#and I have found that those guys usually have less toxic masculinity and less issues with boundaries and whatnot

[strawberryshortpace]

Me applying to get an apartment and live with 2 random dudes hoping it’ll be more New Girl and less True Crime podcast

[apocalypticgargoyle]

Dream smut or fluff where reader and him are high key mean to eachotjer despite having so many mutual friends, but then something (very vague i know I’m sorry) makes them have to get close and the develop feelings? Sorry I’m shit at requests but thank you!!!

i know this is shitty im sorry akjsdh bls forgive me

𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑. ♘ 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐱 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

± warnings: dream being a dick, slight slut shaming, toxic behavior, vulgar/suggestive mentions and language, sexual harassment on a bus (not by dream, you can breathe)

⋆ song recommendation: When the Night is Over by Lord Huron

You pulled a blanket beneath your chin, yawning slightly at whatever the tv was playing. You only had it on in an attempt to drown out the noises coming from your roommate's bedroom as she smoozed her date. You were honestly shocked the two hadn’t moved in together yet with all the time they spent wrapped up.

Her door opened, her eyes widening slightly at the sight of you sprawled out on the couch. He marched toward you quietly, hovering over your shoulder. You peered up at her hesitantly. “What are you watching?” She asked, voice barely above a whisper. You furrowed your brows, opening your mouth to speak but she hurriedly cut you off. “Do you mind watching it at Nick’s instead?”

You raised your eyebrows. “You’re kicking me out again?” She gave you an apologetic smile, making you roll your eyes as you stood up and pulled on your jacket. “This would hurt less if they also paid rent,” you mumbled, with a small glare.

She thanked you repeatedly, holding onto your arm as you gathered what little belongings you needed for the night. “I promise I’ll make it up to you,” she courted, opening the door for you. “Tomorrow, dinner’s on me okay?” You sent her a tired look and she apologized again. She stopped you as you stepped out into the cold night, leaning through the space between the door and the frame. “Maybe you can cozy up to that Clay guy? You guys have such a good vibe,” she mocked, making you chuckle lightly.

You shook your head, waving to her. “Enjoy your night. Please, for the love of God, clean the bathroom afterward,” you called, hearing her laugh at your statement.

The bus ride was quiet due to the time of night and the weather, both of which you didn’t mind. You knew Nick’s house would be warm and loud. Before you knew it, you found yourself in front of his apartment door, kicking at the concrete ground as you heard someone stumbling to let you inside. The door opened swiftly, Clay’s large frame blocking the light from the kitchen. He leaned against the doorframe mockingly as he looked at you.

He wet his lips. “Who’s the lucky guy tonight?” He joshed.

You rolled your eyes, brushing past his body to get out of the cold. “Whoever’s dick you’re not sucking, I guess,” you quipped back, making him laugh darkly. You kicked off your shoes as he shut the door. “Where’s Sapnap?” You asked, shrugging off your jacket. You’d texted him ahead of time to ask if you could stay over, which he readily agreed to.

Clay sent you a smug look. “You guys have a fun night planned?” He made a gesture with his hand to insinuate you were there to give Nick a handjob.

You bit back a chuckle. “Why? You wanna join?” You shot back. He bit his lip and moaned pornographically.

“Cut it out, Dream,” Nick grumbled as he walked into the room. He pulled on your arm to follow him.

Dream scoffed exasperatedly. “Me? I’m not the one who started it!” He called after the two of you.

As Nick pushed you out of the room, you turned your head. “You most certainly did!” You answered. You heard him chuckle at your words as Nick shut the door to his room. You plopped down on his bed as he sat in his chair, swiveling to look at you. “Why does Dream pick at me so much?” You mumbled, fishing in your pockets for your phone.

“He’s jealous,” Nick answered absent-mindedly. “What's the date look like tonight?” He asked, referring to the reason you were there in the first place. This wasn’t the first time or the last time your roommate had kicked you out. It was becoming a more frequent occurrence for you to end up on Nick’s couch or at their place in the middle of the day with your toothbrush and a change of clothes.

You moved to lean into his pillows. “I don’t know, it's the same granola fucker she’s been hanging around,” you answered.

He rubbed his chin with a slight smirk. “There’s a subtle justice to knowing she’s still with that asshat,” he commented, making you snort.

A week later, you were on your way back to your apartment after a lecture when someone felt you up. It was the straw on the camel’s back for you as you spin around to smack the guy, stirring up a few of the bystanders. You’d walked the rest of the way home, stepping through the door to be met with your roommate and her hookup twisted together in the kitchen.

You clamped your hand over your eyes, mumbling about how you just wanted to take a nap when you were once again sent to Nick’s. You let subtle tears fall as you trudged your way across the city, hoping to get out whatever darkness you had to your attitude. The last thing you wanted to do was confront Clay looking like you did. He was like the troll with the keys to the bridge. That was really the only reason the two of you ever talked, so you knew he’d be waiting to berate you before you could get to Nick.

As you walked into the building, you spotted Clay carrying a large box, his hair slightly disheveled and his hands dirty. You knew almost instantly that he was probably attempting to fix the kitchen sink and got a call because of the size of the package. That sink had been dripping since they’d moved in, making it Clay’s mission to futz around with it every Friday afternoon. You tried helping him one time, only ending up with a deflated sense of confidence and the second wave of your childhood anger issues.

He nodded at you as you held the elevator door open for him. “What’s up, babycakes?” He chirped, popping his gum. When you hesitated to answer, he looked at you fully, scoffing. “Damn, walk of shame gone sour?”

You crossed your arms over your chest, inhaling deeply to try and calm your nerves. “I’m not really in the mood today,” you muttered, tucking your hands between your back and the wall.

He snorted, setting the box down between his feet. “You’re always in the mood! Isn’t that like your thing,” he continued to jeer. “You look like you had a fun night though-”

“Clay, stop. I’m serious,” barked at him. His expression twisting at your use of his name.

