Kirsten sat Emily down on the couch and got her draped in a blanket. Then she and Tina made their way upstairs to talk to the other two children.
Emily sat there for a while, still red-eyed. In a way, that had been kind of embarassing, breaking into tears like she really was a little girl. But then, it did seem like it should be a pretty normal reaction for someone in her situation. So should she be embarrassed to be comforted by her...mother like she hadn't been since around the last time she was this age?
Maybe, maybe not. But she couldn't deny that she had really been needing that. Maybe right now, she needed to focus less on what would be normal and more on what worked. She clutched the blanket tightly, wrapping it around her small frame. It felt good.
Kirsten came in to find Rachel spread out randomly across the floor and bawling her eyes out in front of the mirror. She carefully stepped her across the coils and laid a hand on the shoulder of her youngest son-turned-teenage daughter. Rachel turned to face her and flung herself against her father-turned-mother, who was almost knocked over; even just counting her human half, Rachel was noticeably the larger of the two, and she had a base of several hundred pounds of mostly muscle to lever herself against.
"Oh, Dad!" she wailed. "What am I gonna do? How can I live like this!?"
Once Kirsten had recovered from the force of her assault, she wrapped her arms around her daughter. "Don't talk like that," she said. "You'll get through this all right. We all will. Society knows us the way we are now, even for you. All we have to do is learn to live with it ourselves."
"But that's what I mean!" the snake-girl sobbed. "I...I was just trying to figure this out...and...and oh my God, Dad, I think I might like boys!"
Kirsten nodded. She wished this hadn't come up so soon, but all she could do right now was deal with it. "That's nothing to be ashamed of," she said. "It's a perfectly normal thing for a girl your age."
"But I'm not supposed to be a girl my age!" Rachel said, in between gasping sobs. "This body is all wrong! It makes me feel like this when I'm supposed to be a boy myself! How can I live like that?"
"Listen," Kirsten said, embracing her tightly. "Of course you're not going to be able to live like this if you're at odds with your own body. You need to make sure that ends right now. And the only person who can tell you what you're 'supposed' to be is you. All of us are going to have a lot of adjusting to do, and you're no exception. But you need to work towards acceptance of your situation, not against it. Alright?"
Rachel didn't say anything. She just continued crying, as her new mother held her.
Zach flopped back on his bed. "Look," he said. "I...I appreciate the concern. I really do. But...I just really don't know how I feel about any of this."
"Hmm," Tina replied. "Can you tell me what you mean by that?"
He sighed. "I...do I really have to come out and say it? Okay. I don't know what I think about being a boy. I'm kind of thrown-off by it, yeah, but in the grand scheme of things I just don't know. I don't know if I'm going to like girls or guys or what, because I didn't even know when I was a girl. I'm kind of weirded out by this because I'm not used to it, but when it comes to being robbed of my gender, I don't know how I feel because I never really knew how I felt about it in the first place."
Tina stared at her son. "Why didn't you ever tell me any of this?" she asked.
Zach shrugged. "I...I was kind of afraid how you and Dad might react," he said. "You know, if I had turned out to be a lesbian. But...well, mostly I never brought it up because it wasn't a big deal. I didn't know how I felt, so I guess I was just waiting to find out one way or the other."
His mother let out a low whistle. "I guess it must not have been that big a deal," she said. "Your father and I certainly never noticed anything was up. But I will promise you this, dear. No matter how this works out, no matter what you find when you finally do figure yourself out, we're not going to think any less of you for it."
Zach smiled for the first time that day. "Thanks, Mom."
