Glittering Shards

A Trans Fanwork of Firefly (TV) by Elijah Merrill

Important note: I am a trans man, and I once used she/her pronouns internally, until I realized I was a man, at age twenty-nine. The classic trans narrative features a person who "always knew" they were a man or woman. That leaves out those of us who really did think we were men or women until a lot of soul-searching revealed something else.

This is what this fanwork is about—a woman who only understood her true identity when she was in a place where it was safe, and indeed encouraged, to rebel and be yourself. Because of this, during the time she refers to herself with he/him pronouns, the present-tense narrative will also refer to her with he/him pronouns, to reflect her internal state. Never do this in real life. Always default to a person's current pronouns, and to their current name.

Wash and Book do not die. Otherwise, this is canon through Serenity the film. The following is the first of three stories in a series.

Enjoy the story!

"Many children are trained to be silent and not question. It is one of life's strange miracles that some of those children grow up to be the greatest rebels of all."

—Bai Jingyi (they/them), nonbinary Osiris history professor turned border planets schoolteacher; frequent aider of escaped prisoners.

She's a protector, from the time she learns to crawl. Yes, she's logical. Quiet as the black; incisive as a scalpel. She adds up the advantages and subtracts the flaws, already the consummate surgeon, though she won't bear the title for twenty more years. But that's her knowledge. It's what can be written down and measured. What she does with that skill is protect. Huge, messy, absurdly heroic gestures that will get her disowned, beaten up, nearly burned to death, and shot multiple times. But she doesn't know that yet.

At age five, everyone has taught Simon Tam that she is a boy, and no one has taught her to trust her feelings. Only her logic. So when an activist for Independence knocks on the Tam door, a petition in her hand and determination on her face, and Simon thinks I want to be her, she buries that feeling. When an obstetrician friend of her mother's comes to visit, calm dignity from her head to her feet, and Simon thinks I want to be her, she buries that feeling. Because feelings are not to be trusted. They can't give you numbers to add or subtract. They can't be written down and measured.

So, with the steady practicality that she will later use to master organic chemistry and restart the heart of a patient with cardiac arrest, Simon trains herself to stop questioning. By age six, she's convinced herself that when it comes to boy or girl, she already has the answers. And that means never allowing herself, even inwardly, to think I am the Tam daughter. To think they should be saying "her" and "she" when they talk about me.

By age six and a half, Simon doesn't even think daughter or her or she about himself anymore.

Not heroic, perhaps. But logical.

"Ask me for a person who's never shot a gun but has a loved one in danger, and I'll show you history's greatest heroes."

—Mohammed Umar (he/him/they/them), genderqueer union leader thrown in jail six times by local authorities.

When an inquisitive Simon puts a hand on his mother's stomach, the family feels River kick for the first time. That is, Gabriel and Regan feel her kick. Simon just laughs and says it's not kicking, it's dancing.

Simon's tenth birthday is the November before River is born, and the only thing he wants as a gift is a promise that he can witness his sister's birth. His parents agree, not believing he will persist in that promise. They should have. Simon is not one to forget a promise, whether made by himself or anyone else.

Though Regan's labor begins at midnight and isn't over until seven in the morning, Simon never shows any sign of tiredness. When he's not bouncing on his feet as he watches his mother, he dashes about asking questions of the presiding obstetrician or any available nurse. Which part of the baby comes out first? The head? What happens if they're faced the wrong way? A cesarean section? What's that? You said the placenta was made of blood. Isn't it dangerous to lose blood? It's a different kind of blood? Wow. What do you mean?

A spectator might be pardoned for only seeing Simon the scientist. But when the tiny baby with huge wondering eyes takes her first real breath and begins to cry, anyone clearsighted will identify Simon the protector—and it's as a protector that he will be best known in the history of the 'verse.

"I went up to the mountain cave to discover who I was alone. I went to the city to discover who I was with other people. If you neglect either, you will miss what it means to be fully human."

—Adannaya Okeke (she/her), trans philosopher and environmentalist, author of books banned in five systems.

There's an enormous mirror in the Tam front hall, a stunning sight when the chandeliers are lit and reflected in it. It demonstrates Regan's taste placed so strategically, and Gabriel's success in business through the Londinium gilding around the outside, though both would be shocked at the implication that they might be showing off.

Not everyone likes the mirror, though. All the maids curse it because there are invariably fingerprints to scrub off, and they need to haul out a ladder to dust the top. A few jaded guests would point out that the gilding on the outside was probably made with indentured labor. And Simon absolutely hates it, on a primal level.

