Some things never change.
For example, despite the fact that this year marked the sixth anniversary of the time where the Sun suddenly and mysteriously became an enormous nuclear soap-bubble, sending forth iridescent rays that transformed anyone caught by them into strange, fantastic, or even (what should've been) outright impossible new forms, throwing the entire world into chaos and upending society for half a year before just as abruptly returning to normal, leaving in its wake a set of repercussions that started with the introduction of a plethora of entirely new species of sentient life to a civilization that had hitherto had only one, and didn't even end with the introduction of explicitly and tangibly real magic, gods, and monsters to a world that had thought these things to be merely myth, the punchbowl at the Lakeside High class reunion was still filled with the inevitable mixture of off-brand Kool-Aid, frozen pineapple juice, sherbet, and Sprite.
...Or was it 7-Up?
It wasn't that nothing had changed at all, Haru reflected. It wasn't like no cultural products of note had come into the world since the Sun had changed. It was just that some things were, apparently, eternal. Like the playlist, which was as frozen in time now as it was when she - when he - was being dragged to her own mother's class reunion, and probably had been since the release of whichever the very last hit '80s teen movie was.
Maybe, she thought, even longer than that. In this world of magic and miracles, how could she be truly sure that "In Your Eyes" hadn't been playing at Peter Gabriel's graduation?
Not "Solsbury Hill." Certainly not any of his work with Genesis. Heck, not even "Sledgehammer." Always and eternally "In Your Eyes," as if it had been set in stone from the very foundation of the Universe. To be fair, she mused, it was a great song, but who decided which things did or didn't make it into the great and holy Pop Canon, anyway?
She sighed. Twenty-three years old, she thought, and here I am standing in a corner next to the punchbowl, thinking about music.
...Come think, hadn't there been an '80s teen movie like this? Or was that a later movie hearkening back to those movies?
Well, it wasn't like it wasn't fitting. She'd gotten a lot of practice in getting over stage fright in the last six years, and a part of her even relished engaging with an audience now, but when it came to social situations she was still a natural-born wallflower. That much hadn't changed; she might've gone from male to female, white to nonspecifically Asian, croaking tenor to lilting high alto, ordinary human to girl with a third eye that perceived hidden truths, et cetera et cetera, but...some things were just constant.
Honestly, though, she thought she might prefer it this way. Over at the other end of the room, the P.A. system switched over to "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day as she thought back on it. It wasn't like high school had been some miserable hellscape and she never wanted to see any of these people again, but...was she really all that desperate to see any of these people again? She'd had good times with some of them, bad times with others, even both with a few, but the majority of them she hadn't really known at all, or had only known in passing, and most of the ones she'd actually been really close to she was still in touch with, anyway. What were they supposed to do here? Bond over memories of football games she hadn't gone to? Stand around talking with near-strangers about what they'd been doing with their lives?
What had she been doing with her life? Well, definitely not nothing, but...she wondered what was supposed to count as a "good" answer there. Really, she thought, this was what they never told you about becoming an adult; everyone told you about all the things you could do, in some hypothetical future or other, but nobody could really tell you what you should do. Was everybody just supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer and make a lot of money? Did you "lose" some invisible contest if you came to one of these things and hadn't met the Minimum Success Qualifications? What did it say about you if, say...
She sighed and settled back against the wall as her mind reeled in the years. She thought about how it had all started, about the day when a beam of sunlight had caught a teenage boy unawares through a window, and changed him into her. She thought about those first awkward days at school. About meeting Ken and the other members of the band. About her first period. About having her third eye hijacked by some horrible outside force. About falling in with an improvised magical society when she went looking for answers about her visions, and learning the real truth about the Sun's change. About...about the day when it changed back and she didn't, and she faced with certainty the fact that she was going to be a woman for the rest of her life.
The Isley Brothers were tearing it up on "Shout" now, the same way they'd been doing for decades. She thought about everything that had happened after that. About graduating, and the band going their separate ways - Zack to a music scholarship, Violet to med school. About staying together with Ken, and making official what they'd been inching their way toward for most of a year. About making love for the first time, as a woman...and discovering, the next day, that her "second sight" hadn't gone with her virginity, the way her trans-temporal Druid classmate had suggested it might.
She frowned at the memory; it seemed like ages ago that Britanny had raised the possibility that her power might be temporary, that this might simply be one "phase" of her life, as a "maiden." Truth be told, she was ready for that; not that she hated how she looked (an otherwise-normal Asian girl with a third eye wasn't remotely the strangest thing you'd see on the streets these days, and it somehow never seemed out of place on her,) but that being the kind of person who sees visions and divines the hidden made it kind of awkward trying to lead a normal life.
