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Entry tags:
Family Resemblance (SV, PG)
The following little slip of a story is gen, so don't come complaining to me if you read it and don't find any smut, twisted wrong or otherwise.
So there I was innocently chatting with the PSG crew, when...
Family Resemblance
People rarely ask Chloe about her mother, and she's always been kinda glad about that. She's a little guilty for feeling relieved, but after six years she still hadn't come up with a cover story she'd feel comfortable giving. Journalism's a non-fiction thing, and the Wall of Weird makes for a convenient distraction from the weirdness right here at home.
These photos aren't framed and displayed on the living room mantel or above the stair rail or in Chloe's wallet. Especially not there. There is this album, though, the same one Gabe had taken out when he'd sat her down for The Talk. The Talk. For most kids, that's just the birds and the bees. Not -- this. Page after page of a blonde young woman, posed with Chloe's grandparents, her aunt and uncle, other people she's never known.
The woman looks a little uncomfortable in the pictures, a little out of place, even sad in the shots where the camera's caught her unawares. That's what had struck her the most, when she first saw these; her dad almost always seemed happy, content. Back then, she'd thought he knew everything, and could do anything. Not just because it's natural to see your parents as omnipotent, either. He just seemed so... confident, so self-assured. She knew other people saw it, too, because they often commented that was part of what made him a good manager. The girl in these faded photographs... she looked a little like Chloe, around the eyes, around the mouth. But she didn't look like Chloe's dad at tall.
There's a whole life in here: baby pictures, school pictures, high school and college graduation. A few family holidays. A wedding, and even smiling the bride has sad eyes. Chloe peers down at the man who's listed as father on her birth certificate. There are no pictures of him outside these pages, either. After the wedding, just a few photos of the two of them, the stranger man and strange woman; she looks more lost in each successive frame. In the ones taken after she started to show, she looks proud and confused and even sadder, all at once.
Gabe had explained, during the talk, that Chloe was the only good thing that had come from putting it off so long, and that he wouldn't change anything if it meant she wouldn't have come into his life.
There are other baby pictures of Chloe, of course, on the mantel, above the stair rail, on her dad's desk at work. None like these though. None of Gabriella holding her in the hospital, sweaty and worn exhaustion-thin, but beaming; none of Gabriella giving Chloe her first bath; none of the three of them posed in front of baby Chloe's first Christmas tree. She's sad again in the holiday pictures, and starting to be a little angry.
Having Chloe was part of what had turned indecision to certainty, her dad had said. Not during The Talk, but later. They don't talk about it much, but they don't avoid it, either. They're not ashamed of any of it. Chloe's proud of her dad. Some day, she wants to marry a man just like him.
She slips one of the pictures of her infant self in Gabriella's arms out of its plastic sleeve. Opening her wallet, she slips it inside. Next week they'll be getting their school pictures back, and when she's adding her new Petes and Clarks and Lanas, someone will ask, "Who's that?"
She'll say, "Oh, the parental unit. Dad says I have her smile."
Isilya helped with the last line. Otherwise, this is -- say it with me -- all Jenn's fault.
And yes, Tara, I'll post to Girl Friday and Tall Tales after it's been betaed and beaten a bit. Having written it in all of maybe 15 minutes, I shudder to imagine how it'll look to me in a week.
Also, incidentally, since there seems to be some minor confusion about terminology...
Someone whose physical, anatomical gender doesn't match their mental/emotional gender is "transgendered" (regardless of whether they have had gender reassignment surgery [post-op], are preparing for it [pre-op], or have decided against a surgical solution [non-op]). If you find yourself scoffing at the idea that gender dysphoria is real, consider how you would feel if you woke up one morning and found your body had switched sexes on you. The older term for the same condition is "transsexual," which has been replaced much as "Black" replaced "Negro" in the United States around the 1960s. Some transgendered people are heterosexual, some homosexual, and some bisexual, just like the rest of the population. It's polite to refer to someone transgendered using pronouns to match their mental gender, particularly if they're post-op.
People born with ambiguous genitalia (which occurs as frequently as one in every 100,000 births, due to a variety of causes), on the other hand, prefer the term "intersexed" and are entirely separate from transgendered people, though the two groups sometimes combine forces for political reasons.
Transvestites, who like dressing as the opposite sex but don't believe their bodies are mismatched, sometimes band together with one or both of the other groups as well. Transvestite men self-identifying as heterosexual generally prefer to be called "cross-dressers," while their gay counterparts tend to prefer "drag queen," and women who cross-dress are sometimes called "drag kings," particularly if they perform on stage as male impersonators.
more of my fiction here
So there I was innocently chatting with the PSG crew, when...
Jenn: Whoa doggies. There's a plotbunny for you!
Jenn: Gabriella had her baby in Metropolis, then had a sex change operation before moving to Smallville, hence Gabe.
