#this was MASTERFULLY beta'd by fridge246 btw

[throwaninkpot]

i.

  There once was a boy who never felt right. It itched, maybe. Chaffed and claustrophobic, like when the witch who raised him would threaten to transform him into a bug and keep him in a jar, and even the thought had made his throat feel tight and his limbs weak and confined. That threat and all the other threats of equally awful punishment were never enough to make Tip behave. Once, when Mombi sent him to bring in clothes from the wash line, he kept a few items back from the laundry basket. Just a scarf and a blouse--how would that witch like it, Tip thought, if a little Mombi entered the house one day wearing her clothes, hunched over like her, and barking the same commands she gave him and promising the same nasty magics in an exaggerated mimicry of her voice. It would be sure to earn him some harsh punishment, but the prank would be worth it for the startled look he imagined on her awful face. So, he secreted the items away, and a few days later he ducked behind the house, threw the blouse on and tied the scarf over his head. Then grinning, he leaned over the rain bucket to catch a glimpse of the ridiculous image he made. 

In the water's reflection, his grin slipped away replaced by a curious frown. He looked...pretty, almost. The witch's clothes were nothing fine or lovely, made of the same practical lavender fabric as his own. But unlike Tip's own clothes, there were little blue and white flowers dotting the collar of the shirt. And the scarf framed his face in a way that made him look less like the old witch Mombi, and more like one of Gillikin girls he often saw at a distance working in their fields.  

It was strange. Well, yes, it was strange, but not in the way Tip had thought it might be, not in a bad way at all. It was-- 

"Boy! Where are you?"

Tip started, tearing the scarf from his head and hurrying to shrug the blouse off. The moment, like the prank, were forgotten and the day went on.

The days went on. Tip went, and went, and went, on and on, and found himself in a high room in the Emerald City. And it was himself, wasn't it? Tip wasn't a girl. How could Tip be a girl? How could Tip be?

But, well, if it had to be done...

So it was.

Tip went to sleep and Ozma awoke. When she sat up, a mirror was held up to Ozma's face, and looking at her new features didn't feel the way she expected. All those years of seeing a face shakily reflected in water barrels and puddles, and this was the first time the face looking back felt like--felt like-- Something tugged at Ozma's heart that she didn't understand. Me? Me. Is that me?

"Well?" Glinda asked gently, still holding the mirror for Ozma, smiling encouragingly at the child. 

"It's...strange." Ozma started. Oh, was that her voice? High and fluid as a bird song? Nothing like the cracking thing her voice had become in the last few years as Tip. 

"Strange, perhaps," Glinda allowed. "But not so bad, is it?"

"No," Ozma said. Oh, that was her voice. Oh. "No, it...it doesn't feel bad at all."

Once, there was a boy. But that boy isn't. That boy was a dream, or a threat of a tight jar made a reality that Ozma lived in every day. But the dream is over; Ozma awoke. Ozma continues to wake, now in open rooms all arching ceilings and wide windows looking out on her kingdom stretching wide. The clothes are as light as anything on her, and even when she orders adventuring outfits from the dressmaker, they come in lovely shades with little flowers on the collar and they never itch to wear.

      ii.

There once was a boy who was made a boy, cursed to be a boy, never knew anything but being a boy and there was joy in this.  He was happy in a way he had never noticed because he had never thought to question something so intrinsically true.

No one else had felt the need to question it either, until now.

He had tried to tell them--Glinda, the Scarecrow, Woggle-Bug, all of them. He wasn't a girl, he was Tip. He was no girl.

Glinda, smiling sweet, patted his hand. And for a moment he thought--maybe she would--but-- "But you were born a girl," she told him simply, like he was only confused. "So you must resume your proper form."

Tip looked around desperately. All these smiling faces. All the friends he had spent so many adventures beside. None of them would listen. Well, Jack listened. Jack cried at the prospect of losing his father. And Tip had never been comfortable with his parentage of a pumpkin-headed man, hadn't wanted to be Jack's father, but he wanted to be Jack's mother even less. Jack's protestation didn't matter. If Glinda and the others didn't care about Tip's objections, when he was the one who was heir to the throne of Oz and whose life they would be changing, why would they listen to anyone else?

