Chapter Notes: The final chapter! It’s been a journey. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm and support for this fic; I never imagined people would love it as much as they have, and it makes me stupidly happy. Alllll the love for trans!Howard, WHO IS MY BABY.

Now, most people in their stories of gender and self-discovery and all of that, there’s certain sorts of trials and tribulations you expect, yeah? Maybe they have to come out to their family and it don’t go well, or maybe they get beat up by arseholes on the street, or maybe they’re dating someone who don’t take it well and they have to have a whole, ooh, am I gay now, am I straight, what does it meeean? thing. That sort of stuff.

Not me and Howard; me and Howard went and got trapped in another dimension. ‘Course, that doesn’t have anything to do with her being trans, but it doesn’t always, does it? Sometimes mad shit just goes on happenin’.

‘This is all your fault!’ Howard hissed, the back of her head pressing into Vince’s as she craned around the pole they were tied to.

‘Well, I wasn’t to know, was I?’ he shot back. ‘Never been to this dimension before, have I? I didn’t exactly have time to brush up on the etiquette beforehand.’

‘I always said you’d be mistaken for a witch.’

‘Yeah, in the Forties!’ Vince protested. ‘Not in… weird alternate mirror dimensions!’

‘I can’t believe they thought I was your familiar!’ Howard continued on behind him, sounding aggrieved. ‘I’m a person, not an ape!’

Vince shrugged, and then winced as the motion tugged on the rope around their wrists. ‘They ain’t always apes, familiars. And Naboo’s not a witch, he’d probably be well narked if he heard you calling him that. Witches’ familiars are usually cats and things, aren’t they?

‘Oh, great,’ Howard griped. ‘Like that’s much better. Not even mistaken for a biped.’

‘S alright, innit? Cats are well sexy, Howard, y’could do worse.’

That gave Howard a little pause, and Vince could practically see her face working through the reactions, twisting around as she tried to work out whether she ought to be flattered or offended. Even though they were tied up awaiting execution at the hands of a load of tiny hairy people, Vince couldn’t help his smile.

Hairy wasn’t entirely correct, though. The stuff the people were covered in was more like furry, grey-green moss. It looked dead soft, the kind of thing Vince might have taken a lazy afternoon nap on when he was a nipper if he’d found it growing in a sunny hollow or the vee of a comfortingly knobbly old tree. Then again, it also looked like the kind of thing that might just grow right over you while you were taking that nap and swallow you up, so maybe not.

‘Though they ain’t exactly human,’ Vince said, casually following the tail of a thought out into speech. ‘So maybe animals aren’t their idea of what a witch’s familiar looks like. Maybe it’s just tall Northern ladies with mad hair and moustaches.’

Howard twisted, elbowing him as much as she was capable of in their position. ‘I think I preferred cat.’

‘Rrrrow,’ Vince miaowed, fake-sexy like it was Hallowe’en and he had on ears and a catsuit. Howard choked audibly.

Honestly, it was her fault they’d ended up here, wherever here was, in the first place, even if it was Vince who’d got them tied up for being a witch. She was the one who’d tripped and fallen through one of Naboo’s mirrors, though what Naboo was doing keeping dimensional portals open and unprotected where anyone who happened to be snooping around his room (not to mention certain shamans and gorillas who made a habit of getting blazed off their tits) might fall into them, Vince didn’t know. Didn’t seem like very safe business to him.

And now they were trussed up together, one on either side of one of a large circle of wooden poles, ankles bound and wrists tied together at their sides. Howard had tried to wriggle free when the moss people had gone off and left them on their own, but had only succeeded in giving them both rope-burn.

‘Now, witch! You and your demon-consort familiar!’

Howard started hugely at the voice, a tug that knocked Vince’s head against the pole, and he winced. ‘Ow, easy.’

The leader of the moss people had returned, with a cadre of other shapes behind them. They had no real facial features that Vince could see, but an oddly familiar American accent issued from somewhere in there. ‘Now it is time for you to die. Have you repented of your crimes?’

‘We ain’t committed any crimes!’ Vince protested.

‘Silence!’

‘What, you asked!’