Jenn: Oh man. If someone wrote this, I would so be your slave for life.
Jenn: The angst! The--well, kinda bizarrity.
Jack: aren't you my slave already?She's claiming not, so I wrote this anyway. Minimal editing so far, just fixed some tense errors and typos, stripped out the AIM tags and sorted all the orphan lines into paragraphs.
Family Resemblance
People rarely ask Chloe about her mother, and she's always been kinda glad about that. She's a little guilty for feeling relieved, but after six years she still hadn't come up with a cover story she'd feel comfortable giving. Journalism's a non-fiction thing, and the Wall of Weird makes for a convenient distraction from the weirdness right here at home.
These photos aren't framed and displayed on the living room mantel or above the stair rail or in Chloe's wallet. Especially not there. There is this album, though, the same one Gabe had taken out when he'd sat her down for The Talk. The Talk. For most kids, that's just the birds and the bees. Not -- this. Page after page of a blonde young woman, posed with Chloe's grandparents, her aunt and uncle, other people she's never known.
The woman looks a little uncomfortable in the pictures, a little out of place, even sad in the shots where the camera's caught her unawares. That's what had struck her the most, when she first saw these; her dad almost always seemed happy, content. Back then, she'd thought he knew everything, and could do anything. Not just because it's natural to see your parents as omnipotent, either. He just seemed so... confident, so self-assured. She knew other people saw it, too, because they often commented that was part of what made him a good manager. The girl in these faded photographs... she looked a little like Chloe, around the eyes, around the mouth. But she didn't look like Chloe's dad at tall.
There's a whole life in here: baby pictures, school pictures, high school and college graduation. A few family holidays. A wedding, and even smiling the bride has sad eyes. Chloe peers down at the man who's listed as father on her birth certificate. There are no pictures of him outside these pages, either. After the wedding, just a few photos of the two of them, the stranger man and strange woman; she looks more lost in each successive frame. In the ones taken after she started to show, she looks proud and confused and even sadder, all at once.
Gabe had explained, during the talk, that Chloe was the only good thing that had come from putting it off so long, and that he wouldn't change anything if it meant she wouldn't have come into his life.
There are other baby pictures of Chloe, of course, on the mantel, above the stair rail, on her dad's desk at work. None like these though. None of Gabriella holding her in the hospital, sweaty and worn exhaustion-thin, but beaming; none of Gabriella giving Chloe her first bath; none of the three of them posed in front of baby Chloe's first Christmas tree. She's sad again in the holiday pictures, and starting to be a little angry.
Having Chloe was part of what had turned indecision to certainty, her dad had said. Not during The Talk, but later. They don't talk about it much, but they don't avoid it, either. They're not ashamed of any of it. Chloe's proud of her dad. Some day, she wants to marry a man just like him.
She slips one of the pictures of her infant self in Gabriella's arms out of its plastic sleeve. Opening her wallet, she slips it inside. Next week they'll be getting their school pictures back, and when she's adding her new Petes and Clarks and Lanas, someone will ask, "Who's that?"
She'll say, "Oh, the parental unit. Dad says I have her smile."
Isilya helped with the last line. Otherwise, this is -- say it with me -- all Jenn's fault.
And yes, Tara, I'll post to Girl Friday and Tall Tales after it's been betaed and beaten a bit. Having written it in all of maybe 15 minutes, I shudder to imagine how it'll look to me in a week.
Also, incidentally, since there seems to be some minor confusion about terminology...
Someone whose physical, anatomical gender doesn't match their mental/emotional gender is "transgendered" (regardless of whether they have had gender reassignment surgery [post-op], are preparing for it [pre-op], or have decided against a surgical solution [non-op]). If you find yourself scoffing at the idea that gender dysphoria is real, consider how you would feel if you woke up one morning and found your body had switched sexes on you. The older term for the same condition is "transsexual," which has been replaced much as "Black" replaced "Negro" in the United States around the 1960s. Some transgendered people are heterosexual, some homosexual, and some bisexual, just like the rest of the population. It's polite to refer to someone transgendered using pronouns to match their mental gender, particularly if they're post-op.
People born with ambiguous genitalia (which occurs as frequently as one in every 100,000 births, due to a variety of causes), on the other hand, prefer the term "intersexed" and are entirely separate from transgendered people, though the two groups sometimes combine forces for political reasons.
Transvestites, who like dressing as the opposite sex but don't believe their bodies are mismatched, sometimes band together with one or both of the other groups as well. Transvestite men self-identifying as heterosexual generally prefer to be called "cross-dressers," while their gay counterparts tend to prefer "drag queen," and women who cross-dress are sometimes called "drag kings," particularly if they perform on stage as male impersonators.
more of my fiction here
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I liked this while you were writing it last night, and I like it now. Very nice.