All the while, they were kind. Reassuring him that he would be just fine. Guiding him with care to a couch. Meaning so well as they let him be put to sleep and took away everything that Tip knew as Tip. 

There was a boy, once. He is a boy no more.

Even the clothes were different. Tip didn't know why that hurt the most. His scuffed but sturdy purple pants covered in all the dirt from every stop of his travels were magically gone, and in their place was a dress of green gauze and flounce. Oh, and why were his legs put together funny? They weren't meant to sit like that on his hips. Oh, his hips. They were wrong. It was all wrong.

He sat up, burying his hands into the frilly fabric mess for something, anything, to hold onto. Glinda brought out a mirrored glass and it showed a face that was almost but not like his.

"Well?" Glinda asked gently. 

"It's..." Tip started to speak, and then burst into tears when the voice that came out was not his own.

"Give it time," Glinda soothed, days later, after Ozma's return had been announced, and ceremonies and parades had been held. "It must have been such a trial, dearie, and it's only natural it would take you time to adjust after the experience."

The experience. No one liked to speak much of it now, and when they did, it was only in the vague terms. The experience. Ozma's time away. The curse. Before.

If the experience had been such a trial, why did this now feel so wrong? That was the way curses worked, Tip thought: A person was happy, then a spell was cast on them and they were wretched, then the spell was broken and they were happy again.

That order had gotten a bit mixed up here.

He gave it time. Days, months, a year passed. Tip didn't adjust. Tip didn't feel right.

He wondered if maybe this, now, was in fact the curse. Maybe Ozma isn't him. Maybe it never was really, and never will be, even as he answered to that name and smiled at the subjects who murmured it adoringly. 

Maybe fate had found its way through accident and misfortune, and the initial transformation into Tip had been the universe setting something to right. Maybe Oz had been meant to have a king again. Well--after all, Glinda had said no respectable sorceress would deal in transformation magic, but she hadn't said anything about sorcerers. And maybe it wasn't a sorceress who sat on the throne of Oz after all. Maybe Oz was meant to be ruled by a sorcerer again. Give it time, Tip swore, and he would put himself to right again.

      iii.

There once was a boy. There now is a girl. And he would, if she could, live in that space between. Where eyes are fluttering, falling asleep and waking, as Ozma is coming and Tip is going. 

The child left by this sits up, and there is Glinda waiting with a mirrored glass showing a new face for them to meet.

"Well?" Glinda asks gently.

Tip-turned-Ozma can only look between the sorceress and himself in wonder, unable to answer. When he--she?--rises, there are her friends looking just as startled as she feels. She speaks finally: "I hope--" Oh, is that what he sounds like now? Well, his voice had changed once already before; this is nothing stranger than that, only quicker an ordeal than when his voice began dropping and cracking. "I hope that none of you will care less for me than you did before. I'm just the same Tip," she says, and for a moment feels like crying. Struggling to put into words what she doesn't even understand yet. 

What she means is: I'm the same me.

What she means is: Can't I be both?

It's elusive--fickle--ephemeral, fragile as her new gossamer gowns under the touch. Sometimes, he can feel it take shape at his fingertips, as solid as the crown Glinda places on her head. There is Tip. There is Ozma. Sometimes, there seems like little difference between the two. And other times, it is all he can do not to cry as the crowds call out "Princess! Princess Ozma!" as he passes through the streets. It's more than the names. It's more than the new clothes she must wear. It's more than the new way his friends treat him now even though they had promised it would still be the same. It's something like the way the skin wraps around their bones so distinctly different and differently distinct. It is each of these, and still more.

If they could have started as Ozma then turned into Tip then back again to Ozma, maybe the boundaries between are more malleable than people seem to think.

Ozma-still-Tip will learn the words to explain, and invent new ones where she finds the need. Slowly, he comes to understand herself. The citizens of Oz will learn, too, and so come to love their ruler whether there is a king under the crown today or a queen. This is Oz, after all. Where straw or clockwork walk and talk, and heads may be swapped, and young girls in houses fall from they sky then fly away home again. A little multitude of identity is not so odd at all.

(x)