‘Silence!’ they snapped again. A jerk of the head, and one of the other moss people shuffled over, pulling out a knife and roughly cutting the rope that bound him and Howard to the pole, jerking them stumblingly over to face the crowd. Vince focussed on trying not to fall over, and shot a nasty look at the leader as he rubbed at his raw wrists.

‘Now!’ barked the leader, ‘your lying eyes will be gouged out and then preserved and displayed as a warning to others. Yours especially, witch, will make a very fine trophy,’ they added leeringly, and Vince sneered at them. Not that that did any good, but he could do without being perved over by plant people who wanted to kill him.

‘And then,’ they went on, ‘you will be killed and reconstituted into fertiliser. Do you have any questions?’

Normally, this was the part where Howard would start cowering and clinging to Vince and whimpering about Don’t kill her, she’s got so much to give! Vince knew the script. Except this time she wasn’t, and Vince glanced over curiously. She’d drawn herself up, chin lifted and jaw working nervously, and there was a strange expression of clarity on her face. Her eyes glittered under the alien stars.

Perhaps feeling Vince’s gaze on her, Howard’s eyes darted over, meeting Vince’s in a look heavy with significance. She looked like she was trying hard to communicate something to him without saying anything, and Vince shook his head, eyes wide in silent speech for I’ve got no idea what you’re trying to say.

Howard looked briefly exasperated. ‘Distract them!’ she hissed out of the corner of her mouth. Vince’s brow furrowed.

‘What? How?’

‘I don’t know!’ Just… buy me a minute, okay?’

‘Before you kill us!’ Vince burst out wildly, no idea of what he was going to say next. ‘Um. You should know.’

‘What?!’ snapped the leader.

‘We die very… messily,’ Vince ad-libbed, not sounding even remotely convincing to his own ears. ‘Yeah, um, our species, we… combust? When we die? Boom, big fuckoff explosion, meat and guts and shit everywhere, it’s well nasty. So, I mean, if you’re gonna kill us, you’ll probably wanna put down tarps or something? Definitely cover yourselves up, at least. I’m just thinkin’ about you, here.’

The leader paused uncertainly. ‘Lies! You expect us to believe you?’

Vince widened his eyes, offering a hopeful smile. ‘Go on, mate, look at me; you think I could lie with this face? Honestly, I’m, um, you know, just tryin’ to– one last good deed before I die, yeah?’

He could feel the jiggling nudge of Howard’s elbow against his side as she rooted in one of her pockets, and then suddenly she was shouting ‘Hai!’ like she’d been watching too many old kung fu movies, and the air was an explosion of white. Vince choked, stumbling back and squeezing his eyes shut.

‘Oh, shitnuts, it burns!’ the leader was yowling, and behind them a whole chorus of the other moss people, hissing and shouting over each other:

‘Ow, ow, bugger!’

‘Get it off, what is it!?’

‘Mommyyyyy!’

‘Run away!’

‘That’s right!’ Vince coughed, throat still too dry to manage a proper shout, but having a valiant go at it anyway. ‘You better run! Told you I was a witch, didn’t I?’

And then he doubled over to hack up a glob of disturbingly chalky-looking phlegm into the blue grass. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Ew.’

When he unbent himself, the powdery cloud had dispersed, and it was just him and Howard, alone in the circle of posts, casting dim shadows under the starlight. The moss person with the knife had dropped it in their haste to flee, and Vince hopped over to it clumsily, bending to saw through the rope around his ankles and then tossing it to Howard. Howard looked like she’d run afoul of a particularly vicious baker, dusted white from her hair all the way down her shirt, her expression pleased and baffled under the patina of white. ‘It worked!’

Vince laughed, more from relief than anything. ‘What worked? What was that?’

‘Baking soda.’ She hefted a little orange box in one hand, and Vince blinked at it, uncomprehending.

‘Baking soda?’

Howard cleared her throat in that way she had, somehow both self-important and self-conscious, and ran a hand through her hair, shaking loose another small storm of powder. ‘You recall my brief stint as an amateur naturalist?’