It wasn't as if she'd asked to be a seer, and it wasn't something she had much control over, either. She couldn't just go to the corner store and pick out the right lottery ticket; if anything, she was likelier to go to the corner store, tip off the clerk to an attempted robbery that hadn't happened yet, get a weird look, and then get drawn into some Byzantine conspiracy by a clue left behind on the robber's cigarette pack after they'd gotten away. Or possibly after they'd been arrested; by now, some of her local convenience-store clerks had learned that it was worth listening to the three-eyed crazy lady.
Point was, it was often difficult to do normal, basic stuff when the abnormal was so prone to intrude. Not everything was quite as wild as, say, the time she stumbled onto the scheme of a mad sorceress to kidnap children and turn them into her living dolls (she'd managed to tip off the police and foil the plan, but not before almost falling victim herself...at least they'd been able to free those already transformed from the woman's thrall,) but after six years of getting dragged into things simply because she could see what other people couldn't, she was pretty well ready to be done with it. It was like living in one of those cartoons where a bunch of teenagers travel around in a van solving mysteries and playing in a band, except that she wasn't a teenager anymore, didn't have a van, and wasn't in a band right now.
Which was another facet of the awkwardness in coming to this. It didn't really bother her that much - most high-school bands ended up dissolving as the members moved on to college, careers, et cetera, and they'd parted on good terms. And she still got to scratch that itch playing with Ken, at open-mic nights and in his little home studio
She used to feel a bit disappointed by this, but she'd met a lady at one local event who, it turned out, had had an entire career in the late '80s and early '90s selling her music by mail-order with a little New Age label. She'd apparently been confined to a wheelchair and had taken up home recording as a hobby she could do without assistance; she'd regained the use of her legs after the Sun changed and she ended up with a woman's upper body attached to the body of a giant chicken-like bird at the latter's "neck," but the music had stuck.
That had been encouraging, in a way; if someone working out of a basement in rural Oregon years before she was even born had been enough of a "real" musician to make a living as part of a bigger movement, she didn't have anything to feel embarassed about as one half of a young couple pursuing their interests out of a bedroom studio in their little apartment. But here...when the last thing people remember you for is playing in a band, they'd naturally assume you'd go on to success in that, if not fame and fortune, right? Not open-mic nights and a moderately active SoundCloud account...
Now it was the iconic double-bass riff introducing "Stand By Me." She sighed and wondered when Ken was going to get here; this one always got her a little sappy and right now she really kinda wanted to have him hold her in his arms while she reached around and floofed his tail...
Well, what could she say? She wasn't rich and famous, she wasn't currently with a group, she was just...well, an ordinary young adult pursuing a hobby she enjoyed with her boyfriend. That was nothing to be embarassed about, right?
Haru slumped back against the wall and moodily sipped her punch. It wasn't - she truly believed that - but somehow she felt embarassed anyway. It wasn't that she'd harbored any specific dreams of making it big as a singer/flautist or anything, it was just that...she'd kind of figured that, by this point in her life, she'd have gotten somewhere. It had all gone by so fast...she'd taken a year off after graduating, since the world was still busy getting back to normal and she was still coming to terms with being a woman, but one year had turned into two, and then college, and now...
Haru at eighteen would not have expected Haru at twenty-three to still be in school, that was for sure. Even if she was putting herself through college for a Bachelor's in education with a minor in music...it felt like she was supposed to be in another "phase" of her life by now, supposed to be well on her way to whatever constituted the "goal," but she was still doing warmups at the starting line...
She wished she were drinking something a little stronger, as she sank deeper into her funk. Why was she even here!? She didn't know most of these people, and now she was too embarassed to talk to even the people she did know! She was just glued to the wall in the corner of the room, and Ken wasn't here, and...and...
"That is non-alcoholic, right?"
The P.A. system sounded out the inimitable clattering filter sweep and brisk, punctual drumline that announced the start of "Tom Sawyer" as Haru started in surprise at the sound of a voice she hadn't heard in years, but which was familiar nonetheless. She hadn't seen Jon - er, "Jonni" - Madison in a good while, and her voice had matured from a girl's into that of a grown woman in the same way Haru's had, but she was still instantly recognizable. She turned her attention away from her drink; her gaze swept up the figure next to her...and then snapped back down in an instant.
