Chapter 1: A Conventional Wish

Twelve hours into a sixteen-hour shift, my feet had stopped sending pain signals to my brain.

The convention center was a zoo of bright wigs and foam swords. Kids, (they were all kids to me) paraded past in costumes that must have taken months to build.

A girl in full plate armor laughed so hard she nearly toppled into a booth selling body pillows. I searched my mind for who she was depicting: Rellana from Elden Ring? First time seeing that. The next moment, a group of cosplayers swept past me, trailing glitter. One of them, a skinny kid dressed as Rem from Re:Zero caught my eye and gave me a thumbs up. I nodded. That was the extent of my social interaction most days: crowd control and the occasional verbal warning about blocking fire exits.

It was fine. I was fine.

I made my circuit past the vendor hall and down toward the quieter corridors near the loading docks. This was where the amateurs snuck off to take photos against the plain walls and where couples found dark corners.

I heard it before I saw it, a girl's voice pleading: "Please just go. Please."

Round the corner, a young woman was backed against the wall in what had probably been a spectacular costume. Her eyeliner was running and her foundation a smudgy disaster. Standing over her was a guy about her age. His hand was on the wall beside her head, something he learned from some K-Drama perhaps. Three other people hovered at the far end of the hallway. One had his phone out. None of them moved.

I didn't announce myself. I just walked up, hooked my hand around the guy's upper arm, and pulled him back two steps. "Sir. Step away."

He turned his face towards me, and I watched as he scanned my security badge and the expression on my face which I have been told, on more than one occasion, could curdle milk.

"This is between me and my girlfriend," he said.

"Ex," the girl said. "Ex-girlfriend."

"Your ex-girlfriend doesn't seem to want you around," I said. "It's over. Walk away."

He puffed up, and I tightened my grip just enough to give him a clear preview of how the next thirty seconds could go. I was tired, my back hurt, and I was in no mood for a wrestling match with a twenty-year-old.

He deflated once he felt the tension in his joint.

"Whatever, man." He yanked his arm free and shot the girl a look. "We're not done talking."

"Yeah," I said. "You are."

He left, and the gawkers at the end of the hall melted away too, their entertainment concluded. I waited until his footsteps faded before I turned around.

The girl was ugly crying: her eyes swollen and red, her breath hitching as she seemed to fight for breath. She slid down the wall to a crouch, wings crumpled behind her like a broken bird. The costume was beautiful even ruined, the kind of detailed handiwork that spoke of real skill. Whoever she was, she had poured herself into this.

"Hey," I said.

She looked up at me with mascara-streaked eyes and tried to talk, but only managed a wet gulp.

"You're getting your wings messed up," I continued.

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a packet of tissues. Then, after a moment's thought, the granola bar from my breast pocket that was supposed to be dinner. I set them on the floor beside her like offerings at a shrine.

"Take your time," I said.

She pulled out a tissue and pressed it against her face. The granola bar she clutched like a lifeline, though she didn't open it. Her sobs came in waves while I stood there with my hands in my pockets and tried to look dispassionate yet concerned.

"I'm sorry," she said finally. "God, I'm such a mess."

"You're fine. The costume is amazing. Are you Albedo from Overlord?"

That earned a shaky laugh. "I'm Emma. Sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you my name."

"Stan." I paused. "You got someone to call? A ride?"

She nodded and pulled her phone out. I watched her fumble with the screen for a moment before she managed to open the rideshare app. While she waited for the car, she told me, in fits and starts, that she had come alone. That she lived alone; that the ex had shown up uninvited.

I filed all of this away without comment.

"Four minutes," she said, checking her phone.

"I'll wait."

We waited. She blew her nose again with a honk. I tried to tease out some of the bent feathers of her "angel" wings, now folded neatly behind her.

The car pulled up to the loading dock entrance. Emma stood, slipped off her broken wings and turned to me.

"Thank you," she said. "Really. Most people just walked past."

I shrugged. Nodded.

She smiled and disappeared into the car.

I stood there for another half minute, listening to the fluorescent light buzz above me, then I straightened my uniform and went back to my patrol.

Round the corner, I nearly walked into a shopping trolley.

"Jesus!" I stepped back. The trolley was packed with plastic bags and an umbrella. Attached to it was a small woman in a beige cardigan buttoned to the throat, her white hair pulled into a bun. She could have been seventy. She could have been a hundred.

"It was a good thing you did," she said.

I looked past her down the hallway. Empty. No badge, no wristband, no convention pass. She had no business being back here, but I was too tired to muster the energy for a confrontation with someone's grandmother.

"Ma'am, this area is restricted to convention attendees…"

"The girl," she continued, as though I hadn't spoken. "The one with the broken wings. You helped her."

"That's the job."

"Is it? Is that all it was?"

I didn't answer.

She reached into the depths of her shopping trolley and rummaged around until she produced a sliver of something that looked like parchment: old, yellowed, covered in writing I couldn't read.

"What if I told you," she said, holding it up between two fingers like a fortune cookie slip, "that you could help her and yourself? A year or so of your most cherished desire. All you have to do is say yes."

I stared at the parchment. Then at her. Then at the shopping trolley full of plastic bags.

"Are you Emma's fairy godmother?"

"I'm your fairy godmother."

It was midnight at an anime convention. I had been on my feet for thirteen hours now. A strange old woman with a magical parchment was, honestly, not even the weirdest thing I had seen today. A man in a full latex horse costume had tried to use the women's restroom at noon. That was more weird.

"Sure," I said. "Why not. Make it so."

What did I wish for?

Ordinarily, I would have considered a do-over as a girl when I died and was reincarnated, if that was a thing. But I was at an anime and game convention. I smirked and pictured myself as a female cosplayer; and in the privacy of my own skull, where no one could hear, I added: Better make sure I look pretty while you're at it.

The parchment seemed to glow for a few moments and the writing on it vanished. It was a neat trick; maybe she was a convention attendee after all.

"Well," she said, her tone shifting from mystical to thoroughly annoyed. "That was profoundly reckless."

"Excuse me?"

"You were supposed to think it over, you big galoot." She stuffed the blank parchment back into her trolley with the air of someone filing a disappointing tax return. "Deliberate. Contemplate. Wrestle with the moral implications. Haven't you read Goethe before?"

"What? Faust?"

She paused. Looked at me with a sideways glance. "Well, well. Points for literacy."

I crossed my arms. "You're telling me that was, what, a deal with the devil? You don't look much like Mephistopheles."

"And you don't look much like a doctor of philosophy, but here we are, both full of surprises." She adjusted her cardigan with prim efficiency. "The bargain is sealed. Including, I should mention, the 'pretty' part."

"What?"

"The thing you said. About being pretty. It's included."

I hadn't said that out loud. I was certain, absolutely completely certain, I had not said that out loud.

"Most men your age ask for money, or sex, or power," she said, almost conversationally. "Or to be twenty again. You, apparently, want to be decorative."

"What are you talking about? I didn't say anything about…"

But inside, underneath the denial, the need reasserted itself: Was there really anything wrong with wanting to be a pretty girl? It's just a fantasy. Everyone has fantasies.

The old woman had been turning away, one hand on her trolley, but she paused and spoke over her shoulder: "Nothing wrong with wanting to be a girl. It's the pretty part I'm talking about."

I thought to myself: "You want me to wish to be plain and ugly? I mean, even regular women dream of being pretty once in a while."

She didn't respond apart from an audible harrumph. She was already shuffling down the hallway, trolley wheels squeaking against the concrete floor, plastic bags rustling. At the far end, she turned a corner and was gone.

I stood there.

None of that had happened. Obviously. I was exhausted, hypoglycaemic, and I had spent the last twelve hours marinating in a building full of people who believed in magic and dragons and the power of friendship. Some of it had clearly seeped in through my pores.

The parchment hadn't really glowed. Old women with shopping trolleys didn't read minds. There was no bargain, no deal, no Faustian anything.

I uncrossed my arms, went back to my post and finished my shift; and if my hands shook slightly when I clocked out at two a.m., that was just the low blood sugar.

Nothing more.

Chapter 2: Josephine

The first thing I noticed was that the sheets smelled like lavender.

When I opened my eyes, I was met with a technicolor wonderland of color and fabric: bolts of material in electric blue and crimson spilled off a desk cluttered with scissors and thread spools; pieces of armor were piled up in a corner of the sitting room visible through the bedroom door; anime and game posters covered every available wall surface; a sewing mannequin stood in the corner wearing what appeared to be an unfinished Japanese school uniform; and wigs on styrofoam heads lined a shelf like a row of trophies.

Obviously, it was a hallucination.

I closed my eyes and stretched under the sheets and felt my legs rub against each; soft and strangely limber. I sat up, and my hair fell across my face. The hand I brought up to brush it aside was also wrong. Smaller, slender, the nails longer than I had ever kept them.

I looked down. My sleep shirt was oversized, black, and printed with a faded image of Totoro.

A mirror was propped against the wall beside the closet, half-obscured by a hanging garment bag and what looked like a damaged pair of angel wings. I shoved them aside and stood in front of it.

A young woman stared back at me.

She was in her early twenties. Blonde hair, mussed from sleep, falling in waves that couldn't decide if they wanted to be straight or curly. There were a few visible freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, and her eyes were a striking light blue. It was the kind of face you would notice across a coffee shop and think about later.

I was pretty. Or at least I thought I was.

I touched my cheek with trembling fingers. The skin was warm and impossibly smooth under my fingertips. I ran my hand along my jaw, down my neck, and across my collarbone. I could feel the tears forming before I felt them.

I bit down on my lip to stifle the emotions that were surging through me.

It was joy. Pure, stupid, annihilating joy that climbed up my throat and turned into a sound I had never made before: a high pitched squeal. I clapped my hand over my mouth. The woman in the mirror clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were bright and wet.

"Oh my God," I whispered through my fingers. "Oh my God."

I turned sideways, studied the silhouette, turned back. I pulled the hair over one shoulder. I gathered it up and held it on top of my head. I let it drop.

Every configuration was a gift I wanted to unwrap twice. And underneath the giddiness, in a part of my soul that I had kept locked in a basement, I finally allowed myself to admit: I had wanted this.

I had wanted this. Since I was, what, eight? Fourteen? That afternoon in the clearance aisle at Target, when I had picked up a pair of women's underwear, plain black cotton with a thin lace trim, and bought them with a pack of gum and a bottle of water so the cashier wouldn't notice. I had worn them once, alone in my bedroom, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with the door locked. I threw them in the dumpster behind the apartment building the next morning, wrapped in a paper bag.

But the wanting hadn't gone in the dumpster. It had gone into the basement with everything else: the fantasies about being a woman in a beautiful dress; about being held by someone whose hands were bigger than mine; about being with men as a woman, about being touched the way women in movies got touched. All of it shameful, all of it shoved so far down that by the time I was twenty-five I had almost convinced myself it was just a quirk, a glitch in an otherwise functional operating system.

Somewhere in the apartment, a cabinet door banged shut, and I heard the gurgle of a coffee maker.

Someone was here. A friend? A boyfriend?

Barely five seconds later, the door banged open like it had been personally offended by the wall.

"Okay, so I just saw that Daniela posted her Frieren and it's literally the same reference sheet I've been using for three months, which means either she hacked my Pinterest or the universe is personally out to get me, and honestly at this point I'm not ruling anything out… Joey, why are you standing in front of the mirror crying?"

Emma stood in the doorway with a mug of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, her dark hair twisted into a bun. She was wearing an oversized shirt which looked suspiciously similar to mine, a Kiki shirt as faded as my Totoro. The dark circles under her eyes were visible from six feet away, and she looked like she had been awake since well before the coffee maker.

She was the girl from the convention hallway. Same face, minus the mascara tracks and with about eight hours of sleep.

"I'm not crying," I said. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

"You're literally crying." Emma deposited her coffee on the desk, and sat on the edge of the bed with one knee drawn up. "Was it that TikTok? I told you not to watch the one with the dog."

"I didn't watch…"

"The dog gets adopted at the end, it's fine, it's a happy ending." She reached over and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. Her fingers brushed my cheek, and my entire nervous system lit up like a switchboard. I must have flinched, because she pulled back half an inch. "You okay? You're being weird."

"I'm fine. Just a… weird dream."

"Ugh, same. I dreamed I showed up to the con in full costume and forgot pants. Like, full Black Widow top half, bare ass bottom half." She took a sip of her coffee and spoke into the mug. "Which, honestly, would probably get more engagement than anything I've posted this month."

I stood there, feet on cold floor, and tried to assemble the pieces. Emma. Convention. The guy I had pulled off her. The loading dock, the broken wings, the rideshare.

I lived alone, she had said. I came alone.

But she didn't live alone. I was standing in her apartment, our apartment, surrounded by evidence of a shared life. Two mugs on the desk, one with a chipped handle. Two toothbrushes visible through the open bathroom door. A photo on the wall by the window: Emma and me grinning in half-finished costumes, cheeks pressed together.

The fairy godmother hadn't just changed my body. She had changed the world around it and slotted me into it like a missing puzzle piece.

"Joey." Emma was looking at me. "Are you sure you're okay?"

Joey. She said it before. My name was Joey.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm good. Just, um. Groggy."

"Well, wake up, because the con is tomorrow and I still need to fix the belt buckle on my Widow suit and you said you would help with my eye makeup." She was already moving, tightening and smoothing the bedsheets, and pulling the covers back over the bed.