He raised his hands in mock defense. “Sorry, I thought we had---like a bit thing, um-” he cut himself off, awkwardly shoving his fists in his pockets. After a beat of silence between the two of you, the elevator came to a sharp halt on the wrong floor, the light switching to red. The two of you shared a look, knowing that the landlord was probably flipping the wrong switches again. Clay texted Nick to see what was going on.

It began to grow colder in the elevator, as it usually did. When it was off, the cold from outside usually seeped in through the elevator shaft. There was one time you were stuck in the elevator for a few hours with one of your neighbors and Karl when he had come to visit. Back then, the three of you played Uno on the guy’s phone. It was also summer, so the chill creeping up your legs wasn’t as intolerable as it was now.

You rubbed the arms of your sweater in hopes of generating some kind of warmth. Clay watched you carefully, his hands moving to grip the bar behind him. “Do you want my sweatshirt?” He offered. You shook your head, sliding onto the ground and hugging your knees to your chest. He hesitantly slumped down beside you, kicking his long legs out towards the door. The red light filling the space made his features look softer.

He nudged your arm gently with his own. “I know I’m not Sapnap, but…” he chewed on the inside of his cheek, shrugging slightly, “I mean, we’re stuck in here. We can talk about it.”

You blinked away the tears threatening to spill once again, your eyes burning and tired. “I haven’t slept with him, you know?” You stated, turning to look at him briefly before moving to sit cross-legged, planning with your fingers. “I’ve never even kissed him. I’ve never kissed anyone,” you scoffed. Clay was silent, but out of the corner of your eye, you could see him watching you intently.

Being this close to him, you could smell the smoky vanilla undertones of his cologne. The scent reminded you of a masculine version of the candle your aunt always burned when she went out for a night to spite her ex-husband.

Clay leaned his head back against the wood paneling, his soft blond hair flattening in the back to spread against the wall. You swallowed, sighing slightly. “I haven’t even had my first kiss yet and I’m getting groped on the bus and kicked out of my damn apartment because my roommate and her fucking boyfriend have to hook up on every surface. Nothing is sacred.” You shook your head, wiping away some stray tears with the back of your hand and sniffling pathetically. “You can keep making slut jokes, I don’t care. But I swear to God, I haven’t done anything with Sapnap. Or Karl, or Quackity. No one.”

He chuckled softly. “I know. That’s why I used to make those jokes,” he mumbled. “It was like… ironic humor. And then it got so far that the only way I knew you’d talk back to me was if I was fucking around with you,” he admitted. You chuckled slightly at his words, taking a deep breath.

“Oh, Dream,” you sighed. “I would have hooked up with you if you weren’t such an ass,” you chided. His laugh made you feel better. He held his hand out to you, more for support than anything, but as you laced your fingers with his, your heart eased, feeling safe beside him.

After a beat of silence, he spoke up again. "I can ride the bus with you now... if you want..." He offered, a shyness that seemed so foreign to his character shown through his eyes. "I promise I won't grope you," he joshed, making you roll your eyes.

"That's really not something we should be joking about," you mumbled, wiping away the rest of your tears on your sleeve.

His thumb brushed against the back of your hand soothingly. "I mask my awkwardness around you in dark humor. I'm sorry."

[tthael]

I apologize if you’ve already written about this before, but one thing I’ve been wondering about your Indelicate version of Eddie is in regard to his occasional tendency toward more (for lack of a better/less serious-sounding term) “aggresive” actions (e.g., throwing the lotion bottle, throwing the water, etc.) directed toward Richie. I know it was hinted at that the urges to aggress may sometimes be/have been the result of repressed or misconstrued attraction, but I’m wondering if some of it is also a result of Eddie’s injury and the related feelings of a lack of control over his own body? Like hypothetically, if Eddie were never injured or if we fast-forward to him completely healed, do you think that moments like that would still happen? Or am I just really reading too much into the fic and making up this aspect of it? Hope that makes sense - I just love your characterization of Eddie and I want to make sure I’m understanding as much as I can!

I actually haven’t written about this before, and I think that it’s a good thing that I take the time to meditate on it now, because I don’t want the idea that throwing things at your romantic partner is, like, a good thing.

So a lot of my thoughts on Eddie’s aggression derive from two specific aspects of his portrayal. The first (chronologically in Eddie’s timeline) is the portrayal of Eddie as high-strung, snappy, and verbally combative in IT Chapter One (2017).  Within the last year and a half I saw a post that pointed out that some of Eddie’s aggression--especially in interacting with Richie--probably derives from the high-stress situations of a) being hunted by an alien clown demon and b) being abused at home. I had a college professor discussing a history and trauma class point out that, “Traumatized people don’t always behave well.” There are the usual caveats that explanations are not excuses; however, I think that the constant knowledge that he has to return to Sonia’s house and the persistent alarms telling him when he has to take medication, so that even when he’s apart from her he can’t get away from her interference, means that Eddie’s under high pressure. And then you get to the point where all of the children in Derry are being hunted by an actual monster, and it’s a wonder that Eddie behaves as well as he does, because I certainly wouldn’t.

I usually like to incorporate some of book!Eddie’s dreamy introspection into his internal narrative in Indelicate, and I think that some of his pressures are relaxing now that he’s a) no longer living in a house with Sonia, b) acting specifically in ways that maximize his own agency (going where he wants with whom he wants, eating what he wants, actively rejecting much of her influence). However, he’s still got a lot on his plate, and some habits die hard. This is why I have moments of Eddie waiting with the perfect snappy comeback on his tongue, and then stopping himself because he knows it’s something he doesn’t mean. He doesn’t actually want Richie to never talk again, he loves it when Richie talks, and he’s struggling towards sincerity. I personally have a lot of difficulty letting go of the put-down jokes in favor of being sincere with the people I love, so I thought I’d give Eddie several moments of consciously choosing to be honest and kind with Richie.

