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“That woman,” Lala sighs when Ohya’s staggered off to the bathroom, topping off a glass with sparkling water and sliding it across the bar. “Have a seat, honey, this one’s on the house. Non-alcoholic, of course.”
Ren sits down in the nearest seat and takes the glass, taking a tentative sip. It’s sweet—cherry, it tastes like, and pretty good, too, not the artificial stuff that tastes like bad medicine. A girly drink, he thinks vaguely, in a voice that sounds a little like Oni’s rough drawl, but it doesn’t really bother him. If anything, it gives him a strange sort of thrill, getting to drink it without having to think about how ordering it makes him look. “Is she… always like that?”
Lala presses a manicured hand to her cheek. “When she’s drunk.”
“Sounds like a yes,” Ren says dryly, taking another sip of his soda. That gets a laugh from Lala, low and sardonic.
“Oh, you do catch on quick. But what about you, honey? I doubt most boys your age would come to a place like this just for her.”
“Mm,” Ren murmurs, not really keen on giving a more committal response to the most boys thing. Yeah, probably not. He’s not sure if Mishima met Ohya here, but he doesn’t really want to ask, doesn’t really want to know what he thought. He does know exactly what most boys would think of Lala; the words had come into his head the first time he heard her voice, too, and it makes him feel queasy with guilt, guilt at the thought and at the completely nonsensical irritation that she’s found a way to make that baritone sound feminine anyway. He would want to make his voice higher, softer.
He had wanted to, but it felt like it dropped two octaves overnight when he started high school. He couldn’t change it, and it would be weird to try, so he just started talking less.
“One of my friends was in some trouble,” he says, when he realizes she’s still waiting for an explanation. “Ohya-san had information that could help her out.”
Lala gives a sympathetic nod. “And now you owe her one?”
“Not really. I mean, I did a favor for her already, but she wanted to hear from me again, and I thought we could…” He runs his finger along the rim of his glass, staring at the condensation gathering on the sides. “...Make a deal, I guess. I’m not sure it’s gonna work out yet.”
“You seem like a smart kid.” Lala sighs. “And Ichiko-chan’s not a bad person. I’m not going to tell you you what to do, but you let me know if she gives you a hard time, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lala nods approvingly at that, flashing him a painted smile. She idly wipes a glass that already looks perfectly clean, looking him over. “And you’re still welcome here anytime you want, honey.”
Ren tucks his hair behind his ear, nodding, and Lala raises a perfect eyebrow. Maybe from someone else it’d feel judgmental, but that’s… pretty obviously not the case here.
“I like the atmosphere,” he offers; it’s really more like I like that you made me a girly drink without asking and that’s not weird and I’ve only ever seen people like you getting laughed at on TV and I didn’t know there was a place that wasn’t like that and being here makes me feel normal, but he doesn’t know how to put all that into words, and Lala seems to get it anyway.
“You might change your mind if you saw the Sunday rush. It gets pretty packed here. I have a girl who comes in for the night shift, but she usually can’t make it in before midnight. I could use another pair of hands.” She gives him a meaningful look, polishing another glass. “I don’t know what Ichiko-chan was offering to pay you—”
He starts to protest that she wasn’t paying him anything, but Lala just talks over him. “—but you kids always need money, don’t you? How old are you, anyway?”
“Seventeen,” he says. Barely seventeen, but she doesn’t need to know that. Lala tuts, casting another—rather icy—glance toward the back of the bar, then gives him another once-over.
“If you tried to convince me you were twenty I’d have sent you home,” she says amiably. “All you’d need to do is help with some chores around here while I entertain the customers. Washing dishes, clearing tables. No handling alcohol, obviously—and that means touching it, not just drinking it. What do you think?”
“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Yeah, that sounds great. Uh, do I have to dress like you?”
It’s supposed to sound casual. Like he’s joking. Like it’s a completely silly thought, not something that’s been nagging at the back of his mind since he was five years old and fiercely jealous over the kimono his seven year old cousin got to wear for Shichi-Go-San, knowing he wouldn’t get to do the same in two years. For a second he thinks he’s nailed it, too, because Lala chuckles at first—but something on his face must give him away, because her whole expression softens from gentle amusement to sympathy.
“You don’t have to do anything, honey,” she says, so kindly it makes his stomach flip. “But that’s not really what you’re asking, now, is it?”
This is all a big misunderstanding, he thinks.
I was kidding, he thinks.
I’m not like that, he thinks.
“Can I dress like you?” is what comes out of his mouth. Lala rests her chin on her hand, looking at him like a doting aunt.
“Let’s see what I’ve got in the back that might fit you, sweetheart,” she says like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Ren feels a weight lift off his shoulders that he hadn’t even realized he was carrying.
The night shift girl—Mai-chan, Lala calls her—turns out to wear a dress size that fits him, and Lala herself wears the same size shoes, so the answer ends up being “more than he knows what to do with.” The bar is still open and there’s little time to waste, so he swallows down any hesitation and leaves it to Lala’s judgment. She swoops through the dressing room with frankly terrifying efficiency, particularly for a woman whose mobility is limited by a full kimono, and before Ren has much time for second thoughts—or first thoughts—she’s showing him how to smack his lips to even out lip gloss and tucking his hair up into a long black wig while he silently thanks Yoshizawa’s gymnastics warm-ups for giving him the flexibility to do up his own dress without help.