She put her hand on my shoulder as she passed me and squeezed. "Also I ate the last of the cereal, so you'll have to starve today."

I must have had a frown on my face.

"Joking. We can get bagels later."

She said all of this in roughly five seconds and was halfway out the door before I managed: "Sounds good."

Emma disappeared, leaving behind the coffee mug and a faint trace of something floral; shampoo, maybe, or whatever product she had put in her hair.

I sat on the edge of the bed. My bed. Our bed? In my room. In the apartment I shared with the girl whose ex-boyfriend I had confronted a lifetime ago.

My phone was on the nightstand. The date was three weeks from the day I had "saved" Emma at the cosplay "summit."

I picked it up and the screen responded to my face unlocking with a soft click. The wallpaper was a photo of a sunset over a convention center parking lot. My name stared back at me from the lock screen notifications.

Josephine Evans.

My finger went to Instagram, as if this was the first thing I usually did every morning. The handle was @joeyevans_cos and the follower count was around six thousand. Six thousand people following an account that belonged to a person who hadn't existed before this morning. Except she had existed, there were photos going back at least one year: me as Mikasa Ackerman with crazy accurate ODM gear; a Makima from Chainsaw Man; Emma and I in matching Spy x Family costumes; I was Loid, she was Yor, both of us laughing.

The comments were a stream of hearts and exclamation points: Your 2B is going to break the internet. Tutorial for the Makima please?? You and Emma are literally the cutest.

I scrolled through photos of a life I had never lived, costumes I had never built, conventions I had never attended. The tiny, rational part of my brain said: You don't know how to do any of this. You can't sew. You can't do make-up. You don't know anything about creating costumes.

"Joey! Bagel order. Now. I'm fucking starving." It was Emma again.

I set the phone down. "Everything," I called back. "Everything on it."

I looked around the room, at the fabrics, the posters, the half-built armor, the sewing mannequin wearing someone else's dreams, and thought: I can do this, I want to do this.

I didn't know how to cosplay. I didn't know how to be a roommate, or an Instagram personality with six thousand followers and a convention in two days.

But I had wanted this all my life. I would learn how to be a girl.

I would learn how to be Joey Evans.

***

After bagels, we settled in the living room, which was less a living room and more a cosplay workshop that happened to contain a couch.

The dining table had been colonized long ago. Reference photos were taped to the wall above it in neat rows: Black Widow stills from three different MCU movies, each one annotated with sticky notes in Emma's cramped handwriting. Seam placement wrong in AoU-check Winter Soldier version. A hot glue gun sat in its cradle, wisps of dried glue trailing from its tip. Scraps of Worbla and EVA foam littered the floor like industrial confetti.

Emma's Black Widow suit was draped across the table, and she attacked it with the intensity of a surgeon. Gone was the chatty girl from the bedroom doorway. She ran her fingers along the inside seams of the catsuit, found the weak points, and reinforced them with quick, invisible stitches that held the stretch fabric firm without restricting movement.

"The leather's peeling here," she muttered, more to herself than to me. She dabbed acrylic paint onto a sea sponge and began weathering the panels along the forearms, stippling layers of grime and shadow onto the surface until it looked like it had survived an actual firefight.

I sat on the couch and watched her work. She epoxied the snapped belt buckle back together, held it firm for ninety, then checked the holster fit by strapping the whole belt around her hips over her leggings. Then she pulled the red wig from its head and began trimming with a pair of curved scissors, cutting in tiny, careful strokes along the hairline.

"Can you do my eyes?" she said without looking up from the wig. "I want to test the look before Saturday so I'm not scrambling. You're so good at it."

My stomach clenched. I opened my mouth to say something to deflect but Emma had already set the wig down and turned to face me, expectantly.

"Yeah," I said. "Sure."

She waved me towards the vanity in her bedroom where the makeup was organized in clear acrylic drawers. I pulled the drawers open and found palettes, brushes of every conceivable shape, pots of setting powder, tubes of liquid liner, false lashes still in their cases, tiny bottles of lash glue. Below the mirror, a thick binder lay open to a page of printed reference images: Black Widow's smoky eye from The Winter Soldier, broken down into steps by some beauty blogger with annotations added in someone's girlish handwriting.

I reached out nervously… and something happened when I picked up the first brush. It was like my body remembered a language my brain had never learned.

My fingers selected a flat shader brush, dipped it into a warm brown base shade, and began to lay color across Emma's lid with short, controlled strokes. Emma had settled into the chair, chin tilted up, eyes closed, feet tapping on the floor impatiently.

"Hold still, idiot," I said softly.

"Hmm… okay." She didn't even open her eyes.

I worked in silence, my left hand bracing gently against her temple while my right hand moved with a precision that startled me.

I consulted the look book for the wing. The reference showed a smoky effect extending from the outer corner. I smudged the dark shadow outward from the corner of her eye, pulling it into a smoky wing that lifted toward the tail of her brow. Then I added black liner along the lash line and a haze of charcoal beneath the eye.

The line came out clean. Almost perfect; there was a slight wobble as I drew and Emma saw me grimace angrily at myself.

"Gorgeous. Do the other side." The next time it came out clean.

I shaped her brows with a pencil and spoolie, feathering tiny hair-like strokes into the sparse spots. I trimmed a pair of false lashes to fit her eye shape, applied a thin line of adhesive, waited thirty seconds for it to get tacky, then pressed them into place along her lash line with the back of a clean brush.

When I was done, Emma studied herself in the mirror. "Deadly," she said, satisfied. She looked like Scarlett Johansson's slightly sleep-deprived younger sister.

"I can get rid of the bags if you give me some time with the foundation," I blurted out, drawing on some unknown female reservoir of knowledge.

She squeezed my knee as she stood. "Okay. Let's check your costume."

She pulled open the wardrobe, extracted a garment bag, and unzipped it; a 2B costume from NieR: Automata: the black gothic dress with its high collar and fitted bodice, the black blindfold and white-silver wig on a clip, and a pair of thigh-high boots that looked too sexy for words.

"What the fuck," I breathed. "I'm going as 2B?"

Emma gave me a look that could have curdled the cream cheese from breakfast. "Stop with the drama already. Are you twelve? You fucking chose it two months ago."

"Should I try it on?"

"You literally just tried it on last night. It's perfect. Unless you've gained ten pounds since eleven p.m., which, given how you demolished that bagel… " She left the sentence dangling and performatively squeezed my hips.

"Actually. Let's post a teaser. People have been asking."

She sat me down, did my makeup in half the time it had taken me to do hers; quick, efficient strokes that turned my complexion porcelain and unreal. She positioned me by the window where the light fell in clean lines.

"Hold the blindfold up. Chin down a little. Eyes on me. No, softer."

The shutter clicked. Emma showed me the photo and I barely recognized myself: a young woman with knowing eyes and a half-smile, the 2B blindfold dangling from elegant fingers.

We composed the caption together. Emma typed while I watched: Saturday's going to hit different. Who else is counting down?

She tagged me, added hashtags, and posted. Within minutes, hearts began popping up like little red flowers.

"Okay," Emma said, setting her phone face-down. "Now the real work."

Chapter 3: Dress-Up

The alarm went off at six and Emma was already half dressed.

She was in the Black Widow base layers, a skin-tight black undersuit that made her look like Irma Vep. She shoved a mug of coffee into my hands before I had gotten both feet on the floor.

"We're behind," she said. "Are you sick or something? You're usually awake half an hour before me on game day."

"It's six in the morning."

"We're behind. Drink."

The coffee was too hot and too strong but I drank it anyway. The apartment looked like a fabric store had detonated overnight. The sewing machine on the dining table was still threaded from last night's emergency hem repair.

"Shower," Emma said, pointing at me with her phone. "Fifteen minutes. Not a second more. I need the bathroom by six-twenty."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't 'ma'am' me. Move."

I moved, showered, toweled dry, and worked through the skincare routine that my hands seemed to know by heart: cleanser, toner, moisturizer with SPF, a light primer that would give the foundation something to grip.

Back in the bedroom, Emma intercepted me with a comb.

"Sit," she said, pushing me onto the bed. She stood behind me and began working through my wet hair with quick, efficient strokes, her fingers separating the tangles with a practiced ease that suggested she had done this a hundred times. Her knuckles grazed the back of my neck and I shivered.

"Cold?"

"Little bit."

She gathered my hair and twisted it up, pinning it loosely out of the way. Her hand rested on my shoulder for a moment while she leaned around to check the front.

"Okay. You'll cap this later. Don't touch it."

Emma squeezed my shoulder and moved on, already talking about adhesive options for her widow bites, and I sat there with the sensation of her fingers on my skin.

"Base layers," Emma called from across the room, tossing items onto the bed one at a time.

The unglamorous foundation of a cosplay nobody ever sees, skin-toned seamless underwear: a strapless bra that I adjusted, checking the cups and band to make sure nothing would migrate during eight hours of walking and posing; and compression shorts.

I pulled them on and checked the mirror. From the neck down, I looked like a flesh-colored mummy.

"Gorgeous," I muttered sarcastically, but I was only half joking. The whole effect wasn't exactly Insta ready but even the sight of myself this way made me feel like preening.

"Nobody's looking at your compression shorts, babe." Emma appeared beside me and handed me a pair of cheap black thigh-highs, still in their packaging. "These first, then the sheers over top."

I sat on a chair and began working the first thigh-high up my leg, gathering the fabric in my fingers the way you're supposed to, rolling it over my toes and up my calf. The material was cool and impossibly thin. The whole idea of being able to wear these and not look ridiculous made me do somersaults internally.

Black Widow crouched at my feet, and checked the back seam.

"Rotate it. Little more. There." Her fingers pressed against the back of my knee, straightening the line. "Other one."

I did the other one. Emma ran her finger along the seam behind my left knee and thigh, checking for bunching. Her face was six inches from my thigh and she was squinting at a stocking seam with the intensity of a jeweler examining a diamond.

"Sheers," she said, handing them up without looking.

The sheer tights went over everything, a final smoothing layer that added an extra barrier against runs. I stood and Emma circled me once, tugging here, smoothing there, her hands quick and impersonal and everywhere.

"Good. Don't sit down yet."

I stood in the middle of the room in my stockinged feet and compression shorts and strapless bra, layered like some kind of lingerie lasagna, and watched Emma pull my 2B dress from its garment.

I reached for the sleeve pieces hanging beside it, and my thumb caught on a loose thread. Instinctively, I looked around for scissors.

"No," Emma said, without turning around. "Don't cut that. Joey, I swear to God, if you ruin the sleeve I'll kill you and there won't be anyone left to clean up the mess."

"I wasn't going to…"

"You were reaching for the scissors. Tuck the thread and leave it."

I tucked the thread and left it. This Emma didn't seem anything like the girl I found crying in the loading bay just a few days ago.

The dress was black, fitted, and with a high collar. The bodice looked simple from the front but concealed hidden boning and seams. I stepped into it carefully, pulling the fabric up over my hips, guiding my arms through. The side zipper was hidden in the seam, and Emma zipped it for me while I held my breath.

Emma stepped back and looked at me. Tilted her head. Nodded once.

"All that dieting has worked wonders."

"I didn't diet."

"The bagel budget say otherwise." She smiled. "You look incredible. Check the back."

I turned in the mirror. The dress had transformed me. Suddenly I had a silhouette, a shape. The bust needed a small adjustment, so I repositioned the hidden support panel, shifting it a quarter inch to the left until it sat flush. The chest cutout showed exactly enough skin to be interesting without being precarious. I pressed my hand flat against it and breathed in, breathed out. Nothing shifted. I raised my arms above my head. The dress held. I pulled my shoulders back, checked the collar wasn't riding up. Leaned forward at the waist, watching the neckline in the mirror.

"The collar's not choking you?"

"It's fine."

"Check it again in an hour when your neck swells from the wig cap."

I made a mental note. These were the things nobody told you about cosplay: it wasn't about looking good in one perfect photograph. It was about looking good after four hours of walking, sitting on concrete, climbing stairs, bending to pick up a dropped prop, hugging strangers who asked for photos. The dress needed to survive a marathon, not a moment.

Emma was already handing me the petticoat.

It was a short, stiff underskirt that gave the dress its distinctive A-line flare without adding bulk. I stepped into it, pulled it up under the dress, and felt the skirt lift and settle into its proper shape. I checked where the shortest points of the skirt hit my thighs. High. Higher than I had expected, but I was thrilled to be showing some leg.

"Don't tug it down," Emma said, reading my mind. "It's supposed to sit there. You have the legs for it."

The sleeve pieces came next. They were individual garments that slid on like long, fingerless evening gloves extending from elbow to wrist. I worked the first one over my right hand, pulled it snug over my elbow and aligned the seam that ran along the outer edge.

Next, the thigh-high boot covers, structured and heavy, with interior zippers. I sat on the bed and started with the right one, guiding it over my stockinged foot, easing the zipper up with agonizing care to avoid snagging the tights underneath. Every half inch I paused, checked, continued. The left boot fought me harder. The zipper stuck at mid-calf and I had to back it down, smooth the fabric beneath, and try again.

"Slowly," Emma instructed from across the room, not looking up from her own wig adjustment. "You rush that and you'll get a run and I will not be held responsible for my actions."

