“How’s it going?” Peter asked as we stepped in through the door.

He was playing with Legos on the dining room table.

He works as an EMT. Which means that he’s often on call.

This means that he is sometimes amazingly available for any emergency we might have. And sometimes not available at all, at the weirdest times.

It also means that when he is at home, he’s either sleeping, eating, watching TV with Abigail, or doing something meditative and frivolous, like playing with Legos, to relax as best as he can.

Abigail works in childcare with a fairly regular and reliable schedule, and otherwise shuffles around the house in a very fluffy robe and slippers. She was upstairs, watching a show that Peter wasn’t interested in, most likely, winding down from work.

One of them does their taxes and signs the checks and deals with the landlord, and we’ve never seen which one it was who did.

It made the most sense for it to be Peter who did that stuff, because he didn’t have the memory impairments and executive dysfunction problems that we and Abigail had. But he played with Legos so much.

When we just smiled at him, he asked, “Wanna join me? I’ve got half the build left. It’s cute.”

Usually he got spaceship sets, or rebuilt old ones. But this was a pastel house, and a pretty big one at that.

“Soft, puky mint green doesn’t have a gender,” he said, turning his half built creation to look at it from another angle. “It soothes everyone.”

“What,” Sarah started to say and then walked us over to the table to sit down with him. She didn’t finish her thought or sentence and just looked at him, head tilted.

“I thought I’d try something different,” he said, grinning. “You know, inspired by, like, everyone I know now. And I think I like it.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” she said.

“Oh, I know!” he replied cheerfully. “Didn’t I just say that? It’s literally really soothing to me, but. I mean. Look at that green. I didn’t know Lego came in that color.”

Sarah opened her mouth to say something more when Abigail appeared in the hall doorway holding a box of hair dye, and asked, “Sarah! Do you want to do girl stuff with me right now?”

Peter glanced at her and said, “You didn’t even check to see which of them it was.”

“I heard her voice,” Abigail scolded him.

“Oh, of course.”

“We’re kind of really exhausted,” Sarah said. “It’s been a really busy and stressful day, and I don’t think I can handle much of anything, and Goreth’s right here and I don’t know about them, either.”

“Understandable,” Peter said.

Abigail pouted and let her hands and the box drop to her waist, and said, “Poop. I was really hoping to do a new color tonight.”

“I’ll help you with it,” Peter said. “I seem to really be into color right now, anyway!”

“But. Girls,” Abigail gestured listlessly with the box at us.

“Hair dye doesn’t have a gender,” Peter said.

“It really doesn’t,” Sarah confirmed.

“Yes, but. We’re girls. And I thought Sarah’d like to do girl stuff to relax,” Abigail protested.

Sarah considered that the only ‘girl stuff’ she actually liked were the clothes she wore and getting shit done, when she had the energy to do it. Otherwise, Diablo II, science fiction shows, and irritating music were more her pace. If you were going to go gendering things in the first place.

Dying hair sounded like a lot of work, and she really wasn’t up for it.

But Abigail was a cis woman inviting her, a trans woman, to go do girl shit, whatever girl shit could be. And that didn’t happen all that often.

“How about cartoons?” Sarah asked.

“Ooh!” Abigail lit up. “Perfect! I just bought sugar cereal!”

Peter gestured at his house, and suggested, “If you squint at it, these Legos could be girl stuff. But I’m playing with them, so I understand if that might be confusing.”

He was just a little too deadpan for Sarah to figure out if he was being sarcastic or not.

Abigail threw the box of hair dye at him.

“Hey,” he said, letting it bounce off his shoulder without even twitching. “No physical assault in the house.”

“Sorry,” Abigail said.

“That didn’t hurt at all,” Peter said, turning to pick up the box and toss it gently back. “But let’s not make a habit of even playfully hitting each other. Please. After everything that’s happened in the last year, I don’t want to experience that even in play. OK?”

“Sorry. OK. I won’t do that again.”

“Thank you. But I get your point. I’ll lay off the jokes and teasing when you’re frustrated. Or entirely, if you need me to.”

“Thank you,” Abigail said. Then she turned to Sarah expectantly, “Cartoons?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, getting up far more easily than she’d experienced even yesterday, but still feeling drained.

I was thinking right along with her that it was interesting to watch these two interact, even in moments of stress.

It seemed like they kept switching positions, too.