He never looks in it unless he has to. The sight always inspires a rush of edginess and nausea, and a feeling that his skin is going to come off, but he can't figure out what's wrong. It's just a mirror. It just reflects the carpet; the plants in bronze pots, unsullied by even one brown leaf; and the statuettes in alcoves without even a speck of dust. It just reflects himself, the self his parents and teachers have always praised.

But the edginess and nausea and skin-feeling are still there, and they're not confined to the mirror. They show up whenever his father says how proud he is of his son. They show up during haircuts, in the look his mother gives when he only makes friends with girls, in the librarian's skepticism when he asks for books about girls, in his gym teacher's suspicious correction when he automatically walks towards the girls' locker room—no, he doesn't mean to be creepy; he just wasn't thinking. They show up when he asks his doctor if anyone ever has surgery to get rid of their penis, and his doctor has a quiet conversation with his parents later.

What does any of this mean? He doesn't know. Later, he will look back and wonder how he could possibly have not known. But no one in his life has ever said, Simon, some people are trans. No one has ever told him, We will still love you if you're a girl. All he knows is that the edginess and the stomachache and the horrible skin-feeling won't go away, making his body cringe like burning paper.

There's another mirror in Simon's life, this one at school. It's warped and a bit blurry and covered in fingerprints, and he likes it much better. He avoids looking at his own face. Instead, he looks at his friend Chandra's face, or his friend Zitkala's face, or his friend Miriam's face.

Sometimes, he looks at their faces and pretends they belong to him.

Eventually, of course, Simon leaves that school and that mirror. But it's alright, because by that time River is walking—actually, she never really walked; she went straight from crawling to dancing—and he can see, in the Tam mirror, a double of the sister he adores.

When she's first learning to talk, at around a year, the one word she repeatedly gets wrong is brother, for Simon. She keeps saying sister instead. Simon gets a tiny flare of homecoming whenever she does, but it's just a feeling. Feelings are not to be trusted. And anyway, River learns to say brother soon enough, and Simon buries the cringing feeling that gives him under his pride for his beloved sister.

Simon throws himself into caring for River. He provides the exquisite cheerleading and questions and laughter she craves, since their parents are puzzled as to why a girl so intelligent needs so much emotional attention. And letting himself be defined by River is also far, far easier than examining who he is when he's alone.

(The first time Simon reads the word transgender will be in high school, several years after this. The psychology textbook will make it sound pathological. Simon will refuse to believe it. He is intelligent. He is a hard worker. People are proud of him. No matter what, he is not going to be a problem.)

"Pure corundum is made of aluminum and oxygen, and is colorless. Boring. To make a beautiful red ruby from corundum, you must have chromium replacing one percent of the aluminum. What's my point? Don't despise impurities. Without them, we would have no rubies."

—Luo Ming (he/him), trans jeweler who donates a percentage of all his sales to building schools on the border planets.

When River is eight years old, she decides to design an entirely new civilization. As with most of her ideas, Simon is pulled in to serve as backup, which he doesn't mind at all. Let his classmates steal their parents' rice sake and dare each other to sneak into the nearest Companion House on weekend nights. He's happy to debate with his meimei about the relative merits of free market capitalism versus original Marxist socialism, even if he does usually lose no matter which side he takes.

River's pet project in this case is creating a new language, complete with its own alphabet and script. As she scribbles away muttering about irregular verbs and pleasing sound combinations, Simon puts his mind to the task she's given him. That is, coming up with a series of myths for the pantheon of gods she's created.

Along with the new language, the civilization will eventually boast an entirely invented system of government, some very complicated marriage practices, and a social philosophy based on rice farming and butterflies. It will also have a rather strange creation myth.

Humans, according to this myth, were planned by the gods to be absolutely perfect. Nobody knows what that would have looked like, but it would have been pure shining glory. In fact, the gods had already made the humans, molded them from the fabric of the 'verse. But the wild energy they were using flew out of control, and the humans shattered into pieces.

Nobody knew which arms and legs and minds and hearts had gone together. Though the gods did their best to sort it out, the pure shining glory had forever vanished. But the humans became obsessed with finding it again. Ever since, they have come up with hundreds of ideas for creating perfection, and each time, they murder and oppress anyone who doesn't fit. Only the wise know that the search for perfection is futile, and that our time is best served by loving our fellow humans as they are. And only the very wisest of all can see that the idea of pure shining glory was a fool's mission in the beginning, and that our impurities and shadows and commonplace natures are what make us most lovable.