The zipper cleared. I pulled both boots to their full height and adjusted the top edges, making sure they sat evenly, both the same distance from the hem of the skirt. Then I stood.

Everything changed. Almost unconsciously, I was beginning to hold myself like the 2B of the game. Emma noticed. She always noticed. "There she is," she said softly.

I walked to the door and back. Pivoted on one foot, testing my balance. Sat down on the bed, stood up again, making sure I could manage both without flashing the entire convention center. I tried a wider stance, the kind I would need for power poses in photos, one foot slightly ahead of the other.

"Stop showing off, Heel Queen," Emma said, watching me move, hands on her hips.

I sat at the vanity and Emma stood behind me, armed with bobby pins clenched between her teeth. She pulled my hair back, still damp at the roots, and began flattening it against my skull with a wig cap, tucking stray wisps, pressing everything smooth and tight. The cap was nude-colored, and when she was done, I looked temporarily bald in a way that was deeply unflattering.

"Don't look at yourself right now," Emma said, reading my expression.

She lifted the 2B wig from its head: white-silver, a bob that fell past my jawline. She positioned it carefully, settling the front edge along my hairline, adjusting at the temples, checking the ears.

"Tilt your head forward."

I tilted. She tugged the nape into place and secured it with two clips.

"Look up."

She adjusted the bangs with her fingers, sweeping them slightly to one side so that they covered my left forehead and eye area. She stepped back. Came forward again. Moved a few strands of synthetic hair to the left.

"Okay," she said. "Look."

I looked, and it was someone else in the mirror.

Not Joey, certainly not Stan. Not the freckled blonde with the sleep-mussed hair and the Totoro shirt. 2B looked back at me with my eyes, and my eyes looked back at her.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. The woman in the mirror was beautiful in a way that I had no right to be. And yet the universe had conspired and the result was this.

My eyes burned. I blinked it away before Emma could see.

"Don't you dare cry," she said. "I haven't sealed your makeup yet."

"I'm not crying."

"You're always crying. Remember: face card first, feelings later." She put her hands on my shoulders and met my eyes in the mirror. Black Widow behind 2B, both of them smiling. "You look perfect. Now do my face before we're late and I murder you"

Chapter 4: First Convention

It's sort of amazing how being a girl in costume makes you see a place in a different light.

The wall of sound and light that hit me the moment I walked through the doors of the convention center now matched my mood, and no longer seemed like an annoyance.

Someone was hawking prints at full volume from a vendor booth to our left, and a group of kids in matching anime school uniforms nearly bowled us over in a dash towards what I assumed was a panel about to start. I had seen this a hundred times before as a level-headed adult, but this time I was one of the "kids." And I felt like one.

Emma grabbed my elbow. "Blindfold. Now."

She steered me toward a relatively quiet patch of wall between a fire extinguisher and a promotional standee for some gacha game. I had been carrying the blindfold in my hand. Emma took it from me, positioned it across my eyes and the bridge of my nose, and pulled the elastic behind my head. The fabric settled against my upper cheekbones.

"How's the visibility?"

I blinked behind the blindfold. The fabric sat high enough on my nose that I could see downward, mainly the floor and my boots.

"I can see my feet," I said. "Most of the floor."

She stepped back and assessed me with a critical eye. "Okay. We're doing this."

My heeled boots clicked against the convention center floor with a sound that seemed obscenely loud. Sweat was forming under the wig cap in a thin, itchy line. The blindfold slipped a fraction of a millimeter every few steps, and I reached up to adjust it before remembering that 2B would never fidget.

Stan's brain was still running in the background doing vague threat assessments: male, mid-twenties, looking at my legs. A creep? No, just looking. I was okay with that; if I didn't want to be looked at, I would have worn a burqa. Female, maybe sixteen, dressed as Harley, staring openly at my costume. A friend? She waved at me and I kept in character, giving her a stiff bow. Two guys near the Gundam booth, one nudging the other, both looking in my direction. I felt the vanity and self-consciousness slither in. The wig was flawless. The dress fit like it had been sewn onto my body, perfectly cinched even without a corset. I was fine. But being in a convention hall with thousands of others was nothing like the private viewing party with Emma. Every moment of my forty years as a guy screamed: you don't belong here.

"Hey! Excuse me, 2B?"

A photographer materialized at my two o'clock, camera slung around his neck.

"The dress and boots are perfect," he said. "And the silhouette is insane. Can I get a quick shot?"

I froze, then Emma's hand found my arm.

"She would love that," she said, already angling me toward better light. Her hand pressed against the small of my back, adjusting my posture. "Chin down, babe. Hand on hip."

I put my hand on my hip. It felt strangely absurd that someone would want to photograph me, but the guy raised his camera and the shutter fired five times in rapid succession.

"Beautiful," he said. "Thank you. You on Instagram?"

"@joeyevans_cos," Emma said, because she had become my publicist, my manager, and my emotional support animal.

He walked away. I stood there with my hand still on my hip.

"Breathe," Emma said, checking my forehead for a fever before she scooted to one side to do a few of her own shoots.

The next one came four minutes later. A woman in civilian clothes, dragging a wheeled suitcase, who stopped dead in her tracks and said, "Oh my God, I just played NieR:A. Where did you get those boots? You look just like her." I told her I had made the covers over base platforms, and the words came out naturally, because in this reality, I actually had.

After her, a pair of teenage girls asked if they could take a selfie with me. I crouched down to their height and they flanked me, a phone held at arm's length. "Your costume construction is amazing," one of them said, examining the sleeve piece with her fingers. "Is this all hand-sewn?"

"Most of it," I said.

These people weren't humoring me. They weren't being polite. They looked at me and saw a cosplayer who had built something impressive and wore it well.

I was walking differently now and, even in interactions, my movements were precise and minimalist like the 2B from the game. I stopped gawking at every passing cosplayer or store and adopted an upright, and almost melancholic posture when browsing merchandise. As long as the blindfold was on and I was in my "android" persona, I restricted my interactions with Emma beside me: no affection, no anxiety; everything was hidden or suppressed.

A man in an elaborate Geralt of Rivia costume nodded and smiled at me and I gave him a simple, unaffected nod in response. The effect was apparently devastating, because a woman passing in the opposite direction actually said "Oh, fuck off" to her friend in a tone of pure, admiring anguish.

Emma had returned from doing a set with a bunch of "Avengers," and fell into step beside me.

"You're doing it," she said quietly.

"Hmm…?"

"That thing where you stop thinking about it and just become her."

I didn't correct her. If this was just an overly vivid dream which could end any moment, then I wasn't going to waste even a moment of the experience. My calves screamed. My wig cap itched. The blindfold had slipped again and I could feel a bead of sweat tracing a slow path down my spine.

None of it mattered. Not even a little.

***

By noon, I understood why professional cosplayers looked so tired in their behind-the-scenes content.

The convention floor had become a gauntlet. Every ten feet, someone new materialized with a phone or a camera, and I would stop, hold whatever pose felt right, wait for the thumbs up, nod, and move on. My lip gloss had dried up, the blindfold had migrated upward again, sweat had long since defeated the primer on my upper lip, and there was a persistent dampness behind my knees where the boot covers trapped heat against the stockings.

But it was my first time; and I loved all of it.

Emma, meanwhile, was in her element. Black Widow prowled the aisles with the lazy confidence of a jungle cat, stopping for photos with an ease that made me jealous. She knew exactly how to angle her chin, where to place her hand on her hip, how to shift her weight so the catsuit caught the light along the right planes. Between photos she would check her phone, fire off a story update, then fall back into character without missing a beat.

"Water," she said, pressing a bottle into my hand as we passed a hydration station. "Don't mess up your lips."

I drank through a straw, carefully.

"Excuse me, are you two together?" A woman in a Triss Merigold costume had appeared beside us, trailing two other cosplayers: a Yennefer and a Ciri who looked about nineteen. "We're doing a group shoot by the atrium. The light's gorgeous right now. Would you want to join?"

I went blank.

"We would love to," Emma said, hooking her arm through mine. "Lead the way."

"Has she been staying in character all this time?" the Yennefer whispered to Emma. Emma just shrugged and whispered something to her which made her giggle.

The atrium was flooded with natural light from a glass ceiling three stories up. The woman dressed as Triss had clearly scouted out the location. She positioned us against a backdrop of green plants and concrete pillars as the group fell into a kind of organized chaos. The Yennefer directed traffic, while the Ciri had a reflector board she unfolded and held up without being asked.

"2B, you're here. Quarter turn to your right. Yeah, perfect. Can you drop your shoulder? The other one."

I dropped my shoulder. The Yennefer studied me for a moment, then reached for my sleeve piece.

"May I?"

I nodded. She adjusted the fabric at my bicep, smoothing a wrinkle I hadn't noticed, and stepped back with a satisfied nod. "The seam work on this is gorgeous. Is it flat-felled?"

"French seam," I said, the knowledge was somehow there.

"Of course. Okay, everyone. Power poses. Hold them."

We held them. The photographer, a friend of theirs, shot from multiple angles, moving low, shooting up, circling us. I stood in 2B's signature stance, weight on one leg, chin lowered, sword planted on the ground.

These women were serious. They had spent months on their costumes, hours on their makeup, and they treated the photoshoot with the same focus Emma brought to her sewing table.

After the shoot dissolved, the Triss showed us previews on her camera's LCD. I thought I looked good: the costume's lines worked with the light and my posture was confident and detached.

"I'll tag you both," the Triss said, exchanging Instagram handles with Emma while I stood there in a daze.

***

We found a bench near the back of a vendor hall, and Emma collapsed onto it with a groan. Then she helped me take off my blindfold which seemed like her way of telling me to become Joey again.

"God. My feet are filing for divorce." She pulled out her compact and grimaced at what she saw. "Ack. My liner. I look like a raccoon. A sexy raccoon, but still."

"Come on," I said, taking off my gloves. She had been asked to congregate for another Marvel shoot in about an hour and I couldn't let it pass.

I dug through Emma's belt pouch and found the liquid liner, a Q-tip, and a pot of setting powder. Emma tilted her face up and closed her eyes; the convention adrenaline hadn't completely drained out of Emma and she was tapping her feet on the ground as I worked.

"Hold still, idiot."

I cleaned the smudging with the Q-tip, then redrew it in a single smooth motion: a flick from the outer corner, following the angle of her lower lash line. The smoky shadow was still holding. I deepened the outer crease with my pinky, blending the edge, then dusted setting powder along the lid with a tiny brush.

"Other side," I murmured, and she turned her head without opening her eyes.

The work was clean and symmetrical. "Done."

Emma opened her eyes and checked the compact. Turned her head left, right. Her eyebrows rose.

"You absolute witch." She snapped the compact shut. "Seems like you've fully recovered."

"It's a gift." I gave her head a small pat as if she was Pod 042 from the game.

"It's witchcraft."

That made me blush. "Why are you always so nice to me?"

She reached out and put my blindfold back in place and flicked the edge of my blindfold affectionately, the way you would tug a friend's ponytail.

"Don't you start blubbering on me again, Joey Evans. Face card first, feelings later."

I stood, and as I straightened, I caught myself in the glass of a vendor's display case. The silver wig framed a face I was only beginning to recognize as mine. Not a disguise; not a borrowed identity stretched over the wrong scaffolding. Just a woman having fun. Just me.

I stared until Emma's hand landed on my arm.

"Come on, gorgeous. Hall C opens in ten and I want to hit the Artist Alley before the merch sell out."

We walked. My feet throbbed with every step but it was worth it

Chapter 5: In Real Life

I hit the back door of Café Mocha at 7:05, already tying my apron with one hand and fumbling for my time card with the other. The kitchen smelled like scorched milk and cinnamon, and the espresso machine was screaming.

"Work begins at seven," my manager said without looking up from the register. She was a compact woman with the energy of someone who didn't need 5 a.m. wake-up calls.

"Won't happen again. Promise."

"Five minutes is five minutes." She glanced at me, held the look for exactly one second, then smiled. "Table six wants a cortado and a pain au chocolat. Go."

I moved through the tables with a tray balanced on my left hand, coffee cups rattling gently.

"Hey, Joey!"

A middle-aged woman who always took a vanilla latte flagged me down as I passed. She had silver-streaked hair and the kind of warm face that made you feel like you had known her for years. "My daughter showed me your convention photos. The one with the white wig? You looked incredible."

"Thank you," I said.

This kept happening: customers lingering longer, ordering second drinks, a few new faces appearing specifically because they had seen the café tagged in my Instagram stories.

Another regular, Eastern European émigré, offered me dating advice once I loaded up my Instagram on her phone. "Is that you? It's different from the Catwoman thing you did the other time," she said frowning. "Why are you hiding your beautiful figure under that shapeless thing?" Pointing at my apron and jeans. "You'll never find a husband that way."

The morning blurred. I poured, I carried, I smiled, I wiped down tables, restocked the pastry case, and made small talk with the barista.

On my break, I sat on an overturned milk crate in the back hallway and pulled out my phone.

The 2B photos had gained another thousand likes overnight. One thousand. The atrium shots from the group shoot had been reposted by the Triss cosplayer, whose account had sixty thousand followers, and her caption read: This 2B absolutely destroyed me. The seam work alone. Go follow @joeyevans_cos

I texted Emma.

Joey: 14.7k. FOURTEEN POINT SEVEN.

Her response came in four seconds.

Emma: EXCUSE ME??

