"But you couldn't shapeshift before you were a mage..."

"I still knew I was sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, regardless of what my actual body looked like."

"Seems like a weird thing to pay that much attention to."

"Well, I think we've established that I'm a weird person," he laughs.

"Yeah."

"What's it like?"

Chew chew swallow. "Hmm? Being a switch? Uh, what's being a sub like?"

"...Do you not know? Like, some of the time?"

"Yeah but not what it's like being just a sub all the time? I basically just... feel like myself, neither way to be or act feels terribly different than the other. Relationship-wise, I want Isabella to dom me, and if she was a sub—okay that's impossible, um, if I were courting a sub instead, I'd want to dom them, and outside of that sometimes I feel like a dom and sometimes like a sub and all the time like me." Pause. "But all the time long hair is very bothersome."

"I just keep it in a braid," shrugs Jackson. "It's not a big deal. I can't really imagine wanting to dom somebody? It seems like it'd be really hard and - tiring, I guess? And nobody to look out for you and maybe somebody you have to look out for, so like being single only worse. But it's nice that there are doms." Pause. "It'd be nicer if any of them wanted me."

Nod. Pat pat Jackson's shoulder.

Jackson closes his eyes and leans into the pat like nobody has touched him with anything friendlier than a shoe in the last several years.

...that's heartbreaking. Thinking he'll regret this, he asks, "So, uh, do you have any family? Parents, siblings, and stuff?"

"Yeah? I have moms and two little sisters."

"You see them often?"

"I mean, not when I was in virtuality. I went Christmas, I'm going for Thanksgiving."

"Oh." Maybe Sadde won't regret talking about family because Jackson is deeply incurious. But in any case, that might explain how they don't notice it. Maybe. Sigh. "Do they live far?"

"I'm Canadian."

"Oh! Yeah, that's pretty far."

"And Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier," he adds. "I don't know why you have Thanksgiving and Christmas so close together."

"I don't, either. I mean, I don't see the point of Thanksgiving much, so."

Shrug.

Jackson's sort of plodding through his own food. When Sadde finishes he scans the rest of the cafeteria population.