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The Wards program was Hero’s project, but the others were still involved, and Hero was Eidolon’s best friend, so he was still around them quite a bit.
It didn’t make it a huge problem that Chevalier hated Eidolon, but it still wasn’t ideal.
“He doesn’t hate you,” Hero assured him when he brought it up.
“He won’t look at me,” Eidolon argued. It wasn’t a big deal. He was used to people not looking at him. And staring at him. Being in a wheelchair was a good mix of both, and Eidolon hadn’t forgotten that when he drank that vial.
Hero didn’t deny it. “You can be kind of intimidating. I’m sure he’s just shy.”
Intimidating? What was that supposed to mean? How was he intimidating?
“Chevalier’s not shy. Miss Militia is shy, and she talks to me.”
“You have a translation power,” Hero pointed out. “You’re the only person she can really talk to.”
That was a good point, but Eidolon wasn’t going to give him that.
Hero told him to just give Chevalier his space and take whatever opportunity he could to bond a bit without forcing it. It seemed like a difficult set of instructions to follow.
The other Wards must have noticed something, though, because Eidolon started seeing them whispering to Chevalier and giving Eidolon not-so-hidden looks whenever they were in the same room. From what he gleaned, they were confused by Chevalier’s aversion, too.
Chevalier always danced around it, so Eidolon never said anything, but it all came to a point during a training session when Reed practically shoved Chevalier to pair up with Eidolon instead of Legend.
They tried to do these training sessions pretty regularly, four Wards with the four founders of the Protectorate. It was Chevalier, Miss Militia, Mouse Protector, and Reed. There was sort of a natural pattern for them to fall into—Chevalier with Legend, Miss Militia with Alexandria, Mouse Protector with Hero, and Reed with Eidolon—but they were breaking that pattern today, it seemed.
Chevalier sort of stumbled as Reed not so gently guided his teammate to the spot in front of Eidolon. His head jerked up suddenly, likely in horror about the situation he found himself in, eyes not quite meeting Eidolon’s gaze, and he ducked his eyes quickly, drawing his line of sight to the floor.
Eidolon frowned behind his mask. He’d never seen Chevalier do anything like that before.
“We can switch if you want,” Eidolon offered, ignoring the stab of hurt. He glanced over at Miss Militia and Alexandria. “Miss Militia, do you want to work with me today?”
Miss Militia started to respond, ready to agree, but Chevalier spoke before she could. “It’s fine. I can work with Eidolon.”
Everyone seemed fine with that, and Eidolon and Chevalier got to work. Chevalier’s power relied more on his physical skill and stamina to use it, so Eidolon was a little excited to work with him. His agent rarely gave him powers like that, but he still got him, so he had a perspective Legend, Alexandria, and Hero didn’t.
It went well, Eidolon thought, and Chevalier was receptive to what Eidolon had to say, but he still wasn’t looking at him, and that made it really difficult to really accomplish anything.
Eidolon didn’t even make it five minutes before needing to tap out. “Time out.”
“What’s going on?” Chevalier asked as everyone stopped and looked over, and he still wasn’t looking at Eidolon.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to work with me,” Eidolon told him.
“Yeah, we can swap,” Reed spoke up, and he sounded a little guilty for making Chevalier work with Eidolon. Eidolon didn’t know if he’d made them switch as a prank or because he thought Chevalier should step out of his comfort zone, but clearly, he hadn’t expected this to go so badly. And it had to be going badly if other people were noticing.
“No, it’s fine,” Chevalier insisted. He shook himself. “It’s good for me to work with someone new anyway.”
“I’m not offended or anything,” Eidolon told him. “Really. If I make you uncomfortable-”
“You don’t make me uncomfortable.”
“Whatever it is,” Eidolon said, bouncing back quickly. What was it that Hero said? He was intimidating? “Do I scare you?”
“No,” Chevalier answered, and from the way he said it, Eidolon knew he was lying. Everyone did, and a nearly audible pause filled the room. Chevalier shifted his weight on his feet a bit. “Really, it’s fine. It’s not a big deal.”
