“People will never cease to amaze me”. Sean was muttering to himself, quickly getting back into one of his favorite work-oriented rants, but without any real rancor. “Damn Gates and all his unholy minions anyway!”
 

“People will never cease to amaze me”. Sean was muttering to himself, quickly getting back into one of his favorite work-oriented rants, but without any real rancor. “Damn Gates and all his unholy minions anyway!”

“Hey Tess, come look at this shit! Some idiot managed to mix up three different versions of the same database from partial differential backups and now the same query gets 3 different answers depending on which copy the servers access. What a ratfuck!”

Tess poked her head out from behind a rack of switches, blinking a little as she pushed her glasses back up into place. “I didn’t even know that was possible” she piped in her reedy drawl. “That’s ok, you should see what they’ve managed to do with the wiring back here. I don’t think you could get farther from diagram if you tried.”

For a while this went on, the typical banter they had fallen into when working together quickly deteriorating into bad jokes and speculation as to precisely how someone managed to screw up a network that badly. After a bit, they both fell silent as they plunged back into their respective tasks. Some hours later, they agreed that they had each reached a point where they could stop for the day and leave the network functional.

Sean eyed Tess with some jealousy as she stretched, noting how nicely the regime of hormones and exercise had begun to shape her young body. “So your mom tells me you’re going to have enough saved for your surgery in about a year. You gonna do it over the summer break?”

Tess grinned, a little sparkle in her eyes. “Well I thought I might take a semester off after and just enjoy, you know, lay around on the beach, that kind of thing. Just enjoy being a girl finally. Hey,” she dodged a flying wad of paper “No fair, I don’t have any ammo!”

“You better not take time off school and mess up your scholarship! Your mom would kill me!” He tried to sound gruff, but couldn’t quite manage it. He had become friends with the youngster since she and her mother had moved in down the street, still grieving the death of her father.

“Seriously, you know you have the support of the entire Fire department behind you, and that’s been a little hard for some of them to deal with. I mean, the child of a fallen comrade, yes, but you being TS has caused some of them to have to overcome some cherished hatreds and you have to be even better than just a normal genius just to keep em on your side.”

“Yeah, I know, but sometimes that’s a little hard, being the perfect student and all. Sometimes I wish I could just slack off like some of my friends.” Her tone was a little wistful.

They were in the parking lot now, the late summer sun glaring off the windows of parked cars, causing them both to squint a little. “Besides, I’ve got it harder than all of them, I mean who else do you know that has to take a year-long test?”

“Hey, at least you get to take that test. Some of us never had the chance, you know.” Sean held back the familiar wave of self pity, determined not to let it show. *Sometimes things just suck* he thought to himself. His mind wandered back over the years, remembering a time when he had been that young and still not had the hope his young friend had. She was so lucky to have the support of all these people.

“Why didn’t you ever make the transition yourself?” she asked. “You’ve never told me that part. I mean I know what those monsters did to you, but I don’t get the rest of it. How could you stand to go on being a boy when you knew you weren’t inside?”

Sean thought back over the years, trying to decide what to tell her. “Well, It was a lot of bad luck, and a lot of good luck, but mostly it was love.”

She looked at him with a bewildered expression on her face. “Huh?”

He sighed inwardly to himself. *Well, if she doesn’t learn some of the more unpleasant things in life now, they’ll just sneak up on her later* he thought to himself. *besides, she’s almost like the daughter I never got to have*.

“Well, for one thing I wasn’t as lucky as you. Your parents accepted you, even though they were determined to follow medical guidelines and all, you know, no drugs until you reached your majority, the whole bit. Lucky for you, you got a thin build. That, and you cheated, something that wasn’t possible back in my day. I mean when I was your age, the web as we know it now didn’t even exist, much less the ability to order drugs from online pharmacies.”

“But more important at the time, my parents were extremely religious, and things like being a transsexual were considered evil. I never even told my parents, still haven’t. All they know is that I’m gay, and I didn’t even tell them that until I’d been out of their house for a decade. Anyway, I had to go through full puberty as a boy, and I wound up six feet and 180 pounds by the time I was 15. I ran away from home because I couldn’t stomach their bullshit anymore, wandered the country for a couple of years, and wound up coming back home.”

