It takes her a little longer to tell her mom about the thing where she's sometimes a girl. She knew in advance that it would be fine, they'd had conversations about how the obvious thing to do if she got powers and realized there was a secret world of magic was just tell her, her mom promised not to be like the moms in the stories.

They haven't talked explicitly about what she should do if she discovers she's trans. The fact that she's a weird kind of trans doesn't help. A lot of people on the internet seem to think people like her are all faking it.

She tells her mom anyway, and it goes perfectly fine. 

Her mom teaches her how to do her makeup. 

It's very, very hard to actually learn anything useful. There's so many people on the internet saying so many things.

He feels alive. Not always. But more than he has in years. He feels like he's woken up from a long slumber, but only halfway. There are things that matter. His life isn't just going to be a long boring procession of nothing. It suddenly looks likelier to be worse, in some sense, he didn't have "fight for his life against vampires" on his list of potential life outcomes before. But if it's worse there's suddenly something there. His big thing before this was trying to figure out a comprehensive correct theory of metaethics and that motivated him some but it's really rather different than trying to figure out a comprehensive correct theory of the supernatural.

He's pretty sure there are things that aren't vampires out there. Werewolves, it seems like, and more besides. Angels, maybe, or other things pretending to be them. He's not sure which.

He's pretty sure the shape of the world rules out the possibility of a benevolent god. He hopes those aren't real angels.

He can't quite keep hold of his new sense of life. It fades, with time. Not quite back to the place he was before. But the initial energy that suffused him isn't there, anymore.

He still looks up at his tree, and he still believes life is worth it. Now there's even more keeping him going. He knows the hollowness isn't real. He can identify it, now, as just one more way he's insane. It helps. He's going to beat it eventually, grind away at it like every other way he's insane. He's going to grow and grow until he's the person he wants to be. Always forward. Always upward.

He still feels hollow. But he's going to beat it, someday. 

Someday.

He experiments with his powers. He learns how they work. There isn't much space inside but he does the best he can. His mom throws tomatoes at him and he cuts them out of the air before they can hit him and then uses the tomatoes to make sandwiches. He can see in ultraviolet and infrared. He can see the future. He can see the past. He can look into the future to see what would happen if he spent the next few hours looking into the past. He can shoot swordbeams. 

He can cause some injury to his bed frame with a swordbeam. Oops. Well, he didn't strictly speaking need an intact headboard.

He feels like a kid again. 

He focuses on what it feels like. He engraves it into his memory. When he's feeling hollow he won't be able to remember, exactly, not properly. But he'll be able to remember that it was real. That the feeling that the whole world is empty is a lie.

He promised to look straight at reality. 

He's lonely. He's been lonely for a very long time. And he's afraid. He's genuinely built himself into someone who isn't hurt, much, by being alone. But the reason he did all of that is that he was afraid. It hurts, when people dislike him. If he's alone, he can't mess anything up. 

It is, actually, true that he hasn't seen a hint of anyone else like him. Nobody else who's noticed the issue where they're just- completely mad, and hated it, and tried to build something up in themselves to not be like that. It is, actually, true that he enjoys his time alone as much as he does with his classmates.

But he doesn't reach out to other people because he's afraid of how it will go, not for any other reason. That's what's actually determining what he does, nothing else. It's obviously worth trying, even if it usually goes poorly, for those few times it doesn't. How will he ever find someone else like him if he doesn't look?

He can't quite bring himself to do it. Not really. He's too afraid. He can't reach out. Can't- initiate. Ask if someone would like to hang out, if someone would like to do something together. 

But he can talk to the people sitting next to him a bit more. Spend a bit less time in his own head. Grow, slowly, into someone who can cope with the possibility they might be bothering someone.

He's awkward. Weird. He doesn't even talk like other people. When people notice he says he read too many fantasy books when he was a kid and sometimes that gets a laugh, but it doesn't make it any less true. He doesn't really know how to talk to people, after so many years alone. It's been since he was- what, nine? That's a long time to go without having friends, without ever talking to a classmate outside of little things during class. He's even been going home during lunch.

It's not like he can't do the- hollow empty-feeling thing of talking like he's not him. Follow the scripts, say the things he's supposed to. But he can't quite- reach out. Talk like he's himself without it coming out weird or off-putting. 

Well. No way out but through. He'll learn, slowly. And if he seems deeply weird to a lot of people, well, he is. He'll cope.

He'll try to cope. A lot of nights he's so embarrassed at his mistakes it's hard to sleep.

Eventually he'll be better at this 

Someday.

School itself just feels even more pointless, really.

He goes anyway. It's bad for him to miss classes, he can see that now. It hurts him. It's the first step in the spiral that led to last year.

He goes to his classes, and he talks to the people sitting near him, and he does his best.

He's going to get hurt either way. He might as well get hurt trying.