(Simon has just taken a poetry course in college, to round out his curriculum. One of the poets is a trans Buddhist nun. He doesn't know how to interpret the feelings that rise up in him when he analyzes her work, but he reads the book until it falls to pieces. And then he tapes it back together, and reads it until it falls apart yet again.)

Eight years later, that creation myth Simon invented will be the one persistent memory that will keep River from losing hope as the doctors at the Academy open up her brain again and again, trying to create her in glory's image. Even though she has been shattered over and over, Simon will come for her anyway. Because he is wise enough to love her as she was before, as she is now, and as she is yet to be.

The creation myth was one of Simon's relevant contributions to River's project. The other was the civilization's penchant for mosaics—iridescent, glittering, intricate mosaics.

"Question yourself eternally. It is the people who think they know the most who know the least. The road to self-knowledge is paved with doubts."

—Sun Zhong (she/her), trans literature professor who secretly disseminates texts on nonviolent resistance to her students.

When Simon lands on Persephone's Eavesdown Docks, he has nothing but a traumatized River in a cryo box, clothes and a medical bag that merely render him conspicuous, and a soul nearly paralyzed with fright. The underground movement that helped him free River advise him to hit the border planets on the least reputable (but still moderately safe) ship he can find. Serenity's battered state makes it a good choice, but truthfully, he chooses it mainly because Kaylee's sunny glow is like a rope thrown in a storm.

And then he's responsible in great part for getting her shot, almost fatally, in the first few hours he's on the ship. Causing Kaylee's death would be bad enough, but for a little while there, he thought her fellow crew members would throw him and River out the airlock for his part in that bullet, and for his threat to withhold treatment.

Miraculously, Kaylee forgives him. Yet more shockingly, those fellow crew members seem to, if not precisely forgive, at least understand his reasons. It will be quite some time before Simon will find out the most significant facts of what Mal and Zoe went through during their lost war. But he gets the sense early on that they've both made plenty of life-and-death decisions fueled half by panic and half by desperate love.

Simon knows he's wildly attracted to Kaylee. What he can't figure out is why he keeps spitting out all the wrong things. He can be tactless, sure, but not usually this tactless. And he really wants this to go right. Kaylee is so radiant, so lovely. Why can't he stop sabotaging every chance he gets with her?

Most people, Simon imagines, do not have dramatic revelations while in a booth with a dead cow fetus. But it's there, as he names the things that are wonderful about Kaylee, as she encourages him to finish the sentence about her eyes, that he gets it. It's not his feelings for her that are the problem. It's who he is. He knows Kaylee is seeing the handsome doctor who might just sweep her off for a tumble in his quarters, and he knows there's something wrong with that picture, with that person she thinks she sees.

But he doesn't know what is wrong, and so he just ends up sabotaging the encounter again.

Simon has been taught, over and over—by his parents, by his teachers, by his fellow doctors—that logic is king. Only his love for River made Simon ever suspect it might not be. But on Serenity, logic does not rule. Mal will hit and kick like a demon even when outnumbered ten to one. Wash and Zoe's love for each other brings them back together after every fight. Book's faith needs no proof, and Inara believes in every member of the crew even when they let her down.

Simon sees all this, and is starting to suspect he should learn to trust his own feelings. But he has no idea where to even begin.

He struggles to find a way as Inara and Book depart, as they return, as the crew discovers the deaths on Haven and the horrors of Miranda. And then they're on Mr. Universe's moon, and Simon finds himself confessing his love to Kaylee as they're about to die by Reavers. The feelings are deep and they are true, and yet—and yet, what? He still doesn't know.

And then, by a miracle, they do survive, and he and Kaylee can have their engine room escapades and experiments with strawberries and tender words before they fall asleep together. It's wondrous times, but none of it answers the questions Simon is just daring to let himself ask.

It's Kaylee who calls it off, in the end. She says she'd rather be friends. And Simon is half-devastated and half-relieved. Devastated, because he loves her still, and relieved, because some part of him knows that as long as he's trying to fit into the mold of who he thinks Kaylee's lover should be, he won't be fully himself—and Kaylee deserves better than to be with somebody who doesn't know who he is.

(Simon deserves better than to be constantly molding himself. But he doesn't know that yet.)

"If you know that your art will never be perfect, and you allow that knowledge to stop you from making that art, I call you a coward. On the other hand, imperfections and clumsiness are noble and brave."

—Fernanda García (they/them), genderqueer poet and cannery worker currently on the hundredth day of a factory-wide strike for living wages.