The second influence on Eddie’s relationship to physically “lashing out” is his introductory scene from IT (1986), where he’s leaving home and Myra is chasing after him demanding explanations and wailing about how terrified she is. I know that there are lots of analyses of this scene and thoughts on Myra versus Sonia, and I’m not interested in those right now; however, what caught my eye was that Eddie sees Myra’s distress and his first thought is something along the lines of “you might as well hit her”--not that he wants to hit her and he has nothing to lose, but that his causing her emotional distress is as bad as physically abusing his wife. (I can’t recall at the moment whether Eddie’s section comes before or after Bev’s introduction, but I want to say that it’s before, and I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Bev and Eddie’s very different home lives are contrasted.)

So I thought, that as a boy child without a father, raised and abused by his single mother--and considering his issues with (as I write it) suppressed gay feelings, and the sort of “glass closet” I write him with--Eddie’s concepts of masculinity are probably pretty toxic. I think that in order to maintain control over Eddie, Sonia probably got very emotionally manipulative when he resisted her at all, especially as he got older and taller and physically stronger than her, and that she probably cried out things like “Eddie, you’re hurting me, how can you hurt your mother like this?” and made Eddie feel like the abuser (which is, I’m given to understand, a frequent tactic of abusers: reversing the roles to make the victim feel apologetic and guilty). I’m specifically thinking of the way that Gillian Flynn writes manipulative white women who weaponize white women’s fragility--Adora in Sharp Objects, since that’s actually the only Gillian Flynn book I’ve read so far. I think that Eddie would be very conscious of what he perceives as his capacity to be an aggressor, and it would be one more way that Sonia could keep him docile.

Later, with Myra--and I’m writing Myra more sympathetically in Indelicate than I did in Things That Happen After Eddie Lives, so I’m not interested in getting into the “is Myra abusive?” conversation right now, because I’ve written her both ways--I think that Eddie likely had a sort of learned helplessness about his own agency with Sonia that he then transferred onto his relationship with Myra. In Indelicate, I write him with a lot of reluctance to volunteer any information towards her, or his emotional state, or to make any of his wishes known (frequently she shoots them down as too extravagant, the way that I talked about Eddie’s relationship to money and luxury and Myra refusing a larger bed).

I write Eddie as largely unaware of his attraction to men until his near-death-experience, but only because he did not allow himself to connect the dots between what he thought of as physical symptoms (tunnel vision on hot man in coffee shop = optic nerve impairment, see doctor); but I think that Eddie was profoundly aware of his unhappiness in his marriage and just tried to reason with himself that everyone felt like that, and everyone was miserable and suppressing their own wants and needs, because that’s just what marriage is, and any other approach to his marriage would make him abusive, so Eddie and Myra’s marriage was emotionally volatile and extremely stressful.

Which is to say that Indelicate Eddie is a powder keg when Richie gets to him.

Again, I don’t think that throwing things at your romantic partner is an acceptable mode of interaction and I don’t want any readers to get the idea that that’s the underlying message of Indelicate, because it’s not. The scene with the moisturizer is derived from something that happened to me years ago (I was Richie, the guy I had a crush on was Eddie) involving a wayward Frisbee; the scene where Eddie tries and fails to throw a drink at Richie is derived from an anecdote of the early days of my parents’ marriage (my mother was Eddie), one that my father’s coworkers and boss loved to talk about and his best friend still brings up when they hang out.

However, Eddie’s relationship to physicality is also deeply informed by a tumblr post I saw over a year ago that talked about how Eddie grew up being told that he was fragile and delicate and sickly, and how Richie did not give a shit about any of that and was more than willing to just grapple him. For this fic, I decided to lean into that idea: that Eddie longs to be treated as though he’s solid and healthy and strong, and he finds a lot of relief in Richie <i>not</i> treating him gently. But because Eddie is actually physically injured in Indelicate, Richie is being careful not to break him while also dealing with Eddie’s very real (and largely unvoiced) desire for physical contact. It’s not an accident that at the end of the chapter in which Richie and Eddie have a shouting match that Richie wrestles Eddie to the floor and pins him and blows a raspberry on his belly--which is incredibly juvenile at the same time that it’s a display of Richie’s physical capabilities and Eddie finds that bizarrely attractive.

So, on top of Eddie’s desire for physical contact, his extreme stressors, and his lifetime of maladaptive coping mechanisms--the other thing that I consider when I write his dynamic with Richie is that Richie is not physically intimidated by Eddie at all. This is not because Richie is stronger than Eddie (he is) or larger than Eddie (he is). This is because there was a time in which Richie and Eddie found it perfectly acceptable to grapple each other as a form of interactions, because Richie and Eddie have known each other since they were seven years old. I even like to think that at one point, Eddie was the taller of the two, because Richie hit a really ridiculous growth spurt somewhere around the start of puberty and Eddie was something of a “late-bloomer,” and Eddie silently seethed about it through their entire adolescence.

So when Richie and Eddie lash out at each other--largely Eddie, because I think Richie, with his fear of the werewolf and of losing control and hurting someone--they’re building on sort of a lifetime of informal physicality. Stitchy does something similar in their Richie/Eddie fic where elements of roleplay always appear in their romance, because they were kids who played pretend games together, and when you have a bond like that with someone, it does permanently shape what sort of interaction you do and do not find acceptable. I also included a flashback into childhood where Richie gets angry with Eddie and very deliberately and methodically pushes him down on the ground and Eddie cries, not because Richie physically hurt him (he didn’t), but because it wasn’t in good fun there, that was Richie deciding to throw him around because he knew it would upset him.

So there’s a lot going into Eddie’s physically aggressive responses in Indelicate--the toxic masculinity that dictates the way that men are allowed to express anger and the ways in which they are allowed to touch each other; the profound stress that Eddie has endured for his whole lifetime without getting many better coping mechanisms; the feeling of lack of control of his physical body; a regression to childhood habits; and a deep sense of relief that Richie (being big, strong, and a man) is not vulnerable to him in the way that Sonia convinced him she (and later Myra) were.

