Sex in C Major

"Straight there, straight back?" Stefan asked.

"More or less. We'll get the bus. I've already exercised once, I'm not doing it again."

It was cold outside, and the world felt almost foreign and unusual. Like Stefan had forgotten. Which was ridiculous-it had only been a week-but still...he hunched deeper into his jacket, and walked a little too close to Yannis. The bus was noisy and busy, and he felt the odd sensation of being out of his depth, or being somewhere he shouldn't be.

"Why didn't Daz come?" he asked quietly.

Yannis rolled his eyes.

"Don't tell him I told you, but Darian is the world's biggest wuss when it comes to doctors."

"Really?"

"I had to have a district nurse come and help me after my surgeries because he couldn't so much as help change a dressing."

"Really?"

This, the master who could beat and torture and make Stefan bleed?

"Yep."

"But he's so...so rough."

"Because he knows what he's doing when it comes to that," Yannis said simply. "He's never dealt with a foot-long open wound before. Or seen a nipple after its been stapled back onto a chest."

"S-stapled?"

"Yeah. Metal staples all around the areola to stick it back on."

Stefan's stomach churned. A woman with a buggy looked faintly disgusted.

"He fainted when the doctor took them out," Yannis continued calmly, as though they were in private and not, well, on a bus. "Gibbering wreck is a good look on him."

Stefan could barely imagine that, and said so. Yannis simply smirked, and told him that he'd see.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if you want that chest gone, he'll see it. Though you might have to persuade him into the room, he learned his lesson about trying to be the hard man after mine."

A warm flush radiated from Stefan's chest at the assumptions-both that he would ever be able to get his top surgery, and that he would still be a part of Daz's life when it happened. "How...how long did it take?"

"Couple of hours."

"No, I mean...becoming...you."

Yannis frowned. "What?"

"Transitioning."

The woman was openly scowling.

Yannis simply shrugged.

"About seven years. Medically speaking. Couldn't put a number on how long since I wasn't a girl, so to speak."

"Seven!"

It seemed so long.

"Hormones and top surgery within the first year. Hysterectomy in the third. Then a bit of a battle for the bottom surgeries. Apparently not being bothered about sex or the ability to get hard meant I mustn't really want one, so I had a bit of pushback and will you stop staring, please, it's not like your baby is old enough to understand us!"

The sudden aside to the woman made Stefan jump, and then Yannis was pressing the button and the bus started to slow.

"Unbe-fucking-lievable," Yannis said, too loudly. "The people you get in this country."

"Go back to your own then!" the woman said hotly.

"With your attitude, you'd fit in better than I would," Yannis retorted, then took Stefan's shoulder and steered him off the bus.

They were a stop early, and the dark sky was beginning to snow again, but the sudden flash of fury had Stefan too intrigued to care.

"What?"

"Sorry, I just-I didn't think you really...got mad."

"Easily."

"Really?" Stefan asked.

"Mm."

"Not in front of me before."

"You've never made me mad before."

"Has Daz?"

Yannis nodded. "Of course he has, it's like dating a hyperactive puppy sometimes."

"A puppy?"

"Oh he's all Rottweiler with you, but he's that dog out of the toilet roll adverts when it's not about power play and sex. Try catching him playing with the cat sometime."

Yannis told a story about getting their cat-one of a pair of kittens foisted by a colleague onto Daz, who had brought them home full of enthusiasm and without a single thought as to how they were supposed to have kittens when Yannis had had his first genital surgery not three weeks earlier. Stefan was torn between outright disbelief-aside from maybe the kiss attacks he'd seen Daz bestow on Yannis occasionally, he didn't really recognise his master in Yannis' Darian-and hilarity. There was something sweet in the idea of this aggressive dominant jubilantly presenting kittens to his bedridden partner and only at that exact moment realising why it might not have been a stellar idea.

Then Stefan stopped.

"No," Yannis said. "Keep going."

The doctor's surgery. A small, two-storey building wedged between a community centre and a house. Marked out only by the NHS sign, and a nurse smoking on the steps outside.

"I don't want to do this."

Yannis didn't so much as twitch.