About a year after Serenity leaves Mr. Universe's moon, they're transporting cargo to the planet Odysseus. After the transaction is complete, Book heads off to a nearby abbey, Jayne departs to find where the sex workers gather, and Kaylee and River vanish into a fruit market with instructions not to wait for them.

Inara declares she's going to show anyone who's interested the most beautiful garden in the system. Mal snorts and asks what kind of rubbish that is—Odysseus is basically rock, and the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from the algae in the oceans. But despite this apparent skepticism, he joins Simon, Zoe, and Wash as they follow Inara to a small gate in a wall of red stone and pay the entrance fee.

The sight inside inspires enough widened eyes, audible gasps, and dropped jaws to be worth twice what they paid. The garden is made of three-dimensional mosaics, iridescent and gleaming. Plants boast delicate, gemlike leaves and petals, intricate birds perch on every branch, and pools of water shimmer over tiles in interweaving patterns.

Wash and Zoe find a bridge with jewel-bright tiles and linger there, Wash pointing at their reflections in the still water and stating that one Zoe was as much as he could take—two would probably cause heart failure. Inara gets embroiled in conversation with an art historian from Ariel, abandoning Mal and Simon by a small waterfall. Mal observes the mosaic-covered reeds a moment, then demands of a nearby aide why there aren't any gorram mosaic caterpillars, because he paid good money and expects them.

Simon laughs quietly, and when the flustered aide escapes and Mal returns, he informs Mal that "you should be in paradise right now, since you're an expert mosaic maker yourself." The captain raises his eyebrows and asks, if that's so, what shiny art he's done, and can they sell it. And Simon replies without thinking, no, the crew is his mosaic.

Mal orders Simon to explain that, and so he does. Explains that one way or another, everyone gets smashed into pieces, out in the black. Smashed into glittering shards, at best useless and at worst too sharp to be touched without pain. But if someone comes along and assembles them into a mosaic, then...

As much sense as that made in Simon's head, it sounds incredibly strange when said out loud. So he's surprised when Mal says mayhap that's so, but he reckons it's seeing the pieces in the first place that gives the mosaic-person the idea for his picture. Makes him want to create. No artist without shards, no crew without broken folks.

That brief conversation inches open the door in Simon's mind just a little further. It's validation, even if Mal isn't aware of that. A confirmation that even though Serenity's crew smuggles mildly illegal everything and shoots Feds and is constantly walking the tightrope of are-we-going-to-eat-this-week, no one's going to toss him off the ship because he doesn't live up to some image of perfection in their heads. They are—Simon hopes—wise enough to love their fellow humans as they are.

He has to hope that. He has to hope that Serenity's crew only cares that their medic's hands don't shake when extracting a bullet, and not care that everything else about him feels ready to fall to pieces with all the unanswered questions inside.

"Much has been spoken of telling the 'verse the truth. But I think it is just as courageous to even whisper that truth inside your own head. For with that act, you have freed someone—yourself. And you, even alone, can do more than you probably think you can."

—Ekundayo Afolabi (they/them), nonbinary saboteur of biological weapon facilities, wanted by several governments but as yet not apprehended.

Jayne, whose unadulterated tactlessness is probably a matter of public record on some planet or other, once flat-out asks Simon if he's sly, due to his "wearin' them prissy clothes, silk and all." Though the merc doesn't actually bear any ill feeling towards men who sleep with other men—they've encountered such on a planet or two and he's just yelled for another glass of whiskey—his speculations aren't something to wish on anyone.

Luckily, this is not a situation Simon has to handle alone, for Inara calmly states, from where she's making tea by the kitchen counter, that his clothing is typical for Osiris men of relatively high class. Mal adds that he saw plenty of silk vests and suchlike at the fancy party he'd gone to with Kaylee, and that they couldn't all be sly, unless the whole sword-and-duel thing had some weird double meaning. Inara replies that since Mal had been the one delivering the challenging blow, any euphemism could fairly be said to have been on his side, which leads to Mal laughing hard enough to sprain something. (The two of them had concluded their unsurprisingly fraught and tumultuous affair a month before with a surprisingly amiable breakup, and seemed to get along far better now than they ever had in the past.)

When he recovers, Mal tells Jayne that "the doc could dress like 'Nara and it wouldn't make him sly if he's not. Ain't a thing you change with clothes. Hell, he can wear that one slinky dress of Zoe's as long as we get stitched up proper." Wash naturally picks this time to enter the kitchen, and informs them that said slinky dress is reserved for his goddess and off-limits to all others.

However, Simon does not join in the good-natured mockery that follows. Simon is too busy thinking—and feeling—at breakneck speed.