She hadn't really known Jon before the change, but she remembered her well from the time they'd spent together in their rag-tag little magic circle. It had been three or four years since they'd last seen each other, but the figure of a shorter, slightly stocky, moderately busty brunette woman with the lower body of a giant slug was familiar to her. What was more of a surprise was the fact that she was clearly heavily pregnant.
If this had been a sitcom or cartoon, it would've been the perfect setup for a traditional spit-take, but as it actually happened Haru gasped in surprise, inhaled a good bit of her punch, choked and spat it back into her glass, and spent the next several seconds spluttering and coughing until she'd finally cleared out her windpipe.
"Sorry," Jonni said, half-apologetically and half-bemusedly, "I didn't mean to startle you. You looked kinda lost in thought there."
Haru stared wide-eyed at her. "I-" She coughed again. "I, er, you, uh...you're PREGNANT!?"
The slug-woman looked surprised and confused for a brief moment, then chuckled. "Well, yeah, I guess I am," she said with a smile. "Not for too much longer, though. I guess it's been so long for me that I forgot it might be news to other people..."
"That...that's so weird to think about..." she murmured. "I mean, I knew we could, but...it's only been six years since we were..." She shook her head in bewilderment. Intellectually, somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that it was possible - it was, after all, why she had to deal with menstruation and contraception - but even after six years, the part of her brain that categorized these things still considered pregnancy and motherhood to be something that happened to other people. To...to real women. And Jon had been...like her, someone who was just thrust into womanhood without warning one fateful day. Heck, if anything, the slug-girl had been more resistant to the idea of staying female!
Jonni laughed again. "Yeah, well. I kinda always imagined I'd have kids someday, even when I was a guy." She shrugged. "And after a couple years as a girl, the idea just didn't seem that strange anymore..."
"Just What I Needed" by the Cars was playing now; Haru regarded her old classmate. She looked good - she'd matured into quite a lovely young woman, and she seemed far more comfortable in her own (new) skin than she had years ago. She was even wearing (a little, subtle) makeup now, for gods' sake! But there was something more than that. The same could be said for herself, after all - she was used to being the woman she'd grown into now, and she carried it off better - but Jonni had a certain undefinable something to her that she hadn't, even when Haru had last seen her just a few years ago. A few...
She frowned. "A couple years? But it's been...eep!?" She yelped as something warm and wet brushed her bare leg below the hem of her dress - had someone brought a dog to this event? But no, it wasn't just some curious animal nose snuffling about; it was sliding along, a whole length of something slithering past her, over her foot, towards...she looked down and her eyes went wide again.
Jonni chuckled. "Right, I guess you didn't hear about Ernestine, then?" She knelt down - or whatever you'd call it when someone whose lower body is a single mass of boneless muscle tissue with not a knee to be had lowers themselves closer to the ground - to pick up another, much smaller slug-girl, one who looked uncannily like what Haru assumed a younger version of Jonni would. "She's almost two now. Say hi, Ern!"
The little girl glanced warily over at Haru, then buried her face in her mother's breast. Jonni smiled apologetically. "She's a little shy. Ern, honey, this is one of Mama's friends, okay?"
Haru nodded and gave a little wave to the...the not-quite-a-toddler, smiling gently, then returned to boggling over these revelations. Seeing her old classmate like that, hefting a child in one arm like it was the most natural thing in the world, never faltering in her tender grasp even as she one-handedly finagled a plastic cup from the stack and poured herself a glass of punch, she could finally put her finger on it: the "something" Jonni had to her now that she hadn't had before was the same vibe Haru got from her own mother, or Ken's for that matter. The word matronly, in Haru's mind, conjured up images of stout cartoon German housewives with their hair done up in absurdly tight buns, and that wasn't what she was seeing in the slug-woman at all...but maybe, aeons ago, it had meant that, before cultural mutation had taken hold of it and permanently affixed it to whatever Gilded Age newspaper-comic character had served as the archetypal icon, in the same canon of consensus that was currently dictating the playlist; it seemed like it should mean that.
No, this...this was something different, something simpler and more universal than specific points of reference from a century ago that had somehow filtered into the modern cultural consciousness nearly unchanged. It was in the tenderness with which Jonni held her daughter, the warmth of her smile, the softer, slightly plumper build that just showed in her upper arms and face, the mild yet perceptible weariness that suggested a night or three of little to no sleep in the past week...it was something she'd never really thought about before, but it all added up to her classmate being unmistakeably a mom now. Even apart from the obviousness of her pregnancy...
"You okay there?" Jonni asked. "You seem nearly as quiet as she does."
Haru shook her head in wonderment. "It's just...it's so weird...I mean, I knew we could, but...I never thought..." Was she repeating herself? It felt like she kept skipping a groove...