Sometimes it would be like tonight, where Peter was the relaxed and authoritative one, acting relatively like an adult no matter what he was doing, and drawing his boundaries or supporting Abigail’s needs with calm assurance either way.

And sometimes it was like when Sarah had bolted from the house in the frigid, drizzling cold without our cane or coat, in a panic, and Peter had had to go look for her in his Subaru and coax her back to the apartment. And he was kind of a wreck afterward, rambling about his own past and parroting things we’d told him about trans related mental healthcare as if he was the one who knew his shit. And Abigail gently reminded him that he was human, and that we’d been the ones to tell him those statistics.

Sometimes she outright ordered him to do the dishes, and he did them. Immediately.

And sometimes he reminded her that she needed to take a shower.

Sometimes he was the one crying on her shoulder.

And sometimes she was crying in his arms.

And they kept rewatching DS9 together, Peter pretending to have a crush on both Garack and Bashir, and doing a pretty good job of it, and Abigail genuinely having a crush on Kira.

Every now and then, Peter would lean in to us and explain that what he really liked about Garack and Bashir was all the spy stuff. That it was more Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy actually was. And we would nod as if he was right.

And Abigail would later say, “Peter has a serious crush on Kira, too. I’m lucky he loves lesbians.”

For how much they looked like a straight couple, they really, seriously weren’t.

Peter was a cisgender, heterosexual man, and Abigail was a cisgender, bisexual woman, and they weren’t officially married, and damn. They were subtly, deeply queer.

They were another set of goals, Sarah thought for me.

Yes, I agreed.

After preparing the biggest bowls of cereal we could manufacture, we let Abigail lead us upstairs to their livingroom, a smaller room in their attic hallway between their tiny kitchenette and their bedroom.

The kitchenette had a toaster oven, a sink, and a minifridge. Just barely enough to qualify the attic as maybe another unit, but they really had to use the main kitchen a lot anyway. And we all shared the bathroom.

It’s like the landlord had made a halfhearted bid to get the building registered as having more units than it did, and then gave up.

But, it also did mean that sometimes we didn’t see either of our housemates for a whole week, as they holed up from being sick, and did their best not to use the bathroom when we were up and about. To avoid passing on whatever it was to us. And they could do that.

More and more often, we were leaving the house for the day, anyway, so it was easier when those times happened.

But it also meant the two of them wanted to spend more time with us, to make sure we were OK. Or maybe because they genuinely missed us.

Abigail really liked her baby pastel colored fluffy things.

The little hallway couch was covered in crocheted afghans that were somehow made with the fluffiest yarn. Soft, not fuzzy, just really fluffy. Smooth to the touch. Some of them had bigger loops in them than others, so it was possible to pick your level of warmth, too.

We grabbed one that wouldn’t overheat us, and settled to lean on the right hand arm of the couch.

Abigail took the left.

The room was lit by a large window in the bedroom letting in the last of the daylight, and a single desk lamp. It really was still mid afternoon, in the winter, but it was headed toward sunset so fast that it felt like evening.

If we hadn’t had Ktletaccete enhancing our body’s functions and senses, we might have requested more light to eat our cereal by. Until last year, our eyesight had been getting weirdly dim.

But now, when the TV was turned on, it was more than enough.

It turned out that the cartoons that Abigail was watching were an old recording of Rainbow Brite, on fucking VHS.

“Where the hell did you get that?” Sarah asked, as our housemate sank back into the sofa and picked up the remote.

Abigail lifted her head and looked imperiously at us, mouth closed, eyes twinkling, refusing to divulge her secrets.

“That’s a working VCR?” Sarah asked. “That’s, like, our parents’ technology!”

“I know!”

“Seriously, where did you get it? I want one.”

“We have this one,” Abigail said, gesturing with the remote. “You have your aliens, I have my Mysteries of the Ancients.”

Both Sarah and I snickered and chortled at the same time, through the same mouthful of cereal. It was kind of a feat.

“Good. You’re laughing,” Abigail said, and then hit play.

The cartoon was silly and very eighties, and way, way better than we expected from something produced during the height of the era of gendered programming.

“Holy crud, boys were missing out,” Sarah said, at one point.

“Not all boys,” Abigail reminded her.

“Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean.” Sarah gestured with her spoon. “The cis boys who, like us closeted trans girls, bought into all that bullshit or were born to bigoted parents and didn’t think or get to watch this show.”

“Totally,” Abigail nodded.

“Of our parents’ generation.”