Because Mal is right. Putting on feminine clothing won't turn you sly if you're not. But it goes further than that, and deeper. A dress wouldn't be enough to make you a woman if you weren't, and the reverse is true as well. Wearing vests and pants and suit jackets won't make you into a man if you're—

Not.

Simon remembers his school mirror, staring at Chandra and Zitkala and Miriam's faces and imagining they were his. He remembers the Independence activist and the obstetrician, how he thought I want to be her and buried those feelings. He remembers River learning to say brother instead of sister and his permanent sense of homesickness after that.

And he remembers seeing Kaylee's face for the first time, grease-smudged and beaming and sweeter than honey, and realizes why he kept sabotaging his chances with her. He'd loved Kaylee, but he'd also wanted Kaylee's reflected light, and known on some level that it was wrong to fall in love with somebody because you really wanted to be them.

Sometimes revelations don't break out with a thunderclap. Sometimes they come quietly over a cup of cheap tea while your crew teases each other about slinky dresses. Simon knows this, and as he sits in Serenity's kitchen, he acknowledges to himself that he is deep-down different. That when it comes to boy or girl, he doesn't have all the answers yet. And that maybe, just maybe, that's alright.

He doesn't know what he's going to do about it yet. He's certainly not ready to say this out loud to anyone—he can barely hint at it to himself. But even the smallest of acknowledgements means something.

"It takes just as much guts for me to walk down the street in a dress and makeup on an Osiris night, as it took me to charge out of my trench when I fought for Unification. You think I'm joking, but I'm not."

—Soledad Rivera (she/her), former Unification foot soldier turned trans activist, lost a government pension due to her work.

It's while he's pulling a bullet out of Jayne's foot—Wash has made all the requisite lame duck jokes—that Simon becomes aware that his hair is truly too long. He's cut it once while on Serenity, and done a passable enough job, but it's growing out again, and getting in his eyes. So after the stitches are put in and adequate painkillers injected, he borrows a pair of scissors from Kaylee and is heading towards Inara's shuttle to ask if he can use a mirror of hers, those being the least blurry on the ship.

But River complicates matters, as is her custom. She's debating with Book about his Bible as they lift weights—specifically, theorizing that the prophet Ezekiel bringing the dry bones to life was an early example of genetic engineering. As Simon passes above them, she glances up and says, very seriously: "Hairpins."

Book, though clearly puzzled, shrugs this off. But that one word lights up Simon's mind like a meteor shower. What if he let his hair grow? Let it grow until it was long enough to curl, or to braid, even? And as River suggested, use hairpins to keep it out of his eyes until then? What would it be like, to feel his own long hair brushing his shoulders, dancing down his back?

The Simon of a few years ago, the Osiris Simon, would have locked the idea up into a carbon steel box and thrown it into the black. The Simon of six months ago would have mulled it over but probably gone back to denial. But the Simon of right now continues towards the shuttle and, channeling the calm he always reaches for when preparing for a particularly delicate surgery, asks Inara if she has any spare hairpins he could use.

She offers to cut his hair if he likes, and he says he'd prefer the pins.

When he shows up in the kitchen, hair held out of his face with mercifully plain black hairpins—at least Inara does own simple ones—he gets a couple of funny looks. However, no one comments, though Simon knows better than to expect that to last, if he puts into action any of the other ideas now running through his mind.

"The truth is gonna kick you through an engine, shoot at you with a sniper rifle, and make you outfly a ship of Reavers. And then it will set you free."

—Deepali Das (they/them), nonbinary journalist, the only reporter who remained in Serenity Valley for the duration of the conflict and spoke about it publicly.

For an institute dedicated to teaching people to heal the sick, MedAcad was pretty cutthroat. The best of the best, competing to be the elite. It wasn't enough to be smart and driven, because everyone was. So Simon developed a razor-sharp focus, trained himself to notice and imitate the tiniest details of whatever he saw or heard. He's used that focus to learn to reattach limbs, treat a ruptured stomach lining, diagnose the most obscure conditions.

In those days, his instructors were the best doctors Osiris gave to teach their top medical students. Now, he's learning very different skills, and his instructors, who don't even know they're teaching him, are his sister, a Companion, and Serenity's mechanic and first mate.

Simon observes how River's feet touch the floor when she walks, how she carries her weight when she dances in the cargo bay or practices shooting. He watches how Kaylee's hands move while she wields chopsticks or a wrench, the way she licks her lips after she tastes a strawberry. He listens to the tones of Inara's voice—when it's sweet in laughter, when it's warm and promising, when it's icy and indignant, when it's free and teasing. He notes how Zoe holds her shoulders and moves with her hips, the tilt of her head and the arrangement of her limbs in a chair.

