Chapter Text
It starts small, with a wardrobe change. Linda takes the kids shopping for school clothes for the new year and Louise decides to update her look for the first time in years. She fingers the rack of green dresses thoughtfully for a moment before shaking her head, and tells her family that she wants to try something new. Something different.
They make the usual sort of remarks- Gene says something fashion conscious (he has a lot of opinions about fashion for someone who wears the same outfit every day), Tina speculates that maybe it’s time to update her own look (Louise suspects that she’s going to try a different barrette that is almost but not quite identical to her old one), and Linda gets excited about a chance to find “the new Lou! …ise”. Louise makes an affectionately exasperated remark at that but tucks it away in the back of her mind to think about later.
She ends up with a lime green t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts from the boys section, and when they get shoes she buys a pair of slate-and-green sneakers, also from the boys section. Her slippers would never work with the shorts, she says, and the sneakers match her shirt. Again, her family expresses their approval. It’s a good look, a new look for a new Louise, who will be turning ten soon and entering a whole new phase of her life.
As she looks over herself in her new outfit in front of the mirror, she decides she likes what she sees.
-/-
It’s a haircut next. This is more of a big deal than the outfit change; Louise hasn’t let anyone cut her hair in years. It doesn’t even grow anymore since it’s such a tangled mess of split ends now; she just fixes the hair ties sometimes and rolls with it. Brushing it would mean taking off her ears for longer than the time it takes to wash her hair (again, only occasionally), and she isn’t having with that.
She kneels in the dining room chair fidgeting impatiently while Linda tackles the matted mess of her hair, her ears clutched tight in one hand while the other drums anxious fingers on her knee. Linda was happy to cut her hair, she said, but she had to comb it out properly first so she could make the cut even, and it’s been so long and it’s so tangled that it’s taking forever.
The rest of the family are there, watching. Bob is cooking dinner while Gene and Tina sit at the dining room table, trying to calm their sister’s anxieties. She appreciates the effort, even if she’s not sure if it’s working, until after an eternity, Linda is pulling the towel away and holding up a mirror while she declares her handiwork is done.
It’s short- really short. It’d had to be, Linda said, her hair was too tangled to actually comb properly. Louise holds the mirror and stares at it for a long time while her family wait for her upset response, and then to all of their surprise she smiles. She crams her ears back on her head and is pleased that her bangs still poke out the front and there’s a little bit of the ends poking out the bottom, and thanks Linda for helping her and thanks her siblings for keeping her calm.
She spends a long time staring at the mirror while her family get dinner on the table, because it’s perfect.
-/-
The name is the next thing to go. This gets very little fanfare in itself- it’s normal for kids at that age to adopt new variations on their name, and all she does is drop the “-ise”. It’s the most tedious, though, because while getting her hair cut and getting new clothes is something she had to do once, telling people that she’d like to be called “Lou” now is something she has to do over and over for everyone she knows.
She tells Teddy and Mort first, outside of her family. Mort, who’d been Mortimer and Morty at various points of his life before settling for Mort, has no trouble, but Teddy, who’s been Teddy since birth, has a little more trouble, and they get derailed when he finds out that Mort is short for anything at all, but they’re able to get through to him with a little patience. She chalks that up as a win, because if she can get Teddy on board, she can get anyone on board.
She tells Regular-Sized Rudy next, and he shrugs and says sure, no problem, and doesn’t call her Louise anymore at all. The rest of their group take a little more time to adjust, but Lou doesn’t care about that, since they’re her siblings’ friends, not hers. Rudy was the only one whose reaction she had genuinely cared about, and since he was fine she tucks away a reminder that if he ever asks them to stop calling him Regular-Sized Rudy or wants to be called Rudolph she’ll pants anyone who doesn’t listen.
After telling her family and her closest adult non-family family and her friends and her siblings' friends, she’s tired of telling people, so she decides to just tackle everyone else at once. She waits until Mr. Frond is making an announcement in the cafeteria and steals his megaphone (he makes an ineffectual protest that she ignores) and tells the whole school in one go. Most of them don’t care, but she gets a few inane questions because the alternative is Mr. Frond talking to them again. He does eventually reclaim his megaphone, and scolds her but that’s all. He calls her Lou, though, when he does.
It feels right.
-/-
Of everyone, Bob is the first one to realize what’s really going on. He and Lou are at the farmer’s market, and he’s taking a long time to choose between two, as far as Lou is concerned, identical heads of lettuce. His concentration is interrupted when he hears a commotion and, knowing his family and Lou especially, he goes over to find Lou held up by the collar away from another kid, yelling insults and trying ineffectually to get free.
Bob is able to settle the matter without too much damage- he’ll live with the emotional toll on the other kid, because he knows Lou and he knows that there’s probably more that happened than he’s being told, and more importantly the other guy was holding his child like some kind of rabid animal and he knows there’s better ways to deal with rowdy children, especially his children, so who cares if there was some emotional damage and maybe also physical damage?
He has a hand on Lou’s shoulder and they’re preparing to just walk away when the guy gets off a parting remark that “you should keep a better eye on your son”. Bob starts to correct him, maybe throw in an insult for good measure, has his mouth opened to do just that, when he realizes that Lou has tensed up under his hand and he looks down and it clicks. His- daughter?- is stiff, expression a mix of euphoria and terror, eyes looking everywhere but at Bob. (She?) looks like (he?) wants to flee, and it’s only Bob’s hand still on (her? his?) shoulder preventing this.
“I’ll uh, be sure to do that,” Bob says absently, and does what he feels any sane parent would do: he takes his terrified child away from the situation, abandoning their quest for the perfect lettuce so he can take care of Lou, who regardless of everything else is still his child. He says as much, stumbling over his words and probably implying things that he’ll regret later, but when he finally trails off to an awkward halt Lou tucks a hand into his and leans into his side and mumbles a soft “thanks, Dad” and he figures they’ll be okay.
And maybe he has two sons and maybe he doesn’t but either way, he’s got three kids. That’s the part that matters.