“Right.”

Sarah looked over at Abigail, who was focused on the T.V., and said, “I am the trans girl here, right?”

“Yep!”

“Just checking.”

“Such a girl.”

Sarah stuck her tongue out and pushed at Abigail’s foot with our foot. And Abigail stuck her tongue out in a very cute, gentle way, but kept watching the show.

I could feel all of her tension leaving our chest and shoulders, just draining away with the next breath.

We felt light and happy.

“Thank you,” Sarah said, almost just mouthing the words she was so quiet, afraid to hear her own voice.

“Any damn time,” Abigail said firmly.

Sarah looked up with a thought and waited a bit before asking, “Were you and Peter competing to do something girly with us?”

“You fucking bet we were,” Abigail said.

“So he’s not genuinely enjoying that Lego set?” Sarah asked.

“Are you kidding?” Abigail finally looked over. “You saw his face. He’s having an epiphany.”

“Like mine?” Sarah asked.

Abigail snorted, “No. That’s the boyest boy I’ve ever fucked.”

“OK.”

“You know how he gets sometimes.”

“We do. We. Yes. We do.”

Abigail gently kicked back, “You’re the trans girl. You should know this gender stuff is bullshit. Why am I the one reminding you?”

Sarah watched the cartoon made for girls for a few seconds and then said, “You might not be quite as wrapped up in the gender bullshit as we are, actually.”

Abigail shrugged and said, “I think it fucks us all up. Again. Peter.”

“OK.”

“Anyway, this is helping you, so it’s also not all bullshit. Obviously.”

Sarah didn’t have words for that, so she just wobbled our head and gestured at the TV with her spoon in agreement.

“What about your visitors?” Abigail asked. 

She had a hard time saying Ktletaccete when other people weren’t mispronouncing it. She got it unerringly right when other people struggled, though. But, since we were the only other ones in the room, we got to be the ones who spoke the word.

“The Ktletaccete?” Sarah couldn’t stop herself from asking.

“Yes.”

“What about them?”

“Do they have the genders?”

“Kinda?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, and Ashwin or anyone else can correct me if I’m wrong, they thought they didn’t,” Sarah said. She thought she’d had this conversation with Abigail before, but it’s very possible that it was a false memory, or that the Abigail she was talking to was the side of Abigail that hadn’t been part of that conversation.

Abigail had been born without a corpus callosum. And while that didn’t officially make her a plural system, especially not against her own self identification, it did give her similar impairments. As Ashwin had written in nems book before, it was why she’d related so strongly with us and insisted on Peter bringing us in from the cold.

Watching Abigail as if to see if at least part of our housemate was listening, Sarah continued, “The Founding Crew had constructed the Sunspot culture so that no one who hatched from an egg was assigned a gender. They erased everything that referenced gender from the language and never taught about it, breaking from their parent ship’s culture in that way. But, in order to protect their children from their own prejudices they created the Tutors to raise them. And, um,” Sarah swallowed some saliva while she thought back on our work on the Sunspot Chronicles. “Well, it turns out that Tutors are people, too, and that Tutor is an assigned gender with strict gender expressions and gender roles. And they really fucked up there.”

“Ooh, yeah. That’s bad,” Abigail said.

“It gets worse,” Sarah said. “Like the Crew, the Tutors are basically immortal, Network people. Unless they deliberately erase themselves, they live as long as the Sunspot does. And, for hundreds of generations of Children, the Tutors never wavered, never complained, never rebelled, never struck, never thought that maybe being a Tutor wasn’t all they were capable of being.”

“That sounds disordered,” Abigail said. “They were made to think and feel that way?”

“Apparently,” Sarah said.

“But they were still people.”

“Absolutely,” Sarah said. “A few hundred years ago. Five hundred of our years ago, when Ashwin was born in nems system, the Pembers, their Tutor, Metabang proposed a wild experiment, and it was approved by the Crew Council, and it blew the whole thing wide open. Nobody predicted what happened. Not even Phage. And you really gotta read our book, Abigail. It’s in there.”

“I will. I will. I will.”

“Anyway, and this is the part we’re still translating, but Ashwin is filling us in with their own memories as they do it,” Sarah continued. “Metabang’s sibling Abacus was kind of fucked with by the Crew when Phage’s child, Niʔa, hatched. And as a result of that, Abacus deliberately committed treason and got sanctioned for it. And while it was imprisoned, it wrote about the emancipation of the Tutors, and eventually got to give a big speech about it. Then a couple hundred years after that, with very little change from the Crew, they met their first aliens. And now they’ve got Phage’s gift, and their whole world is turned upside down.”

