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Number Two realizes pretty early on that he isn’t like Number Seven, but it takes him a little longer to realize he isn’t like Number Three either. They should be peas in a pod, the only girls on the team, but Number Three is boring. She never wants to go bug hunting or count how long he can hold his breath underwater, and she never wants to fight with him, even when Two makes it clear he’s not being serious.
Their nannies always pair them together, the three of them. The boys have their hair cut into the same sideways part, and the girls have theirs cut straight down their back, with bangs to top it off. Two hates it. It gets caught in his eyes when he’s playing, and his nanny is always too harsh when she runs a brush through it. Eventually, Number Seven gets put in a group of her own, and after that it’s just him and Three.
Grace, their mother, comes into the picture when they’re four, and unlike the nannies, she doesn’t leave. Two is too young to realize that most children get mothers when they’re born. Not a few years after the fact. But his young brain rationalizes it pretty well. Sir is always telling them how bad they are, how they have to be better. Maybe now they were finally good enough to have a mom.
Three and Four are infatuated with her, more so than the rest of them. They trail behind her when they have time, and Three tries to swish her skirt and style her hair to match their mothers. Four tries it too, with little success. They’ve all gotten in trouble before, but Two had never seen their father as angry as when Four came traipsing down the stairs, a whole six years old, swimming in one of Grace’s dresses and tripping in her heels. He never thought that they were allowed to do that sort of thing, and they clearly aren’t, if Sir’s response is anything to go by.
But. Grace doesn’t mind. Grace doesn’t say anything at all. She just smiles at him, wipes the tears off his cheek and says “I thought you looked lovely.”
Number Two feels something ravenous unfolding in his chest.
Four wants to hang out with him and Three. Four also wants to hang out with Five and Six. There’s a fluidity to him that Two envys. When they’re together, without anyone else around, he asks him.
“W-Why do you- Why do you act like a g-girl sometimes?” They are eight, and Two knows lots of things now. He knows how to sneak around at night without being caught, how to slip snacks into the waist of his skirt and bring them back to his room, but he still struggles with speaking. His mom helps him a lot, but Sir doesn’t like it. Sir doesn’t like him . Or any of them, when he thinks about it.
Four looks up from his project, which seems to involve cutting holes of various shapes and sizes into his dress shirts. He’s on his sixth, and he’s gonna run out soon. Two offered to let him work on his shirts if it came to that, and Four had smiled blindingly at him.
“What do you mean, mon frère?” he tilts his head like a bird. They all speak passable French- and Italian, and Mandarin, and Spanish, and Latin, and whatever else Sir thought they absolutely needed to know- so Two knows the meaning of the words. It makes that black hole inside of him pulse and writh. But Four also knows a lot of things that Two doesn’t, things from movies and shows and songs that Two never understands. Four says a lot of weird things sometimes, and he knows this is just a part of that, but still. My brother has a nice ring to it.
“Y-you know what I mean,” he glares back.
He is an angry child, he knows that. He and Five are twins in that aspect, that rage that sears under their skin. But where Five is angry about his powers, his seemingly stagnant training, their father’s favoritism, Two is mad about something vaguer. Something he doesn’t really have words for. Something that flares every time Four pulls a new stunt.
His most recent had involved a tube of lipstick he had pilfered from god knows where and smeared across half his face. He then went around grabbing everyone in the house and kissing their cheeks with fervor, which in turn covered half of their faces in lipstick. That was an interesting day.
“I guess,” he says, and turns back to his shirt. “It just seems stupid, doesn’t it? If we’re all supposed to be the same, then why do you and Three and Seven get to wear skirts, and I don’t? Why do you get to have long hair, and I don’t?”
“Is that- Is that something you want?” Two asks, and if his voice is desperate neither of them comment on it.
“Sometimes,” he says, and finally looks back up at him. “Is it something you want?”
He hates crying in front of his siblings. He can’t be the weak, stuttering girl his father thinks he is, so he never breaks down where anyone else can see. But the question is so direct, and Four stares him dead in the eye when he asks it. Like he knows. Like there’s something to know.
Two loses it. Whatever response he could have given is lost in the heaving, wet sobs that come out instead. It’s messy, and he’s ugly when he cries. The red, puffy eyes and the dripping snot. Four is on him in an instant, wrapping him in unsure arms.
“I’m sorry,” he says, panicked. “I didn’t mean to make you sad. You don’t have to be sad.”
Two buries his face in his brother’s shoulder, soaking tears and mucus into his last undamaged shirt. Everything packed tightly under his skin uncoils at once, and he is left loose, unsteady. He shakes his head, an answer to the question and a denial of Four’s guilt.
“I-I-I don’t,” he says.
“What?” Four asks, apparently having lost track of their earlier conversation in his concern.
“I don’t want it,” he confesses for the very first time in his life.
“Oh,” Four says. “ Oh. Well that’s ok.”
And he says it like he means it. Like everything is ok, and all the awful, monstrous things Two dreams about aren’t monstrous at all. Like they’re normal, not even deserving of a descriptor.
