Before you fell into the Underground, you never really knew who you were.

Oh, you knew the basic facts, of course. Your name was Frisk, you were eight years old, your birthday was December 21, you lived with your mother in a tiny, run-down apartment, you had no friends, and you were the reason your father left and your mother was always angry.

Aside from that, your self-identity was shaky. You didn't even know what you liked to do for fun. At home, there was nothing much to do besides homework, watching whatever you could find on your battered old TV, and trying to stay out of your mother's way. You weren't allowed to play outside. Your mother said you lived in a "bad neighborhood", but you weren't sure what that meant. You thought you would have liked to play outside, if you could. The other kids always played together after school, but you had to come straight home every day. You wouldn't have minded so much if there had been something else to do at home, but there was nothing. You would eat a snack, do your homework, and then spend the rest of the day in boredom and loneliness.

Sometimes you would sit for hours in front of your smudged window, watching the people pass by. You didn't think they looked bad. Some of them looked sad or angry, and most were dirty, but that didn't mean they were bad people. You thought they probably just needed someone to be nice to them. You would have been friends with them if you could.

But you didn't have any friends. You knew why; it was because you were too different. People didn't like someone like you. You were too quiet – you didn't like to talk unless you had to. You didn't know all the games and references the other kids did, so you couldn't follow their conversations or relate to them. Your appearance was shabby compared to the others; your uneven hair that you cut yourself, your patched leggings, your oversized sweater, the little bruises and cuts that seemed to appear on your face every few days.

But as much of an outcast as it made you, that was still all surface stuff, enough to earn you scorn but not the outright malice that the other kids showed you. No, you knew what the real heart of the issue was, the biggest question mark in your uncertain idea of who you were.

You didn't know whether you were a boy or a girl.

You thought you would have been okay with that, except for the fact that no one else was. It made people uncomfortable at best, downright hostile at worst. People didn't like not knowing what gender you were, always demanding you tell them, like you were hiding some important secret. It seemed to matter so much to everyone.

You barely even understood what gender was, much less what you were yourself. How could you explain that you didn't feel like either? So you could never answer their questions, usually just shrugging, and that only made them angry, more aggressive.

"How can you not know? You have to be something. Are you a he or a she? What's in your pants? What's on your birth certificate? If you're not anything, you must be an it."

But you still couldn't answer, and the questions kept coming, and more and more people hated you.

Your mother called you "she", except when she was drunk and got mixed up, which had been happening more often lately. The kids at school usually stuck with "he", the nastier ones occasionally calling you "it", hurling it at you, intending for it to hurt. Your teachers never seemed sure what to call you. A few chose a pronoun and stuck with it, but most of them tried not to address you at all. No one ever asked what you wanted to be called.

You wouldn't have known what to answer anyway.

"He can't be a girl 'cause he's not pretty enough," you overheard one kid whisper in class before the teacher arrived.

"And if he is a girl he's such a tomboy it's as good as the same thing," another one added scathingly.

"But doesn't she wear a dress sometimes?" someone asked. "That means she's a girl."

"Yeah, well maybe he's just a faggot," the first kid said. "That's what my dad calls boys who wear dresses." A round of giggles went around the room. In the corner, you buried your head in your arms and wished you didn't exist.

()()()()

Then the moment that would define the rest of your life happened.

Your mother forgot to pick you up from school.

It had never happened before. She was neglectful and abusive and sometimes you weren't sure whether she even loved you, but she always at least made an effort to get you to and from school. You waited outside the building for two hours before taking a bus back yourself. The bus smelt of sweat and you felt like everyone was looking at you, but you held tight to the rail and tried to be determined.

When you finally made it home, almost weak with relief, you found your mother passed out on the couch with an empty beer bottle in her hand. You didn't wake her up, and neither of you said anything to each other later that night when she finally got up to stagger to the bathroom.

You could have almost brushed it off as a one-time incident, except that it happened again the next day.

And the next.

The third day, she stopped bothering to even take you to school. You took a bus for the rest of that week, using change you found in her purse. When you were home, she didn't even talk to you. Not to apologize, not to yell, nothing. She just ignored you and spent all her time sitting listlessly on the couch, drinking and staring at the television.

You thought maybe things would go back to normal after the weekend, but Monday came and nothing had changed. That night, you cried yourself to sleep.

When you walked out of school after your last class on Friday and pointlessly looked around for a mother you already knew wouldn't be there, you finally realized the truth.

In all the ways that mattered, your mother had abandoned you.

()()()()

The decision was easy after that. There was nothing left for you here.

Using the money you had taken from your mother's purse earlier, you took a bus to the edge of town.

You got off at the bus stop.

You climbed the mountain the kids at school told stories about.

You entered the cave at the top.

You fell.

Your last ironic thought before everything went black was that you still didn't know whether you were a boy or a girl.

And now you never would.