Just as in MedAcad, he notices, and he imitates.

At first, it seems no one sees or cares. But as Simon's walk develops a slight sway, as his hair grows to shoulder-length, as his voice and laugh get lighter, that changes. The crew's array of responses intimidate him no less for their silence. Wash seems utterly bewildered and frequently glances at his wife for her reaction. Kaylee's forehead wrinkles in puzzlement whenever she sees him. It's impossible for Simon to read Zoe, and that has him imagining the worst. He catches Jayne's lip curling in disgust when he's in the vicinity. Book develops a perpetually concerned look in his presence. Mal keeps glancing at him as if he's a bank vault that should have been left unlocked, but for some unknown reason isn't.

Simon has never been more grateful for Inara's serene countenance and the fact that River, being psychic and his meimei, understands what's going on without words. The idea of shaking off what he's learned, of going back to speaking and moving his old way, seems impossible. It would be like walking into a trap and letting the door slam shut without a fight.

But he feels like a circus freak when the crew gives him those confused and disgusted and concerned looks, and that hurts too, and scares him. This is the only home he has, and the idea of jeopardizing that is terrifying. It's funny to think how he once disparaged this ship, how he once voluntarily walked off it, because he loves Serenity now, and he loves the people on it more. Simon can't imagine not being part of their crew, and the very idea that they might tell him to leave keeps him up at night, trying to talk himself down from panic.

Finally Jayne, with typical crudeness, tells him at dinner that if he's "doin' all this so you can whore like 'Nara, you'd best find someone off-ship to practice on, so the rest of us don't got to watch it." Kaylee and River, who are seated adjacent to his chair, both kick him, upon which he glares and adds that "everyone's thinkin' it. Just unnatural."

Mal tells Jayne to walk away from the table, now.

It's a gesture of support Simon doesn't expect at all, since it's an uphill battle to not think of himself as unnatural. Apparently Jayne doesn't expect it either, nor like it, because he looks at the rest of the crew as if for support. The only one who responds is Zoe, who simply says, "Well? You heard him."

Later, on the bridge, Simon awkwardly tries to deliver thanks. But Mal seems half-ready to take offense at the notion that he'd have let Jayne's remark pass. He orders Simon not to stand for that from anyone, then adds, "Mayhap the 'verse don't want any of us to step out of line, but when Zoe and me fought for Independence, that weren't just to free the outer planets. It was for ordinary folks too. So, 'long as you're on this crew, you get any freedom you can carve out for yourself."

Simon really hopes that Mal means it. Because it's no longer enough to imitate River and Kaylee and Zoe and Inara. He needs to find out who he is when he's not—

No. That's not right. Simon takes a breath.

I want to be her.

Simon is my sister.

No crew without broken folks.

Logic isn't king.

She needs to find out who she is when she's not imitating. What Simon Tam the woman would do, and be, and feel. She's still not ready to tell anyone about this. But in her own mind, she is finally ready to acknowledge that when it comes to boy or girl, she does have an answer, and it's not an easy answer.

But at least it's true.

"Out in the black, you can never tell who's gonna kick your ass in a brawl. My advice? Either run, or find something that's really worth fighting for."

—Daisuke Yoshida (he/him), trans smuggler of escaping slaves; slavers throughout the system curse his name.

To Simon, guns are nightmarish and grotesque. Having spent years studying the fragility of the human body and the painstaking process of repairing damage to it, she would vastly prefer that every rifle and shotgun and pistol in the 'verse would spontaneously evaporate. However, given that's unlikely to happen, she resigns herself to carrying one, and they do have certain advantages as weapons—they need only a minimum of strength, and she has the expert hand-eye coordination required to become an excellent shot. Zoe offered her gun lessons months ago, with a look on her face that indicated Simon was not going to refuse, and by this time, Simon feels about as comfortable handling a gun as any doctor can, and can hit at least a non-moving target more often than not.

Brawling hand-to-hand is another matter entirely. Deciding that a person who spends her time either in the black or on the border planets should have at least some knowledge of how to avoid and land a disabling punch, Simon's recruited Mal to help her out. This is a somewhat worrisome prospect, but Zoe's already spending enough time providing gun lessons, and she's certainly not going to ask Jayne.

The captain does not go easy on her, so Simon is now vividly aware of how much it hurts when your back and shoulders and knees hit the floor. Repeatedly.

