When We Take Different Paths 2018

Clothes Do Not Make The Man - Nonbinary Gray

Disclaimer: All Fairy Tail Characters Belong To Hiro Mashima

When We Take Different Paths

Week 3 - Gender Identities

Prompts - Clothes and Family

Clothes Don't Make the Man

Gray waited anxiously for his mother to leave for her lunch date with her friends. She had been talking about it all week and Gray was excited for her. Ever since his father had died three years ago, it was not often that she was able to go out and do something for herself. She worked very hard and Gray felt bad that he was not old enough to help her. Next year he would be able to get a part-time job and then maybe she could relax a bit more.

She kissed him goodbye, still talking on her phone. He made sure that she had left the apartment they shared, waited for a full five minutes before he even dared to enter her bedroom. His heart was beating fast, half in excitement and half in fear as he stood inside her closet and started taking items out. A dress, some shoes. He touched the material, smiling at how soft it was, how cool it felt against his skin.

The guilt started right away. This was wrong. He shouldn't be in here. Tears started to collect at the corner of his eyes. What was wrong with him? He didn't know anyone else who felt the same way.

It didn't matter, he was already here. Things couldn't get any worse, and he had to find out. He had promised himself he would explore this just this once. He'd get it out of his system and then he could go back to being the boy everyone expected him to be, even if it didn't feel right. Even if he felt this constant sense of wrongness within himself.

He had thought it was bad enough that he was gay - that wasn't normal either, was it? But it was more accepted than whatever the hell this was. Maybe it was his weird way of normalizing the fact that he liked boys. Girls liked boys, didn't they?

Dear fucking God, I am so confused, Gray thought with frustration. He took a deep breath and placed the dress on his mother's bed as he began undressing in front of the mirrored closet doors. He looked at his reflection, dressed in nothing but his boxers and felt that wrongness again.

This is not who I am. He didn't know who he was exactly but this body, this image - it belonged to someone else. He grabbed the dress off of the bed and looked at it in his hands, trying to summon up enough courage to finally put it on. It was a blue dress, and outside of the fact that its fabric felt soft and luxurious against his skin, the only thing he knew about it was that it had been his father's favorite. His mother had mentioned that absently at some point, perhaps when she was getting ready for yet another work event. Gray used to sit on her bed and watch her get ready, fascinated by the ritual of it all. Was it wrong to feel connected to a garment? Maybe knowing that his father had loved it made it feel okay. God, that made no sense.

He undid the zipper slowly, and with every inch it went down a bit of his courage escaped him. He put one leg in and then the other, grabbed the straps and pulled them up slowly, already feeling different as he felt that softness embrace his body. He would not be able to close the zipper, he had the body of a 6 foot tall boy and his mother stood a half foot shorter, but it was enough to give him an idea of how he would look if it was his.

He looked at himself in the mirror and began to cry softly. He swayed a little, just enough to have the skirt twirl around him. Even through his tears he managed a tentative smile. Oh dear fucking god, he felt so much more comfortable with himself and as he realized this he grabbed one of his mother's pillows and hugged it to his chest. He sat down on the bed and began to cry in earnest. He cried because his darkest fear had just been realized, because even within the small sense of rightness he felt with this simple act, he now knew something about himself he couldn't unknow. Even worse, he did not know what it meant.