The Problem With Pink Hair and Cat Ears

The room was still dark when Elayna woke up.

For about one second she didn't know where she was.

Then she did, and she tried to sit up, and her body said no. She tried again. Her body said absolutely not. She tried a third time with more conviction and her body, apparently recognizing that she was going to insistently keep doing this, gave in with the reluctant cooperation of something that had lost the argument but wanted it duly noted that it had ultimately disagreed.

Across the room Kiri was already awake and dressed — sitting on the edge of her bed and slowly swinging her legs over the edge in a manner that suggested she’d been awake for a while and was waiting for everyone else but didn't feel the need to say anything, her white fox tail curled neatly beside her, slowly drifting over the bed. Evelyn was pulling her hair back with a brush with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done it at least at least ten thousand times, already dressed in her combat-training uniform. Zyvara was lacing her boots with an expression of intense, focused displeasure that suggested she had some strong opinions about first light as a concept.

"Morning," Elayna said, or tried to. It came out slightly compressed.

"Hm, morning" Kiri said, with the small forward tilt.

"It's too early," Zyvara said, without looking up.

"It's first light," Elayna yawned deeply. "That's when we were told—"

"I know when it is," Zyvara said, voice rough. "I said it was too early."

Evelyn looked at Zyvara and then Elayna with the expression of someone who had decided to find all of this charming.

Elayna rubbed her eyes slowly, thoroughly, knuckling the sleep from them with unhurried dedication.

She blinked.

Her eyes opened to approximately a third of the way and stayed there — heavy-lidded, soft, the unfocused quality of someone whose gaze was looking at things but not registering them. She stared at nothing specific with those half-open golden eyes, expression completely blank, sitting upright in the way of something that had achieved vertical only through considerable effort and wasn't sure what to do with the achievement yet.

Her nightshirt — oversized, was falling past her thighs, the sleeves ending somewhere past her hands and had twisted itself during the night into something that wasn’t quite sitting on straight, one shoulder slipping. Her hair was doing several things simultaneously, none of which had been requested by Elayna. Going left on one side, slightly upward on the other, and hair strands doing something at the back of her head that defied reality. A single strand had crossed her face entirely and rested across her nose settling with the stubbornness of something that had been there for hours and intended to stay.

Evelyn looked at her from across the room with those calm blue eyes.

Saints she’s adorable, she thought. She looks like a doll that's been left on the floor.

Right, Elayna thought, with the slowly coming clarity of someone whose brain had just located one single item on its agenda. The pants.

She found the leather pants at the end of her bed where she'd left them, picked them up, and stepped into them with the automatic efficiency of someone still running entirely on muscle memory, the conscious part of her mind yet to fully report for duty.

They got to her thighs.

She pulled. They didn't move.

She pulled harder. They moved just slightly.

She bounced. A small and practical hop, her feet leaving the ground an inch or two.

The leather got to her thighs and stopped, where they always did, as if registering what was ahead and taking a moment to prepare itself for what was coming. She hauled the waistband up and bounced again — and again, working the leather upward inch by inch over the full and ridiculously generous curve of her hips and rear, the fabric pulling skin-tight as it went, it stretched to an almost unreasonable degree across everything it had to account for before finally, very reluctantly, snapping loudly into place.

She smoothed and fixed the waistband with great dignity.

Kiri, from across the room, was looking at something.

Not the ceiling. Not her desk. Not the ‘nothing in particular’ she usually addressed her observations to.

Something specific this time.

Her pale half-lidded eyes were resting on Elayna's lower half with the flat and relaxed attention of someone who had found an object of study and was in no hurry to look away.

"Indecent," she said.

"Elayna," Evelyn said, in the tone of someone trying to make a very important point, "this is exactly what we mean when we say you're going to get in trouble."

"by the — SAINTS," Zyvara said, huge red eyes staring, boot lace completely forgotten in her hand. "How does that even fit."

Elayna looked up from the pants.

She looked at all three of them.

She looked back down at the pants.

"They fit fine," she said, with great dignity, and gave one hard, final decisive bounce that settled everything into its place with the conclusiveness of a matter being closed. "I always put them on like this," she defended, slightly self-consciously, warmth creeping into her face as the slow but still-waking parts of her brain started to catch up with what her body had just been doing in front of everyone.

She reached for the combat top and pulled it on — white with black accents, with the blue dragon emblem sitting exactly where it should, the uniform fit as perfectly as it was designed to. She smoothed the front. Looked down at herself.

Right, she thought. My Hair.

She reached up and found, immediately, that her hair had not resolved itself during the dressing process the way she'd vaguely hoped it might. She worked her fingers through it experimentally. Found resistance. Found what felt like a small piece of something organic and sentient at the back of her head.

"Elayna," Evelyn said, from across the room, those blue eyes already on her head with the expression of someone who had been watching this unfold and had been patient long enough. With an expression that very clearly said. Oh you sweet thing.

"I can do it myself," Elayna said.

"You have twigs in it," Evelyn said, in a very cheerful tone. "More than one."

Elayna reached up more thoroughly. There were, in fact, multiple twigs. She had no explanation for the twigs.

