Work Text:
“I’m surprised you weren’t gunning for a pair of DD’s. Modesty doesn’t seem like your style, Quire.”
“You know, I thought about it’d but if we ever lost auxiliary power around here somebody might faceplant right into my new rack and I’d hate to be mistaken for Emma Frost.”
Even with her back turned she can feel Sophie grinning at that… which does something to cut through the nauseated terror Quentin’s got buried not that far beneath that supremely confident, aloof, completely unbothered surface.
It’s not like the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, what it would be like to be shaped like that, or like Krakoa wasn’t home to the custodians of some gravity-defying cans. The superhero community in general tends to be gifted in that department. Or like Quentin doesn’t remember lying on that crappy XL twin mattress back at the Jean Grey School with one hand down her tiny yellow athletic shorts, staring down a scotch-taped poster of a Maxim girl in a bikini while all the cells in her big brilliant omega-class brain tried to rationalize why wondering what it’d feel like to have tits didn’t make you gay. No, it makes you smart. Smart people have great tits.
If the Hatchery’s factory floor looks all craggy and botanical, folk horror chic, the staff-only area looks pretty much the same as locker rooms everywhere, just minus the smell of chlorine and with little day-glo mosses growing up through the floor tile This is the first time privacy has been much of a consideration in the X-Force member resurrection process. Quentin’s had a good half-hour of quality time with her new body — coming out of the groggy post-resurrection haze, toweling off the Hatchery slime — and the novelty isn’t wearing off. Her new breasts are small and shallow, if she were feeling a little more prickly she’d sneer that they’re proportional, thank you very much, but it’s hard to feel anything more right now than honest-to-God wonder. Her hands on her new chest. New sensations. Goosebumps.
All the earlier tweaks were equally exploratory. The color of her hair, the amount of hair on her arms. Normal people get to try new things in college, or in their twenties, get far away from everyone who knew you in high school and start trying shit out. Krakoa’s vibe is all very spring break, pool party, Mutants Gone Wild — sweaty sex with a hysterical edge underneath it all because everyone knows something this good can’t last. And Krakoa’s never going to last, so why not? Try something new.
Change your name, change your costume, change your team. Change your future. Change your mind. But this had been a long time coming. Seeing your own future, seeing what you become and wanting to be anything but that. Changing her body had been one of the perks of the job, a little unethical but okay, like reselling the high-end handbags you get with your employee discount. And it’s not like Quentin Quire, disgustingly wealthy time-traveling billionaire with a Hellfire Club-branded charge card, couldn’t afford to get the work done the old-fashioned way. The new-fashioned way, with how these things are coming along. Designer parts in infinite permutations. But doctors are freaky and there hadn’t been time before and some deep-down part of Quentin Quire is as scared of change as it is to stay the same forever. Putting in the request had felt like: fuck it. Fuck the future, here comes today.
Killing yourself over and over and over again, always kind of hoping maybe the next time you come back you’ll have worked out all the kinks and gotten it right. That was when Quentin started putting in requests. Every revision means new contours, new details, iterating on perfection. It never hurts to ask: I’ve got to go and do some more high-risk solo cave exploration on the island that’s still trying to eat me, can I at least have tits this time? The worst they can do is say no.
The worst thing she can do, however, remains to be seen. What if she hates it? What if illusions and simulations and weird little fantasies are completely different from having an actual body, one you can’t snap out of at will? It wasn’t like her body had felt catastrophically wrong before, or at least not in ways that couldn’t be plausibly explained by about a hundred other things like being a mutant and being adopted and being resurrected out of a ten gallon tank of goo on the whim of an interplanetary murder bird.
And it’s not like there’s a good frame of reference for before all that. Who ever felt good about their body at sixteen? In high school? At the boarding school for kids nobody wants? With a little bastard like Quentin Quire roaming the halls, a spiteful insecure mind-reader with an endless personal reservoir of venom reserved for anybody who actually seemed to like themselves. What did Slick ever do except write some embarrassing song lyrics and have a hot girlfriend? Pretended to be somebody cooler-looking and more interesting than he really was, and here comes Kid Omega, hey everybody, who wants to see Slick naked?
Slick’s dead now, dead for real, and no one cares enough to bump him up in the queue for resurrection protocols. Just another dead teenage mutant, blasted into chunky mutant marinara for being born the wrong way. Quentin owes him more than an apology. More than an explanation, but the explanation is going to have to start with: so I’m kind of a girl now, don’t freak out.
Fuck, that’s another thing. If this whole genderqueer thing sticks she can still be Kid Omega but it was enough of a pain in the ass changing her legal name the first time around to something that didn’t invite such vicious mockery. Maybe she can just be Q. Maybe everyone who’s ever wanted to shove her into a nice easy box, this or that, A or B, 1 or 0, can go fuck themselves.
Besides, she’s not committing to this for a lifetime. This is just until the next time she dies in the line of duty, which with the way things are shaping up around here, won’t be that long anyway.
This is just a test run. It’s only temporary. And that’s fine.
Anyway, she’s been standing around playing with herself for way too long now. Quentin slides off the exam table and pulls her shirt on over her head — watch out, mutantkind, the no-bra thing is back in style. There’s a little tug, almost a bounce, and the fabric sliding over her nipples has coincidentally made them rock-hard. It’s vaguely erotic, the way Sophie’s fingernails tracing the back of her buzzed scalp is erotic, but more than anything it puts a big stupid smile on her face.
Incidentally, her nipples are pink now instead of completely forgettable brown. Which one of the Five threw that in there? Maybe she can get them pierced.
Sophie, in her head: I hope you won’t mind, but I kind of got an eyeful earlier when we were getting you ready. They look nice.
And she’s not wrong.