Legend stepped forward, clearly alarmed. He put himself between Eidolon and Chevalier, which hurt a little, but Eidolon totally understood. It was an appropriate reaction. He’d probably do the same if their positions were reversed. Not that they ever would be. Legend was too good a guy. “Does Eidolon scare you, Chevalier?”
“No. No,” Chevalier said, sounding a little more honest the second time, but Eidolon still didn’t believe him. He saw Mouse Protector, Miss Militia, and Reed exchange a worried look. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“But I do scare you?” Eidolon asked, because how could he not?
Chevalier looked caught between nodding, shaking his head, and shrugging. “It’s not… you.”
The training session was clearly over at this point as everyone crowded around. Still, Chevalier’s gaze remained low.
“Whatever it is, you can tell us, Chevalier,” Hero told him gently, getting a little closer. “You know we’re here to-”
“I can see people’s trigger events!” Chevalier blurted out, lifting his head suddenly, and everyone froze.
The Wards and the Protectorate capes froze for very different reasons, Eidolon knew. After all, Eidolon and his friends didn’t have trigger events. Assuming Chevalier was telling the truth, what could he be seeing?
Chevalier seemed oblivious to his mentors’ panic and focused on his friends. “Most of the time it’s not, like, literal. It’s kind of, um, hard to see, or sometimes I think it’s more symbolic. Like with Legend, I see the shadow of this, um, glittery knight. And- and with Hero, I see this satellite… antenna… thing.”
“But mine scares you?” Eidolon asked, interrupting their little aside. Chevalier glanced back at him, looking more at Eidolon’s chest than his face, and nodded.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I haven’t told anyone about that part of my power. I’m sorry if you thought I didn’t like you. I actually think you’re really cool, but I just- It makes my head hurt to look at you for too long, and the shadow is really, um, freaky.”
Scary. Chevalier was still a teenager, even if he felt like more of an adult than Eidolon did sometimes. He wouldn’t admit that something scared him like that. But that didn’t mean it was true.
“What is it?” Eidolon asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. He couldn’t imagine what it could be.
“You don’t have to tell us,” Hero interrupted before Chevalier could say anything.
“No, it’s fine. You deserve to know,” Chevalier told him, and he looked up, still not really looking at Eidolon but coming close. “It’s- Um, it’s this… sequence. It goes really fast, but I’ve never watched the whole thing.”
“That’s okay,” Eidolon assured him. If Hero hadn’t just reminded Chevalier he didn’t need to do anything he wasn’t comfortable with, he probably would have asked him to look. “You can just tell me what you’ve seen so far.”
What he started describing was truly disturbing.
“There’s this guy, and I think maybe he’s you,” Chevalier started. “He’s kind of in this sitting position, but he’s floating. The, uh, shadow, it’s all these knives, and he takes one, and he stabs himself in the crotch, and he drags it all the way up to the body until he slices through his face, and then he reaches inside his chest, and he pulls this girl out, and then he starts stabbing her, and the whole shadow kind of changes color as their blood gets everywhere, but he just keeps stabbing her.”
Eidolon didn’t need an empathy power to feel the horror all around him, but his agent gave him one anyway.
Thanks, agent.
“And, um, that’s as far as I’ve gotten,” Chevalier added a little quietly. Miss Militia slotted herself at his side and squeezed his hand. Chevalier let his fingers clasp hers, but he didn’t look up from the floor.
“Jesus,” Mouse Protector said loudly. “Sorry for always trying to make you talk to him.”
“Yeah,” Reed agreed quickly. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have tried to make you train with him if I’d known.”
“It’s fine,” Chevalier insisted. “I have to get used to it.”
Eidolon wanted to say he didn’t, but that wasn’t really true. Chevalier wanted to be a career cape, just like Eidolon and his friends. They would be working together for a long time if everything went well.
“Eidolon?” Hero called out, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You good?”
Was he? Eidolon had been more focused on the people around him, but the vision Chevalier described… The more he thought about it… “What does the girl look like?”
“It’s kind of hard to- Actually, I don’t know why I thought she was a girl,” Chevalier said thoughtfully. “She looks just like the guy. They might be the same person, actually.”
