« I know. » My Owner eased my thighs apart. “You’re a naughty thing, Sniper, spreading confusing rumors to keep us guessing.” I couldn’t look down, but saw a subtle smile as their fingers cracked the seal. I thought hard about whether to reveal this here, but it’s time. I remain infinitely grateful to everyone who helped me keep the secret this long: the Celebrity Youth Act, my coaches, doctors, teammates, journalists, my many fans who knew, and many more who burned to know but respected my request so much you even rioted outside The Scoop that time they threatened an exposé. But it’s time free you all from that silence, that mystery, to let you see completely what I was, now that my doll days are over. Speaking of which, Mycroft, if you’re going to use archaic pronouns anyway you may as well go all the way, you know which one I use in private, and deep in my heart. It was a museum visit that began it, taken to galleries so young that innocence and lack of context made me fix on different things than grownups do, the dolphins beside Venus, the cute dog in the corner of a Holy Family, the shiny armor on a shiny angel with a face like my face, flawless like the dolls I then already was. The art that takes our breath away in childhood is usually not the same art that steals it in adulthood, but I rounded one stone corner and I gasped, still gasp each time I visit, not only at the marble body, tender and so soft in sleep, the subtle flatness of the calluses under the perfect toes, but I gasp(ed) at the people, always the people, staring at the unknown ancient master’s masterpiece stretched out before them. Their faces were… it’s not lust, no, it’s wonder’s union with desire, the mixture lingering in every one of them, old, young, as they walk(ed) slowly around the figure, peaking at the intimate parts semi-hidden in the different corners the sleeper’s pose but in pure innocence, since art, like dolls, exists to be gazed on, it inhuman, it, perfected, it wants to be gazed on, actualizing its purpose, as Mycroft would say Plato would say, or, no, that’s Aristotle, Plato’s the one who said seeing such beauty elevates the soul. Either way, I recognized that gaze from moments when a fan first met me, or first opened up a doll box and saw beauty, but the spell breaks normally, yet here it lasted, those amazing gazes, lingering in joy. I wanted them, that, wanted to be that, the lingering and all-inviting spell that Sleeping Hermaphroditus casts upon on a wonder-dazzled world. It wasn’t on first visit that I made up my mind, it was my fifth I think, but that first opened introspection’s door, through which I recognized the me I wanted. Time to share.