Sometimes she wonders if Mal just wants to know how many times he can throw her down before she'll stop scrambling back up again. There's times, usually at the end of a lesson, that she compares herself to a rubber ball. Up she stands, Mal knocks her down with a hard shove. Back to her feet, duck one punch, but here comes another to the cheekbone. Spring up again, dodge an elbow to the stomach, but then get tripped. Sure, she can hit him back, but the difference is that he doesn't fall. Soldiers-turned-smugglers are just stronger than doctors.

Knife fighting is doubly humiliating. Were they using real blades, Simon would be dead ten times in two minutes. She finds herself hoping any planet on which they take a job has a lot of sand she can kick in her opponents' faces.

Giving up is not an option, however. Acquiring these skills may one day save her life, or someone else's. Core doctors can leave protection of their patients to security guards, but as a ship's medic with rudimentary resources, it's just as helpful to keep those in her charge from being hurt in the first place as it is to treat them afterwards. And Simon can't save lives at all if she's failed to defend herself and is unconscious or dead when somebody gets shot. Rules are different out here—she accepted that long ago.

Osiris high society would be perplexed at the sight of Simon in the cargo bay at night, when everyone else is in bed. She works on kicks to invisible knees and groins and thighs, then paces in circles until her walk becomes a smooth glide and the sway of her hips becomes an unthinking given. She works on uppercuts to nonexistent stomachs and jaws and noses, then practices imbuing grace in the gestures of her fingers and her chin and her shoulders, until the refined elegance becomes what she does automatically. She works with the hand weights Jayne and Book leave in the cargo bay, and then repeats back everything she said that day, refusing to go to sleep until the words emerge in a voice that lilts and sings the way she always secretly wanted.

Yes, Osiris high society would be mystified indeed, would see inherent contradictions in Simon's actions. Fighting will give you away, they might comment, betray an already tenuous disguise, and besides, if you can cope with such masculine behavior as brawling, are you quite sure you're not mistaken?

To which Simon would reply that it's not a disguise, it's reality, albeit reality that was hidden for most of her life. And then she would introduce Osiris high society to Zoe Washburne, to River Tam, and to Mal's blushing bride of the many names, all of whom brawl far better than she ever did, and inform them that their point is invalid.

"Why shouldn't we change our names? Look at the Bible. Abraham and Sarah did. So did Peter and Paul. In fact, look at Jesus! He became our Christ when he rose from the dead. Changing your name is obviously holy. Go for it!"

—Juan Ortega (he/him), wildly popular traveling trans preacher on the border planets, kicked out of his church but loved by all who hear his sermons.

Among his other stellar and winning qualities, it seems Adelai Niska is as stubborn as a cross between the devil and a gadfly-stung donkey. They've just completed a job near Ezra when two armed ships fly in and attempt to threaten them into submission. River manages to scramble their nav systems, Wash and Kaylee deliver a spectacular Crazy Ivan, and Serenity flies free—this time.

Simon, who vividly recalls a sliced-off ear and the aftereffects of repeated electrocution, makes up her mind that they should have a plan, just in case the torture-happy crime lord succeeds in snatching any of them. As she's never seen or spoken to Niska, she explains her reasoning to the crew at large and then sets about questioning those of its members who might have useful information. Wash, having been in understandable panic most of the time, can only describe Niska and the effects of the electrocution machine. Mal gives a more detailed picture of the torture chamber in general. Zoe remembers quite a bit of the Skyplex layout and defining features of a few employees. Book, shockingly, tells Simon all about the hierarchy and philosophy of the organization, pretty much as if he were describing an import company. Simon isn't sure she wants to know how Book learned all that.

In the end, three pieces of their information end up becoming relevant. Firstly, Zoe recounts how, when they were first hired by Niska, he showed them the bloodied corpse of his wife's nephew and had added that "at dinner I be getting earful, but there is no help for that." Secondly, Mal describes the torture device used on him directly after Wash left as having "three weird pointy metal legs. Kind of like a crab." Thirdly, Book mentions that Niska is known for being obsessed with the works of Shan Yu, the self-styled warrior poet—ergo, sadistic dictator.

Simon has read some of those works herself, enough to think the 'verse would be a safer place if the man had gotten a bullet through his brain. She scans the Cortex page on Shan Yu's life in the interest of being armed with all possible information. As a doctor who's done autopsies on people who were burned alive or thrown out windows, she manages, barely, to view the captures of his victims displayed there without losing her breakfast. Inara and Wash, peering over her shoulder, aren't so lucky, and have to dash to the infirmary sink.

