#it touches on wash's thoughts and motivations during season 6/recovery one

[startinginorange]

Trans Rvb Week - Tuesday Pt 2

Wash realized he was trans fairly young, actually. He was still in preschool school when he first began to tell people he was boy- tell people fairly indiscriminately, too. 

He told his parents, he told his teacher, he told his classmates, he told the lady who served him ice-cream from a food truck once. She hadn’t misgendered him, or mentioned his gender at all, she just handed him the ice-cream with a smile and he said, “Thanks! I’m a boy!”

His mom wasn’t very amused, but the lady in question found it amusing and adorable. 

Not that his mom wasn’t supportive- his dad had difficulty with it sometimes, but his mom was there. she was just very serious about the whole thing in general. 

“Honey,” she began as they made their way over to a shady bench. “You told that woman you were a boy, just like you’ve been telling me and daddy that you’re a boy.”

He nods and makes an obligatory noise, too busy trying to eat his entire ice-cream scoop in one bite than to really answer her. He wasn’t sure what she was asking, anyway. Of course he told people he was a boy. It felt good to say, it felt true.

His mom paused, possibly expecting more, but when it became obvious that was all she was getting she began to speak again.

“You know,” she said, “if the doctors told us you were a boy we were going to name you David. Do you like that name?”

He stops eating his ice-cream to consider this question, because it seemed important. Names were important, right? That’s why you had to know all of them. 

It doesn’t take him too long to come up with an answer, though. 

“Yeah!” 

His mom smiles and speaks, with the kind of look and expression that you don’t understand as a kid. It’s only when you look back on it that you can actually see how much love is there. 

“Would you like us to call you David, honey?”

David stops eating entirely to look over at his mom. He was absolutely shocked. He didn’t even realize that you could do that- names seemed so permanent. 

He nods as vigorously as he can. “Yes!” Remembering his manners he adds, “Please!”

His mother’s smile somehow softens even more. “All right then, honey.”

“David now,” he corrects, and his mother laughs. 

“You’ll still be honey to me, even if your name were Tutankhamun,” she teases. 

His father was resistant to the change, but she convinced him eventually. Everyone else took it remarkably well. Sometimes there were administrative mix-ups and teachers would say the wrong name at first and sometimes doctors would use the wrong pronouns, but they always changed after being corrected. No one had real problems with it. 

No one until Cecil Kyle.

Warning for transphobia, bullying, and mild violence under the cut

Cecil Kyle was always cruel about it, from the very first day when the teacher said the wrong name. 

It would be easier if he were dumb, if he just repeated the same things over and over again and everyone just ignored him, but despite his ignorance and prejudice Kyle was actually sort of clever. He came up with witty things to say, well witty by elementary school standards, that everyone loved to repeat. Little singsong things and slogans.

David even caught a couple of his “friends” repeating them occasionally, and when he asked about it they just brushed it off. It was funny and catchy, couldn’t David understand?

He did understand, and that was the hard part. It was so easy to come out when he was young, back then it was all the excitement of the realization and the joy of sharing it. The messages from the jokes and advertisements and his father’s occasional muttered comments hadn’t sank in yet. 

But now, thanks to Cecil Kyle, they wormed their way into his heart with a vengeance. For the first time he learned shame. He asked his teacher to call him by his legal name again and asked his mom to buy him some more feminine clothes to try to get it to stop, but at first that just made it change tone. 

His mother was concerned, she started being concerned when he began asking for more sick days and cutting class, but he refused to tell her what was going on. She already looked so worried and he knew if he tried to tell her he was going to cry, and boys didn’t cry, and he knew he didn’t have the words to communicate the depth of it. Not that he fully understood these reasons, he just knew that there was a reluctance to tell her in his heart too strong to get past. 

When he asked for the girl clothes his mother became more worried, but his father was relieved. He’d always respectful David’s clothing requests, but now he was actually happy about them. 

David never got anything too feminine, he couldn’t stand it, but he chose what he could out of the girl’s section of the store. 