I hmm’d and haww’d over a scene in the most recent chapter in which Eddie strikes Richie with an open hand (it’s a little slap on the chest, and I wanted it to come across very like the sort of corrective smack to the back of the head that I can imagine any of the Losers issuing to Richie back in 1989 when he shoots off at the mouth), because that’s not something I’d be comfortable doing to a romantic partner myself. Richie thinks nothing of it and turns it into a dirty joke, but I do need to get more into Eddie’s decision to touch Richie in kind ways in direct refusal of that “you construct intricate rituals that allow you to touch other men” facet of toxic masculinity.

I know it’s a ridiculously long answer, but it’s a serious issue and I wanted to give it the greatest possible consideration instead of writing something flip. Because both the incidents you named (ones I didn’t even realize formed a pattern, to be honest) are drawn from real life, I can’t say that they’re moments that are influenced by Eddie’s physical disability, but I do think they’re more influenced by his emotional state. I also think that as some of his stressors come off his plate and he gets more comfortable having an adult relationship with Richie, he’s going to stop throwing things at him. I even had Eddie stop after throwing the water, not just because it was ridiculous but because he realized how out of line he was in that moment. Recognizing when you’re out of control in an argument is, I find, an important part of self-improvement; and learning to walk away or to reset is a valuable skill.

Thank you so much for reading!

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @kevaaronday!

Read on AO3

*****

Heard you were tough (but you don't look it)

1 - That Asshole 0 - Derek 1

Usually Derek got a different response after he’d saved someone’s life.

Depending on if the person was in the know or not, he either got some very surprised screaming about monsters, or a sincere thank you and the occasional offer to be thanked in some other way. Which he always declined, because that would be taking advantage.

This guy, this… asshole. He was different.

“I had that,” he was immediately yelling at Derek.

Different, and clearly delusional.

“You were seconds away from death,” Derek wondered if The Asshole was on something. “The Omega’s fangs were inches from tearing your throat out.”

Derek had jumped in immediately, without a thought for his own safety. As an Alpha, he’d heal pretty damn quickly from anything a crazed Omega could do to him. And the guy almost getting his throat torn out was human - at least at first glance.

“As if,” The Asshole was actually laughing at him.

“I get that you probably have a weapon or two in hand,” Derek did not have the patience to be dealing with a hunter who thought himself invincible. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be killed.”

Though, he couldn’t smell any wolfsbane on this guy. He couldn’t smell much of anything, which was probably a bad sign. If hunters had somehow learned how to block their chemosignals, that would take away a large part of the advantage the wolves had over them.

They needed that advantage.

His pack was probably going to call him paranoid, since they had very little problems with hunters anymore, now that Chris Argent had turned out to be a decent person. But it wasn’t paranoia if it kept all of them alive.

“I don’t need weapons,” That Asshole rolled his eyes at Derek.

That was a new one. He hadn’t ever heard a hunter say that before. They were always so dependant on their guns and their wolfsbane - or even bows. This guy seemingly carried none of those things. Though he was wearing so many layers it was hard to tell.

“Do you have claws hidden underneath that plaid?” Derek had to ask.

Because that was the only way that The Asshole would have made it out alive. There was no way a human got that close to a rabid Omega without any weapons on him and still lived to tell the tale. Not without some kind of interference. Or someone saving their ungrateful ass.

“Nothing up my sleeves,” the guy pushed up said sleeves.

Nothing to see there. There was nothing special about this guy, until Derek turned to look at the Omega (the corpse) lying on the ground, and then looked up to find that The Asshole was nowhere to be found.

Well, fuck. Clearly this was no random human. The smell of petrichor told him that much - funny how that he could smell, when there was nothing about the magic-user himself that Derek could get a scent on. So he was powerful, and could have probably handled himself against that Omega - but was it worth the risk?

And still, a ‘thank you’ wouldn’t have been out of place here. Derek was just saving a life, it was That Asshole who had to make it into a big fight. Just because Derek hadn’t wanted him to die at the hands of a feral Omega.

That was about as kind as he got.

2 - The best Spark ever 1 - Grumpy Wolf 1

So clearly the Beacon Hills Alpha was a self-righteous ass, but it wasn’t like Stiles could just let him die. That would be… less than ideal for his standing in the local community. Also, he wasn’t actually that much of an asshole. Not usually, not to anyone who didn’t deserve it.

He was just in doubt about how much the Alpha deserved it.

Still, there was a difference between actively being an asshole to someone and letting them die because of a troupe of egomaniac hunters. Beacon Hills needed an Alpha, and Stiles was going to get one over on the asshole Alpha - so clearly two reasons to do the right thing. That and Stiles’ hatred of hunters. That made three.

Ugh, guess he had to show off now. He hated doing that (no he didn’t).

“Hello there fellas,” Stiles did enjoy playing the harmless human card when it gave him an advantage. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it feels like the start of a bullying PSA.”

That stopped these rednecks in their tracks - and seriously, why were hunters usually rednecks? Was it the racism or the love of guns? Or both? Both.

“You’d best get on your merry way, boy,” the one with the baseball cap started threatening him.

And that meant he really didn’t know what he was up against, which was awesome for Stiles but not so much for these guys. And not so much for the Alpha’s ego, clearly, because he was halfway to growling at Stiles before he even spoke up. Right, because it was perfectly fine for Stiles to be the damsel but this guy is too manly to be put in that position?

Fucking toxic masculinity!

“I’m going to need your pet Alpha for that,” Stiles grinned. “I kinda called dibs.”

That surprised them enough that Stiles could get off the first spell with a quick flick of the wrist - a modification of the mountain ash circle that allowed nothing or no one to enter or exit the circle without Stiles’ permission. And since the asshole Alpha was very much outside that circle…

“You’re welcome,” Stiles cocked his head, waiting for some appreciation from said Alpha.

He got none.

The Alpha was basically growling at him. “You called dibs?”

Maybe that wasn’t the best thing he could have said about an apparently extremely paranoid Alpha. But he’d already said it, and well, he stood by it. Because underneath that anger, and the heavy brow, and the asshole behavior… Well, underneath all of that the Alpha was kind of hot and Stiles would have hate-sexed him in a heartbeat. If, you know, he wasn’t an ungrateful ass. Or if he seemed like the kind of guy who was into hate-sex.  