The slug-woman nodded. "Tell me about it. Tim and I went into it by choice, with the full support of our families, and it was still freaking scary."
"I'dve thought it'd be easier for you, really." A gong rang in the start of "Walk Like An Egyptian," and both Jonni and Haru turned to see a harpy-woman casually stepping into the conversation. Sarah McMillan's plumage was as bright as ever, her feathers neatly preened. She still went naked, which had become fairly common for harpies in the last few years, but she was better-groomed now than she had been in the not-quite-feral phase she'd gone through immediately after her change, and was wearing the kind of jewelry that her new species had come to favor: a necklace of brightly-colored glass beads and raptor talons, feather earrings, and a loose cord around her waist that a small purse hung from. (Makeup, however, was evidently just too much trouble for someone without hands. Not that she needed it to look stunning.)
Jonni laughed ruefully. "No such luck. All the relevant parts are human; baby still had to come out through my pelvis. Between that and the dilation..." She frowned, then smiled apologetically at Sarah. "Though I suppose I can't complain to you on that front..."
The harpy shrugged. "Eh...I'm built for it. And honestly, it hurts like a bi-" She caught herself as she noticed Ernestine. "-uh, a bunch, but I'll take it over days of bleeding, bloating, and cramps any time. 'Course, you haven't had to deal with that for a while yourself, I guess?" She eyed the pregnant woman's belly knowingly.
The slug-woman chuckled. "Well, no. Believe me, though, I may be getting a pass on my cycle and riding high on endorphins now, but I still remember the reckoning I'm due for in a couple weeks."
Haru had quietly disposed of her glass of backwashed punch and poured herself a new one. She found herself sinking back into it and starting to brood a bit again. She hadn't really known Sarah except by reputation, but the thing about seeing her here was...she actually was a successful professional musician. Not wildly - she wasn't a world-famous pop idol or anything, but she was a leading singer with a choir based out of Minneapolis, and active in the local music scene. Haru had actually heard her a couple times; her range was quite impressive, from soft-yet-husky Stevie Nicks alto to piercing high notes. And yet another classmate who seemed to have their life together, while she...
"Wh-what's it like?" she asked quietly. She was surprised at herself for asking; it wasn't something she'd ever really thought about before.
Jonni seemed surprised as well for a moment, then smiled knowingly. "I didn't get a wink of sleep last night," she laughed. "She's a feisty one; she was doing gymnastics in there 'til about four-thirty. With Ernestine, she was so quiet most of the time that I'dve been worried if I hadn't felt the occasional stretch-and-yawn." She nuzzled her little daughter and hugged her tight; her tone of voice switched to that timeless, universal baby-talk mode. "You were just happy to be close to Mama, weren'tcha, boo?"
The little slug-girl buried herself deeper into Jonni's chest, then half-turned her head to glance at the other two women out of the corner of her eye. She gave Haru an enigmatic little baby smile; this broadened out to a tiny grin when she caught sight of the harpy with the brightly-colored feathers and the shiny baubles. Haru felt simultaneously charmed and slightly miffed.
"Really, though," Jonni continued, "it's...it's hard to even describe. Your whole perspective changes. Like, you go through high school and college and get out into the adult world thinking, 'where am I going? What's my life gonna look like?' Even once it was Tim and I, it was just that there were two 'mes' and we were going wherever we were going together."
"Every Breath You Take" quietly padded in on its little cycle of muted guitar notes, and Haru boggled over it. She wondered if some far-future historian would one day have to try to reconstruct the history of 20th-century popular music from party playlists, and what the resulting theories of musical evolution would look like.
"But then...then you have kids, and it's like, all of a sudden there's this tiny little person who is completely dependent on you for everything, and your primary goal in life is just to keep them fed, clean, and sheltered, and the reward is that you get to watch this tiny little person that you brought into the world discover everything for the first time, and develop from a simple little creature into their own distinct personality, except some of it is so recognizable as something they got from you or your husband, and..."
Jonni chuckled. "And listen to me, getting all sappy. This is what it does to you. You go in thinking you want to do it because it seems like it'd be neat to try, and next thing you know your entire purpose in life has shifted and you're boring all your non-parent friends stiff telling them about what your kid did or said the other day..." She shrugged apologetically.
"N-no, it's okay, really," Haru said. "I mean, I was the one who asked. I just, um, I..."
"I think what she's trying to say is, she wanted to know what it feels like," Sarah interjected wryly. Haru nodded meekly, her face flushing.