That was what Eidolon suspected. “I tried to kill myself when I was eighteen.”
He hadn’t meant to say that. The words just sort of slipped out.
The horror around him grew. Eidolon pressed his lips together to keep him from saying anything else.
“Training session over,” Legend declared, and he put a hand on Eidolon’s shoulder to shuffle him out of the room.
Hero stayed with the Wards, comforting Chevalier and a guilty Reed and Mouse Protector, while Legend and Alexandria talked with Eidolon, making sure he was okay but mostly figuring out how to move forward.
“Chevalier shouldn’t have to see that. He’s just a kid,” Legend told him as if Eidolon didn’t already know that. “But he said it hurt him to look at you, too.”
“It’s probably because your powers change, not because of the vial,” Alexandria added, and Eidolon probably would have gotten there himself in a few minutes.
The conclusion they came to was just for Eidolon to avoid Chevalier as much as reasonably possible until they understood his power a little more, but as Eidolon went over Chevalier’s words in his mind that night, he couldn’t help but seek him out the next morning.
“Why did you think she was a girl?” Eidolon asked when he not-so-accidentally ran into Chevalier in the hall outside the Wards’ wing of the base.
“What?”
“From your vision. Yesterday, you said you didn’t actually know she was a girl. She looked just like the guy, but you thought she was a girl,” Eidolon explained. “How come?”
Chevalier shrugged, and Eidolon felt a little bad for putting him in this position, but he needed to know. “I don’t know. I just kind of… knew. Why?”
Eidolon thought about the way he’d felt as a teenager. The pain, of course, and the frustration of having to rely on other people for everything, and the overwhelming, daunting realization that it would be this way forever, but there were other feelings too, ones focused on his body and other people in a way that he knew wasn’t just because of his disability.
“No reason,” Eidolon told him, and he let him be for a bit.
It took Eidolon until that evening to work up the courage. He could feel his agent trying to give him what he wanted, but he didn’t let himself give in until he was standing in the shower, the hot water splashing down on his naked skin.
It made him very aware of his body, and it made him very aware when it began to change.
It was a Changer power, not a Striker power, but he still let his hands rest on his body, one on his chest and one over his pelvis, and he felt his body change. Shrinking and inversion down low, and swelling up higher, his chest growing heavier. He kept his hands where they were, but he could feel his hips going wider, thighs growing thicker, and his shoulders and waist becoming a little narrower.
He felt a weight on his head as his hair grew longer, draping down his back, catching and collecting the water as it fell down on him.
She hadn’t realized she’d closed her eyes until they were open, and she was looking at her new body.
For one wonderful, wonderful second, everything felt right.
Then her agent took her power, and any good feelings Eidolon may have been feeling were replaced by panic.
“No, no, no,” Eidolon said aloud, hands scrambling at her body. What had once felt good, suddenly felt new and different. She tried to will the new parts away, for her hips to shrink and her chest to go flat, but nothing was happening. Her agent had fully and truly taken the Changer power.
She was stuck like this.
Eidolon disguised herself the best she could.
She cut her long hair off before she even left the bathroom, using her beard trimmer to shave it all down to a buzz cut. She normally wore a mask and a hood, so it wasn’t like anyone usually saw her hair anyway. No one would question the bad haircut.
The hips and chest were a little harder, but her costume had a cape, so as long as she wore a couple shirts under her costume to bulk out her frame, she was pretty sure she could disguise her new curves under her cape if she felt like someone was looking at them.
Eidolon spent the rest of the night coming up with a thousand excuses for why she seemed smaller or why her voice was suddenly higher, but no one said anything
Why wasn’t anyone saying anything?
The realization that she wanted someone to say something hit her very hard and very abruptly.
A lot of things were very suddenly making a lot of sense.
“Chevalier,” Eidolon called out, catching Chevalier in the hall like she had just last week. Chevalier looked up, seeming a little surprised to see her, but he still stopped to hear what she had to say. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Chevalier said, shifting his body a bit so he was properly facing Eidolon. His gaze was still a little off, which Eidolon didn’t mind, but she needed him to look at her. “What’s up?”