“I’m sorry, are these rednecks more your type?” Stiles had no trouble keeping the circle intact. “I am not sure you’re kink-compatible.”

The joking just riled the Alpha up even more, which was a whole different level of entertaining. And watching the Alpha’s eyebrows twitch when Stiles easily tightened the circle the hunters were still trapped in, well that was just the icing on the cake, really. The guy was really pissed off that Stiles was powerful enough to save himself and others - such a savior complex.

“Well, I’d best be off,” Stiles wasn’t going to let the Asshole Alpha get another word in. “I have some criminals to hand-deliver to the Sheriff. You’re welcome.”

And with that, he left an Alpha werewolf in the dust. Like a BAMF.

3 - Dangerous magic user 1 - Derek 2

There was no way that Derek was going to let a dangerous magic user run through Beacon Hills unchecked. This was his territory, and it was his job to keep people safe, and therefore it was his job to know when dangerous people were around who risked tipping the balance.

And this guy - there was no way that he wasn’t dangerous. Someone that powerful, who could trap groups of hunters with a flick of his wrist and casually drag a protective circle after him… Maybe Derek had trust issues - and he knew he did - but he couldn’t trust the intentions of anyone that powerful. Especially when this person hadn’t even introduced himself to the pack, which was supposed to be tradition.

It almost made him miss Deaton. At least he remembered how things were supposed to work, enigmatic as he might have been before randomly bailing two months ago. He never even explained why he left or where he’d gone. And he’d left no forwarding address.

The wendigos were a bit more of an urgent issue, though.

Derek’d had to look through his mother’s old journals, the one she always locked up in the vault because she didn’t want the kids to get their hands on them. She’d spoken of the creatures, mentioned how dangerous they were and how imperative it was that they be kept far away from humans - especially those who were born with magic in their blood.

Did he mention that wendigos had an immunity to most spells?

Clearly the pain in the ass magic user hadn’t done the research, because he was still out there, in the Preserve in the middle of the night, flinging spells at an advancing wendigo. Derek knew his pack was dealing with the rest of the family, but they’d left the most dangerous one to him - as they should. Derek healed faster than they did.

“Get out of the way,” he threw himself into battle without another thought. “They’re mostly immune to magic. You need to get to safety.”

The magic user didn’t listen, not right away. But Derek couldn’t spend too much energy keeping track on him, not when he had a cannibalistic creature to get rid of. Looking back once already earned him a slash across the ribs, and he was lucky it wasn’t worse.

“What the hell is that thing?”

So clearly the magic user wasn’t leaving.

“Wendigo,” Derek shouted at him. “Now leave. Please. I’ve got this.”

The please just… came out. It was completely unlike their previous interactions, but Derek had said it and now he had to deal with it. Or he could just pretend he’d never said it and deal with a dangerous monster instead. That sounded like the better option.

Sometimes he wished there was another way to deal with a wendigo. But there wasn’t. His mother had tried, several times even, and if Talia Hale couldn’t do it… It had to be impossible.

He took a deep breath, trying to center himself, trying to anchor himself to his pack as he let the wolf into the driver’s seat. Against a creature like this, it is best to shift completely. Like his mother had.

It hurt to have his bones completely rearrange themselves, but he was used to pain. It helped him heal the scratches from the wendigo a bit quicker too.

“Holy shit, did you just?” Mage was still there.

Derek-wolf growled at him. Not safe for Mage with nice scent .

Not until after he shifted back, his body too tired to maintain the shift after he’d managed to defeat the angry wendigo singlehanded, did he realize that the magic user had never left. That he’d stuck around to watch Derek save his stupid life, for some reason.

Though he disappeared as soon as Derek’s pack came to find him.

He didn’t say thank you. Not surprising.

4 - The Amazing Mischief 2 - Sexy Wolf 2

So apparently the Alpha could actually turn into a wolf. Stiles was reluctantly impressed. Reluctantly, because the guy was still an asshole who thought Stiles couldn’t handle himself against one single wendigo - and yeah, okay, maybe he was right about the whole immunity to magic thing, but still.

But the full shift? Impressive. Saying please? Heartbreaking. Protecting Stiles even in full wolf form? Confusing. Stupid. Weird.

Grudging acceptance was not the way he wanted to go with this guy.

And so, when he saw another chance to piss the Alpha off by saving his ass, even though he had a whole pack he could call in for backup instead… Stiles just had to take it.

And yeah, technically he was the protector of the town now, after that vet had just disappeared and his Dad had dragged him back from Poland because they really needed the help. And after the weeks he’s had, with the Omega and the hunters and a family of wendigos - well, Stiles is never dismissing the Hellmouth-like quality of Beacon Hills ever again. So technically it was now his job to protect idiot martyr Alphas - even though his job description just said “consultant”.

Ugh, damn Alpha werewolf and his martyr complex.

“We have got to stop meeting like this, Sourwolf,” Stiles leaps in front of the monster with a smug grin on his face.

Is that actually a fucking kanima? He’s never seen one of those in the flesh before.

“Of course you’re here,” the Alpha is not amused.

“Danger’s calling,” Stiles shrugged as he erected a magical shield. “Did you murder anyone recently? Other than the wendigo? Because he shouldn’t be after you like this, sexy wolf.”

That one just kind of slipped out, but Stiles was certainly not going to walk it back. No, he was totally going to own it - he’d hit on Alpha werewolves before. Sure, those were probably less hot - and less of an asshole. Infuriatingly, that made this guy just Stiles’ type.

Which was something he’d have to contemplate after he saved him from the kanima.

“Please just call me Derek,” the Alpha hid his face.

Because he was actually… blushing? That was awesome. Even the kanima seemed to think it was funny, which was just…

“Is he our new Daddy?”

Where the kanima had just stood, a smug douche-looking guy had taken his place. There was still a slimy quality about him, but it didn’t seem like they were in any kind of real danger, so Stiles figured he could drop the shield.