He’s expecting to look terrible when Lala parks him in front of a mirror, but he doesn’t. He’s not wearing a bra—borrowing a dress is one thing, especially with Lala’s insistence that Mai won’t mind and Ren’s insistence that he’ll pay for it to get dry-cleaned, but borrowing a girl’s underwear is completely different—but the dress is ruffled on the top in a way that makes it look like he’s got something there anyway. The skirt flares out enough that it makes his hips looks less narrow, and that makes his shoulders look less broad, and wearing tights means it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t shaved his legs.
The wig falls in appealing curls around his shoulders. The makeup is minimal—just lip gloss and mascara, and Lala had cooed about what nice skin and lashes he had the whole time she was doing it—and even his glasses fit, somehow, like he’d coordinated them with this outfit on purpose.
He looks like a girl, head to toe. A tall, skinny girl, who doesn’t really know how to carry herself and can’t stop messing with her hair, but a girl. Maybe even a pretty girl.
“Ready, honey?” Lala asks him, and Ren forces his eyes away from the mirror so she can whisk him back out to the bar. Maybe tomorrow he can laugh about this with Ryuji—hey, you’ll never believe what I did last night, isn’t that hilarious—but no. No, he knows he won’t. He keeps waiting to get his footing back, for this to all feel funny again, but deep down—as some part of him longs to go back to the mirror, to keep on staring at the girl looking back from the other side—he knows that whatever this is, it’s not a joke.
Morgana gawks at him speechlessly from his bag when he comes out. Ren smiles—tries to smile—and quickly presses a hushing finger to his lips. Ohya seems to be gone, and a few customers have come in in the time it took for Lala to dress him, two businessmen and a fashionable young woman. One of the men—a guy in his twenties, short, dressed in a suit a little big on him—raises his eyebrows at the sight of Ren.
“Well, who’s this?” he asks, mouth tugged up in a wide smile. Ren crosses his arms over his chest, but the man’s eyes don’t leave his face; he doesn’t leer, doesn’t gawk at his body, doesn’t do anything to make himself seem anything less than friendly. A big, warm hand squeezes Ren’s shoulder.
“She’s just doing a little part-time work for me,” Lala says, and when she says the pronoun so naturally, too, like there’s not even any question— “Isn’t that right, honey?”
—what this is just clicks.
“That’s right,” he says—no, maybe it should be she says, and she tries to make her voice higher, softer, just like she’d been so sure Lala should. It’s really not that easy, and deep down she knew it wouldn’t be—that she hadn’t been annoyed by Lala, somehow, but envious that she could sound so confident without trying to fight her own vocal cords. The man at the bar doesn’t even flinch; he just winks at Lala, and Lala winks back.
“Lala-chan’s a wonderful woman,” the man says. “All sorts of people come around here, she’ll take care of you. So you have a good night, alright?”
Ren nods, not sure what to say, and Lala gives her shoulder another squeeze. “I’ll be showing her the ropes—just holler if you need anything, I’ll be right back with you.”
There’s really not that much to show; Ren ends up doing pretty much the same things she does at Leblanc, it turns out, and however bad the rush here can get, she still thinks a busy night at Ore no Beko would make it look like a joke. Most of the customers aren’t as unruly as Ohya, even the drunk ones, and Lala seems to be able to manage most of them without much help. The few Ren ends up chatting with with don’t startle at her height or her voice at all, and if her dress doesn’t quite hang right or she doesn’t quite walk the way a girl used to heels should, no one seems to care about that either.
“The most important thing about this job is being a good listener, darling,” Lala tells her as she’s running Ren through how to make a few virgin cocktails. “Most of the people around here just want someone to talk to, and a place they'll always know they're welcome. You'll hear all kinds of things if you give them the chance.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“That goes for you too,” she adds. “If your friends ever have any more trouble, honey, you let me know right away. And you, darling…”
She leads Ren further away from the bar, lowering her voice so none of the customers will hear them.
“I’ll get you a key to the dressing room for next time—just let yourself in the back, and you can stay here as long as you like.”
“Thank you,” Ren murmurs, realizing, abruptly, that her eyes are burning a little behind her glasses. She blinks, trying to will them to stay dry, to not ruin her mascara. “Thank you, Lala-san.”
“Oh, honey, it’s nothing,” Lala says, waving her hand. “It’s not an easy world out there for boys like you.”
She pauses for a beat, giving Ren a searching look. “Or should I say girls like us?”
I am thou, thou art I…
“Us,” Ren says, and it feels right. Deep in her soul, she can feel Arsène’s burning pride in his—her? her, definitely her—partner, can feel Pixie and Ame-no-Uzume and Nekomata’s tittering joy, can hear the voice echoing in her head that confirms what she already knows—that this, what Lala has given her, isn’t nothing at all.
With the birth of the Charity Persona, I have obtained the winds of blessing that shall lead to freedom and new power.