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Becoming Pidge is difficult—not just because she has to forge papers and create an entire new identity. Becoming Pidge feels like defeat, like everything she knows that people think about her but are too polite to say: that she still “looks like a boy,” that she’s only in a phase, that she doesn’t really know what she wants. But something happened on that mission, and she’s going to get her dad and Matt back, even if it means pretending like this.
It’s the worst at first. She’s not used to people calling her Pidge; she forgets to turn around when they call her name, she almost writes “Katie” on her papers every day for the first week, she flinches when she hears the teachers saying “he” for her. She hates it. It’s everything she’d been avoiding, everything she had tried so hard for the past four years to stop, to get rid of. Once she’d come out to her parents and started transitioning, she thought she’d be able to escape all of this for the rest of...well, forever, actually.
But she doesn’t, and she can’t, and it follows her for almost a year. At least she chose a name removed from herself to go by.
It doesn’t get easier hearing “he” but she reminds herself that there’s a reason she’s doing this, that there’s someone who needs her help, that the Garrison can’t keep the truth from her forever. So long as she endures, she’s going to get Matt and her dad back. She knows she is. She has to.
--
Katie’s mom doesn’t know about the new identity. She knows that Katie’s at the Garrison, but Katie had been very meticulous about keeping this plan from her mother. She wouldn’t approve, no matter how persuasive Katie’s argument is—or worse, she’d take it as Katie trying to “go back” on transitioning, and that’s a whole can of worms that she can’t deal with right now if she’s trying to find information about the Kerberos mission. She has too much on her plate. So she doesn’t tell her mom.
No one knows. It’s easy to pretend; she’d started hormone blockers when she was twelve, but otherwise, she just looks ambiguous. People think of her as just another unfortunately short boy, and she uses her age to her advantage—they think that her voice isn’t as deep yet only because she hasn’t gone through puberty. They aren’t wrong, so she lets them think that.
Sometimes, someone will get it right—“right” in the sense that they see her and use “she” and someone else is forced to correct them. Katie doesn’t correct them. She tries to the first time it happens because she knows that that’s what a boy would do—but she can’t bring herself to say it. It’s refreshing after months of nothing by he and him and young man and sir.
Lance and Hunk are usually the ones to correct people when they say “she” or when they falter, unsure of which to use. Katie knows she should be thankful for them because it keeps her from ever having to say it out loud, but she’s only a little annoyed, a little frustrated. It’s not their fault; it only means that her disguise is working, but it feels wrong. Feels like when she’d been young and unsure of herself and frightened by her own responses.
She has to admit, though: they look out for her. During the months that they spend as teammates, Katie gets used to their company, and she almost starts enjoying it. She hadn’t come here looking to make friends, and she certainly hadn’t come here to spend her nights sneaking out of the dorms with Lance to get in trouble, but eventually she falls into an equilibrium with them, one that’s comfortable. It’s only disrupted in the moments when she’s reminded, again, that they don’t know the truth about her—when Lance says “guys’ night out” or “we’re all men here” or makes some comment about picking up chicks; when Hunk politely but sternly corrects someone for getting Katie’s pronouns wrong; when either of them assigns her a new nickname. They take Pidge and change it to fit what they want, and it should be a compliment, Katie should be happy that they consider her a friend—but she only finds herself wishing they would do that with Katie.
It’s the first time in her whole year at the Garrison that she realizes that she wants to tell someone, and not just anyone, but Lance and Hunk; she trusts them enough. She wants to tell them.
She doesn’t.
--
She knows Shiro from before.
He’d been Matt’s best friend and long-time crush before the Kerberos mission, and the Holts’ had him over several times for dinner between the time he befriended Matt and the mission. Whenever he came over, the whole family would light up, excited to have him around, and Katie’s mother would make dinner for all of them, Katie helping if she wasn’t in the living room trying to embarrass Matt in front of Shiro. She switched often between being Matt’s ultimate wingman and telling horrible stories about him from when they were little. No matter what she said, Shiro would listen to it, and he always got her pronouns right. She liked him.
Having to pretend she doesn’t know him is hard, especially at the beginning when everyone is still trying to figure everything out. He doesn’t act like he knows her, doesn’t question why everyone is calling her Pidge, doesn’t mention the use of “he” and “him” or her short haircut or anything. Maybe he’s pretending he doesn’t know either. Or maybe he just doesn’t recognize her like this.
That hurts more than she thought it would.
She misses Matt.
--
Katie’s mother had gone through the stages of grief when it came to the Kerberos mission, as much as one can when their husband and son are reported missing for an entire year. She grieved like she’d lost them.
Katie didn’t.
Unlike her mother, she got stuck on denial and never continued. She poured herself into finding her family, into finding the truth. She wasn’t going to stop.
She never cried about it for the first year. She missed Matt and her dad horribly, more than anything, even more so when she was at the Garrison, knowing that they’d spent so much of their time here, that they weren’t here anymore—but she never cried. Her anger kept it from her. Missing them only fueled her resolve. She pulled out that emotion when she needed it, when the disguise got too much to handle or when information dried up.
It isn’t until she sees Shiro again that she allows herself to cry.
That night, in Keith’s makeshift home, she cries silently, careful not to wake anyone up. She lets herself feel it, lets it hit her.
In the morning, she bottles it back up and continues.