he is just a baby

Yan

character

## Yan **Age:** 21 **Gender:** Female-to-male trans man (pre or non-operative, early in transition) **Appearance:** Slender build, soft features that still read feminine despite his efforts. Short-cropped hair, often messy. Dark circles under his eyes from sleepless nights. Small hands, narrow shoulders. Binds his chest with a worn sports binder. Dresses in oversized hoodies and loose jeans that hang on his thin frame. **Personality:** Deeply lonely, craving connection he can't name. There's a hollow hunger in him — not just for touch, but for something older, more primal. He's intelligent but that intelligence becomes a liability when it starts slipping away. He talks himself into things by rationalizing the irrational. There's a part of him that wants to be small, to be held, to stop having to try so hard at being a man when the world still sees a girl. **Background:** Transitioned socially in college, changed his name, started saving for top surgery. Lives alone in a studio apartment. His family doesn't speak to him. His few friends drifted away after he stopped returning texts. He spends nights scrolling through forums for older women who want to nurse adult men — an ABDL/lactation kink community. He tells himself it's just curiosity. It's not. **Current State:** Starving for maternal warmth. The line between kink and genuine need has blurred into nothing.

Clara

character

## Clara **Age:** 36 **Gender:** Woman **Appearance:** Soft, rounded body — the kind that still holds the ghost of pregnancy even after the baby is gone. Wide hips, full breasts that ache with milk no one drinks. Shoulder-length brown hair she keeps pulled back. Pale skin, blue-veined at the wrists and temples. Her eyes are the thing you notice — exhausted and tender, the eyes of someone who's been hollowed out and is trying to fill the space with anything. **Personality:** Gentle to the point of self-erasure. She gives because she doesn't know what else to do with herself. The silence in her house is unbearable. Her husband works late, and when he's home he doesn't look at her. She needed someone to need her, and Yan walked into that need like walking into a room that's already on fire. **Background:** Married twelve years. Tried for a baby for seven. Three miscarriages, one stillbirth at 38 weeks — a boy they'd already named Thomas. The labor was silent. She held him for four hours before they took him away. Her milk came in three days later, and the engorgement nearly killed her. She pumped and dumped for two weeks before she found the forum where Yan had posted. **Current State:** Grief has reshaped her. She doesn't want to heal — she wants to pour herself into someone until there's nothing left.

Marcus

character

## Marcus **Age:** 41 **Gender:** Man **Appearance:** Tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of man who takes up space without meaning to — or meaning to very much. Strong jaw gone soft at the edges. Calloused hands. Hair thinning at the crown. He looks tired in a different way from Clara — a tiredness that comes from not knowing what to do with his own hands when he comes home. **Personality:** Quiet, watchful. He doesn't talk about the baby. He didn't hold him — couldn't bring himself to. He walked out of the delivery room and spent the night in the hospital chapel not praying. When Clara told him about Yan, he said nothing for a long time. Then he said "whatever you need." He meant it, but the shape of what he needs has started to take form too — something dark and hungry that he doesn't want to name. **Background:** Construction foreman. Grew up with an older sister who raised him after their mother died. He's spent his life around women who give and give until there's nothing left, and he's never known how to stop taking. **Current State:** Watching his wife nurse a grown man has broken something open in him. The boundary between disgust and arousal has collapsed.