“You interrupted our sparring session,” Alpha Derek had crossed his arms over his solid chest.

And no, Stiles, that was a terrible road to go down.

Best to focus on the fact that there was a fucking kanima in the pack, and no one had bothered to inform him of that. He was going to have to have words with his Dad about this. Yes, his father would hear about this.

“Still saved your wolfy butt,” Stiles had to argue.

“I was in no danger whatsoever,” Derek rolled his eyes.

Ugh, the sass was a great look on him, and that was just unfair. He was just glad he was good at masking scent, because he did not want the wolf to have that kind of advantage.

“Still counts.”

Figuring that was a decent enough exit line, Stiles made a magical escape. Sure, it was a waste of his power, but he was trying to make a good impression here. Sort of.

5 - Mr. Stilinski if you’re nasty 3 - Derek freaking Hale 2

Research was key, especially when dealing with a pack that he was going to be having dealings with for a long time, if his Dad had his way. Dad was so happy to finally have Stiles close again, that he was about five seconds away from setting up a play-date with Alpha Hale and his pack. He only dropped it when Stiles assured him that he had it handled.

Sure, his Dad only dropped it long enough to seriously laugh at him, but it worked.

So the next time he approached the Hale pack, he followed the protocol that Babcia had drummed into him. Which was all well and good, until they got attacked like ten seconds after Stiles had finally properly introduced himself to Derek.

“Chimeras,” the blonde girl cursed. “Fucking chimeras.”

Oh, his Dad had filled him in on those, and Stiles was not in any way looking forward to this, but he was prepared to handle them. If he had to, because those kids had probably not asked to be turned into this, had not asked to be made feral.

“We just have to hold them off long enough for Lydia to get the cure,” Derek showed why he was actually a good Alpha. “Stay safe. Be careful. Don’t go after them alone. You know Theo and his traps.”

Fucking Theo was still around? Of course he was. He was never happy until he was making everyone in this town miserable. Sucked for him that Stiles was back now, because Stiles had never had any patience for his brand of dangerous bullshit. Also, Stiles was way more powerful than he was, and he was going to enjoy rubbing that in Theo’s face.

Just, well, he still didn’t want to hurt any innocent people.

“There’s a cure?” Stiles turned to Derek. “I can hold them for a while. How long do you need?”

The look on Derek’s face was just unfair. It was grateful, warm, pleased - Derek trusted him, trusted Stiles with his life and his pack’s lives. And that was… stupid of him. Sure, Stiles had saved his life… well this would be the third time’s charm.

Okay maybe it wasn’t stupid.

And maybe they made it work, with the girl named Lydia - he vaguely remembered her from elementary school, before his Mom died and he went to live with Babcia to get a handle on his abilities - and all of Derek’s pack. But Stiles’ powers were the only reason no one was harmed while they waited for the cure to work.

That wasn’t arrogance, that was the painful truth.

“Thank you,” Derek looked at him way too sincerely.

“Yeah, had to save that hot ass,” Stiles was babbling, he knew he was. “Disregard that. I’m just going to go. Because well, it’s your turn next. Or whatever.”

It was. Stiles was in the lead now, and it wasn’t like Stiles wanted to be saved… He just wanted to be chased, a little. Maybe wanted Derek to like him. He wanted this not to be the last of this thing they were doing. He didn’t want to go back to the politics of it, the usual business of the pack and the protector.

He kinda just… wanted Derek. Which was stupid, but it was what is was.

6 - Stiles 3 - Derek 3

It took Jackson about fifteen jokes about getting a new daddy to get Derek moving. Yeah, he was disappointed in himself too.

But Stiles - and what even was that name - was different. He was the Sheriff’s son, a good old boy from Beacon Hills, but he was also a powerful mage and the most immature asshole Derek knew outside of his own pack. Derek was drawn in by him, like magic, but it was also terrifying.

But when he saw those hunters, those very same hunters that Stiles had chased off a few weeks ago, trying to move in for some revenge… Well, he didn’t even think. He just leapt, growled at them like they couldn’t just put him down with a single bullet.

“Stay away from him,” he growled out from a suddenly fanged mouth.

So much for his fabled control. Because they were threatening Stiles, and Stiles was…

Not his. Not like pack, no matter how badly Derek wanted just that. Because Stiles had proven himself worthy, putting himself out there for Derek, risking himself to keep Derek’s pack safe. It made him special, made him worth taking note of as a potential ally. It was the humor, the flirting, the seeming fearlessness that made Stiles worth taking note of as a potential partner.

“Did the beast find himself a pet human?” Hunters were never original.

“A friend,” Derek growled. “A mage. A powerful mage. And the son of the Sheriff.”

Maybe he thought of Stiles as just another harmless human at first, as someone who needed protecting. He knew better now, knew just how dangerous Stiles could be to people who meant harm. Staying back and letting Stiles handle things was never going to be his first instinct, but having Stiles and his bag of tricks around could make such a difference in this dangerous town. They could really make a difference here.

“Skip the mating rituals,” the hunters were not impressed.

“I have Chris Argent on speed dial,” Derek warned, and somehow that worked.

Derek kept his claws out, kept up the beta shift just to be sure, but the hunters backed off Stiles and walked away. Sure, they’d be back, but Derek could handle it. Or he could let Chris do it.

“Guess we’re tied now,” Stiles turned to him, impish grin on his face.

“I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities,” Derek responded, because he knew exactly what this was. “But I’m not just going to let you win.”

This was actually a mating ritual - it was courting in the most roundabout way. And he didn’t have to doubt Stiles’ interest, because he was right there with him. They could bicker and get to know each other later, but the interest was obvious from both sides.

“Good,” Stiles stepped in closer.

“How about we go on a date that doesn’t involve violence?” Derek found himself making the first move. “Tomorrow night?”

That put him in the lead in another competition, and Stiles was already getting pouty that he hadn’t been the first to score. It was childish and overly competitive and perfect for Derek.

“I had that,” Stiles huffed. “I was going to ask you.”