()()()()

…

But you were wrong.

You woke up in a strange land full of strange creatures. Though many of them were dangerous and often frightening, within that first day, you experienced more kindness than you had ever known on the surface. As time went on, a hole in your heart you barely even knew existed started to heal. And so began the best period of your life.

The Underworld was different from your old life in almost every way imaginable. For the first time ever, you had friends. They didn't care that you were quiet, that your hair was messy and your clothes ragged, and as you grew to trust them you started to open up more and more. You laughed more in your first week underground than you ever had in your life.

Surrounded by friends and freedom, you finally started to discover who you were. You found that you were someone who had compassion for everyone, no matter how strange or different, someone who loved exploring, someone who laughed at puns and adored the smell of pie, someone who liked harmless flirting and jumping in rain puddles, someone who felt oddly emotional around music boxes, and someone who never wanted to let go of a hug. Someone who, despite all the hurt you had experienced, had an amazing capacity for love. And for the first time, you thought you might even like who you were.

But all these realizations came about gradually over the course of your journey. The first big change was more immediate, and at the time, more surprising.

No one asked if you were a boy or a girl.

No one probed you with questions and got upset when you couldn't answer. No one called you "he" or "she". No one seemed to care at all about gender.

Instead, everyone called you they. The first time Toriel referred to you this way, you hadn't known what she meant. You had always thought "they" meant multiple people, so you automatically looked around for who she might be talking about. Eventually, when she and other monsters kept using it, you realized they meant you. You were confused, but felt too awkward to ask why. But as you met more monsters and got a better idea of what life was like in the Underground, a fascinating picture began to emerge.

As it turned out, monsters weren't too picky when it came to matters like gender. They accepted without question multiple genders and ways of expression, and had no problem if that expression changed over the course of someone's life. When monsters were born, you found, their parents might call them the pronoun that traditionally closest matched their sex, but just as often called them "they" until they were old enough to choose the pronoun that best suited them. While many monsters did feel most comfortable with "he" or "she" (Toriel, Sans, and Papyrus to name but a few), a good portion of them preferred "they", and from what you could tell, it wasn't seen as any less normal or valid.

You grew increasingly more amazed as you met more of these monsters. Napstablook and Monster Kid were the ones you knew best, though you also met a variety of others in passing. All of them went by "they". And you began to realize that you felt a connection to them, a sense of sameness. So even though a part of you almost felt deceptive, you never told anyone that you had ever gone by anything different.

And since you never objected to the pronoun or requested a different one, Toriel kept referring to you as they, and the other monsters in the Ruins followed her lead. When you met Sans, he did the same, which meant that Papyrus and the other monsters of Snowdin did as well. And Undyne got her information from Papyrus, so when she sent out the order to capture you, she naturally used the same pronoun he did. So it spread, and pretty soon the entire Underground was calling you they. And none of them thought anything of it.

All this, and you didn't have to answer a single nosy question, or even say a single word about the subject.

You thought maybe it shouldn't have been so important to you. Maybe one little word shouldn't have that much power. After all, you were far away from everything familiar, you were running for your life half the time, your new friends were all trapped underground, and you had a strange voice in your head. Silly to care so much about what people called you.

But you did.

On the surface, you had always known you were different. No matter what gender people thought you were, it left an unshakable sense of wrongness. Like a persistent itch you couldn't scratch and would never go away. You had thought there was something horribly wrong with you. But here, every time someone used that word, "they", it felt like a tight knot in your stomach dissolved. An itch scratched, a pain relieved, a sense of excitement and peace in who you were.

They. They. THEY.

This was right. This was how it should be. This was how it should have always been.

So maybe it was a small thing in the midst of everything else going on and maybe it was the most important thing to ever happen to you, but whatever it was, this newfound identity glowing inside you like a gem and the knowledge that you had friends who accepted you without question filled you with determination.

()()()()

Your journey continued. You made it to the Core, and then the king's castle. You learned the tragic story of Prince Asriel and the first human. Despite your best efforts, King Asgore was killed. You confronted Flowey in a nightmarish battle. You triumphed, but immediately reloaded, unsatisfied. You discovered the dark secret Alphys had been hiding. You saved Asgore and reunited with all your friends. In the most emotionally agonizing battle of your life, you faced Asriel Dreemurr. You saved your friends. Later, you sobbed into Asriel's shoulder as you hugged him goodbye and left him alone among the golden flowers his long-departed sibling had loved so much.

And finally, finally, you stood with your best friends on the surface and watched the sunset. Your heart swelled with an almost unbearable surge of love, and you knew that things were finally going to be okay. Hand in hand with your new mother, the person you loved most in all the world, you walked toward a new life, shining before you.

()()()()

Weeks later, after a diplomatic meeting you had attended as official monster ambassador, someone approached you and said rudely, "So what are you? A he or she?"

You smiled.

"I'm a they."