Author: nepthys
Rating: R, to play it safe
Ssummary: Kate and the blues.
Website: http://neith.envy.nu/ *shameless plug*
Disclaimer: Joss owns everything. Doesn't share either.
Distribution: List archives, anyone else please ask.

The nursery was blue when she was born. Ships sailing on water painted dark indigo, cerulean fish surrounding the treasure chest at the bottom of the sea. It had been painted during the third trimester, when she was still a foetus sheltered by her mother's flesh and her father still carried hope it'd be a boy. His boy, a son to carry his colours and the badge he wore, as *his* father had, and his grandfather had before him.

It's a story she has heard a million times, it seems.

How they had all the boy names picked out, the blue nursery, and then it turned out to be a *girl*. They don't even have to tell her the story; there it was on the wall. Blue, always blue; her father's colours and what he had wanted her to be.

She tries her best to be as a son, for him. And no one could hardly tell she wasn't; not with the cropped hair and lean swimmer's body, flat and *boyish*. No dolls or princess dresses, no tea parties or ballet lessons. She is a tomboy, a cowboy, a pirate, and a soldier. Jeans and t-shirts, action hero toys. Fishing trips, baseball practise. Kate, not Katherine.

Kate spends nearly all her time at the station after school, perched on the desk of either Dad or his partner Frank. Pillaging the candy jar and listening, mesmerized, to the stories they told her, about the car chases, the bad guys and how they caught them. Heroes, they are. And Dad's the bravest, the best of them all. What most kids believed of their parents; yet Kate's father really *is*.

***

A few weeks after her thirteenth birthday, the sheets are stained red one morning when she wakes.

And it keeps bleeding *down there*, the next day and the next. Auntie May isn't really helpful either, making it all sound like some kind of terribly complex and mystical phenomenon, a sacred mystery not to be spoken of loudly or in the presence of boys.

It doesn't feel as if it's sacred though, just a churning ache in her stomach that felt as if something was *twisting*. And the colour of it, a faded sort of pinkish red, is practically screaming *girl* and that wasn't what she was supposed to be at all.

It's a relief, when she increases the hours in the swimming-baths and the sea, and it disappears altogether. Her body immersed in blue; slow, lazy strokes through the water, keeping her pure and light and liquefied, like music and magic and feathers, far from the carmine heaviness of the clotted blood.

She manages to keep her sheets blessedly clean for a while, yet soon the additional laps aren't enough and no amount of treading her body through the blue can ward off the ugly red stains. Hips becoming more rounded, chest swelling and slowly developing into *breasts* that won't go away even when she pounds on them with her fists, trying to *will* them to disappear. She turns blue, then green and yellow, and finally the bruises fade and the skin is pink again.

Kate just wants to *howl* because she liked the old body better, she really did. And she doesn't quite know how to *be* anything else.

***

And so she finds herself digging through her father's closet, which is stupid because there was hardly anything there that could help her being a girl, now was there? Nothing there but dust bunnies and a few shoe boxes. And a gun, mustn't forget that; the reason why she wasn't allowed to go near the closet *ever*.

Careful not to touch the boxes at the back of the upper shelf, Kate digs out the rectangular box hidden in the back, an antique jewel case containing the most valuable items they own. It isn't jewellery though or anything like that. It's just photographs, yet to Kate they are infinitely more precious.

Sitting down on the floor, Indian style, she spreads the contents of the box on the floor. She doesn't remember much, not really, just a pair of gray-greenish eyes and a warm smile. But there's Mom in the photographs, happy and smiling. She's pretty and poised; everything a girl should be and Kate just *isn't*.

And it feels almost like playing dress-up, when she slips her feet into her mother's shoes. Tries to twirl, even though she's just wearing jeans, but the shoes are too large for her yet, and she stumbles a little, taking hold of the dresser as to not fall.

Maybe they would never quite fit; rather like the ugly step sister in the fairy tale, attempting to stick her ungainly foot into the glass slipper. And maybe she isn't meant to be Cinderella, but a much better heroine. Slaying dragons. Putting them behind bars where they belong.

Laughter bubbles in her throat, as she fastens her father's badge on her shirt, right next to her heart, which is surely pounding red and slick inside her chest. The hair's just too short to do anything with, but she brushes it back from her face and puts a bit of vaseline on her lips, to make them look glossy like in the magazines. Scrutinizes the face in the bathroom mirror.

Not really pretty, she thinks. But she looks a little like Mom, around the eyes and the curve of the mouth. So maybe it's okay.

***

She's twenty-seven and surrounded by pink and blue again. Blue cloth, and the red, the inevitable girlish red seeping treacherously down her thighs. A little dizzy from the anaesthesia, but she makes out a woman in blue, kneeling next to her, holding something pink. Five, ten, twenty pink toes and fingers.

And Kate is happy that it's a girl.