Emma: hold on let me check…

Emma: YOU ABSOLUTE PSYCHO

I grinned at my phone like an idiot, toggling between our text thread and the comments section.

The rest of my shift passed in a caffeinated haze. I refilled sugar dispensers, smiled at strangers, and counted my tips in the back room: forty-seven dollars in loose coins and crumpled bills that I smoothed flat.

My feet ached. But it was fine; really fine for once. Because these were the right feet and the right body. I wondered when the "being a woman" honeymoon would finally be over. Hopefully never.

I was untying my apron by the register when I heard the whispering.

Two girls, maybe sixteen, standing near the door with iced drinks they had barely touched. One had her phone out. The other was doing that thing where you grab your friend's arm and squeeze while trying to look casual and failing spectacularly.

They approached in the shuffling, giggling way that teenage girls approach anything that makes them nervous.

"Um, hi. Sorry. Are you… Joey Evans? From Instagram?"

My stomach did a backflip. "That's me."

"Oh my God." The arm-squeezer squeezed harder. Her friend winced. "We saw your 2B at the con last weekend. You were, like, amazing. Can we get a photo?"

I was still wearing my apron. There was a coffee stain on my left hip, my hair was a mess, I barely had any makeup on, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks climbing toward my ears.

"I look like a disaster right now," I said. I wasn't a movie star or even a famous model; why did they want a photo with me in my work clothes?

"You look so pretty," the quieter one said, with such guileless sincerity that something cracked open in my chest.

We huddled together by the pastry case. The arm-squeezer held her phone at arm's length and we all leaned in. The shutter clicked. They thanked me three times each and tumbled out the door in a tangle of laughter and phone-checking.

I stood there by the register, apron bunched in my hands, and felt the stupid grin on my face. Just a month ago, people had crossed the aisle to avoid making eye contact with me. Now two teenagers wanted a selfie with me in a coffee-stained apron.

Pretty. She had called me pretty.

I pressed my apron against my chest like a keepsake and walked home.

***

The apartment looked like a craft store had lost a bar fight.

I stepped through the door and immediately had to navigate around a sheet of EVA foam that had been left leaning against the wall, a pair of scissors balanced precariously on top of it. The living room floor was a minefield of fabric scraps, hot glue strings, and what appeared to be the severed arm of a mannequin wearing half a gauntlet.

"WTF, Emma. I just cleaned up two days ago!"

Emma was on our bed. Cross-legged, hunched over her design book, surrounded by a moat of swatches in every shade of red and black. She had a pencil behind one ear and another in her hand.

"Since when did you become a neat freak?" she mumbled, not looking up.

I set my bag down, changed out of my work clothes, and started cleaning. Again.

It wasn't a conscious decision. Something in me, the Stan part I suppose, simply could not coexist with chaos. I gathered the scattered EVA foam scraps into a pile, then sorted them by color. I collected the loose thread spools from the couch cushions and returned them to the organizer on the shelf. I found three separate pairs of scissors in three separate locations and reunited them in the scissors cup by the sewing machine, where they belonged.

"Where's the blue craft foam?" Emma asked, still not looking up. Her pencil moved in quick, decisive strokes across the page, sketching what looked like the silhouette of a weapon.

"I moved it," I said, lining up my paint brushes in perfect size order on the desk. Smallest on the left, largest on the right. "To the craft foam box."

"I knew where it was before you moved it."

"It was on top of the toaster."

"I know it was on the toaster." She finally glanced up, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. "That was its home. The toaster was its home."

"The toaster is the toaster's home."

I handed her a slab of blue craft foam just to avoid prolonging the conversation.

She made a sound like a deflating balloon and went back to her sketching, and I went back to my cleaning. This was how it always went. She would finish with a tool and set it down wherever her hand happened to be. And I would follow behind her like a human Roomba, returning things to their designated places.

It should have annoyed me, really annoyed me; but it didn't. At least not most of the time. There was something satisfying about having a shared space to tend, someone's life to organize.

***

Our apartment was tiny. One bedroom, which meant one queen bed pushed against the wall, which meant we slept approximately eight inches apart every night, Emma's cold feet inevitably migrating onto my side by 2 a.m.

By most evenings, we had migrated to the dining table, which served as workstation, eating surface, and repository for whatever Emma had most recently been obsessing over. I sat with my laptop open, editing con photos: adjusting the contrast on the atrium shots, cloning out a stray elbow from the group pose, running a subtle filter that brought out the white of the wig against the green backdrop.

Beside me, Emma had her phone propped against a stack of fabric bolts, swiping through DMs with one hand while eating cereal for dinner with the other.

"Someone wants to commission a Jinx," she said.

"Which version?"

"Arcane, obviously. Nobody wants League Jinx anymore." She typed a reply one-handed. "I quoted them four hundred and they said 'that seems high.' High. For a full costume with light-up props. I'm going to scream."

"Don't scream." I thought about the request for a moment. "Wait, do they want us to throw in a Fishbones? Do they think filament grows on trees? If they do, I'm the one who's going to scream."

She ate another handful of cereal. I nudged the box closer to her without looking up from my screen. She nudged her phone toward me to show a particularly nice comment on the atrium photos: "The way this 2B moves is giving actual android energy." I read it twice.

We worked in silence, the only sounds the click of my mouse, the tap of Emma's thumbs on glass, and the occasional crunch of cereal being consumed.

***

I was two coats into a matte black finish on a prop sword when Emma's phone lit up.

The ringtone, some ancient Faye Wong song I had heard a zillion times before, cut through the apartment like a romantic little banshee. Emma lunged for it, checked the screen, and her entire posture changed.

"Hello, this is Emma Seaton." Her voice dropped half an octave and gained the kind of smooth warmth typical of people who sell real estate. She hit speaker and set the phone on the nightstand, and I froze with the spray can in my hand.

The person on the other was someone from a marketing agency. They were launching a streaming platform and they wanted cosplayers at their launch event. Specifically, they wanted a Yor Forger, and they had seen Emma's work.

She nodded along, asked about timing and venue and usage rights for photos, and when they said the number, eight hundred dollars, one day, travel covered, her hand found a pillow and squeezed it so hard the seams nearly burst.

"That sounds wonderful," she said, in a tone that suggested she received offers like this every Tuesday. "Let me check my schedule and I'll confirm with you before the end of day. Thank you so much."

She hung up. Held the phone against her chest. Looked at me.

Then she screamed.

Not a cute scream. A full-throated, apartment-shaking howl of joy that probably registered on the Richter scale. She launched herself off her chair and tackled me.

"Eight hundred dollars!" She was bouncing. Physically bouncing, with me still attached. "Eight hundred dollars for ONE DAY, Joey! ONE DAY! And we just need to freshen up the old costume."

"I heard," I said, laughing, my hands on her waist to keep us both from toppling over.

She pulled back, grabbed my face with both hands, and shook it gently. "We're getting the good fabric for the next build. The actual good fabric. Not the clearance bin stuff that pills after one wash."

"We need to budget first."

"Don't you dare budget me right now. Let me have this for five minutes before you spreadsheet it."

I let her have it for five minutes. Then I spread-sheeted it.

We ordered a burger and a large order of fries from the burger joint downstairs. We spread it all out on the bed because the dining table was still occupied by the sewing machine, and I pulled up a notes app and started allocating.

"Two hundred for materials," I said, dipping a fry in ketchup. "The Yor wig needs replacing and the stockings are shot."

"One-fifty for materials, fifty for transportation."

"Make it sixty for buffer."

"One-fifty materials, sixty transport, and…" Emma pointed a fry at me. "Two hundred into savings. Real savings. Not the 'savings' that becomes a wig budget."

"That was one time."

"Twice at least," she said, but I had no recollection of that other time. She ate the fry. "Okay. That leaves three-ninety for whatever. New ring light? Fix the dress form?"

We went back and forth until every dollar had a job.

***

Later, with the food containers set aside and the apartment smelling like something deep fried, we settled into our evening ritual.

Emma opened her DM folder, scrolled to the unread requests, and cleared her throat.

"Ready?"

"Sort of."

She adopted the voice of a medieval herald: "'Greetings, m'lady. Your cosplay of Black Widow was a vision to behold. I myself am something of a Hawkeye.'" She lowered her phone. "He attached a photo of himself holding a Nerf bow. In his bathroom."

"No."

"There's a toilet bowl visible behind him."

"But is he cute…" I covered my face. "Honest mistake. Next."

"'Hey beautiful, I know this is random but I had a vision of us at a convention together. You as Hinata, me as Naruto. We could make it canon.'" She delivered this with the breathless sincerity of a soap opera confession, one hand on her chest.

"Tell him you only date Akatsuki members."

She scrolled further. "Okay, okay, here's one for you. Ready? Joey Evans DM folder, unread request number…" she counted silently, "…eleven."

She cleared her throat again, dropped her voice to a husky whisper, and read: "'I dream that I'm kissing you every night.'"

A moment of silence. Emma looked at me, her eyes visible just over her phone.

"Just kissing?" she said.

And then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. A quick, warm press of lips that I felt down to my toes. And before I could process that, she turned my face with her fingertips and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips still tasted of toothpaste.

"There," she said, pulling back and returning to her phone as if she had done nothing more remarkable than borrow a hair band. "Now he can stop dreaming. I've done it for him."

I sat very still. My cheek burned. My lips burned. My ears seemed to be throbbing.

"You okay?" Emma glanced at me. "You look like you swallowed a fry wrong."

"Fine," I said. "Good. Yep."

She snorted and went back to scrolling.

***

The evening wound down the way it always did.

Emma pulled up her editing software and started cutting footage for a behind-the-scenes reel. I had told her, on more than one occasion, that using the laptop and mouse would be easier but did she listen? She narrated her process in a low murmur: "cut here, transition, no that's too fast, slow it down."

Her remarks got softer as the minutes passed, the words spacing further apart, the pauses growing longer.

Her head drifted sideways. Landed on my shoulder first, then slid down to my lap.

I held still. The phone was still in her hand, screen dimming, the editing timeline frozen mid-cut. Her breathing slowed and deepened.

I reached down and eased the phone from her fingers, attached it to her charging cable and set it on the nightstand. Her hair had escaped the bun entirely and fanned across my thighs.

I touched her face. Just barely, the tip of a finger against her cheekbone, the way you would touch something you were afraid might break. She didn't stir. I dipped my head, close enough that her breath was against my face. Her hair smelled of lavender; the scent which had woken me on my first day as a woman.

I pulled the blanket up over her shoulders and settled back against the headboard. Somewhere outside, the city was still alive, but in here, in our small and cluttered kingdom of fabric, makeup, and borrowed dreams, everything was still.

Chapter 6: Breakthrough

Chicago was a different animal entirely, and the crowd at the DES convention center was denser, louder, and more intense than anything I had experienced.

The Sariel costume had taken us eight weeks.

Eight weeks of late nights, burned fingers, and creative profanity. The result was, objectively, insane. White-and-gold armor plates covered my torso and shoulders, each one hand-shaped from thermoplastic and painted with gold filigree that caught every light in the building. The mechanical wings extended from a backpack rig hidden under the armor, spanning nearly five feet when fully deployed, their translucent energy panels made from LED-embedded resin that shifted from gold to warm amber when I toggled the switch at my hip. Above my head, the halo rig floated on a thin carbon-fiber arm.

It was an Emma masterpiece.

Emma walked beside me in her Yor Forger: the elegant black dress and weapons holstered at her thighs. The streaming platform had paid for travel and the hotel room, and she had used the remaining budget to upgrade the costume's fabric.

"Wings are drawing aggro," she said, glancing over her shoulder at the growing trail of phones aimed in our direction.

"Good aggro or bad aggro?"

"Good. Very good. Three o'clock, photographer with the big Canon. He's been tracking you for thirty feet."

I gave the photographer a slow turn, letting the wings catch the overhead lights; the halo rig pulsed gently above my head. He fired off a burst of shots and gave me a thumbs up.

There were people pointing at me and gasping every few feet. Others called out my name: not Joey; Sariel. I would give them a smile and a nod, trying to keep in character. Sariel wasn't exactly a smile-y kind of game character, she liked to bash things with good hair physics. Absolutely no one was shy about coming up to me once it got started:

"Oh my god, Oh my god, you look just like her."

"Are you a model?" "Are you famous?"

"Can you do something sexy?"

"Have you even played the game?" Check my Steam account.

"You look like a Valkyrie, like you could kill someone right now."

"You look huge, like an amazon. Do you work out?" It's just the prosthetics and platforms.

Whenever someone asked me whether I made my own costume, I would hand them a homemade card with Emma's contact details on it.

A lady from Game Temple (Tencent), the developers of the game, managed to hustle us close to their booth and arranged a large impromptu photo session for me, with Emma making sure everything was in the right place. The Tencent lady gave us her card as we left and we exchanged WeChat contacts.

We pushed deeper into the main hall. A pair of Genshin Impact cosplayers waved us over for a group shot. A little girl in a homemade angel costume stared at my wings with her mouth open, and I crouched down to her level and let her touch the translucent wing panels. Her mother mouthed "thank you" over her head.

That's when I saw them.

Two security guards leaning against a wall at a junction between halls. Standard-issue black polos, radio earpieces, lanyards with badges. I recognized them both immediately: Dave and Marcus. I had worked alongside them for two years at conventions just like this one. They were doing what Dave and Marcus always did during the slow stretches: leaning, watching, commenting. A woman in a Cammy costume passed and Dave said something to Marcus that made him snort. Marcus tilted his head to follow her, appraising, his mouth moving in a way I was all too familiar with.