The slug-woman laughed. "Right, well, there's upsides and downsides. Morning sickness sucks, then when you're over that you start having to go to the bathroom all the time because your kid is sitting on top of your bladder and getting bigger by the day, and nothing makes you self-conscious like being in the late stages and feeling huge while also having to wear a maternity bra, and dealing with hormonal mood-swings on top of that. And then there's the surprise kidney punches and the nights where baby wakes up at 3 A.M. and wants to play..."
Her expression softened. "But, you know, in some ways it's a kind of closeness you can only ever experience like this. Like, my child is literally inside of me, almost a part of my body, even, right down to..." She paused for a moment. "Well, she's got her own heart now, but you get what I mean. I can't wait to meet her, to see her little face, to watch her grow up, but..." She sighed happily. "But this, right now, is something I'll never get to experience with her again. Something that even she won't remember, but that I'll treasure until my dying- oof!"
Sarah laughed as Jonni winced. "Surprise kidney punch?"
"Gah...no, that was the diaphragm," the slug-woman groaned. "Jeez, kid!" she said, addressing her belly. "You'll be out soon enough!"
The harpy shook her head, chuckling. "Well, that's another thing I won't have to worry about, if I ever decide to have kids. They can just stay inside their shells and away from my organs until they're ready to come out." She grimaced slightly. "Of course, in my case, the problem would be having to stick close enough to keep 'em warm and tend to them until they hatch. It'd play h-er, havoc with my schedule."
Jonni laughed. "Oh, believe me, they do that no matter how you have 'em. But yeah, it's a big commitment. I've heard some harpies talking about trying industrial incubators, but that seems so impersonal to me..."
She glanced up at Haru, who looked as if she wanted to say something but couldn't work up the nerve. She smiled knowingly and slid over next to her classmate and fellow boy-turned-girl; she took her hand and gently slipped it under her shirt and onto her stomach. Haru felt nervous and awkward and wondered - firstly, was it that obvious what she was thinking? - and secondly, did she have any right to be doing this? To be feeling these things? Thinking these thoughts? Was it right for her, someone who wasn't even a born woman, to...to...
And then she felt it; she gasped softly. It wasn't exactly a kick, since that required feet, and the current occupant of Jonni's womb seemed to be built like her mother, but Haru could feel something broad and soft yet surprisingly strong wriggling under the surface. It wasn't the first time she'd felt something like this; long ago, when her aunt was pregnant with one of her cousins, she'd gotten to feel the baby kicking. But this was the first time since...since she'd acquired a womb of her own, since she became capable of...of...
Haru became aware that she was crying, though she couldn't say why. Jonni pulled her into a hug with her free arm; she was initially hesitant, especially when she felt the slick surface of little Ernestine's foot brushing up against her waist, but it was too comforting after the funk she'd been in, the brooding and the awkwardness. She returned the hug, no longer particularly caring that she'd have to slip out to the ladies' room and wipe off her dress later.
Jonni leaned in close. "Don't get me wrong," she whispered to Haru, her tone more serious than it had been. "It's not something you just 'try out' as a solution for other problems, and it's not something to be taken lightly. Any parent owes it to their kids to not half-ass the job. But for what it's worth..." She smiled beatifically. "Oh, I wouldn't trade it for anything."
Haru only blushed in response.
Some minutes later, a young woman with three eyes quietly exited the girls' bathroom of her old school, marveling at how long it had been since she'd first entered it. Fortunately, the slime secreted by the slug-girls' lower bodies was primarily water-based, and while it had involved an ungodly quantity of paper towels and several minutes of awkwardly contorting herself to stand under the blowdrier, she'd been able to get her dress cleaned up to where it merely looked like someone had spilled punch on her.
Haru made her way through the halls back toward the gym, still marveling. Six years...it seemed like a lifetime ago. Sarah was a professional singer...she was going into teaching...Jon had gotten married and had kids. Who'da thunk it?
The P.A. was just fading out on the final strains of "Sledgehammer" when she walked back inside. Jonni had been joined by her husband, and the two of them were doing that thing where you try to show a small child how to dance by taking them by the wrists and gently swaying them from side to side...but Ernestine's attention was still fixed on the bright plumage flashing in the center of the room, as Sarah was freely dancing with herself.
The immortal James Jamerson gently teased in the intro to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" as Haru happened to glance across the room. Ken was standing there, on the edge of the crowd. She caught his eye, and he smiled. She smiled back, and they started to make their way towards each other. Maybe, she thought...maybe different "phases" of life meant different things to different people...maybe they didn't always look how you'd come to expect. Maybe...some things could change after all.
