Pidge wasn't sure where they first got the idea for it. Sure, she had been pretending to be a boy for the majority of the past year. And yeah, she had kept her new aesthetic. But she had never said that she wasn't a girl. In fact, she straight out said it when she revealed her deception. So how in the hell did the team think that she was nonbinary?!

She hadn't realised it at first, that they hadn't been using female pronouns. Or any, for that matter. It took her a while to realize it. The first time that had she thought about it was on their third game night.

"I put down a five, man. You can't just drop a seven out of nowhere; you have to coordinate." Lance said, waving his cards around to accent his complaint. Pidge noted that he had a draw four card and an abundance of blue cards.

Keith huffed and reshuffled his cards. "Both cards are yellow. You can match colors too."

"No, you can't." Lance insisted. This time Pidge caught sight of another card, a yellow skip card.

Pidge sighed. This was the third time this round that they'd gotten into card mechanics. Pidge had already clarified the rules, multiple times. Hell, even Allura was getting and understanding of it. "You have to match the color or the number. Keith's move was valid." She explained, pointing to each of the offending cards in turn.

Keith fanned himself with his cards. "Thank you."

Lance grumbled. "They can't possibly remember all the freaking rules for every freaking card game we get."

They? Who the hell was 'they'? Pidge was the only one who had the rule books to just about every earth game down only one that she was contested on was Monopoly, but they changed the rules for that one too many times for her interpretation to matter, let alone anyone else's.

Hunk nudged her and she placed down a greed skip card. Lance frowned as his turn was skipped.

Pidge didn't bother thinking too hard on the offending pronoun. It must've been a slip on the tongue, nothing more.

OoOoOoOoO

The second time that it occurred was a week later, at the dinner table.

"Pass me the salt." Someone said, mouth filled with food.

Pidge hadn't really been paying attention to anything other than her plate. She was tired as hell and hungry enough to eat a cow from the past four hours of grueling training. She shoveled more of Hunk's cooking into her mouth, not bothering to look up.

"Yo, Pidge. The salt." Lance repeated, slightly annoyed at the delay in his request.

Pidge looked up, a few noodles hanging out of her mouth. Lance pointed at Hunk and then his food. Hunk had a thing about salt on his food; to him, it was both unneeded and unnecessary, not to mention slightly insulting. Rather than incurring the wrath of the formidable Hunk, the plan was to discreetly let a Paladin close to the salt shaker know, before passing it under the table. She slurped the noodles into her mouth and slipped the salt into her palm. Lance grabbed it from her hand and poured some into his hand before sprinkling it over his food.

"I can't imagine that they find the food that amazing, that they never need any salt of their own." Lance mumbled.

Hunk slid his chair back and searched the table top for the missing salt shaker. "What's that about salt?" He asked menacingly.

Pidge shrugged it off as a misspoken word and finished her food. She was too hungry to stop for polite conversation and didn't exactly feel in the mood to interfere in Lance and Hunk's impending search for salt.

The third time that she thought about it was on the way to the training room.

Hunk walked beside her in comfortable silence. That was one of the things that she liked the most about him. He was easy to be around because he understood people. He knew when to be quiet and when to talk and when to be serious and when to interject with a funny quip.

As they approached the elevator that would bring them to the training room, his expression shifted nervously. Pidge tried to ignore it, but he kinda looked like he had to go pee really bad and she was unsure if she was supposed to be concerned.

"Is something wrong?" Pidge finally asked.

Hunk sighed in relief, a big gust of air leaving him as if he was a balloon that she stuck a pin in. "It's been really bugging me, but I didn't want to annoy you with it." He took a deep breath, and when he released it, he brought his words with it. "Are your pronouns 'they' and 'them'?"

Pidge blinked. That was new. While she had known more than a few people that identified as such, she never thought that she could be interpreted as a nonbinary. She laughed nervously. "Uh, sorry to break it you Hunk, but I'm a girl. Just the standard 'she' and 'her' for me, thank you very much."

"Really?" Hunk questioned, brow raised unbeleivabely high.

"Yeah."

"Oh." He said, somewhat still in shock as they entered the training deck. For such an intuitive crew, it came as a surprise to them to find out her gender, for the second time. It was an even bigger surprise when she admitted that she was gay a week later.

Author's note:

Before anyone gets offended, I'd like to explain why I included this one-shot. I am gender-fluid, but my birth sex is female. I understand the LGBT community and I'd absolutely love to have more LGBT characters in media, especially cartoons. But, I also think it's important to have variation in female characters too. Most geek girls, or nerdy females on tv are ridiculously pretty, with a pair of glasses added in to give the 'nerd' look to her. I think it's important to have girls like Pidge, who are just fine with their gender, but present less girlishly and more realistically. While I have nothing against nonbinary Pidge stories, I've seen a heck of a lot of them, and a lot less of female Pidge stories. I just wanted to bring a new take on her character, especially with the aggressive view on her character. (You may have also noticed the aggressiveness in the different ships, but that's a different one shot.)

Feel free to send in prompts and ideas for me to write. I'll write any ship, any gender, anything really. And I mean it.