My stomach tightened. I knew exactly what they were saying because I had stood in that exact position a hundred times. Not saying those things, I hadn't been that guy, or at least I told myself I hadn't; but standing beside them while they said it, saying nothing.

Emma and I walked past. I was armored, haloed, unrecognizable. A girl. Dave's elbow connected with Marcus's ribs. Marcus looked me up and down; not at the armor, not at the wings, not at the weeks of work or the engineering or the art. He looked at the gap between the armor plates where the bodysuit hugged my thighs and waist. He said something to Dave. Dave laughed.

I wasn't disgusted exactly; I had expected it, experienced some of it online. I had assumed most women just shrugged it off, took it as a compliment. That was my excuse when I was a man; it was all just harmless fun. Boys will be boys. What did women expect when they showed off their bodies?

I caught myself. Not all men. Dave and Marcus were Dave and Marcus. The guy who had let me borrow his phone charger during a twelve-hour shift last year wasn't Dave and Marcus. The kid in the Rem costume who had given me a thumbs up wasn't Dave and Marcus.

But God, I was glad I wasn't standing against that wall anymore.

"Hey." Emma's arm slid through mine. Her eyes searched my face. "You okay? You went somewhere."

"Just recognized someone. From before."

She didn't ask from before what. She just tightened her grip on my arm and steered me left, toward the stage area where we were scheduled for a stage event in twenty minutes.

"Come on, Sariel," she said. "You've got a sword and a halo and a pair of wings that cost me three weeks of sleep. Let's go use them."

***

It was close to midnight by the time we returned from the cosplay community meet-up.

Our hotel room looked like a wardrobe bomb had exploded in it. Sariel's armor plates were lined up along the desk, Yor's black dress hung from the bathroom door, and the counter behind it was a battlefield of makeup wipes and cotton pads stained with foundation.

We sat cross-legged on one of the beds with our fries between us, because we weren't quite ready for bed.

"…and then he just lies down on the floor in front of me," Emma said, gesturing with a fry, "holds his phone sideways, and goes, 'Can you make it look like you're trampling me to death?'" She started cackling.

"What the f…" I tried to dredge up an old memory. "I know, I know. It's the Wonder Woman Hiketeia thing where she stomps on Batman's head."

"Wow, you definitely earned your nerd badge right there." She fed me a fry dipped in ketchup as a reward.

Just nine months ago, I had been a man who ate dinner alone in a studio apartment with the TV on for company. Now I was sitting cross-legged on a hotel bed in Chicago, eating celebration fries with my best friend, my body still tingling from where I had peeled off prosthetic armor edges.

"You're doing it again," Emma said.

"Doing what?"

"That thing where you stare at me like I'm a nature documentary."

"Sorry. I was just thinking."

She ate another fry, watching me. "About?"

I picked at the edge of a paper container. "Do you ever feel like you've lived two completely different lives? Like there's a before-you and an after-you, and they're so different they might as well be different people?"

Emma's expression changed and the joy seemed to drain out of it.

"Yeah," she said. "I do."

She set down her fry and wiped her fingers on a napkin. "After Derek, I didn't know who I was. Like, literally. He had been making my decisions for so long. What I wore, who I talked to, what I posted. Then when he was gone, I just stood in my apartment and had no idea what to do next." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "I had to figure out what I actually liked. What music was mine and not his. What I wanted to eat when no one was telling me. It sounds stupid…"

"Not stupid."

"It felt stupid. I would stand in the grocery store for ten minutes trying to pick a cereal because I genuinely didn't know my own preference anymore." She gave a small, crooked smile. "Took me months. And honestly, some days I still catch myself doing things because I think someone else wants me to, not because I want to."

I nodded.

"The after-me is better though," she said. "Way better."

"I would pick the after-me too," I said, looking down.

Emma reached over and squeezed my hand.

"Okay." Emma grabbed her phone from the nightstand and pulled up her reference folder. "Tomorrow. You're Rei, I'm doing Mitsuri."

"That wig is going to be a nightmare."

"The wig is already a nightmare. I've accepted it. Focus on your problems."

"I've worn the suit twice before, and I'm still the same size." I pinched my belly fat. "I think. It's past midnight. I'm too tired to try it on."

Emma swiped to a folder of Rei Ayanami references and my measurements: the white plugsuit, the blue bob, the red contact lenses. "Your plugsuit's fitted and sealed. The wig, contacts, and neural clips shouldn't be a problem."

"I think I'll skip the contacts on my 'rest' day. Bad for the eyes."

"I've heard of Injured Rei before but Lazy Rei? That's a new one."

She shoved my shoulder. I shoved hers. Her phone nearly slid off the bed and we both lunged for it, laughing, and I thought: this. This is the life I would pick. Every time. Every version. This one.

***

The Rei Ayanami plugsuit fit like a second skin, which was sort of the problem.

A plugsuit left no room for error. No armor plates to hide behind, no flowing skirt to forgive a misaligned seam. Just white stretch fabric molded to every line of my body.

I was nearly a year into whole "loving being a girl" honeymoon but it hadn't got any better. If anything, it had got worse. There were at least three other Reis attending the convention and, now that I had had enough sleep, I wanted to be better than all of them. I wanted my body to be perfect in the suit, and Emma sighed and shook her head when she saw me spend ten minutes checking out my lines in the full length mirror.

She put her hands on my hips and said, "You're beautiful, okay?"

Once I hit the floor, I started acting all demure and restrained like a stern Japanese mother. Even the red contacts I had rebuffed the night before had been put in place. I had no idea what the whole being vain thing was about until I had this body and now it seemed like an irresistible tide.

Predictably, it happened ten minutes from a scheduled shoot with a photographer whose work I had been admiring. Emma had gone ahead to check the lighting at our location. I stopped in a corridor to adjust the heel strap on my right boot, bending forward at the waist…

And felt it. A soft pop near the base of my spine, followed by the unmistakable whisper of thread releasing from fabric.

I straightened slowly, as though moving carefully might undo what had already happened. My hand reached behind me and found it: a split along the center back seam, about three inches long, gaping enough that I could feel air on my skin through the gap.

"No," I whispered. "No, no, no."

The nearest bathroom was forty feet away. I walked there with my hand pressed against my back like I was nursing a wound, weaving through the crowd trying not to draw attention while internally screaming.

The bathroom was bright and cold. I locked myself in the largest stall, twisted around, and took a picture of the tear with my phone: three inches of exposed skin between two flaps of white fabric. The stitching had given up entirely, leaving a clean separation that would only get worse with movement. I tried to reach it but it was pointless; the strain on the seam only made it separate further down my ass.

My finger hit Emma's name in my contacts before the thought fully formed.

Joey: SOS. Bathroom near hall D. Seam blew out on my back. HELP.

Three dots appeared immediately.

Emma: omw. don't move don't touch it

She was there in four minutes, pushing through the stall door with an emergency sewing kit in one hand and a look of focused determination.

"Where?"

I turned around. She sucked air through her teeth.

"Don't say it," I told her.

"What? That your ass has grown over the past six months?"

I would have swatted her but I didn't want to move.

"Okay. Not as bad as I thought. Tension tear, not a fabric rip. The material's fine, just the thread gave out." She was already threading a needle, her fingers moving with the precision of someone who had done this a thousand times. "I need you to stand straight. Arms at your sides. Don't move."

"I wasn't planning to…"

"Shh."

I stood still. The stall was small enough that Emma was practically pressed against me, her breath warm on the skin of my back. She peeled the edges of the tear apart gently, examined the failed stitching, and began working.

The needle moved in quick, tight stitches. I felt each one as a tiny tug against my skin. Emma hummed while she worked, that Final Fantasy thing she had as her ringtone.

"You've been bending wrong all morning."

"I bent one time."

"One time too many. You have to bend at the hips, not the waist. We've discussed this." Another stitch. Another tug. "If you bend at the waist in a plugsuit, the back seam takes all the strain. Physics, babe."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Bend down, not forward, Ayanami San"

I laughed. Here I was, standing in a fluorescent-lit stall with my costume split open, completely dependent on another person to put me back together. Stan would have rather walked out of the convention than ask for help. Because Stan didn't have an Emma.

Her fingers brushed my bare skin as she pulled the last stitch tight and knotted it. I shivered.

"Cold?"

"Little bit."

She smoothed the repaired seam with her palm, pressing the fabric flat, running her hand down the center of my back to check the tension. She pulled the plugsuit gently, readjusting what had shifted during the repair, and gave my ass a satisfied pat.

"Good as new. Better actually. I reinforced the stitch line."

I turned around. We were standing six inches apart in a bathroom stall, close enough that I could see the individual lashes above her brown eyes.

"Thank you," I said. I kissed her lightly on the cheek and hugged her tightly. She didn't seem to mind. "You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, you know." I could feel the tears forming in my eyes again, and she saw it.

"Oh no," she said. "It's blubbery Joey again." She carefully dabbed the tears from my eyes so that my makeup wouldn't be affected. "Face card first… "

"…feelings later," I completed.

"Come on, let's go. We're late." She put the sewing kit into her backpack and unlatched the stall door.

We walked out of the bathroom side by side, and the seam held.

***

It happened in the corridor between Halls B and D, where the crowd thinned and the overhead lights were dimmer.

We had taken the back route to avoid the bottleneck near the main stage. Emma was checking her phone, scrolling through tags from the morning's photoshoot, and I was walking beside her with my hands loose at my sides, still buzzing from a good session with the photographer. The Rei costume had photographed beautifully. The plugsuit's clean lines and the crimson contacts gave every shot a kind of eerie intensity that I loved. As for Emma, I guess you could say that she "slayed."

"Hey, nice costumes."

I didn't turn around. Compliments from strangers were part of convention life, and this one sounded harmless enough.

Then it came again, closer: "Seriously, you two look amazing. What are you from?"

I glanced over my shoulder. Three guys, no costumes, con badges hanging from lanyards. One in a Punisher tee, one in a hoodie despite the heat, one trailing slightly behind the other two. They were smiling.

"Evangelion and Demon Slayer," Emma said over her shoulder, still walking.

"Cool, cool. Hey, can we get a photo?"

Emma slowed. I didn't.

"We're actually heading somewhere," I said. "Sorry."

They kept following.

The comments shifted. The one in the Punisher tee leaned toward his friend and said something I caught fragments of: "…plugsuit is insane, look at her…" The friend in the hoodie said something back that ended in a laugh.

Stan's brain fired up like an old engine. Three males, one slightly separated from the other two, which meant the trailing one was either less committed or waiting for an opening. The corridor ahead was about sixty feet long with a fire exit on the left and a vendor hall entrance on the right. The vendor hall would be populated. The fire exit would set off an alarm.

"Hey, Mitsuri, that boob window is crazy," the Punisher tee said, louder now. "Your tits look amazing in it."

Emma's head turned.

"Joey…"

"I know." I took her arm and angled us right, toward the vendor hall entrance.

"Hey, don't be like that." The hoodie had sped up. He was trying to flank us, moving to our right, cutting the angle toward the vendor hall door. "We're just being friendly."

"We're good, thanks," I told them.

He stepped into our path. Not blocking exactly, just standing where we needed to walk, hands in his hoodie pockets, smile still pasted on.

I closed the gap with Emma while simultaneously narrowing the space the hoodie would need to hold his ground, forcing him to move or be moved. It was a technique I had used a hundred times in uniform.

He moved. A half-step sideways, just enough.

I guided Emma through the vendor hall doors and into a wash of noise and light. Hundreds of people, packed between booths, beautifully and safely crowded. I didn't look back until we were twenty feet in, and when I did, the corridor entrance was empty.

Emma's arm was rigid under my hand. I released my grip.

"Sorry," I said. "I grabbed you kind of hard."

"What the fuck. Were they following us?"

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"Since the corridor junction."

She stared at me. "How did you…"

I shrugged, scrambling for an explanation that wasn't I spent a decade working security. "I've read things. Online."

Emma didn't look convinced, but she didn't push it. Instead she let out a long, shaky breath and ran her hands over her face.

"God. I hate this. This is why I stopped going to cons alone after Derek."

"Derek?"

"I've blocked him three times since the beginning of the year," she said. "Spotted him near our booth last convention. When you were away."

"What?! Why didn't you tell me?"

She pulled her phone out, then put it back, then pulled it out again. "I'm fine. I'm fine. You think you're safe because there are thousands of people here, and then…"

I put my arm around her shoulders and she leaned into me. She was shaking, just slightly, a tremor I could feel through the fabric of her costume.

"I won't let anything happen to you," I said. It came out with more conviction than I intended.

Emma pulled back enough to look at my face.

"Okay, weirdo Yojimbo Rei," she said. "Let's go find somewhere with better lighting and more witnesses."

***

Our phones wouldn't shut up.

We had been home for two hours and the notifications hadn't slowed. Every time I set my phone face-down on the dining table, it vibrated itself in a slow circle. Emma's wasn't much better. Her screen lit up every few seconds with a new comment, a new follower, a new DM request.

The apartment was its usual beautiful disaster. We had dumped our convention luggage in the entryway and fallen directly on to the couch, still in travel clothes.

