This is... okay. This is weird, and kind of cruel and horrifying. Um. If you've problem with child abuse, physical or sexual, it's not in here directly, but it's definitely bordering onto it. This contains elements that may make some people uncomfortable (gender confusion, abuse allusions, crossdressing), and you have been warned. Spoilers for chapter 47.
The dress is small, and the dress is blue. Not like his eyes, deep and endless ocean or perhaps poisonous like anti-freeze. No, it's powdery. It's light, and it's airy, like sky. When he grasps it in shaking fingers, it's lacy and delicate.
These tiles are cold. They hurt his feet.
"Go ahead, Sora. Go ahead. Take off the shirt, Sora."
Daddy's legs are slung over the porcelain lip of the tub, and a rectangular glass bottle sits in his lap. It is perhaps filled with water, but it smells much sharper, and angrier. Even at this age, he is six, and he knows it's better not to argue. He wouldn't want to be bothersome. She wouldn't want to be bothersome. It. Sora hates pronouns. There are so many, and none of them are right. Sora likes "it." "It" sounds ugly, and indescribable. It suits him perfectly.
"And the pants, Sora, keep going. Take off your pants too. Pasty white legs."
The shirt is neatly folded, and set onto the counter. The pants are following. The powder blue dress, hanging from the door handle, it shouldn't look so threatening. Sora's fingers are trembling too much to undo the tie, and he nearly lets out a sound of distress - please, goddess, if there was any, help him, foiled by a simple pair of pants - when the knot comes undone. The pants are an equal color of blue, powdery. Scrubs. They're comfortable.
He shivers in his underwear. They're made for little boys, but he is not one. But he's not made for the little girls' underwear either. The little boys' underwear is cheaper. His hands cup over his crotch area, as heat starts bubbling upwards in his chest. It's thick heat, humid, and it fills his throat. He feels quite like he can't breathe, and tries to swallow around it. It feels like swallowing cotton. It feels like swallowing a pillow.
"Put on the dress. Sora's a nice little girly's name, huh? Why don't you put on the dress, Sora?"
There's that heat, it's climbing upwards, it's boiling behind his eyes, like water. Like before someone cooks noodles, just like his limbs feel like. He doesn't speak, and he takes the dress off the hanger. His father bought it at the thrift store today. It was only fifty cents. The hem is torn, and the sleeve has a stain on it. It was forgotten, and unwanted. Sora is sure that it fits him perfectly, although he is not a little girl.
"Do you like the dress? It was cheap. That's good. That's real good." It is good. He shouldn't spend money on gifts, not when he's giving it to nothing. "Just like your mommy would've bought you. But she's not here, is she? She's gone. She's gone."
Sora swallows around that cotton again, and his throat is real tight, it doesn't allow for much give. He starts to step into the dress, a puddle on the ground, when a larger hand lashes out and catches his wrist. When his father leans in, he smells like shoe polish and cupcake frosting. It should smell homey. It doesn't. "That's not quite right, is it? You don't have little girly parts, do you, Sora?"
There are fingers where they don't belong, and Sora drops the dress with his other hand. He does cry out now, when they catch under the elastic of his underwear and tug, sideways, not off. "You don't have little girly parts. Go ahead. Let's see, Sora. Let's see."
There's a blur around the edges of his vision, and it slowly clouds over and inward. Not like fog, cool and damp and enveloping. But hot, like a fever, and it spills down his cheeks, around his chin, drips off onto his hands as he drops the underwear with trembling fingers. His father releases his wrist. He can't see him leaning back in the tub, but he can hear the muted 'thump', he can see the shape lean backwards. He shivers from the cold and stares straight ahead at the shampoos on the tub rack, the flood still seeping down his cheeks.
He feels like a failure. Crying is so bothersome. Big boys don't cry. But little girls do cry. Does that make him a little girl? Why would a little girl wear boys' underwear? It just makes more tears come, delineating messy lines down his cheekbones, pooling off onto his chest, onto the tiles.
