Melting Richard Cheese (Jasper)

[Deleted]

Marcus cruised down the stairs until he finally hit the ground floor of the common room, snapping his fingers to the easy-listening beats from his ipod. He couldn't hear a thing of what was going on around him. That was the great thing about earbuds. You could totally zone out into your music and forget about what was going on in the world around you. And that's exactly what Marcus did. He was oblivious to the fact that while he was "lip-syncing" to a tango version of "Insane In The Membrane", he was also grunting out slightly off-key verses which he, of course, couldn't hear properly. He thought he was singing low and softly enough that nobody else could hear him. The common room was usually pretty noisy, what were the odds that it would be a ghost town down there?

He moseyed over to the soda machines and pulled out a pocket of change from his goth-like pants, plucking out the quarters he needed to obtain his Mountain Dew. The rest were deposited back into his wide pockets, hitting the bottom with a jingle, and he slipped the coins into the machine and pushed the button. Hopefully it would work this time, this vending machine had a bad habit of malfunctioning at the worst times.

*KA-THUNK*

Woot! 'Lo and behold, Marcus had a soda! He smiled about as bright as a kid on Christmas morning, popping open the can and taking in a hearty slurp of the cool caffeinated beverage. Mmmm....bubbles...

Bubbles...going in exactly the wrong direction, whoops. Marcus scrunched his nose and wiggled it, wondering if there was anything he could do to stop it. But...when it wanted to come, it wanted to come, and Marcus had pretty much gotten used to it by this point. And all the secret "home remedies" that people suggested never worked. Fuuuck...

*ACHOO! ACHOO!! ACHOO!!! ACHOO!!!!*

Four violent sneezes in a row, causing his body to shake and ache, and his hair to fly this way and that. And which left splashes Mountain Dew all over his hand.

Marcus straightened up, wincing as her shoulders and back twinged in pain, and slowly combed back her hair from her face with her slim fingers. She really hated when this happened. Marcus set her Mountain Dew on a nearby table and lifted her white tank to start tightening her belt. It'd do her no good if her pants fell off before she got back to her room.

[Jasper Blackwater]

Jasper preferred to study in the common area of the dormitory—he’d never been much for quiet environments, and the ambient noise generally helped him concentrate. He enjoyed watching people bustle about, and liked to pause to listen to other people’s conversations, which he nearly always forgot no more than two seconds afterward. In one ear and out the other. He liked to think of it as a passive form of socializing. Every now and then, he’d take a break and watch someone play soda roulette with the room’s notoriously fickle vending machine.

He was comfortably positioned on the sofa in the middle of the room, cradling his math notebook against his lap and writing on it from what should have been an incredibly awkward angle. Somewhere behind him, he heard footsteps making their way down the stairs. As the other person drew nearer, he could make out the muted sounds of music being blasted through headphones at high volume.

A voice—male—singing lowly and out of key, in that particular way that people sing when they think no one is around to hear them, or simply don’t care. Change jingling. Buttons clicking. The telltale ka-thunk that meant someone had triumphed over the soda machine—for now, anyway.

It was all very comforting to him, that ambient noise. Indeed, he might not have turned around at all, except—

The violent sneezing broke the pattern of typical noise, and Jas jumped so immediately that he nearly rolled onto the floor. He managed to brace himself on the edge of the sofa; the unexpected movement had caused his faded black t-shirt to ride up a little, exposing a few inches of olive-toned belly. He blinked, wide-eyed, as the male in front of the vending machine became a female.

There was a beat of silence.

“Bless you,” he said, although it had the inflection of a question. He could see a dark spot on the carpet where a bit of soda had been spilled. Without so much as a second of hesitation, he reached for the roll of paper towels that had been left on the nearby table, presumably by the people who’d been having a pizza party in the same spot the day before.

He ripped off a generous section of paper towel and rolled onto his feet with a subtle umf. He approached Marcus—at least, Jasper assumed that the older boy still went by Marcus during moments like these—and gently flapped the folded paper towels at his shoulder.

“Need these?” he asked, not unkindly. His eyes were trained politely on the wall beside them, so as to avoid looking down Marcus’s pants—or, perhaps more importantly, down into the sheer-white of Marcus’s tank top, which now contained girl boobs.

