The cold white light of a winter morning filled the room when I awoke; yesterday's clouds were gone and the sky outside the window was clear and bright. Little curlicues and "ferns" of frost graced the window, glittering in the sunlight. The air was absolutely still, apart from the distant rattle of the furnace.

I was still wound enough to be awake, but I'd be running down soon enough. I tried to get up, but Tammy had shifted in her sleep, and was sprawled out half on top of me, one arm over my shoulder, the weight of her tail pinning my legs to the bed. My body had the plain mechanical strength to break free anyway, but it'd drain me completely, and where would that get me?

I gave up and laid back down; I'd just have to wait for her to wake up. But it was distracting lying there, feeling her: her weight pressing against me, the rise and fall of her breathing, the warmth and softness of her skin, the coolness and smooth, scaly texture of her tail, the stiff rays of her caudal fin gently flexing as she slept, a pectoral fin twitching against my side... What would I have felt, here and now, if I were still the me I was before? What did I feel now...?

After a while, Tammy stirred, tail twitching, and flopped over the other way. That helped a little; I could just focus on lying here in the morning quiet; the old house creaking softly, a clatter of dishes down the hall as someone in the kitchen prepared breakfast, the insistent pricking of the cat trying to stab through the covers...

...Hang on; I glanced at the foot of the bed out of the corner of my eye. There she was, methodically pawing at the comforter, claws out, getting a feel for the sleeping fish underneath. It was too thick for her to get through, so Tammy hadn't noticed, but the intent was clear. She probably couldn't do any real harm, but I might as well put the kibosh on this; gathering my strength, I lurched into a sitting position and batted an arm in her direction. "Scat, already! Geez!"

Sekhmet darted out of the way and bolted for the door, where she gave me a death-glare and slunk out of the room. Tammy stirred next to me and rubbed her eyes. "Wha' wuz tha' all 'bout...?" she asked groggily.

"Aaann assasssinn," I said, feeling myself start to run down. "Come to ssllaayy you in the nighttt."

She chuckled ruefully, shaking the sleep from her head. "I swear, that cat...oh, let me get that for you." She sat up in bed and wound me up, then swung her tail around to sit next to me on the edge of the mattress.

"Y'know, the last time I slept here, I was using the rail there to sit up," she mused. "I had to pick up my legs and move them just to turn myself. Every day, for ten years...but it already feels weird to think about. Not like that part of my life was a dream, just...I've fallen out of the habit. Ten years, and all it took was a month of not having to for me to forget."

I wasn't sure how to respond, or if she expected me to, but she paused like she did. "...Well, it might be the changes to your brain, too," I offered after a moment. "Higher concepts like 'you won't drown breathing water' are one thing, but basic stuff like motor function, proprioception, and mobility comes wired-in no matter how you end up."*

* (Old habits die hard, of course; many new lamiae and centaurs, for example, accidentally shut the door on their extensive back forty, but it doesn't usually take them long to learn.)

She nodded thoughtfully. "S'pose so. Maybe it only feels funny to me because I remember the last time I had to get used to living with drastic changes to my body." She shook her head. "I was so angry then..."

"You seemed angry at the start of this, too," I said, before I caught myself. "Uh, um...sorry. I didn't mean-"

Tammy waved it off. "No, you're right. I just..." She thought for a minute, sighed heavily, then chuckled to herself.

"See, Rhoda's almost five years younger than me," she said. "When I was little, for a long time, it was just my brothers and me; at first, because Dad was always at work and Mom was pregnant, then because Mom was working and Dad was juggling learning to farm with caring for my baby sister. For the first decade of my life, Nick and Jason were my whole world. We'd spend hours at the playground, back in the city, or just tromping around here exploring. Even once Rhoda learned to walk, she was always one step behind me, and I was one step behind them."

"...And then there was the accident," she said, with another heavy sigh. I wondered if it would be rude to ask, but she read my expression. "It wasn't anything special. We were visiting my aunt, we went for a walk, and some idiot came screaming around the corner with me in the crosswalk." I saw her trying to suppress a flash of anger. "That was the worst part, at first - when I was in the hospital, trying to process it all. It wasn't anything I did, just something that happened - but it still meant that I was never gonna walk again, not without some crazy experimental therapy that might turn my life even more upside-down."

She glanced over at the books on the cupboard. "So after the shock wore off - once I really understood that I had to face living my life with this, and any cure was either a crazy risk or a theoretical in-the-possible-near-future - that was kinda what I grabbed onto as a goal. Like, I knew there was this technology that maybe was going to be able to just fix me and not turn me into God-knows-what, so I thought, once that is a thing, then I can do what I really wanted to..."