"Joey." Emma held up her phone, eyes wide. "You're at thirty-three thousand."

"What?"

"Thirty-three. Thousand." She turned the screen toward me. "You gained sixteen thousand in three days."

I grabbed my phone and opened Instagram. The Sariel photos had exploded. The atrium shot had been reposted by gaming accounts, cosplay aggregators, and the official Angel's Requiem community page. The caption on the repost read: Real-life Sariel just dropped. We're not okay.

There were even pictures of me out of character laughing with Emma between shoots. Comments poured in faster than I could read them. The Rei photos were doing well too, but the Sariel was the one that had caught fire. Someone had clipped a video of me walking through the main hall and set it to the game's soundtrack, and it had over a hundred thousand views.

An online cosplay magazine had run a short feature on convention highlights, and when they had asked me about the Sariel build, I had said: "It's all Emma. She's a costume-making genius." The quote had been pulled out and used as a caption for a photo of both of us. Emma took a screenshot and made it her phone wallpaper.

"You absolute sap," she said. "I'm framing this."

Then the email came.

A craft supply company, one we had bought from, wanted to sponsor us. The terms were straightforward: they send products and we create content showing how we used them in our builds. Monthly posts, tagged and hash tagged, with creative freedom over the execution.

We read the email together. When we finished it for the second time, she looked at me.

"We need a schedule," I said.

"We need to celebrate. French fries?"

"We need a schedule first. Then we celebrate." I pulled up a spreadsheet and my fingers started to move in a distinctly Stan-like manner: I blocked out posting dates, content types, product integration timelines. I color-coded by platform. I built a content calendar that extended three months out, with slots for convention coverage, build tutorials, and sponsored posts.

Emma ordered a burger and fries, then watched me over the top of her phone with an expression caught between amusement and genuine awe.

"When did you become a business major?"

"This is Youtube influencer shit not an MBA."

She held my face in her palms and pinched my cheeks. "Is this the real Joey Evans?"

The follower count kept climbing. Each new thousand felt like validation in numerical form, proof that I existed and was seen. I refreshed the page more often than I wanted to admit.

Then the other comments started showing up.

The first one was on a Rei photo: her jaw is kind of mannish tbh. take note of her crotch. I read it three times, each pass cutting a little deeper. The second was on the Sariel shoot: nice costume but the body proportions are off. Too broad in the shoulders for Sariel. And then, on a close-up of my Rei makeup: this asian-style makeup on a white girl is lowkey offensive. Stop copying asian features for clout.

I had a thick skin as Stan but this was different; this was something new, a part of me that had only recently learned to care what people thought.

Emma noticed of course.

"Show me." She held out her hand and I gave her my phone like a child handing over a splinter for extraction.

She read through the comments, her thumb scrolling slowly. Her expression didn't change, which told me she had seen worse.

"Okay," she said, handing the phone back. "First, the jaw comment is from a guy with fourteen followers and a profile picture of a car. He doesn't matter. What kind of fuck thinks you look like a guy. Second, the shoulder thing is cretinous. Third," She paused. "Babe, cosplay makeup is cosplay makeup. You're literally recreating a Japanese character. That's the art form. The Japanese and Chinese literally don't give a shit about cultural appropriation. They love it when white girls wear kimonos and qipaos."

"It still feels…"

"I know. It stings. It's supposed to sting. Why do you think they write it?" She pulled up her own comment history and showed me a screen full of abuse I had never seen; comments about her body, her face, her talent, her relationship status. A greatest hits collection of human cruelty.

"You never showed me these."

"Because they don't deserve my time, and they don't deserve yours." She closed the app. "Read the constructive ones. Someone said your wig styling was slightly off-center? That's useful. Someone suggested a different adhesive for the armor panels? That's useful. The rest is noise."

I nodded.

Later that night, we migrated to the bedroom. I sat against the headboard with my laptop open, tweaking the content calendar, adding notes about which products to feature first. Beside me, Emma scrolled through her phone, occasionally showing me a comment or a photo she liked, her reactions getting slower and quieter as the minutes passed.

Her head drifted. First upright, then tilting, then settling into my lap. Her phone screen dimmed and went dark.

I reached down and eased it from her fingers, plugged it into her charger, set it on the nightstand. Her breathing deepened. I stroked her hair, gently.

My laptop screen glowed with the content calendar; and below it, hidden in a minimized tab, my follower count had ticked past forty thousand. Somewhere in the world, strangers were looking at photos of me. Some of them were kind. Some of them were cruel. All of them were looking at a woman who hadn't existed eight months ago.

I closed the laptop. The apartment was quiet except for Emma's breathing and the distant roar of the city.

This life, the costumes, the comments, the trolls, the fries, the girl asleep in my lap, was exhausting; complicated; and it was completely mine.

I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Chapter 7: Warning Signs

The phone woke me at 6:47 a.m. on a Tuesday, vibrating insistently.

I reached for it with my eyes still closed. The screen was too bright and I squinted at it. An email notification: Tencent Games - Partnership & Promotions.

I opened it.

Dear Ms. Josephine Evans, Following the success of your Sariel cosplay at our Chicago activation event, we are pleased to extend an offer for you to serve as the primary promotional model for the Angel's Requiem: Divine Protocol expansion pack launch. The role would include press photography sessions, side-stage appearances at six major conventions across the United States, autograph sessions at our sponsored booths, and creation of sponsored video content for our social media channels…

There was a number at the bottom of the email. I read it twice. Then a third time.

I made a sound. It wasn't dignified. It was a girlish squeal which I had been using with increasing regularity. I sat bolt upright and bounced on the mattress hard enough to send my pillow tumbling off.

Emma, who had been a warm, motionless lump of blanket and dark hair beside me, slowly came alive. She was not usually a morning person.

"What…" She pushed herself up on one elbow, eyes barely open, hair plastered across half her face. "Joey, what the fuck, it's not even seven…"

"Read this." I shoved the phone at her face. "Read it. Read it right now."

She took the phone and her eyes moved across the screen. I watched her expression shift from bleary annoyance to gradual comprehension.

"Holy shit, Joey." She sat up fully. "That's… holy shit. That's amazing."

She grabbed me, both arms around my shoulders. Her chin dug into my collarbone and her lavender hair was in my mouth and I didn't care about any of it because Emma was holding me and I could feel her heart beating fast against mine.

"I knew it, I knew it," she said into my shoulder. "Main fucking model for the expansion."

"I know."

"Six conventions. At least."

"I know."

She pulled back, held me at arm's length, and studied my face. "That lady from the booth. She actually came through."

We migrated to the kitchen in a tangle of blankets and excitement. Emma put the coffee on while I sat at the counter with the email open, reading sections aloud between sips of water.

"Press photos," I read. "Side-stage appearances. Autograph sessions…"

"You're going to need a signature. An actual signature, not the chicken scratch you put on the rent check."

"What?"

"You'll practice on napkins like a normal person." She poured coffee into two mugs, slid mine across the counter, and leaned on her elbows opposite me. "Okay. Logistics. Talk to me."

We talked logistics. The contract required pristine costumes maintained across eight-hour convention days, which meant backup pieces, emergency repair kits, and probably a dedicated changing area near whatever booth they set up. I would need to stay in character for extended periods, pose for hundreds of photos, and handle the full spectrum of convention humanity, from the earnest fans who had rehearsed their compliments to the awkward ones who would stand too close and ask if I had a boyfriend.

"They also want another look, Sariel as the steampunk mage from the start of the game. Look at the budget they're providing."

Emma grabbed her laptop and opened it. "Okay. Let's draft a response before you accidentally reply with just a keyboard smash and nineteen exclamation marks."

We wrote the reply together, or rather Emma wrote most of it while I paced behind her. We discussed availability, asked about costume specifications, requested details on travel arrangements. Emma added a line about creative input on promotional content that I wouldn't have thought to include.

"Always negotiate," she said. "Even when you're excited."

When we got to the payment section, I pulled up an accounting app and started calculating. The number in the email was more money than I had made in six months at the café.

"We can put a chunk into savings," I said, still pacing. "Real savings this time. And the rest… we could upgrade the heat gun. Get the good Worbla, not the off-brand stuff. We can build you something incredible for the next con. A full Tifa with the Advent Children armor, or… oh, what about that Yennefer you've been pinning references for? We can get proper jacquard not…"

I stopped. Emma was smiling, but the smile had gone slightly rigid at the corners.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." She shook her head and the smile softened again. "I'm just tired. It's early."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure. This is your thing, Joey. I'm so happy for you." She reached across the counter and squeezed my hand. Her fingers were warm from the coffee mug. "You deserve this. Every bit of it."

I squeezed back. It was 7:30 in the morning and she was right; it was too early for this kind of thing.

But later, while Emma was in the shower and I sat alone at the table with my cooling coffee. It had been two years since Emma, post break-up, had met Joey at a convention; over a year since I had woken up in a bed that smelled of Emma's hair, in a body I had spent forty years pretending I didn't need.

Everything I knew about cosplay, Emma had taught me. The stitches, the thermoplastics, the wig styling, the makeup, the photography angles, the social media strategy, the art of standing in platform heels for eight hours without your knees buckling.

And now Tencent was calling my name. Not ours. Mine.

I picked up my phone and looked at the email one more time. The excitement was still there, but underneath it, there was something else: a small, uncomfortable awareness.

I drank my coffee and waited for Emma to finish her shower so we could argue about breakfast.

***

The Tencent booth occupied a corner of Hall A like a small kingdom. Three massive LED screens looped the Divine Protocol trailer on repeat, the bass from the speakers vibrating through the floor and through my heels.

Banners of Sariel flanked the entrance, her mechanical wings spread wide against a digital sky. And then there was me, standing in front of those banners in the real-world version of her armor. Every armor plate had been cleaned, repainted, and edge-sealed for this event. The result was a costume that looked like it had been machined rather than hand-built in a cramped apartment by two women surviving on coffee and stubbornness.

Emma stood beside me as Tifa Lockhart. The costume was gorgeous: she had nailed the black leather skirt, the white crop top, and suspenders. Her dark hair was down and slightly longer than usual thanks to extensions she had blended in that morning. She looked stunning.

But today wasn't about Tifa.

The Tencent PR team had me on a tight schedule. Official press photos first: a photographer with equipment that cost more than our rent directed me through a series of poses against backdrops printed with the game's logo. Between each setup, Emma appeared at my elbow, adjusting the halo's angle, checking that the wing panels hadn't shifted, pressing a water bottle into my hand.

"Drink," she said. "You're going to pass out under those lights."

Then she disappeared behind the booth's curtain.

The fans started lining up around eleven.

It began as a modest queue, maybe twenty people, and then it swelled. Within an hour the line stretched past the edge of the Tencent booth and wrapped around a support pillar. A volunteer with a walkie-talkie appeared to manage the flow.

I signed posters, I signed T-shirts, and I signed sketchbooks. I smiled until my cheeks ached, posed for selfies, complimented costumes, and said "thank you so much" with genuine warmth that only began to thin around hour three. It was completely surreal; I was only a model cosplaying as a game character. Why would they want my signature?

Emma helped me detach my wings for the signing, then moved off to her own Final Fantasy events. She would drift back to the Tencent booth every hour or so to check up on me; directing people forward, chatting with fans who recognized her, keeping the energy up. But as the line grew and the attention consolidated around me, she drifted backward. I would look up between signings and find her a little farther away each time, arms crossed, lost in thought.

She appeared beside me during a brief gap in the queue. Her fingers found a panel in the back which had been displaced by a particularly enthusiastic fan hug and shifted it back into place the same way she had been fixing my costumes since the very beginning.

"Guess the algorithm gods really love you," she murmured.

"Pure luck and timing," I agreed.

Emma massaged my neck for a while. Then she pulled away and walked toward the far end of the hall, where her own meet-and-greet table sat with a modest stack of prints and a handful of fans waiting.

The afternoon was relentless. The Tencent team wanted B-roll footage: me walking through the convention hall in character, interacting with fans, deploying the wings in dramatic slow motion. Photographers materialized from every direction, professional and amateur alike.

Between shots, I looked for Emma. I found her leaning against a pillar near the edge of the Tencent space, arms at her side. Her Tifa costume was immaculate but she looked exhausted.

After the photographers dispersed, I walked over to her. My feet were screaming.

"Hey," I said. "You okay? You look…"

"Tired," she said. "Just tired."

I waited. There was something else under the surface, it was obvious.

"It's easy for you," she said quietly. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the crowd, at the banners with Sariel's face. "People have already decided you're the face."

This wasn't like Emma. I wanted to say: you made me; you built this costume; you taught me how to stand; how to pose; how to sew. Without you, I would be…

But the Tencent PR person was waving me back to the booth, and Emma had already turned away, reaching for her phone, pulling up something; Instagram, DMs, anything to fill the space where our conversation should have been.

I went back to the booth, and I smiled, I signed, and I posed.

***

That night, I stood at the sink of our hotel bathroom and worked a cotton pad across my cheek, watching the foundation lift away in pale streaks to reveal the skin beneath.

And then my reflection shifted.

Not dramatically, not like in a horror movie. More like looking at a word you've read a thousand times and suddenly not recognizing it. The face in the mirror was mine, but for a span of maybe three seconds, it looked like a photograph of someone else. My hands tingled, and I dropped the cotton pad and gripped the edge of the sink. Then the sensation passed, the pins and needles stopped, and the face was mine again; just Joey, flushed and tired from a long convention day.