‘Nnnnnot really, no,’ Vince said without much guilt. Howard had tried on so many improbable vocations over the years, Vince could hardly be expected to remember all of them.

Howard sniffed. ‘Well, I recalled from my research at the time that baking soda is a safe, simple, and cost-effective way to get rid of the plague of unwanted moss in the domestic lawn or garden.’ The rote-memorisation quality to her voice faltered slightly, and she shrugged. ‘And I thought, well, they look a bit like moss, it’s worth a try.’

‘And you just happened to have a box of baking soda in your pockets?’ Vince bent again, peering incredulously. ‘How big are your pockets, even?’

Howard patted with satisfaction at pockets which definitely didn’t look big enough to have held the carton of baking soda. ‘Always pays to be prepared, Vince.’

Vince shook his head, a breath hissing between his teeth. ‘Girl guide gone mental, you are.’ Despite her evident pleasure, though, Howard was still looking rather baffled, and Vince laughed up at her in sudden, unexpected realisation. ‘Hey, Howard! Check you out! You’re finally a proper Action Hero!’

‘I am?’ Howard said, blinking, and then, ‘I am! Hah! What’d I always tell you? Monsoon Moon, comin’ atcha like a beam, like a ray, like a… botanist!’

Vince snorted as Howard delivered a series of flailing karate chops into the night air, but she subsided into stillness soon enough, looking down at her hands as if she’d never seen them before, curling them up tight and then spreading her fingers out in a fan.

‘I am,’ she repeated, and her tone was so quiet and wondering that for a moment, Vince felt like he was intruding on something intensely private. Howard’s eyes were very bright when she looked from her hands over to Vince, her cheeks drawn tight into a wobbly sort of smile. There was a smudge of baking soda in her moustache. ‘Picked a good time for it,’ she murmured. ‘Finally. Saved your arse.’

Vince chuckled, but it caught weirdly under his collarbone on the way out, like his throat was a mostly-empty tube of toothpaste. He swallowed. His face was threatening to do something weird, he could tell; there was a brittle, crackling feeling sneaking around his mouth and nose, and he drew in a sharp, fortifying breath. That wouldn’t do.

‘So now that you’re officially an Action Hero…’ Vince sidled into Howard’s personal space, letting one side of his mouth quirk up in a smirk (a much more acceptable thing for his face to be doing, under the circumstances). ‘You know what happens at the end of a proper Action Hero adventure, don’t you?’

Howard levelled a wry look at him, but Vince could see she was still buzzing, adrenaline and victory and sudden surprised self-awareness.

‘Well…’ Vince bit gently down on his lip, feeling the stretch as he let it slowly out between his teeth. ‘They get the girl, don’t they?’

An eyebrow got involved in Howard’s expression.

‘And I know I’m not exactly a girl,’ Vince went on. ‘But close enough, yeah?’

Howard had drifted closer as he spoke, her eyes warm, curious little slits, and Vince cocked his chin up in expectation of a kiss, but it didn’t come. Instead, Howard paused bare inches away, and hummed thoughtfully.

‘Mmm, I dunno, Vince. If I’m a real Action Hero now, I might be entitled to someone prettier.’

‘Prettier!? Watch it, cheeky; there’s no-one prettier than me.’

Howard’s face finally split into a wide, genuine grin, and she bent neatly to smack a chaste kiss against Vince’s mouth. He smiled, private and close-lipped, lifting his arms to hook around Howard’s neck, hands insinuating themselves into her hair and finding a curl to twirl ‘round his finger.

‘Mm, no, a proper one,’ he murmured. Howard obliged.

Vince felt the pause and querysome little noise Howard made into his mouth before she pulled out of the kiss to look around them, frowning vaguely. ‘How’re we gonna get home? It’s not like there’s a mirror for us to walk back through.’

Vince shrugged carelessly. ‘Naboo’ll show up eventually, won’t he? He’ll show up all bent outta shape that we were goin’ through his stuff and haul our arses home like he always does. You can rely on Naboo.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Howard’s arms swung aimlessly at her sides as she tipped back on her heels to peer up at the sky. Now they weren’t trussed up about to be horribly murdered, Vince was able to appreciate that whatever planet or dimension or alternate universe they were on or in was actually pretty gorgeous, all mad kaleidoscopic night sky and weird feathery purple trees and mesas and palisades behind them, glowing a soft cadmium orange.

