak from her victim. “Ah, sorry! It’s just, that seems really stupid. There’s this amazing spell that just does the transition for you, and it’s restricted like that? And you can’t modify it so it works for people beyond that one familiar?”

“Yeah, that’s how the elders are. They dictate which spells get taught and which ones are forbidden knowledge, so to say. They’d probably say it’s ‘for our own good’ or something like that.” She curled together even more and sighed. “Reverse-engineering is probably the only way to figure it out.”

Fionna moved around a bit, now being eye-to-eye with her friend. “And you could do that..?”

Grace got that look she always got when she became invested in something technical. “Well, I could try casting it again—even if it fails, some energy patterns should still be recognizable, though they’d likely be restricted to only one part of the spell. Likely the initial targeting or something. But even that could clue us in as to which compression method was used. And from then, we could try brute-forcing—”

Before she could completely get absorbed in that, Fionna interrupted her. “So you’re saying it’s possible?”

Snapping out of her thoughts, Grace looked straight at her friend. For the first time since her revelation, she felt actually confident in herself. “Yeah, though it might take a while.” She grinned, letting this new euphoria flow through her. No matter how much the powers that be wanted this to remain secret, she now had hope. Hope both for herself, and for anyone else in her situation.

Fionna took note of the stupid grin now smiling at her. Not stupid in a disparaging way, but stupid in the way that someone smiles when they think they can take on the world. And after how shellshocked Grace had been this night, it was a welcome change of pace. WIth her smiling like that, Fionna couldn’t help but want to support her in her endeavors.

Suddenly, Grace wiggled out of the embrace and got up, heading out of the room. “I’m gonna shave. Right now. Everywhere. I can’t fucking take this.” And with that, she was gone, and Fionna was left to herself wondering what the witch had in mind for when she finished this hypothetical “optimal body” spell. She wasn’t sure if her friend had even fully planned that out yet, but she seemed to have an idea of where to start. And that was all that they needed for now. An idea, this hope that things would be alright. This was certainly more hopeful of a situation than she was in back when she first realized.

When Grace returned to the bathroom, the sheepgirl had already dozed off on the mattress, but the creaking of the door and the careful footsteps made her jolt awake. And what she saw surprised her.

From what she could see, both the arms, legs and face of her friend were full of little cuts, some of them still bleeding. Aside from that, all those parts of her body were also beet-red. Clearly, someone hadn’t applied proper procedure when shaving. Then again, that shouldn’t have been a surprise; most people’s first shave was messy.

Before Grace could even really enter the room, Fionna was already pushing her out of the door again. “Listen, we’re gonna fix this up right now or you’re gonna regret this for a while.” She sighed to herself. This was going to be a long night.

underFlorence

Thank you to Ashlyn for pointing the factoid in the title out to me, apparently there's some Echidnas that do so, too. And, well, Grace here! Phineas and Ferb lied to me.