She sighed again, a bittersweet smile on her face. "I pictured someday just...leaving the hospital, getting out of my chair, and just running. Didn't matter where - just being free again. I held onto that dream for years - so y'know, I finally went through what I could never work up the courage for, and I still couldn't walk. And...yeah, that made me angry."

"...I'm sorry." I wasn't sure if I was apologizing, or just empathizing. Was it my fault that we'd wound up like this? If I hadn't been a nervous wreck, if I hadn't freaked out, if I hadn't failed to shut the door...

Tammy shook her head. "That's the thing," she said. "I was angry - but what'd it get me? Brooding doesn't change anything, it just makes you bitter and depressed. You're still exactly where you were, but you feel worse about it. I struggled with that a lot, at first; wasn't until Mom and Dad sat down and had a long, hard talk with me how I could either waste my time brooding or keep moving forward as best as I could that I started learning to get past that."

"You're not still upset about it?" I struggled to wrap my mind around that. How could you just let go of something you'd held onto for that long? How could you rearrange your whole understanding of who and what you were even supposed to be...?

"No...?" she said. "One thing Mom had to explain to me back then was that I was actually lucky. I could just as easily have died in that accident, or been completely paralyzed - but I was alive, I wasn't disfigured, I could still move enough that I could learn to take care of myself, and I didn't have any brain damage. Not everybody is that fortunate."

She glanced down at her fins and tail. "And now? Hell, I got really lucky. I'm still normal-sized, I still look like me, I can do things and go places I couldn't before, and all of me works. Even the bad things about this body are just milder versions of limitations I was already used to." She shrugged. "It's definitely not what I thought I wanted, and I still don't know how I'll feel down the road. But all things considered? You bet it could be worse."

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She didn't, I noticed, point out that she was still a woman. Was it really just that that explained why she and Emma were so much more okay with this than I was? Well, it wasn't the only thing I had to cope with now, even if it was the thing that occupied my thoughts the most...

I sighed, feeling the vibrations rushing through whatever constituted my voicebox now. "How'd...how did you deal with needing help all the time? I mean, by the time I met you, you could take care of yourself, but before that...?"

Tammy looked surprised for a moment, then gave me a gentle, empathetic smile. "It's tough, isn't it? We all want to be independent; even as a kid, when it was 'normal' to depend on the grown-ups, I still wanted to catch up to my brothers, still felt that urge to do it myself when adults helped me with stuff. And being an adult makes it that much harder, since you're 'supposed' to be taking care of yourself, as far as society's concerned."

Tell me about it, I thought, but I was a bit surprised at the audible air-quotes around "supposed" there. "You don't see it that way, then?" I asked. I wasn't thrilled about it either, but what did being an "adult" mean, if not that...? If you couldn't look after yourself, if you continually had to be bailed out by others, if you were just some dropout...

Tammy shook her head. "See, that's the thing. It's a good ideal, but how many people really don't depend on anyone else for anything? Pretty much nobody, not in modern civilization. Everybody needs somebody's help - and if some of us need help with things that most people don't, so what? It doesn't make us worth less than anyone else."

"You...you really think so...?"

She chuckled dryly. "I'm not saying I didn't struggle with those feelings for a while. I mean, I wasn't even strong enough to lift myself into my chair until months into therapy; I couldn't even go to the bathroom without assistance. Even for kid-me, that was mortifying; it felt like I had to go back to being a baby all over again. About the only difference was I could still feed and bathe myself, if someone was there to bring me food and get me into the tub."

She shrugged. "And sure, bit by bit I got better at taking care of myself, got more independent, but y'know what? Even that came with the help of a whole bunch of folks - my family, my therapists, the Rotary guys, all kinds of people I maybe didn't even know. Strangers holding doors for me, picking up things I dropped, et cetera et cetera et cetera."

"And that's just life!" she continued, gesticulating with surprising intensity. Her pectoral fins tracked the motion of her hands; was she doing that consciously...? "Dad can fix a tractor, but he has to call my uncle if the computer goes haywire. Mom's a freakin' doctor, and she has to refer people out to specialists all the time. Everyone needs other people; there's nothing shameful about that."

She gave me a wry smile and shifted closer to me, putting an arm around my shoulder and pulling me into a half-hug. I hesitated for a moment before relenting and sinking into it, resting my head on her shoulder. "Besides," she said, "it's not like you don't have anything to contribute to the people around you. We all do what we can, and other people do what they can for us, that's all."

I sighed, feeling my key turn, the energy she'd just given me gradually depleting... "I guess that's the idea, isn't it...?" But for those of us who didn't even know why we were here, let alone what we were supposed to make of ourselves...