Four seems so out of his depth. None of them are good at comforting one another, and Two is probably the guiltiest of them all in terms of insensitivity, but the boy is making an effort, trying his hardest to awkwardly pat Two’s back and offer some kind words. All it does is make him cry harder.
After a long cry-session that Two will never admit to having, his throat torn raw and the rest of him covered in snot and tears, he is finally able to calm down.
“I don’t w-want any of it,” he says again, with more urgency, begging Four to understand what he means even if he himself is unclear.
Four seems to consider that for a minute, every second agony for Two who wonders what he plans to do with the information. He doesn’t think he’d tell dad, but he might laugh it off, or tell their mom, or tell him he’s imagining it all. “I’ll give you my shorts if you give me your skirts,” he says, finally.
Two almost cries again, but instead he laughs wetly and smiles at his brother. “Deal,” he says.
Four cuts his hair that day, the same way he cut up those shirts. Blotchy and uneven, but cut all the same. They trade pants too, and Two watches as Four cuts, paints, and burns every skirt in his closet. A few are left in-tact for Four himself to wear, but the solidarity he feels with his brother in that moment, and the unbridled joy of watching those pleated prisons turn to ash, is unlike anything he’s felt before.
Their mother puts out the fire. Their mother stares at Two’s new look in confusion. Their mother listens while he stutters and sobs through his explanation. Their mother holds him and sits with him and helps him figure out how to tell his father.
He does not yet know the words for what he feels. That will come later. When he is older and his father cares much less and the internet is a little bit easier to navigate. He comes out that night, but he learns the word ‘transgender’ nearly a decade later.
In opposition to that moment, the one that will live forever in his mind in golden light. Warm, kind, and tender how his life never is, never has been, and never will be. The next few hours are cold. Their father is cold. Unfeeling.
He listens, at least. Two stumbles and trips his way through the sentences. Says “I’m not like the others.” and “I’m a boy.” and “I’m sorry.” He says “I’m sorry.” so much it starts to sound like silence. His father is silent. Two has started to hate silence.
“Are you done?” he says, at last.
“Y-yes?” Two replies. He never knows what his father wants, in these moments, and he’s especially unsure now, in this uncharted territory. He has never been this honest, and he has never felt this much like an imposter. He is both actor and playwright, character and author, metaphor and truth. Who’s to say they aren’t all the same?
“Then you are dismissed,” Reginald Hargreeves announces.
He never brings it up again.
Two brings it up.
He brings it up to Four, when his closet is refilled with skirts. They continue their new tradition of absolutely destroying their clothes together. They end their nights with lungs full of smoke, covered in marker and ash and bits of fabric. Eventually, the old man starts replacing them with shorts, like the ones the boys wear. Sometimes, he’ll still sit with Four as he “redesigns” his wardrobe. Offer him suggestions on where to cut little stars into his jackets, draws a picture of a dog on the back of his shorts in black sharpie, steals him scarves from Three’s room to put on his head.
He brings it up to Grace, when father makes no moves to fix his hair. She sits him on a chair downstairs and carefully cuts it the way she does all of the boys. His gets to be a bit shorter, because of the way Four went about it, but he doesn’t mind. In his opinion, the closer the shave the better. She holds his hand when he looks in the mirror for the first time, and wipes the tears that spring from his eyes.
He brings it up to the others. Sits them all down in the living room and tells them, squeezing the life out of Four’s hand, that there’s been a mistake. That he’s a boy, and it’s all better now. They are eight, almost nine, so they take it in stride. Everything else is so weird- their powers, their mother, their… whatever Pogo is- that something as simple as mixing up a gender seems par for the course.
He brings it up to Pogo, who tells him an anecdote about a woman he met in Zanzibar who had been her tribe’s chief’s son and heir, only to find out she was a woman. How she fought tooth and nail and eventually was recognized as herself. He got to watch her perform the first ceremony with her tribe's matriarchs, symbolizing her as a grown woman, ready for marriage. Pogo doesn’t mention it when Two digs half-moon nail prints into his palm while he listens.
A few years later, Five disappears. He leaves one day and never comes back. Their father says nothing as days and weeks and, eventually, months pass. This is when their family starts to break down. This is when Hargreeves’ makeshift, rusted machine starts to malfunction.
They don’t have names. An interviewer asks them. She presses her microphone close to One’s lips and asks “What are your real names?” and One asks “What do you mean?”. Their lives change in the three minutes it takes her to explain.
Grace gives them their real names. She, with the help of Pogo, looks through their father’s papers for any record of birth names, things their birth mothers might have called them. They find Klaus’ first. He’s German. Who knew? Then Vanya, whose mother was Russian and had given birth to her in a public swimming pool. Then Allison, American. The rest of them are nameless, either without record or without mothers who cared enough.
Grace names Ben first, after a painter, then Luther, after an astronomer, and finally Diego, after another painter.
It is a blatantly male name, a signifier of his gender the way so little in the house is. He loves his mother. He loves his name.
But most importantly, Diego Hargreeves loves being a ‘he’, regardless of how his father feels about it.