[Deleted]

Despite clearly not being male anymore, Marcus also lacked anything resembling a curvy figure. Had she been a real girl, she would have described herself as having been built “like a boy”. That’s about all she could say about her bony hips and a chest that was barely there. Were it not for the obvious change in her facial features, shifting from a sharp, angled structure to something much softer, the lengthening of her hair, and, decrease in her height(though only about 4 inches. As it was, she was pretty sure man!Marcus was still growing, despite already being well over 6 ft), then the changes would be barely recognizable. Maybe. That was, at least, how Marcus saw it. It somehow really bugged her that she didn’t warrant a more pleasing figure for her female form. Especially since as a man, he still lacked a variety of distinguishing male characteristics(ie. Marcus was sour that he couldn’t put on any measure of muscle or weight).

That might be part of the reason why she made no move to keep herself covered; because there was hardly anything to see. The other reason, which was far more likely, was that she was just a boy who normally didn’t have to care about that thing, and, in fact, refused to adopt any sense of female shame.

Therefore, Marcus was either completely oblivious to the reason why Jasper(that was his name, right?) averted his eyes, or she just ignored it for the sake of maintaining her manliness. Or something. Maybe.

“Thanks,” she sighed, taking the offered paper towels to blot off the sticky soda on her arm. She let her shirt drop again, having finished tightening her belt.

The silence between them continued as they cleaned up the resulting mess from yet another one of Marcus’ notorious sneeze-a-thons. She swore, she was going to get a hernia from them one of these days(seriously! She read about this one dude who did that once!). Marcus wiped the soda from her arm, then knelt down to soak up the spot on the carpet. It wasn’t her job to keep the carpet clean, and Marcus was a naturally messy person on a normal day, but she wasn’t going to leave her messes out in the public areas, at least. She blinked up to the other boy. “You’re Jasper, right?” she asked, pulling the buds from her ears. Her tone was friendly, but was slightly more despondent than usual. Marcus was feeling just a bit under the weather today, unfortunately.

[Jasper Blackwater]

Jasper kept his gaze firmly affixed to the wall; after all, small boobs were still boobs. Indeed, he’d always rather liked the small ones best—

He cleared his throat to distract himself from his own train of thought.

“Sure,” he said. After a few moments had passed and he was fairly certain that Marcus’s pants wouldn’t fall off of his—her—girl-body, he allowed his gaze to drift back to the other boy’s—girl’s!—face. He smiled a small, reassuring smile when she inquired about his name. He hoped that showing kindness would negate any embarrassment that might arise.

“Yeah, I am,” he said. “Jas is fine, too. I’ll answer to either. And you’re... Marcus? Right?”

There was a pause.

“That sneezing stuff has really been going around, you know?” Jasper continued, in the same upbeat, conversational tone. “One of my roommates had it, too. I’ve been hitting the Vitamin C like crazy.”

He rustled around in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small snack bag filled with a handful of orange gummies and a couple of blue-green ibuprofen capsules.

“Want one?”

[Deleted]

Marcus offered a smile to the boy. “Yeah, that’s right. Um…I’m good with Marc or Marcus, too.” Though most people went for Marcus these days, unless they were trying to give him some embarrassing feminine nickname that he didn’t appreciate.

There was silence while Marcus cleaned herself up. There was a slight flush of embarrassment in her cheeks. She didn’t like being a girl, and didn’t like people seeing her change from one to the other. It probably looked weird to them. And then they’d ask questions…

The fact that Jasper didn’t ask any questions or make too big of a deal over what he’d seen put the girl’s mind at ease somewhat. She nodded. “Yeah, and if even one person in the dorms has got it, I’m definitely getting it, you know?” She chuckled. “Don’t even have to meet them face to face, the bugs just kinda like, gravitate to me? I don’t know, maybe there’s something in my blood they like?” She chuckled, enjoying the lightness of the conversation.

Marcus tilted her head at the offer, her smile growing uncertain. “Uh…which ones? The candy or the drugs?” she asked with a nervous laugh. Ibuprofen probably wasn't going to help her anyway, though it was a nice sentiment.