I stood there for another thirty seconds, breathing, watching the mirror. Then I picked up the cotton pad and finished removing my makeup.

In the bedroom, Emma was already asleep. I pulled the blanket over her shoulders. Then I sat at the table with my laptop and opened Kimi and asked it to look into enchanted parchments and transformation bargains. It was something which I should have done months ago.

The results were what you would expect: conspiracy theories, scattered reports about mentally ill men who claimed to have spent a year, sometimes two, as someone else. There was even a satirical posting about an ex-stripper billionaire's wife who might have "beat the system." The AI's definitive conclusion was that it was a kind of minor mass hysteria.

A year or so of your most cherished desire. That's what the old woman had said. A year or so. Was I on borrowed time? I touched my face. The skin was warm, smooth, and real. These were my cheekbones. This was my chin, my arms, my body. The right body.

I didn't sleep that night.

By morning, the panic had transformed into something more useful: a plan and a purpose.

I started with the Yennefer.

Emma had been pinning references for months; but she never started building it because the materials were expensive and there was always a commission or a sponsored post demanding her attention first. Doing a Yennefer now was a luxury; at least until the next Witcher game came out.

I ordered the materials before Emma even woke up: tone-on-tone black jacquard for the jacket; high grade eco leather for the inserted panels; faux fur for the collar and trim; and suede for the trousers. The shirt, gloves, belt, cast metal buttons, and boots I sourced separately; each one would require varying degrees of modification.

When everything arrived at our home two weeks later, I cleared the dining table and sorted it into neat piles. I started with the jacket, cutting the brocade panels first and checking the pattern placement so the texture stayed clean across the seams. Then came the leather jacket panels and sleeve trims; followed by the fur trim and decorative cordwork. The beadwork on the sleeves I did by hand, stitching each pearl-white Czech glass bead individually on the sleeve trim.

Emma watched me from the couch one evening, her feet tucked under her.

"Come here," she said. "We can work on it tomorrow morning."

"I want to get it right," I told her. "And you've got too many commissions to complete."

I didn't look up from the beadwork. "We should make a photobook," I said. "Of everything we've done. All the costumes, all the cons, the behind-the-scenes stuff. Something physical. Something to remember everything by."

I bent closer to the beads and pretended I was concentrating.

"That's a really sweet idea," Emma said softly. "You sentimental weirdo."

That night, after she fell asleep, I sat on the floor beside our costume case with a sheet of stationery and a pen. The letter took me three attempts.

Dear Emma, I wrote. If you're reading this, then something has changed and I probably can't explain it to you in person. I need you to know that the past two years have been the best of my life. That's not an exaggeration. Before I met you, I was someone I didn't want to be.

I wrote vaguely about the "fairy godmother" and the parchment, but only just enough that she wouldn't assume I was having a mental break. Then I told her that I thought I was once a man and left it at that. I wrote about the way I felt when she fell asleep in my lap. I wrote about the DM readings that made me laugh until my ribs ached. I told her she was the most talented person I had ever known. I told her that I loved her.

I folded the letter twice, slipped it into an envelope, and tucked it beneath the false bottom of our costume case, between the foam padding and the reinforced base. If the magic ended and I ceased to exist, at least this would remain.

In the bedroom, Emma shifted in her sleep and murmured something I couldn't hear. I climbed into bed beside her, pulled the blanket up, and pressed my forehead between her shoulder blades.

I lay there in the dark with my eyes open, feeling her warmth and the rise and fall of her chest, and I thought: not yet. Please. Not yet.

Chapter 8: Angel's Requiem

By my third official outing as Sariel, I had gotten used to the rhythm of posing, smiling, and signing.

Emma was with me all the way, this time as Yennefer, doing what she always did: fitting me, repairing me, feeding me. She had laid our merchandise across our table in neat rows, sorted by character and size, each one sleeved in a clear protective film. Her own promotional work had dried up even as her commission waiting list started extending beyond half a year.

Before we packed up for the morning, two girls who couldn't have been older than twelve stood at the edge of the booth for five full minutes, working up the courage to approach, before one of them finally squeaked: "Your wings are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"Did you build them?"

"My best friend built these," I said, and pointed at Emma, who was adjusting her wig in a compact mirror ten feet away, pretending she couldn't hear us. "She's the genius. I'm just the mannequin."

Emma snorted without looking up. "Don't listen to her. She's the whole package."

***

An organizer found us just after lunch, while Emma was rearranging the print display and I was reattaching a wing panel that had loosened during a photo session with a group of fans.

He was a tall man in a convention staff polo. He introduced himself and offered me a paid guest spot at next month's Portland convention. Featured panelist. Separate signing table. Promotional material with my face on it.

"We would love to have you," he said. "The Sariel has been the talk of the floor, and I have soft spot for your CZ2128."

I glanced at Emma. She was standing two feet away, close enough to hear every word.

"That sounds amazing," I said. "Can I think about it and get back to you?"

"Of course." He handed me a business card and left, already scanning the hall for his next recruit.

I turned to Emma. "What do you think?"

"I think it's great," she said. "You should do it." Her shoulders had gone rigid.

"We can talk about it later," I said.

"Nothing to talk about. It's your thing. Go for it."

She turned back to the display and began sorting stuff she had already sorted, and I stood there holding a business card that felt heavier than it should have.

The afternoon deteriorated from there.

A photographer spoke to Emma and asked to shoot me against the LED wall.

"Just the Sariel. The wings work better solo against the lights." Emma stepped aside without a word. I watched her retreat to the back of the booth and busy herself with something on her phone, her thumb scrolling without purpose.

A fan approached the table and pointed at Emma's prints. "These are gorgeous," she said. Then she looked at me and her eyes went wide. "Oh my God, you're the Sariel girl! Can I get a photo?" She didn't buy a print.

Another fan, a boy in a school uniform cosplay, asked Emma: "Are you her manager?"

Emma's smile didn't waver. "Something like that," she said.

By five o'clock, her responses had been whittled down to single syllables. Fine. Sure. Yep.

The convention hall thinned as the day wound down. We were behind the booth curtain tidying up, working in silence. The muffled roar of the remaining crowd leaked through the fabric walls.

"Emma?"

"Hmm."

"Can we talk?"

She slid a stack of posters into their box with more force than necessary. "About what?"

"About what's been happening, between us."

She didn't answer right away. She closed the box and pressed the flaps down.

"Do you even like this? What we do?" she said, still looking at the box. "Or do you just like being told you're pretty?"

"What?"

She turned around and I saw that the her eyes were red.

"Half the time I don't know who you even are anymore. You showed up in my life and you were this… this weird, quiet girl who cried in front of mirrors and couldn't do her own wig cap. And now you're on stage giving speeches and signing autographs and people are flying you to conventions and I'm standing behind a booth selling prints that nobody's buying because they're all looking… " She pressed her hand against her mouth, held it there for a second, then dropped it.

The silence between us was awful. My hands were shaking uncontrollably, and I set the remaining posters on the table and pressed my palms flat against the surface to steady them.

"You have no idea what you mean to me," I whispered

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't make this about… I'm asking about…"

"I love you, Emma."

Emma stared at me.

"I love you," I said again, and the tears were coming now. "Not because you built my costumes. Not because you taught me how to do makeup or sew or style a wig. Because you're the first person who ever made me feel like I was worth knowing. Before you, I was…" I caught myself, swerving around the truth I couldn't speak. "I was nobody. And you saw me. You saw me before anyone else did. Every single good thing in my life started with you."

I wiped my face with the back of my gauntlet.

"I would burn it all down tomorrow," I said. "The followers, the sponsorship, the Tencent deal, all of it. If I had to choose between any of that and you. Do you understand? You're everything to me."

Emma's arms were crossed. She had turned away from me, but I could see the war happening behind her eyes. The part of her that wanted to believe me fighting the part that had been trained by Derek, by life.

"I don't need your pity," she said quietly.

"It's not."

"It is. You feel bad because you got the thing and I didn't, and now you're…"

"Emma." I waited until she looked at me. "I don't want to lose you."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her arms loosened, just slightly.

We stood there for a long time.

She uncrossed her arms and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, smearing Yennefer's dark liner into a gray streaks across her temple. I reached over and fixed it with my thumb, gently, the way she had fixed a thousand small things for me.

We packed the rest of the booth in silence.

Later, as we took a circuit through the last dregs of the convention hall, Emma's hand found mine, her fingers threading through my own.

"I'm happy for you," she said. "I really am. It's just hard sometimes."

I squeezed her hand. "I know."

"I'm sorry I said that. About you liking being pretty."

"I do like being pretty. But I like being your friend more."

She laughed. "You're such a mush."

"Learned it from you."

And so we walked and walked, through the quietening hall in a large circle with our fingers intertwined, two women in borrowed skins and real tears.

***

The convention floor was truly emptying out by the time we got back.

We packed up in silence. Emma folded the tablecloth into precise thirds while I boxed the remaining prints, sliding each one into its protective sleeve with the care of someone filing love letters. Our little corner of the vendor hall looked naked without its dressing, just a folding table and two chairs and a stack of boxes that contained, in miniature, everything we had built together.

Emma was humming again. The Faye Wong song that continued to survive as her ringtone. She looked up and caught me watching her and rolled her eyes.

"Stop staring and help me with the case."

I was reaching for the costume case when I saw him.

He was thirty feet away, half-hidden behind a vendor's empty booth frame, baseball cap pulled low. The same twenty-something who had pinned Emma against a wall in a service corridor almost two years and a lifetime ago.

Derek.

"Hey," I said. "Let me get that side. You grab the wig cases."

I moved to Emma's left, placing myself between her and his line of sight. She didn't notice. She was wrestling a wig head into a padded bag, muttering about the styrofoam.

I kept packing. He was closer now, maybe twenty feet, lingering near a fire extinguisher mounted on a support column. I should have called security. I should have pulled out my phone and dialed the convention emergency number. But he hadn't done anything yet, and the part of me that was still Stan calculated that I could manage one agitated man if it came to that.

I was wrong.

He came fast. Not from the angle I had been watching but from behind the adjacent booth where he had circled while I was latching the costume case. A security guard at the hall entrance shouted something and I heard the thud of a body being shouldered aside, and then Derek was ten feet away, his face contorted with rage.

"You think you're so special now?" His breath reeked of whiskey and vomit. "I made you who you are. You were nothing before me. Nothing."

Emma didn't flinch. She didn't cry. She set down the wig case and faced him.

"Leave, Derek."

"Or what? Your little girlfriend's going to stop me?"

He laughed, and his right hand came out of his jacket pocket. The knife was small, a folding blade, maybe four inches.

He lunged and my body moved before my mind fully grasped the situation. I stepped between them and my left hand came up to redirect his wrist, catching it at the base of his palm, pushing outward.

But I wasn't Stan anymore. My hands were smaller and I was at least sixty pounds lighter than the body that had learned how to disarm a man. His wrist twisted in my grip and the blade came back, and I felt it before I understood it, a searing pain below my ribs on the left. He pulled back and drove it in again, lower.

I heard Emma scream.

My hand was still on his wrist; then I had both of them on him as he pulled back, twisting the knife back towards him. My knees were buckling and I lashed out with my boot, hoping to hit his peroneal. He cursed as he fell forward on to me, slipping on the pool of blood between us; and I felt the blade slip smoothly between his ribs. He flinched and rolled off me, pulling the blade from his chest. That was his last mistake.

But I was too far gone to see the rest of it.

Emma was pulling off my armor and pressing something to my side. I could barely see her face but my hand found her arm. She dropped to her knees beside me.

"No, no, no, no… Joey, stay with me, stay with me…"

"Emma."

"Someone call an ambulance! Someone…"

Her face blurred. The beadwork on her Yennefer costume caught the light one last time, each bead a tiny star I had stitched by hand. I pulled her close and pressed my forehead against hers.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 9: After Joey

The first thing I noticed was the absence of lavender.

The pillow case I woke up on was rough and smelled of nothing more than detergent. I lay still with my eyes closed for a moment and stretched my legs. Her cold feet were nowhere to be found.

Then I opened my eyes. The room was bare, unwelcoming. No posters, no fairy lights, no sewing machine or shelf of wig heads. Just a smoke detector with a blinking red eye and a hairline crack in the plaster.

I sat up and everything was wrong. My hands gripped the edge of the mattress and they were enormous, thick, dark hair covering the forearms. I stared at them and felt a wave of nausea coming on.

The apartment was small, utilitarian. There was a kitchenette with a two-burner stove, a card table with one chair, a TV mounted on the wall opposite the bed, its screen dark. No fabric scraps. No EVA foam confetti on the floor. No…

The counter held a stack of mail, sorted and opened, each envelope slit neatly along the top edge. A mug sat upside-down on the drying rack, dry and spotless. The trash can was empty.

My phone was on the card table, plugged into a charger. The Home Screen indicated that it was just over a week since I left her. Three unread messages from my shift supervisor: schedule confirmation for next week; a reminder about updated badge protocols; and a forwarded memo about parking lot coverage. It was as though nothing had happened; as though I had been here the whole time.

The bathroom was four steps from the bed, the mirror small and mounted above the sink.

The face in it was a stranger in his mid-forties. Stubble across a jaw that was too heavy, too square. I touched my cheek with trembling fingers. The skin was rough. Dry. Real.