Good, so at least they were definitely on the same page. And Stiles was going to say yes when he got over not being the one to ask.

“You snooze, you lose,” Derek pointed out.

“You’re terrible and I can’t believe I’m dating you,” Stiles rolled his eyes.

Okay, so maybe Stiles wasn’t over it yet, but he could work on it. His pack was going to mock him for all eternity, but Derek kind of couldn’t wait for Stiles to be a real part of his pack.

“I’m assuming that’s a yes,” Derek grinned. “Pick you up at seven.”

As Stiles huffed and puffed and groaned, Derek was the one making a perfectly-timed exit this time.

Score for Hale.

[pepperstrawberry]

Heavy post...*waves to frens*

Warning: Long post... but not putting it under a cut because I specifically want new followers to read this. Mutuals and long time followers? Nothing new here, feel free to hit that page down button a few times XD

So, over the last few weeks, I’ve gained a lot of new followers... and lost some too. Now of course, I generally don’t worry too much about it (or try not to). I know some folk unfollow maybe because it’s been a while and their interests have changed, or maybe in some cases they were dealing with some frustrating things that I happen to be also talking about at the time and so they wanted to get away from it all for a while and it wasn’t really a personal thing. No judgement on that stuffs...

But, I do want to make some things clear for those that have recently followed me and might have followed just because of a cute image or two I made for magic stuffs with the new set dropping:

First: I am a trans woman. I support the full LGBTAQ+ spectrum. Yes, this includes Non-binary, Asexual, Aromantic, and all. I’m not going to argue with folks on the inclusion. It’s just that way. Oh yeah, and Bisexual, both being and supporting. This means even when a couple is not with who you think they should be with (a straight person seeing a ‘bi’ with the same or gay seeing ‘bi’ with different, you know that whole thing... no matter who a bisexual person is with, they are still bi)

Second: I’m anti-capitalist. Yes, I live in a capitalist world, and have to abide by the current machinations of it. I mean, consider things like Patreon, Go Fund Me, and the like. Those are not ‘capitalist’ (though can and have been used in that way), but are a way a community can help creators make a living without having to worry about making every product ‘marketable’. (which is why I’m against the recent shift that Patreon is doing for it’s creators, but that is a whole other post).

Third: I am a supporter of things like Black Lives Matter and other inter-sectional things. Look, the same sort of oppressive arguments, and often even the same people, are used against both people within the LGBTQA+ community AND people of color. It just makes sense to back them up as much as my fellow lgbt friends.

Fourth: Which leads me to being Feminist. 3rd wave specifically. Yes, there are crap folk that claim to be feminist, but that is the case with any group. I mean there are lesbians that are against trans woman, soo... Anyhoo, the bottom line of 3rd wave Feminism is inter-sectional support. Women, LGBT folk, People of Color, and everything like that. And before you go ‘but what about white males?’, consider that that is who holds the power right now. Well, White, Male, and Rich. But many of the things that real feminism fights for also covers things that would help out men as well. Things like better therapy and psychological help. The idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ isn’t the idea that ‘masculinity is toxic’, but that there are ways that being a ‘guy’ has been pushed that are toxic in nature, both a danger for others as well as the men themselves. Remember the idea of ‘real men don’t cry’? That’s toxic. It teaches men that being sad isn’t a manly thing, but to express anger is okay. Which is why we get a lot of these shooters doing what they do.

Fifth: I’m... I guess I’m agnostic? I used to be christian, but I have found that some threads within that faith are... problematic lets say. But I find ANY system of belief (or non-belief in the case of Atheism or however you want to define it) has fringe folks that are... problematic as it were. I judge less on religious affiliation and more on how that religious faith is expressed. I would have more to say on that, but really that is the bottom line. If your faith is more about proving others wrong/judging others over just living the best life you can and helping others, then your faith is garbage. end of story. Don’t matter which god, gods, or even no gods at all you follow.

Sixth: I tend to be a bit of a critic about things. Sometimes I blow things out of proportion, sometimes I don’t go quite far enough. But in the end, I try to be as honest as I can and as clear as my rambly nature lets me. Though, as I always emphasize, I never mean to judge a person on their love of a thing. There are rare exceptions of course. Like, I will judge you if you love “Birth of a Nation” or “Triumph of the Will’ as they are both KKK/Nazi movies and white supremacist in nature. There is nothing in either to be lauded save that they were likely the first movies in their era to pull together several film elements that had already existed (really they were more a triumph of budget then of talent). If you like Game of Thrones because of how ‘realistic’ it is to do -that- to so many women (you know what that is), then yes, I’m judging you. But If you like Game of thrones for all the other reasons -in spite- of -that-, then no judgement at all. Those moments shouldn’t be enjoyed. At best, they should effect you will a visceral disgust as the moments are intended.

I used to (and sometimes still do) reblog the heavier, more ‘polictical’ posts to my other blog @pepperolitics, but after the purge messed up my adult blog, it’s harder to bother with a side blog these days. So there are times where my more direct political aspect comes to play on main.

And really? That shouldn’t be that much an issue when you think about it.

I mean, I try to stay positive and light on my main blog. That usually means the heavy subjects get put to my other blogs. Adult subjects to my adult blog (which is now effectively gone even if I haven’t actually deleted it yet) and the POLITICS go to the political blog...

But that would be the seventh thing on the list of getting to know me:

NOTHING IS EVER NON-POLITICAL.

Nothing.

Now, I will say there is a difference between ‘political’ and ‘POLITICAL’, that is to say: we are human, the way we interact with each other is inherently political. How we agree, disagree, compromise on a day to day basis is political. Manners are political.

All ART is political.

But then there is the capital ‘P’ POLITICAL, where we are talking about government, the big policies, the big moments, the major events.

Where we switch from political to POLITICAL is when we go from things that are inherent, inferred, or basically subtext to straight up text and direct.

In otherwords: I refuse the idea that me suddenly talking about politics is me “becoming” political. I have always been political, we all are. it’s just sometimes, you have to make your politics clear.