Tammy gave me a Look. "Oh, c'mon, you. D'you think I was BS-ing when I said you were a big help? Even before all this, you were ready to help out any time we needed. You have a hell of a lot more to offer than just a GPA, so quit acting like you're some useless waste of space because you need to be wound up now. Even if you didn't, nobody needs an excuse just to live." She sighed. "This is a guy thing, isn't it...?"

Was it...? I hadn't thought about it that way before; I wasn't consciously trying to preserve all the machismo I never had anyway, which would've been beyond pointless when I was a freaking wind-up doll in the shape of a petite young woman, but on a less overtly cartoonish level...I was a man, wasn't I? Men were supposed to be strong, competent, self-reliant; supposed to be, if not bold and take-charge, at least self-assured and independent...

"Supposed" - but that was never me to begin with. Aimless, uncertain, weak-willed, always looking to others for direction I couldn't find myself...did that make me less of a man? If so, did it make me more of a woman...? No, that couldn't be right; women-as-naturally-feckless-ninnies was the kind of rancid '50s bullshit that poor Charlie had had to contend with. Both of my roommates showed more confidence and self-determination than I ever had, and they were unquestionably women. Was it all just a false dichotomy, then?

But if my major malfunction wasn't due to a deficiency of masculinity, then...why was I a "girl?" Was there a reason? A point? Had I somehow brought this upon myself? Then why had I become what I'd never felt a desire to be? Had I put myself on trial, and rendered this the judgement? That might explain being a machine, but why a girl? Was there no reason at all, just the capriciousness of an uncaring universe? Or were the Strong Principle folks right, and some force out there just wanted this to happen to me? What did any of them - my subconscious, or God, or the "dice," or society for that matter - even want out of me...!?

There was a muted, hollow thump as Tammy slapped the side of my leg with her caudal fin. "You're doing it again, Stu. C'mon, breakfast's on; you can brood over coffee." She scooched over towards the dresser. "'Sides, y'know what - as embarrassed as I was? When I finally learned to stop thinking of myself as a burden...I don't think I ever realized how loved I really was, until then."

"Because that's what it means, when people help you," she said, rummaging through the drawers for a change of underwear and a casual tee. "Sure, some of 'em are doing it out of obligation, but that still means they recognize that the rest of the world agrees you're important enough to warrant it. And the people close to you, when you watch them go out of their way for you, day after day, year after year?"

"You come to realize," she said, with a warm smile, "that it's a way of expressing their love for you. A million little things you'd never even think about if you could still do them yourself; but people are there to do them for you, to remind you that you matter. So if you ever feel it getting to you - remember that, okay...?"

I got up and went to get dressed, turning that over in my mind - was she right? Was it okay if you couldn't pull your own weight the way everyone else did? Could the kindness of others really make up for being unable to care for yourself? - but my things were still upstairs. Well, screw it; I picked up the clothes they'd dressed me in, unfolded them, and put them back on. I couldn't do the wrap skirt as neatly as Rhoda had, but it'd do for now, and I could change back into my own clothes later...

Then I had to turn away as Tammy changed, as unconcerned as she'd been last night. This was new, wasn't it? I hadn't really noticed back at the dorm, being in the other half of the suite, but she'd been self-conscious around me at the pool that one time; was she just adapting to merfolk norms now, or did even she not see me as a guy anymore...?

She vaulted into her chair and wheeled into the hall while I stood there pondering; I followed in a daze. I paused at the door, feeling a strange sort of disconnect, but it passed after a moment, and I went to the kitchen, shaking my head. Breakfast was ready, and so was the coffee; caffeine had no more effect on me than alcohol, but the warm, toasty fragrance was pleasing nonetheless. Between simple pleasures and good company, I pretty much forgot about my brooding until later.

In fact, the whole weekend passed like that: flashes of confused introspection broken up by a familial warmth that was strangely addictive. I'd worried about feeling like a stranger, and there were still moments where I felt awkward about it, and about the ruse that was "Susan," but it was impossible to stay uncomfortable for long when everybody was so welcoming and supportive. There was more music, more conversation, more costume nonsense, games, stories, and so on; by the end of it, I was actually sorry to leave.

But leave we must, and it was while Rhoda drove us back to the college that I really started thinking it over again. Was Tammy right? I was so used to worrying about other people's expectations, about being a disappointment to the people who'd invested in me; but the way I was now, I'd never be able to fend for myself. Was it really okay if I was a burden to other people, even if I might have other things to offer in exchange? Did she mean it when she said that you didn't even owe that much to society? And what was the purpose in becoming what I now was...?