He tried and he tried and the worst part was the Cecil Kyle didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care about anything. Cecil didn’t care when the teacher sent him to detention, apparently his parents didn’t mind, or when David called him names right back. He didn’t even seem to care when David punched him once- he smiled as David got sent to detention for the first time. 

It was the helplessness that really got to David, that he had all this anger and pain that he just wanted it to stop or to make Cecil Kyle feel an ounce of it but he couldn’t. All he could do was hold it in, go back into the closet, and hope. 

David learned not to respond and eventually Cecil Kyle got bored of him and moved on, but it took David years of classes without Cecil Kyle or his own ex-friends in them to slowly start coming out again. To re-find his own identity and the joy it brought him behind the pain and shame.

But the thing about hunkering down, not responding, just doing what they wanted him to do and hoping, the thing about taking the “don’t let it get to you” approach is that it still does get to you. You can’t stop it from getting to you. You just can’t express any of how it does. You don’t stop yourself from being angry or hurt- you just push it down and put on a calm facade to survive. 

So even when David healed enough to find himself again and come out the hurt was still there. The pain and the anger. It never left, it never could. 

The next time David saw Cecil Kyle was in the eighth grade boys bathroom. 

David stopped, he halted like a deer in the headlights. There he was, the boogyman of David’s childhood, washing his hands in the sink. David’s still frozen when Cecil saw him in the mirror. 

David saw the recognition in Cecil’s eyes before he started to speak.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I was in the boys bathroom,” he said. “Or did you forget that you’re a girl again?”

Cecil continued talking, but David didn’t hear it. He couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat and he could barely see beyond his own anger. He was shaking and Cecil Kyle was just standing there talking like this was fifth grade and he was untouchable. 

But he wasn’t untouchable. He couldn’t be. David had grown and healed and when he balled his fists up he felt nothing like the kid in that fifth grade class who had never even gotten detention. His mom had gotten him self-defense lessons since then, and it was time to defend himself. 

He pounced forward and slammed Cecil into the wall, using a defensive hold he learned. Well, that was what he’d tried to do. In his anger David had forgotten his surroundings, and he ended up slamming him over the sink and crushing the side of his face into the mirror.

Cecil screamed, and a teacher came running in. 

After that there was an ambulance, police, and a million questions. David went through it all in a haze. His mom came and he didn’t even remember what he said to her, but she argued with the police and the school on his behalf. 

David looked at his hands and, for all of his guilt, couldn’t help but feel some lightness in his chest. He wasn’t helpless anymore. 

He signed up for the military when he was 18. His parents had been supportive, but they couldn’t afford any of the transitional care David had needed, had barely been able to afford to get him new binders when the old ones came out and neither of them had insurance that covered transitional care for minors. David needed a job, and the military health insurance packets was one of the best. 

But it wasn’t just for that. Humanity was in a war, in a war against an enemy that made them seem powerless. A desperate war for survival, and David knew what that felt like on a smaller scale. He didn’t want to be helpless, but he didn’t want to hurt people that didn’t deserve it, so he joined the military because he trusted them to be doing the right thing. 

Later on he would look at that trust and shake his head. 

Later on he would end up trapped by an enemy he thought he could trust, a program without any supervision and enough funding to get better lawyers than he ever could. A program that had too much weight to ever be threatened by a soldier who’d been declared legally insane and diagnosed with paranoia, one that Wash knew would kill him if he even tried to fight back. 

Another bully that made him feel powerless, but Wash knew how to deal with it now. He kept his head down, he kept his emotions in, he played sane and calm as best he could. He waited until they trusted him again because he knew, he knew that the day was coming when they would mess up and no longer be as powerful as they seemed. 

Another bully had broken him, but just like last time Wash didn’t stay broken. He remembered who he was, even if he knew he wasn’t the same person he had been. He healed crooked and practiced fighting until his knuckles bled. 

The Director and the Counselor thought they had the upper hand, but Wash knew how to survive.