As soon as Sarah was done talking, Ashwin spoke up and said, “The Sunspot spins for gravity, Sarah, it’s always turning upside down.”

Chuckling, Abigail pointed at us and said, “You need to take them all to Australia, Sarah!”

“Oh, if only we could,” Sarah said, glumly. “Traveling while trans is scary enough. But where’d we get the money for it?”

“Unfair.”

“Yeah. But, Rräoha really wants to go. And the Murmuration might be able to do it for gem, actually.”

“To Australia?”

“Anywhere. Gem wants to travel, to see the rest of the Earth.”

“And the others don’t?” Abigail asked.

“We do,” Ashwin responded.

These quick responses with the sharp changes in voice always made it seem like we were doing voice work for a cartoon show, but Abigail was used to it and staunchly refused to even blink.

“We need to figure out how to get you all on a plane,” she declared.

“I don’t want to deal with the TSA,” Sarah said. “Or getting a passport.”

“Couldn’t Ashwin, like, spoof that shit?” Abigail asked.

“Mmmmmmmm…” Ashwin growled skeptically.

As soon as nem was done making noise, Sarah said, “Only if the TSA and everyone else in the airport literally let us do so.”

“Oh, you all made me believe in magic with what you’ve done. That shit is real. There’s got to be a way.”

“I’ve got way too much stuff to do here,” Sarah said. “We all do.” Trying to shut down this line of conversation. It was fruitless to talk about it. From all sorts of different angles. Glumly, into her cereal, she nonsensically added, mumbling, “Goreth and I are getting to travel in a way, anyway.”

“But they’re not – wait,” Abigail blinked. “What do you mean?”

Sarah looked at her in confusion and asked, “What do you mean, what do I mean? You don’t remember what we told you last night?”

Abigail made a circular motion of her head and widened her eyes, with a quick outward gesture of her hands, but didn’t say anything. Implying that, no, of course she didn’t remember.

“Sorry,” Sarah sighed. “OK. You know how the Ktletaccete got here, right? Through this Tunnel in our head.”

“Yeah. That’s where Phage came from, too. When you were kids.”

“Right.”

“And?”

“Phage let Goreth go back through the Tunnel, to visit the Sunspot. Last night.”

Abigail’s jaw dropped, eyes even wider, and she jerked her head and shoulders down and forward, an exaggerated expression of wonder and disbelief, “You what?”

“Not me, Goreth,” Sarah said.

“And, so, they’re, like, gone right now?”

“No,” I volunteered. “But also, yes.”

Abigail blinked several times and shook her head, “I don’t get it.”

“Sarah, may I?”

“Yes.”

“I went through the Tunnel, Abigail. And I’m still on the other side of it. But I’m also here. Because, if you’re not Phage, the Tunnel just makes a copy of you when you try to go through it,” I said.

“Oh. Oh, weird,” she replied.

“Yes, and, in about a month’s time, I plan to reconnect with my other self and get those memories. A whole month of memories of being on the Sunspot,” I explained.

“Oh, that’s so fucking wild!”

“But, it doesn’t do anything to help the Ktletaccete explore Earth, which I think you were going to say,” I added.

She shook her head as she sucked on another mouthful of cereal, then chewed it, and swallowed it, and said, “No. No, it doesn’t. Which means we do need to get you on a plane.”

“But the TSA,” Sarah protested.

“We just have to take down the TSA first,” Abigail said, blithely as shit.

“Why does everyone think we get to be supervillains now?” Sarah asked.

Abigail blinked again, and asked innocently, “You don’t?”

Sarah speared her with a look, “Are you being like Peter right now?”

Abigail wrinkled her nose and snorted and said, “Yeah,” relaxing. “I’m sorry. But, I do think you need it. Both the fun bullshitting, and getting out of the country. Somehow. Like, maybe a long term plan, OK? We’ll help you figure it out.”

“We’ve been to Germany,” Sarah said.

“That doesn’t count without the Ktletaccete,” Abigail said, accidentally getting the word right.

“And we agree,” Ashwin said.

“Shit,” Sarah replied and ate more cereal to prevent anyone else from speaking.

At some point, Abigail had paused the show. She reached up and hit play again.