The only positive bit of information on that Cortex page is the account of Shan Yu's eventual defeat and conviction of war crimes and genocide. He was sentenced to life in prison by a high judge, Sonia Ambrosi, and died a few years later under suspicious circumstances. None of this is relevant to Simon's search for Niska's possible weaknesses, but she is intrigued by the name of the judge.

A few days later, she's in the infirmary, cataloguing supplies and strategizing as to how she'll talk Mal into purchasing higher-grade painkillers. River wanders up to the door, mouth curved in a proud smile, and says: "Sonia? Captain's cut his finger on broken railing. Needs stitches."

There's no real time for her to absorb the words, because about ten seconds later said captain storms into the infirmary, demanding why, if he has to end up with a bloody hand, does it have to be his trigger finger that gets marked for the slicing? Luckily for his peace of mind, Mal doesn't yet realize that the doctor stitching up his hand is having a vivid internal debate.

Is it time? Is it really time to tell these people she loves about who she is? What if they're disgusted? What if they're angry? What if she doesn't have a home on Serenity anymore afterwards? She wouldn't survive that.

She knows that, generally speaking, the border planets and the folk who live there are much more welcoming of trans people than the Core where she grew up. Though laws against transness were left behind long ago, living openly as trans on the Core is often downright dangerous. The border planets, needing every worker, influenced by Independents who value personal liberty, and drawing people from Earth-That-Was cultures that always honored trans people, are much safer. But it's not the border planets that matter as much as these eight people on this particular Firefly.

Logic does not answer the question. It can't. Feelings must, and what she's feeling is much more like trust. She believes, in a way the old Simon never could have, that Serenity's crew will be alright with this. She knows they are wise enough to see that pure shining glory is a fool's mission, that the commonplace Serenity medic has survived and done things the gifted Osiris doctor never could. She hopes they are also wise enough to love that commonplace Serenity medic as a woman, not a man.

But she can't know without doing it. So the next day, she summons the calm she'd use to staunch an open artery, stands up at the chipped but solid dinner table, and states, quietly but firmly, "From now on, my name is Dr. Sonia Tam."

"I bet a lot more people love you than you think."

—Wanjiku Kenyatta (she/her/they/them), genderfluid nurse for soldiers with PTSD, almost fired when they came out until their patients protested.

Silence.

"I'm trans," Sonia adds, just in case it's not clear.

More silence. Then Jayne demands to know why: "If you's not a man, how come when you was shackin' up with Kaylee, we had to stuff pillows in our ears to drown y'all out? Ya just usin' her to cover up or somethin'?"

Inara cuts in to inform the table at large that gender is independent of sexual orientation. Some women do sleep with women, after all. Sonia gets some courage back and tells them that she herself is bisexual, and adds acerbically that Jayne still shouldn't get his hopes up, just so he'll splutter for a few minutes at the insinuation and they can have some peace.

Zoe regards her levelly and says, "I have just one question."

Sonia tries not to squirm. She knows if Zoe is on her side, Wash absolutely will be too. She knows how much Mal respects his first mate's opinion. A lot depends on getting this answer right. "Yes?"

"What took you so long?" In response to Sonia's stare, Zoe shrugs. "Only asking 'cause most of us figured it out months ago. We've been waiting for you to say something and you kept not."

Sonia glances around incredulously. Zoe is right. Nobody even looks surprised. Inara and River are both beaming as if they're unspeakably proud of her. Book seems thoughtful. Mal is matter-of-fact, and after a moment declares that it's a relief she finally got around to this, because too much fuss and denial clogs up a ship's engines, and the longer they have to practice the right pronouns, the better.

Jayne then gives a shrug, says that at least it explains a lot, and goes back to eating. Wash jumps in to ask if Sonia's pronouns are she/her, or they/them, or something else. Kaylee asks if they can help in any way, because mayhap it was hard to say that.

Almost stammering, Sonia clarifies she/her, and tells Kaylee she'll let them know if she needs anything. It's almost a shock how quickly the conversation switches to their upcoming job. If it weren't for everyone correcting themselves around her pronouns, Sonia would nearly believe she hadn't said anything.

But after dinner, Inara quietly approaches her and says that if Sonia ever wants help with hormone therapy—and there's no hurry—she knows people. Sonia's taken enough risks for quite a while, but she'd been wondering about that, and she thanks Inara and promises she'll let her know.

Book has his own gift to offer, one Sonia hadn't expected. That night, when they're lifting weights together, he begins speaking about the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas.

If you do not bring forth what is inside you, Book says, it will destroy you. But if you do bring forth what is inside you, it will save you.