It wasn’t exactly romantic, Vince thought, but it was pretty close. Beautiful scenery and a starlit sky, even if nothing was the right colour and they were covered in baking soda. He dropped into a squat, leaning back to sit with a little ‘oof’, stretching his legs out in front of him and bracing himself on his arms to look up at the sky. The moon was out, but this one was sort of yellowish, and had no cheerful, simple face looking back.

‘Reckon we should probably just stay where we are, yeah?’ He lifted his voice. ‘Make it easier for Naboo to find us when he comes looking. No sense in going wandering off and probably gettin’ caught up in some other nonsense.’

He felt a bit like a teenager. Not the way he’d ever really felt himself as a teenager, but the way teenagers in American films felt, sitting in cars and trying not to be too obvious.

Howard’s mouth twitched in a way that said she knew what Vince was doing and wasn’t sure whether she ought to call him out on it or not. Vince’s eyes flicked from studying the unfamiliar constellations to give her his best innocent look, and she huffed a little laugh through her nose.

‘A very sensible suggestion.’

They pulled hastily apart when Naboo finally arrived some time later, Howard scrambling to her feet and wiping the back of her hand over her mouth, tugging at the hem of her shirt like they’d been doing worse than just having a bit of a snog. Vince, a little flushed but unabashed, stayed where he was, half propped up in the long grass. Naboo left Bollo to struggle with rolling up the carpet, and clumped over, looking unimpressed. Vince nodded affably up at him.

‘Alright, Naboo?’

‘What, this is it? No catastrophes, you haven’t been locked up or violated by monsters or anything? Y’just decided, oh, you really needed to get stuck in an alternate dimension so you could mess around? Couldn’t’ve done that in the dimension you were already in?’

‘Nah, we got nabbed almost as soon as we got here. All set up to be killed by the locals, but Howard pulled out the magic, last minute, wham, ran ‘em right off. Aw, you should’ve seen it, dead impressive.’

‘Howard pulled out the magic,’ Naboo repeated. His dark eyes were inscrutable as ever, but his tone was just doubtful enough to be vaguely insulting. Or it probably would have been insulting, at any rate, if it hadn’t been so entirely understandable.

‘I did, as a matter of fact,’ said Howard, giving her stomach a little brush with her fingertips, and Vince looked over at her, quiet and curious. He knew well enough what Howard’s boasting sounded like, desperate overcompensating bluster, and this wasn’t that. She still sounded proud, but it was the sort of pride that didn’t need anyone else’s affirmation to make it real. Vince pressed his knees together, squirming a little on the spot.

For an impossibly long moment, Naboo just studied Howard impassively. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he nodded. ‘All right. Well done, then.’

Both Howard and Vince blinked. ‘Well done?’

Naboo shrugged. ‘Well, you had to grow out of being a total useless coward at some point, didn’t you?’

It was the worst kind of backhanded compliment, but coming from Naboo, it was practically ringing praise. Howard’s face convulsed awkwardly, and then a smile fluttered across it as if blown there by a hesitant wind.

Vince grinned outright. ‘Cheers, Naboo.’

Bollo, out of breath and hauling the rolled-up carpet, trundled up behind Naboo, and gave Howard a nod and a grunt. ‘Howard learning.’

‘Learning what?’ Howard wanted to know, but Bollo just shook his head.

‘You see.’

Naboo grimaced, wrinkling his nose. ‘Right, are we done being all lovey dovey here? ‘Cos I think that’s about as much sincerity as I can handle.’

And at that, Howard laughed, a real, proper, fond laugh that creased up her face and left white lines of baking soda in all the laugh lines, and ambled over to clap Naboo on the shoulder. ‘You know, Naboo, I think we are.’

Naboo pulled away, the nose-wrinkle spreading out to encompass his entire face. ‘All right, all right, we’re all proud of you. Now I wanna get back. Come on, Bollo, get the carpet out.’