“Is this the girl you see in your vision?” she asked, and then she took off her mask.
Chevalier didn’t have time to look away before seeing Eidolon’s face. He still tried, head darting to one side, but he was too slow. It was out of politeness, of course. Capes hid their identities, but Eidolon didn’t really have a secret identity, so it wasn’t like she was losing anything here.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to, but I don’t mind.”
He looked up, and Eidolon saw the recognition even with the boy’s mask covering his face.
“It’s you,” Chevalier breathed. “You’re the girl in my vision.”
Eidolon felt a stab of an emotion she’d never felt before. It was… good. It was good.
But then came Chevalier’s confusion. “Are you using a Changer power?”
“Yeah,” Eidolon admitted, even though she didn’t want to. She hesitated for a moment before adding, “Something about what you said felt right. I think- I think your power knew. That I’m- That I’m a girl.”
She hated how much she was stuttering, but she got the words out, and she was pretty proud of herself for it.
Chevalier’s confusion didn’t let up. Eidolon didn’t know why she expected it to. “In a Mulan way or in a transgender way?”
“What?” Eidolon had never heard either of those words before.
“Legend might be able to explain what transgender means better than I can,” Chevalier told her, “and I’m sure Mouse Protector would be happy to show you Mulan.”
And that meant telling more people about whatever was going on with her. Great.
Eidolon figured Hero would be able to explain this Mulan thing just as good as Mouse Protector could, but Hero ended up roping the Wards in anyway when she asked.
It was a movie, apparently. Hero got the DVD with astonishing speed, and the Wards insisted on making a movie night out of it, which Eidolon really did not want to do, but the need to understand what Chevalier meant won out.
Chevalier thankfully didn’t say anything when the Wards, Hero, and Eidolon gathered around the TV in the Wards’ wing. Eidolon thought he was being considerate, but he was also sitting right next to Miss Militia, whom Eidolon was pretty sure he had a crush on, so he might have just been more focused on her than Eidolon or the movie.
The movie was good. It hadn’t caught Eidolon’s attention at first, and she’d been distracted by how many people were around him, how many eyes might see her larger chest, or how many ears might hear how her voice had changed. But then she actually started paying attention, and Eidolon got it.
It wasn’t her. Chevalier had been asking if she was a woman pretending to be a man, and Eidolon was, in a way, but not in the way shown in the movie. But there were plenty of scenes that struck a chord, and Eidolon found unexpectedly deep emotions welling in her chest.
A few of the Wards cried, and Eidolon fought hard not to be among them, even if Hero was wiping his nose a little bit.
The conversation with Legend went a little better.
A lot better, actually. It was incredibly helpful.
“What does transgender mean?” Eidolon asked him.
Legend was in his office doing some Protectorate paperwork, or so Eidolon assumed, but he seemed happy to sweep it aside to explain it to Eidolon.
Legend admitted that he didn’t know all the details, but what he told Eidolon made everything click into place.
Eidolon had known she was a woman. Or, she’d figured it out. She had some intrinsic sense that this was, in fact, reality. But she hadn’t thought that there might be some explanation for it. That what she was feeling had a word for it, and that other people had experienced the same thing. Did experience the same thing.
The realization shocked her so much that she didn’t notice when Legend had stopped talking.
“Eidolon?”
Her head jolted up. “Yeah?”
“I asked why you were asking,” Legend repeated.
Eidolon swallowed. She’d already told Chevalier, but when it came down to it, Chevalier was just some kid she worked with sometimes, and Legend was one of her best friends. This was so much harder.
“That’s me,” Eidolon managed to get out. “Transgender.”
Legend got it instantly. “You’re a woman?”
Hearing Legend say it felt even better than when Chevalier realized she was the girl from the vision. “Yeah. I, um, figured it out recently. From what Chevalier said, and then my agent gave me a Changer power, and I couldn’t change back, and I realized I don’t want to.”