I searched for her. For any trace: a freckle, a softness, a lingering ghost of the face that had been mine. But Joey was gone. Every inch of her had been reclaimed by whatever magic had made her possible.

The sound that came out of me was nothing like the high, startled laugh from that first morning. It was raw and broken, a howl. I collapsed on to the cold tiles of the bathroom, shoulders shaking, crying, gasping, until there was nothing left inside me.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the light through the bathroom window to shift. Long enough for the tears to exhaust themselves into a raw, hollow ache behind my eyes. And in my mind, throughout, I was asking God, asking the old woman: why it had to be this way; why they didn't just let me die.

Eventually I washed my face. The water was cold, the stinging discomfort a welcome intrusion.

Back at the card table, I opened my laptop and typed my handle into the search bar: @joeyevans_cos.

The account was still there. 85,000 followers. The profile picture showed a woman with blonde hair and a half-smile, in white armor. The grid was frozen: the last post was from the convention, a photo of Sariel's wings catching the light. Below that, a photo of Emma "fixing" me. Eight days ago.

The comments beneath it started normally: hearts, fire emojis, the usual chorus of admiration. Then they changed. joey are you okay? and praying for you and I just heard, I can't believe it and, further down, messages that I couldn't read past the first few words because the screen blurred and I had to press my palms against my eyes.

I found Emma's page. Her most recent post was four days old, a single photo of Joey. The atrium shot from my first convention, the one where the light caught the white wig and made it glow. The caption was three words: I love you.

I closed the laptop; walked to the bed and lay down on my back; and the silence closed in from every direction: no sewing machine whirring, no Emma murmuring about DMs, no sound of cereal being eaten. Nothing.

The bed was too small for two people. It had only ever held one.

***

The uniform still fit me, technically; but by the third week back, I had punched a new hole in the belt with a multi-tool. By the second month, the black polo hung off my shoulders loosely.

I clocked in. I patrolled. I clocked out. The convention center rotated through its calendar of events and I moved through all of them like a man serving out a sentence. My shift supervisor asked if I was feeling okay. I told him I was fine, and he didn't ask again.

The other guards noticed. Dave, who I hadn't seen since Chicago, visited our center for a regional training seminar and studied me across the break room. "You lose somebody?" he asked, which was more perceptive than I had ever given him credit for.

"Something like that," I said.

He nodded and didn't push it.

Food became a problem I solved with the minimum viable effort. A sandwich from the gas station. A can of soup heated on the two-burner stove. I ate standing up, chewing without tasting, swallowing because the body demanded fuel and the body was all I had left.

My hands. That was the cruelest part.

I bought a sewing kit from the craft store three blocks from my apartment: a pack of needles, a spool of black thread, a pair of scissors, a square of muslin fabric. I sat at the card table under the overhead light and tried to sew a straight seam.

The needle looked absurd between my thumb and forefinger, a toothpick gripped by a bear. The first stitch was too wide. The second pulled the fabric into a pucker. I ripped both out and started again, and again. And then, just for a moment, my fingers found something. A rhythm. The needle dipped, caught, pulled through in a motion that was too precise to be beginner's luck. Three stitches, four, five, each one small and even and spaced with a regularity that my hands shouldn't have been capable of. Then the sixth stitch went sideways and the thread knotted.

I kept trying. Night after night, the card table became my sewing table, and the apartment filled with practice squares of muslin covered in uneven stitches that occasionally, inexplicably, produced a line of work that would have made Emma nod. I knew that Joey was in there, somewhere, buried beneath a hundred and eighty pounds of bone and sinew and wrongness, reaching up through my clumsy fingers.

The apartment stayed immaculate. I cleaned it the way Joey had cleaned, because the alternative was sitting still, and sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and remembering meant the lavender and the laughter and the weight of Emma's head in my lap and the slow rhythm of her breathing as she fell asleep.

***

I checked Emma's accounts every morning before work and every night before sleep. For three months after Joey's death, @emmaseaton_cos was silent. The 2B photo of Joey remained her most recent post, accumulating likes and comments like flowers on a grave.

Then, on a Tuesday in late November, she posted.

A commission piece: a meticulously constructed Asuka plugsuit displayed on a dress form, photographed against a clean white backdrop with close-ups for details. The caption read: Commission complete. DMs open for inquiries. That was it. No emoji. No exclamation marks. No shout outs to the community.

I stared at the photo for twenty minutes. The craftsmanship was flawless. She was working. She was surviving.

More posts followed, spaced out over weeks. A Jinx styled to perfection. A set of armor gauntlets with hand-painted weathering. Each one technically accomplished, each one emptied of the chaotic joy that had once animated her feed. Her follower count grew steadily. People appreciated the work and that was all that really mattered once Joey was gradually forgotten.

I watched her rebuild herself through my phone screen, one commission at a time, and I was… glad. I couldn't lose her as well.

But I couldn't comment. Wouldn't DM her. What would I say? Hi, I'm the forty year old security guard who used to be your dead roommate. How are you holding up?

***

On a Monday morning in March, I arrived at work to find the upcoming event schedule posted on the break room corkboard. A regional anime convention, mid-tier, the kind that drew ten thousand attendees and a modest vendor hall. My eyes moved down the guest list, scanning for the same thing I had been searching for over the past few months.

And for the first time in eight months, she was there.

Emma Seaton. Cosplay Guest. Vendor Hall Booth 47.

The dread arrived first, the certainty that seeing her would break something I had barely managed to hold together. But underneath it was something worse.

Hope.

***

Booth 47 was visible from my post at the junction between Halls A and B, if I stood at the right angle and craned my neck past the support column.

I had been doing exactly that for the past three hours.

Emma had arrived at eight, an hour before the doors opened. I had watched her unload boxes from a rolling cart, arrange merch on the table, and prop up a small sign with her rates. She was alone; just Emma and her boxes and the memory of a hundred booth setups.

She was wearing 2B.

Not the version I had worn years ago at our first convention together. This was the updated design, the one I had sketched in bed one night, refining the neckline, adjusting the sleeve proportions and materials, adding subtle panel work that gave the silhouette more dimension.

The blindfold sat across Emma's face, hiding her eyes. Between photos, her smile fell away like a mask being set down. Her shoulders would curve inward, and she would watch the crowd distractedly, checking her phone with the mechanical frequency of someone looking for nothing in particular.

My break came at one-fifteen. I clocked out, set my radio on the charging dock in the break room, and stood in the hallway for a full minute with my back against the wall, breathing. I had made sure to shave and have my hair cut; put on a new shirt and pants; something fitting, to make myself more presentable.

Then I walked to Booth 47.

She was adjusting a print display when I approached; her back to me, the 2B blindfold set aside on her booth table. I stopped three feet away.

"Excuse me. Emma?"

She turned. Up close, the dark circles around her eyes were visible beneath a layer of concealer. Her eyes moved over me: the security uniform, the lanyard, the gaunt face of a man who had lost thirty pounds he couldn't afford to.

"You're the security guard," she said. "Who helped me. You look different."

"Yeah. Stan." I shifted my weight, suddenly painfully aware of how large I was. "I saw the news about your friend. About Joey. I'm sorry."

Her gaze dropped to the table. "Thank you." She straightened a print that didn't need straightening. "That's kind of you."

The silence stretched. I should have walked away. A normal person would have walked away. Instead I heard myself ask: "You haven't been posting much. On Instagram."

Emma's eyebrows rose slightly. "You follow me?"

"I, uh, I saw some of your stuff after the convention. After what happened near the loading area. You're talented."

"I've been doing commissions," she said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant and completely closed. "Focusing on the business side." She began sorting again.

I didn't move away.

She glanced at me sideways, and I could see her trying to figure out why a middle-aged security guard was lingering at her booth making small talk.

"You don't need to stick around," she said. "I feel safe. The venue's been great."

"Of course. I just…" I cast around for something, anything, to keep the thread from breaking. Behind her, draped over a chair, I could see a costume laid out for tomorrow: black jacquard jacket with leather panels, suede pants, leather over-knee boots. Yennefer. "Are you doing a trial run on that tonight?"

She followed my gaze. "The Yennefer? Yeah, I want to test the makeup before tomorrow. I've been struggling with the eye look." She said the last part to the costume, not to me. "The smoky violet thing you can sometimes see in the game. I keep making it too warm."

I had made notes on this before our last convention together. "Are you starting with a cool-toned taupe as your transition shade? Because if you're jumping straight to violet, the undertone will pull warm against your skin. You need to lay a neutral base first, then build the purple into the outer crease. And blend with a clean brush between… "

Emma stared at me.

"A friend of mine was into it," I explained. "Cosplay makeup. She taught me some things. Do you want me to try?"

Emma studied me for a while with an expression I couldn't quite decipher. Then she reached behind the booth curtain and pulled out a makeup bag.

"Why not," she sighed.

I sat on a folding chair beside her. She handed me a palette and a set of brushes, and I selected a flat shader and a blending brush.

"Tilt your chin up," I said.

She tilted her chin up. Closed her eyes.

The first stroke was too heavy. I corrected, lightened my touch, and the second was better. The taupe went down in the crease. The violet layered over it, cool and smoky, exactly where Yennefer's signature shadow belonged.

Emma sat very still for about ten seconds, then she degenerated to the foot tapping thing she always did.

"Hold still, idiot." That was the only thing that would make her stop.

My left hand braced gently against her temple, steadying the work, and I felt the warmth of her skin and the slight pulse beneath it.

"I know why it happened," Emma said, her eyes still closed. "We had an argument just before, and she was trying to prove something to me." A tear escaped from beneath her lashes and traced a line across the work I had just finished. "Sometimes, when I wake up, I can still feel her beside me in bed."

My hand stopped. The brush hovered a quarter inch from her skin. The tear reached the edge of the violet shadow and I caught it with the pad of my thumb, gently, pressing just enough to absorb it without smearing the pigment.

"Face card first," I whispered. "Feelings later."

Emma's eyes opened.

I held her gaze for as long as I could bear it, then picked up a clean brush and began setting the shadow with powder.

"There," I said. "Check it."

She picked up her compact. Turned her head left, then right, then back. The Yennefer eye was perfect; cool violet bleeding into smoky charcoal at the outer corner. She looked at the mirror, then back at me. The compact seemed to shake in her fingers, but she didn't say anything.

I should have left. But I couldn't.

The Yennefer costume was right there, draped over Emma's repair kit. I stood up before I made the decision to stand.

"May I?" I said, already reaching.

Emma seemed anxious for a moment, as if I was about touch a precious relic. Then something seemed to occur to her and she nodded.

I lifted the jacquard jacket from the chair. My hands moved over the leather paneling, ensuring that everything was lying flat and the hand stitching hadn't pulled away. I couldn't find anything wrong with the sleeve trim and gloves; the beadwork along the sleeves of the jacket was exactly as I had stitched it.

"What's wrong with it?" I said, running my thumb along an interior seam. "Did something happen during…"

I stopped.

"No, nothing like that," she said. "I noticed something was wrong when I first wore it. Just needs some tidying up."

"Why didn't you tell me?" The words were out before I could catch them.

"Because…" Emma went very still. "She made it for me."

"I mean…" I scrambled. "I'm sorry, that was… my mother taught me how to sew. I'm just curious about the construction."

Emma said nothing.

I checked the lower half of the costume, the suede pants and the boots, and my eyes went straight to the rear zip on the left over knee shaft. The zipper tape had begun to separate from the leather at the very top. It was a small thing, maybe an inch of lift, but under convention wear it would travel the full length by lunchtime.

"It's here," I said, pleased with myself. "The tape wasn't caught deeply enough in the hand-stitching. It needs to be saddle stitched with a leather needle. And I should have run a thin line of contact cement under the tape edge first before the needle went in."

I set it down and reached for our repair kit, its contents in the same cheerful disarray that Emma's tools always inhabited. Scissors handles poking out at odd angles. Thread spools loose and tangled. A seam ripper buried under a nest of bias tape.

I couldn't work this way, so I began to sort.

The scissors went into a cluster, handles aligned. The thread spools organized by color: blacks together, silvers together, the single spool of deep violet beside them. The seam ripper extracted and placed parallel to the scissors. The bias tape wound neatly and tucked in a side pocket. Measuring tape coiled. Needles returned to their case. Bobby pins collected into a magnetic tray. Smallest on the left. Largest on the right.

"Joey?"

"Yeah…?" My hand froze over the repair kit, arranged now with a precision that was bordering on pathological.

I looked up. Emma was staring at me.

Not at my hands. At my face. Her eyes moved across my features with an intensity that reminded me of the way she used to examine a costume for flaws.

I tried to speak but all that emerged from my mouth were the same sobs and gasps that wracked my body on the first day of my return. I couldn't stop myself. I wanted to be seen by her, recognized by her; but not like this, not in this body.

I felt her hands on my shoulders, calming me as I fought for breath; her hand wiping away my tears. "I can explain," I said.

"I read your letter, you crybaby," she replied, but I could hear from the strain in her voice that she was crying as well.

Finally, when I had nothing left in me, when I had done all my crying, I looked up, ashamed of what I had become.

Emma wiped the tears from my eyes with her sleeve. Her eyes were red and swollen, and the Yennefer makeup smudged beyond repair, but there was a smile on her face.

"Welcome home, Joey Evans," she said, her hand resting on my cheek. "What took you so long?"