She chewed on her lower lip for a while as he maneuvered through the afternoon traffic jam. “So what happened, why didn’t you change then, I mean, I guess I just don’t understand it. I know a lot of six foot natural girls, and some of them are pretty muscled up and all, it can’t have been that much different?”

“Well, I hadn’t been back here for very long, maybe three months” he braked sharply as another car cut suddenly in front of them “and I met Charlie. I fell in love with him, we moved in together a couple of months after that, and that was pretty much that. He couldn’t stand the idea of me transitioning or even dressing up, so I just decided to stay as I was, since I never thought I was gonna be able to even pretend to be a woman. I gave up that part of myself.”

She thought for a moment. “Wow, that’s kind of so sad, and so happy at the same time. I feel really bad for you. I’m just glad Chad accepts me for who I am”

*I really hope he does, kid, I really hope he does* he thought to himself, lost for a moment in his own reflections. “Hey, you know, take it slow, kiddo, you’ve got all the time in the world. I mean, Chad is a nice kid, I just don’t want you to get hurt. It’s not like you’ve had all that many boyfriends, you know.”

She conceded the point, and they sat in silence for the rest of the way home. Sean pulled the car into his driveway, still lost in his own thoughts and memories. Tess seemed a bit somber as she got out of the car, hefting her work sack across her shoulder by one strap and starting to walk across the lawn to her empty house.

“Hey Tess, you wanna eat dinner with us?” She turned and broke into a smile, the sunlight slanting across her face.

“Sure, Charlie always makes enough for 4 anyway. Guess I might as well help yawl eat it.” The smile turned into a grin as she halfway ran to the door, bursting through into the interior. Sean just shook his head at the enthusiasm and energy of the young girl as he gathered his own work sack and trudged toward home and comfort, desperately yearning to simply sit and get a little more work done before dinner.

He was too distracted to notice the distinct lack of happy noises of greeting from inside the house, but as he trudged tiredly inside, he was treated to a very rude awakening. He felt an arm snake around his neck from behind and tighten, trying to choke him, and reflex kicked in. He grabbed hold of the arm, kicked backwards, and curled his body back around it while throwing his weight forward and curling into a ball.

He caught a quick glimpse of Charlie elbowing another man who held him and twisting away as he came rolling up to face another man who was holding a knife to Tess’s throat. The man he had thrown was still in midair, a surprised look on his face as he flew upside down to crash into the opposite wall. Charlie was in the middle of trying to keep his captor’s knife away from his body, running backwards, the man in hot pursuit, knife extended.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion for a moment. The man holding Tess drew his knife across her throat, a fountain of blood following in the wake of the blade, and flung her aside to crouch in a knife fighter’s stance. Charlie was still backpedaling, but for the moment he had to concentrate on the man who was advancing toward him, the steel whistling in arcs before him. The man stabbed toward him as he rushed into the arc of the knife. He caught the knife wielding arm, broke it backwards over his knee, and continued as fast as possible toward the other assailant, just in time to see him sink the blade into his lover’s chest.

Now he was in a pure rage, operating completely on muscle memory. A sanped blow to the man’s throat, and he fell backward, gargling out his life, choking on his own blood. He turned, the other man had recovered his blade with his unbroken arm and the one who had grabbed him as he came in was starting to pick himself up. The man with the knife charged, blade first. He dodged, whirled behind him, grabbed the man’s head and used the momentum of his movement to snap his neck.

Another flowing movement, and he was kicking the third man in the face, then wrapping the other leg around his neck and coming to the ground with a loud cracking noise as the man’s neck broke, a stupid little grin drooling blood from a corner of his lip.

Charlie had regained his feet and was rushing for the phone as Sean slowly came out of his bloodrage to stagger toward where Tess lay. It was obvious to him that she was dead, and he picked her head up to cradle it in his lap as he collapsed in tears, her blood sticky al over him, the last few pulses ebbing as he sat in the spreading puddle hearing Charlie talk to the operator in desperate tones. It only seemed a moment later the medics arrived, prying Tess from his grasp as he sobbed, Charlie trying to comfort him until the techs took him away as well.

It was only the feeling of being picked up and strapped to a gurney while he struggled to get loose that brought him back to a touch of consciousness.