Legend’s gaze flickered down. Eidolon had stopped trying to flatten her chest and disguise her hips, not revealing her body but not trying to hide it either. Eidolon knew Legend wasn’t really looking, not like most men would look at a woman, but it still made Eidolon stand a little straighter, very aware of the eyes drifting over her body.
“I thought I noticed something,” Legend admitted, “but I wasn’t sure. But you said you’re happy? With the changes, I mean.”
Eidolon nodded. She really was.
Legend asked Eidolon if she wanted help coming out to Alexandria and Hero, but she declined the offer. They were her friends. They deserved to hear it from her directly.
But Eidolon still appreciated the vocabulary Legend could give her. Legend’s boyfriend knew some transgender people, so he was a big help, and now that Eidolon knew what the right words were, it wasn’t hard to use the internet to learn more.
Alexandria and Hero were a little confused at first, but Alexandria was happy to have another woman among them, and Hero just doubled down on their friendship, reminding Eidolon that she would always be his friend.
Eidolon let Chevalier tell the Wards. She pretended it was a leadership exercise, but in reality, she just didn’t want to go through the process of telling people anymore. Eidolon didn’t think Chevalier bought it, but he didn’t seem to mind.
She did take the time to talk to Miss Militia herself, though. Her English was getting pretty good, but Eidolon thought they might be sort of friends at this point, and it was just a lot easier to let her agent give her a translation power. Like Alexandria, Miss Militia was excited to have another girl around.
Eidolon assumed there was a similar process with the rest of the Protectorate. Eidolon wasn’t really close with them, and she told Legend it was okay to tell people, but there wasn’t really a formal announcement. A lot of people still called her the wrong thing a lot, but Legend, Alexandria, Hero, and the Wards were pretty good about calling her a woman, and eventually, the others seemed to catch on.
The media didn’t really catch a whiff of it until the next Endbringer fight, though.
Eidolon still wore the same costume, so she was pretty sure that in the middle of a fight, no one would really notice, considering they had other things to worry about. Not dying, mostly. If anyone was focused on Eidolon enough to notice the changes to her body, they were probably not going to last long enough to tell anyone about it.
But the fight had to end eventually, and at some point, Eidolon had to talk to people.
International news outlets ran stories about Eidolon’s supposed newfound womanhood before any American ones did, which Hero thought was pretty funny, but Eidolon wasn’t really sure what to do with. The PR department didn’t either.
Legend shielded him from the worst of it, but it was still a problem they were all very aware of.
“You don’t have to come out like I did,” Legend told him. “I was ready for my identity to be politicized, but that doesn’t mean you have to let them do the same thing to you.”
Eidolon admired Legend for a lot of things, and his willingness to come out in hopes that it would allow him to help more people like himself wasn’t even one of the top reasons he admired him. It was getting higher on the list, though, because Eidolon couldn’t imagine doing anything like that.
“If you don’t feel strongly about it, I just say let them speculate,” Alexandria suggested. “Let them have their rat race. You just focus on yourself.”
Eidolon liked that idea. Part of her wanted people to know she wasn’t a man anymore, but she didn’t, like Legend had said, want to politicize it.
Hero had a good solution. “I’ll just tell the Wards to aggressively correct people whenever it comes up. Problem solved.”
Okay, good solution may not be the best way to describe it, but the Wards seemed happy to be involved, so Eidolon went along with it. It wasn’t the worst plan, and more people were calling her “she,” so it was at least kind of working.
A lot of things changed, and yet they didn’t at the same time.
She was still Eidolon. She was still a superhero and a little larger than life. She still had a little trouble getting along with people. She was still friends with Alexandria, Legend, and Hero. She still talked with Miss Militia and trained with Reed.
But Chevalier wasn’t still avoiding her.
It took awhile to notice, but she was fairly confident that she’d caught it the first time Chevalier met her gaze.
She didn’t ask what had changed, whether he’d just gotten used to the visions or if they’d changed. She didn’t really want to know.
There was still something. Chevalier still struggled to look at her, even if he did it sometimes. But something was different, and Eidolon hoped it was the vision. That image of slicing herself open didn’t feel like her anymore, and she hoped that some fundamental part of her had changed to reflect how much she’d gotten better.