not a butterfly at all

It didn't take Ghondor long to realize that the identity she'd been born with didn't fit. The masculine pronouns started to jar soon after she could understand them, and what (who) they referred to. She didn't want to wear dresses, but she wanted long hair she could tie into braids. When the jokes started about how she'd "charm all the little girls with that handsome face", she smelled something seriously off.

When puberty hit, she arranged with Doc Hollis for just blockers, to start, but switched to proper estrogen patches soon after. She didn't want to be curvy, like the Bitchqueen, but a little definition would be nice. Not busty, but a little something up top. Maybe she regretted how much of her height growth had been blocked, later on, but no biggie - literally.

She got resigned to the everyday pills, the everyday correcting folks on her pronouns, the everyday buzz in the back of her head about the Vandham boy that might have been. (In her mid-teenage years, she'd used her fists for more than just training. Only ever on guys bigger than her, though.) She was "ma'am" to Aggy and Oggy, and not "sir". It was great.

All that part was easy.

It was this naming stuff that itched.

Ghondor was not a girl's name. Everyone knew it. The Bitchqueen knew it, Granddad knew it, and even the Granddad of a thousand years ago had known it, because he'd transed his whole gender to fit.

But every time she snuck into the clinic and paged through baby name books, trying to find something else that'd fit her and her new look (and how new was it, really? such a long time coming), she'd stop before she'd even begun.

How could she be anything but Ghondor? No matter the disagreements she had with her mother, no matter how pitiful the Vandham line seemed to have turned out, this name had stood for centuries. Just two syllables.

"Why not ditch it?" Shania had asked.

You didn't ditch your family - not unless they'd been really rotten to you. Ghondor could do, be, anything she wanted. Change her body, change her face, change her weapon and her taste in food (well, maybe not that), but she couldn't change the thing that carried home with her wherever she went.

Monica had named her baby Ghondor, and Monica's baby Ghondor would always be.