"What is that?" his father speaks up again, and Sora doesn't answer, even if he knows he should. There are questions, and then there are rhetoric questions, and he knows very well not to speak unless spoken to. He doesn't trust his voice, at this rate. He doesn't know if he remembers how to use it. He's not sure he has one anymore, or perhaps it's trapped underneath that heat, underneath that pillow in his throat, lost somewhere in his body. Perhaps it's deserted him, gone to a better person who will get to use it. Perhaps it's broken.
"What do you do with that? Sora. I'm talking to you. What the hell is that? Put your fingers there."
Sora's hands clasp together at once, in front of his chest. He can't see, he can't see, he shakes his head, hurriedly, and the wind from the action stings at his eyes, tiny droplets whipping off his cheeks.
"TOUCH it." It barks out so quickly and suddenly that Sora does cry out, shortly, frightened, a small yip in the quiet of the room as his hands latch together tighter. His knuckles are turning white. "You can't even answer the damn question. I'm telling you what to do. Your father's telling you what to do. Go ahead, Sora. We're waiting for answers. We're waiting for answers to your questions."
The whimper that escapes his throat is very small, and very foreign. Sora is convinced that it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to a small, wounded animal. It belongs to a kitten, perhaps. An injured one, that's been separated from its mother. It's on shaky legs, it's small, it's lost, and it needs to lick its wounds. Yes. That's the sort of sound he just made. It wasn't a Sora noise. Sora wasn't entirely sure what a Sora noise even sounded like. Perhaps Sora sounded like a kitten.
His fingers refuse to unclench for a few long seconds, and when they do, it's fast, spasmodically, almost as if two magnets have been forced apart. One hand rests against his chest, a soft, cold palm over his heart. He can feel it, fluttering beneath his chest, delicate as hummingbird wings, and beating just as fast. What delicate creatures humans were, that small stressors could send their hearts atwitter. His own is crashing into his rib cage, a staccato rhythm in the quiet of the room, and he suddenly feels very much aware of it, worried his father can hear, and will judge him for it.
He doesn't mean to. He didn't mean for anything to happen.
Tiny, cold fingers inch downward, gingerly, shakily, mapping out uncharted territory as weak as a baby fawn on new legs. They walk across goosepimpled skin, down his belly, down to his hips, stuttering before a hairless, uncharted territory. Sora hears the clink of glass, a bottle neck against teeth, as his fingers stutter to a halt. "I can't. I can't."
"What iis/i it, Sora?"
Sora's breath comes out in tiny, shuddering pants, his fingers slowly starting back on their path, running over a very small bump, which leads to a crevice, also small. He doesn't know what that means. He doesn't know what little girls feel like or look like. He doesn't know what little boys feel like or look like. He doesn't know how to fix it, he doesn't even know what's DIFFERENT, he just knows that he's wrong, wrong, wrong.
His hand jumps away from his skin as though he's been burned as he lets out another small cry, and he clasps them back together, hurriedly, letting his fingers thread and his knuckles tighten to a bone-white color all over again. The tears are flowing anew, as he sucks in a shuddering breath and bends his legs together at the knees. He feels shy. He feels wrong. He feels naked and wrong and cold.
His father sets down the bottle. He can tell, because there is a small thud of glass against the bottom of the tub. "Put your clothes on."
Sora can't be told fast enough. He yips, and scrambles, tugging his underwear up, clutching his shirt and his pants to his body and backing quickly into the corner as his father clambers out of the tub. He can't see, he can't see. It isn't hitting he fears, it's more words, ugly words, words that snake around and slink underneath his skin, they twist about his veins and sink deep, deep into his bones and just ilinger/i for a while.
"D-d-don't--" he manages out in a small stutter as he watches the shadow linger over him, and then suddenly it isn't. Sora sinks to the cold tiles, hugging his clothes to his body, and without his father to see, he finally lets himself go, racking sobs that shake his body and make his chest ache with the effort.
The dress is gone. For some little girl to wear. For some little boy to rip.