"—though mum never told me which way around it was."

"...You don't even know? What does your birth certificate say?"

He shakes his head. "No clue, mum never answered when I asked and hid it from me. She says it doesn't matter and she loves me anyway," he snorts, and Willow snickers.

"I mean, that's a better answer than 'stay what you were whether you like it or not', but she won't even tell you? That's terrible. Do you have other family who might say?"

"...nnnoooo," he answers, then shrugs uncomfortably. "I think she's afraid I'll go on a genderfeels loop about what my 'real gender' is and it'll make me upset, and this particular technical detail isn't one I'm too curious about at the moment, I reckon if I really want to find out she'll tell me."

"Or she'll figure this means you're about to go on a genderfeels loop and will refuse even more because she thinks you might be more upset," Willow points out.

"...or that," he concedes.

"Well, when you're of age she'll have to cough up all your documents either way, I guess."

"Yeah, that's part of the reason why I don't care much."

"Well, as long as it isn't bothering you."

"It's not."

"How often do you usually change? How do you want people talking about you when you aren't there to give a clue?"

"I usually stay a single gender for at least a day, usually around two or three days, but seven-day sprees or two-hour hiccups aren't unheard of. I don't accidentally shift—or I guess I should call it morph?—genders, but it's usually pretty random what gender I'm feeling like on any given day. As for talking about me, you can use the last one you saw me as, or 'they' if that's better."

"I'll probably use 'they,' I'll never remember what I last saw you as."

"Okay."

"I'm not sure yet if I'll remember or not," muses Miranda. "And yeah I think it's usually morph but people will know what you mean if you say shift."

He shrugs. "I can get used to morph, it's not like I've had much chance in my life to make a habit of talking about it any particular way."

"Do you not have a lot of neighbors?" wonders Miranda.

"I kinda had to be pretty secret for most of my early childhood, and then I got into the habit of hiding from them. Also there was always a whole lot of moving because of my little, er, accidents—"

"Accidents?"

"Yeah, like, morphing donkey ears unexpectedly and stuff like that. So, anyway, I never really got to know any neighbours I did have."

Willow giggles at the donkey ears.

"What about school?"

"School was a problem," he admits. "Most of the time people noticed my eyes had morphed colours I'd morph them back and tell them my eyes were weird and it was a trick of the light. As for the gender..." His face morphs slowly to something that's more-or-less between his boy-face and his girl-face, leaning more towards the boy-face, and then it shifts some more towards the girl-face. Given that he's eleven, the androgynous look is not too hard to pull off. "I used something like this, so it was more plausible that the changes weren't that supernatural." His face returns to what it was. "The donkey ears were more trouble, mum didn't let me anywhere near school before I was like five or so, and then most of the time the shifts happened when adults weren't looking so no one believed the kids. Except when it did happen in front of the adults, and then I had to change schools." He sighs. "There was also the bullying problem, most kids were okay with the gender thing but then some kids told their parents about it and they'd come back next week being bigoted and calling me a freak and a he-she and stuff like that." He doesn't sound particularly bothered by that, it sounds like just a fact of his life.

"Aw!" Willow says, and immediately moves to the other side of the compartment to give Sadde a hug.