She sat down and let Evelyn work, which felt familiar in a way that settled warmly somewhere behind her sternum. Mira had done this every morning for as long as she could remember. This feeling of someone else's hands knowing what they were doing with your hair was something she hadn't expected to miss quite this much, or quite this quickly.

Realizing she had someone who could help with her hair again, Elayna thought, Maybe I should ask Evelyn to braid it.

"There," Evelyn said, after a while, sounding very satisfied with herself. "Much better."

The combat uniform was, she had to admit, very good.

White with black accents, well structured, fitted, closer to a formal military jacket than anything she'd worn for training before, built specifically for movement. It sat close and tight without restricting her, closed cleanly at the front, the blue dragon emblem sitting on the chest exactly where it always was. No capelet. No corset-bodice. Just clean lines and good, purposeful design, the feeling of something designed and crafted by people who understood exactly what it was going to be used for.

She looked at herself briefly in the mirror.

Right, she thought. Master sword mage. She said to herself as she felt slightly emboldened.

They walked to the training hall together, the dormitory corridor quiet and slightly cool the way it was before the day had properly started. The wooden floor warm underfoot even at first light, the corridor had the kind of quiet that had distant footsteps somewhere further in the building, and the faint smell of morning air coming through a window someone had left cracked open overnight.

After a while, Zyvara said, to the air generally:

"Elayna."

"Hm?"

"Your hips. Your thighs. Your rear." She said it the way she said most things, directly, without any ceremony, like casually stating the weather. "Your whole lower body. You need to start being aware of the effect it has on people. We don't say this as a joke. But as an actual thing you need to take seriously."

Elayna was quiet for a moment.

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry—"

"Don't apologize," Evelyn said immediately, with the hard firmness of someone who had strong feelings about this kind of thing specifically. "It's not your fault and it's not something to be sorry for." A slight pause. "But Zyvara's right. You walk around like it isn't happening and it is. Every day. Every room you walk into."

Elayna frowned slightly, those golden eyes genuinely puzzled.

"But — why is it a bad thing?" she said. "I don't really understand. It's just how I am. I-I know It's... More, than average, but why would that cause so many problems, Is my body just. Bad? I don’t understand." She added with not some mild confusion.

A short silence.

Evelyn and Zyvara looked at each other briefly with the look of two people deciding how to explain something that shouldn't need explaining but apparently did.

"It's not bad," Evelyn said carefully. "You're not bad, Elayna. There's nothing wrong with how you look." She paused, choosing her words. "But people — some people when they see something like that, something that looks the way you do below the waist, it does something to them. It makes them want certain things. And most people manage that fine. But some don't manage it at all."

"Your lower body," Zyvara said, with the flat directness of someone intending to finish the sentence properly, "is just — ridiculous. I’m sorry but I mean that literally. It is an absolutely unreasonable amount of woman in one place, and it makes that problem significantly worse in certain people. And always in the kind of people you don't want to have those sorts of problems with themselves."

"We're not trying to frighten you," Evelyn said gently. "We just — we'd rather say it to you now than have you figure it out the hard way."

"I just don't know what to do about it," Elayna said quietly. "It's not something I can change." She said as she looked at each of them with mild confusion.

"No," Zyvara said, her tone stripped of its usual blunt edge, something more direct underneath it now. "It isn't. So, you don't change it. You just stop being unaware of it." She looked at her. "There are people who will look and mean nothing by it. And there are people who will look and mean something by it that you won't like. You need to be able to tell the difference before something happens, not after it’s already happened."

Kiri walked in silence for a moment.

"You are not the problem," she said, without looking at anyone. "But your body will attract problems. Know which ones to walk away from before those problems become yours."

Elayna looked at her.

Kiri, who measured her words like they cost something. Kiri, who had said more just now than she'd said in any single moment since they'd met.

She looked at Evelyn, whose blue eyes were still on her with that quiet steady warmth. At Zyvara, who had set aside her usual crude bluntness to say something real and genuine.

They all seemed to really have meant it. Every word. And not as a lecture, not as a warning delivered out of obligation, but because they genuinely, actually cared for what happened to her. Three people she had known for less than a week.

Something settled in her chest that was warm and slightly overwhelming and something she didn't have a name for yet. Elayna was very happy to call these people her friends. She should probably tell them that sometime, that seemed important as well.

Evelyn added with a tender smile, "We'll talk about this more some other time Elayna, you don't have to worry too much right now."

"...Okay," she said quietly. Not dismissing it. But actually hearing it all this time, all the way through.

Nobody said anything further.

They walked the rest of the way in a silence that felt less like awkwardness and more like something that had now been said and received and was now settling properly.

Then, because she was Elayna and the training hall was getting closer with every step, her thoughts drifted, almost against her will, to what was waiting inside it. Her classmates with their weapons in their hands. All kinds of unique magic attacks and defenses she hadn't seen yet. Fights between her classmates. Excitement of seeing what people were actually truly made of when it counted, which was something she had been looking forward to since before she'd even arrived at the academy.

I'll think about the rest later, she decided, which was probably the most honest thing she'd thought all morning.

For now, the training halls.

First light was fully up by the time the training hall came into view.