‘I just finish rolling it up!’ Bollo protested, and Naboo looked at him flatly.

‘Did you want to hang around here any longer than we have to?’

And, grumbling, Bollo assented.

Howard was terrified of flying on planes, but for some reason, Naboo’s carpet had never bothered her. Fewer mechanical parts to potentially fail and send them all plummeting to a horrible death, Vince supposed. So she didn’t cling to Vince as they flew back, and Vince didn’t hold her hand for comfort as Naboo and Bollo bickered over directions. After one of their near-death adventures, Vince was usually fizzing over with energy; he’d want to go out dancing or something to wear out the giddy adrenaline left over. Now, though, there was something welling up from under his lungs, but it wasn’t the usual bouncing zip. It was a warm feeling like a throatful of hot tea that made him feel curiously grounded, for all they were hundreds of feet in the air.

He leaned over to knock shoulders with Howard, and bit his lip around a smile. ‘You are gonna have to teach me how you do that with your pockets. I could well use that; you’ve seen how tight my trousers are, I can’t fit hardly anything into my pockets.’

Howard just tapped her nose with a finger. ‘Tricks of the trade, Vince.’

‘What trade? The having-too-many-pockets-and-keeping-enough-stuff-in-them-to-build-a-Spinning-Jenny trade?’ Vince wasn’t actually even sure what a Spinning Jenny was, but he remembered the name from one of Howard’s lectures.

‘Ahh, but I could build a Spinning Jenny if I had to, if the circumstances called for it; you’d not be laughing then.’

The wind stung Vince’s eyes, but he grinned anyway, leaning playfully in. ‘Oh, really?’

‘If the two of you are gonna start snogging back there,’ Naboo called over his shoulder, ‘I will have Bollo shove you off the carpet.’

Vince didn’t see as that deserved a response, but Howard harrumphed. ‘Of course we’re not; Vince might be prone to such reckless behaviour, but I am well aware that that would contravene safety regulations.’

Vince was pretty sure there weren’t any safety regulations for flying carpets, and that even if there were, Naboo had probably broken all of them by now, but Howard’s tone was so deadpan that Vince honestly had no idea whether she was joking or not. Her hair was whisking about all over her face and her eyes were all squinted up underneath it, but there was a definite twinkle happening in the midst of all the crow’s feet, and suddenly Vince was smiling so hard it hurt.

He kept on smiling all the way home, even when Howard squinted suspiciously at him and demanded to know why.

So, that’s it! More or less, for now. I thought that seemed like a pretty good place to end things, anyway. Narrative and all that.

Now, the thing about Howard is, she likes to take things slow. Always has done. I’m the one always throwin’ meself in at the deep end and just goin’ with the flow. (Howard’s pointed out that that’s a very jazzy outlook; I’d point out that Howard is a filthy liar.) Howard prefers to sit down and research for ages and ages, and doesn’t end up doing anything half the time, for all her banging on about being a Wild and Impulsive Woman of Action. So that’s how she’s doing this, taking it slow.

She hasn’t picked out a new first name, doesn’t even know if she’s gonna, yet, but she figured she could handle the baby step of changing her middle name instead. Which, fair enough, Tom and Jerry were rubbish middle names. Mama and Papa Moon are generally pretty boring and sensible (in a good way! Howard’s mum always gave me biscuits when I were a nipper), but I always wondered what that was about. So now it’s Beatrice. Howard Beatrice Moon. It’s got a ring to it, yeah?

Still, it’s pretty wicked seein’ how happy she is now. Not all the time, mind; like I said, this ain’t a proper ending to the story, but loads more than she had been for ages. Sometimes we have a bit of a cuddle and a kiss, and that’s well nice, and sometimes Howard freaks out and we have to stop, but sometimes she doesn’t. And sometimes I call her Bea, just to see the way her little crab eyes crinkle up when she smiles.

Culumacilinte

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Pea: or, the Rediscovery of Howard B. Moon

In Which There is an Adventure, and Howard Becomes a Woman of Action

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In Which There is an Adventure, and Howard Becomes a Woman of Action

Contents

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