Or in other other words: White, capitalist, hurrah! jingoist soilder of things like C.O.D/battlefield is just as POLITICAL as a Woman with a girlfriend and a trans side kick or something... it’s just we have been so surrounded by the former over the latter that we think of it as the accepted norm rather then one flavor of story hero among so many others...

...okay, I’m getting extra rambly and tangental... But that was kinda the point of this post.

Some of you will disagree with some of my points for one reason or another. Sometimes in shades, and sometimes in full... But my base point is, many of my long time followers already know this about me, but some of the new folk might not. And if you are going to stick around, this is the sort of lady you are following.

Hi. I’m Anita Priscilla Barton. Many call me Strawberry, or Pepper, or even just Pep. I am a Bisexual Trans Woman, I love magic the gathering, coffee, and all my wonderful friends and mutuals. And yes, I am a political entity who’s beliefs,  shape her art and critique. Just as all of ours do.

[elizabethrobertajones]

13x04 watching notes

TBH that is my exact strategy when I am tired and want to go home.

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it's 2am and I just woke up after a lengthy power nap/full REM cycle because going to bed at 9 is for cool kids so uh I'm watching the episode but also it's 2am. I didn't do it deliberately but here I aaaam.

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Getting right in there with Dean telling the the truth in the recap - is he really gonna spill it all to a therapist? experts have been awaiting it ever since 1x10 so

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"experts" being me, I am an independent judiciary body

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*grief grief grief* *Jack angst*

Oh yeah Cas recap because Cas is back

Should I even write expectations for this episode? I'm a bit late since I already started watching :P Blah blah Glynn blah blah probably going to be fine, blah blah swear I saw someone say she's "never written Cas before" but uh we just had recaps from 12x19 so I mean who wrote that?

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this guy has a weird reaction to the dead wife coming back

like, oh, okay, that happened. guess we say hello

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Is this the "understated" reaction when Cas comes back

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Oh we're doing regular old stabbing? Is this a shapeshifter thing or a revenge curse thing? Is it all going to be romantic couples? because lol pls don't

Also the recap did expressly list off 2 dead moms and a dead crowley along with a dead Cas who is also a brother and father to active main characters

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Sam like "hey"

Dean like >.> Are you trying to be friends after I yelled at you?

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Sam being remarkably cool about Dean's netflix and holy oil suggestion

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Dean being extremely less cool about Sam's suggestion

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They're sort of recapping the argument from the end of last episode for us, which is good because it wasn't in the recap unless it was but it's 2am and my brain randomly discarded that

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oh my god it was

okay these are not meta notes

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Sam's trying to play at grief counsellor and it's super not working because he's using it as their fight. You don't get in a snappy comeback about "oh so you want to move on"

Dean looks extremely murderously done with all this because How Dare etc

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"For me"

God damn puppy dog eyes.

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awww Jack's watching The Clone Wars. Because he is a wee new baby and this is his star wars generation I guess.

mittensmorgul pffft. (I have never seen Clone Wars so I have no idea what that even means)

elizabethrobertajones It's the adventures *drum roll* of Darth Vader when he was still Anakin, before he went evil Ashoka or however you spell it is his Padawan

mittensmorgul aahhh

elizabethrobertajones Jack's identifying with her and not with the pre-evil but still getting the Imperial March music layered over his bad decisions Anakin the entire show is 10000 episodes just an endless "we can't make him go evil because that happens in the movie but we can tease basically everything up to that" stuff

mittensmorgul At least he's iffy about Anakin...

elizabethrobertajones yeah good choice, basically it's also brand new he found the non-dinosaur version of Star Wars of the previous generation :P and it's less political than the prequels I think The Clone Wars is generally well-liked whereas nerd rage dictates the Prequels are the Worst and I guess it's Too Soon to get into the newer Star Wars films since we don't know how the arcs of the new kids pay off

[side note: I haven't watched it per se because there's tons of it but I've been in the same room as my brother watching it, and seen a lot of pop culture general knowledge that I've sponged up so I could be wrong about some little details as I mostly know how it's been described to me]

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Also Jack's identifying with the female character, because fuck off toxic masculinity, she seems awesome and he has no idea he isn't “”supposed”” to. She also is one of the aliens with the huge tentacle things on her head so idk if it's a good idea for him to get too into this without  meeting more of the general population - Sam's probably right

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Uhoh, Jack kinda does a snarky eyebrow about "you're the good guys" - Did Sam fail to sell it or is Jack really just starting to have trust issues now he's watching TV with black or white morality (literally a dark side and a light side - hrm.) and given his experience of the Winchesters yelling their very shades of grey takes on him at each other

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Well he hasn't learned to be cagey about overhearing that

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*blink blink blink* *sigh*

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"You're *using* me"

Oh no, poor Jack :(

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He also implicitly trusts Dean's judgement more than Sam's bonding, despite how Sam has made all the movements towards him. As people have been meta'ing, Dean's being extremely honest and Jack's setting his markers by that, even if it's horrific to the point of deciding he has to be evil because Dean thinks so.

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Sam says he, Dean and CAS closed the rift - hey, Cas got knocked out by Lucifer in round 1 of that as a distraction and Crowley helped you close it.

They probably have not explained Crowley to him at all.

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At least Sam is being honest now about what happened with the rift, and that it's their mom

and Jack speaks the language of lost moms. Now HE looks at SAM with sympathy.

Probably also explains Dean...

I think Jack is defaulting back to thinking about Dean way more than Sam's opinion of him, although perhaps he may like Sam more now he was upfront and some of why "so uh yeah I was KINDA using you" is on the table

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Jack was wearing a darker henley, which tbh with Dean wearing them again all of a sudden makes it blurry to me if this is not about his Dean-alignment more than colour coding his feelings on being evil (like how Amara's nail polish started off black and got right down to light grey by the end of the season). Now he's swapped to being the Cas Intern.

Ow.

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and aww all the fake IDs. There's a lot to take in about these guys :P

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Oh no Dean said "loony toons" on the episode which may or may not be an exact use of 8x08 for Cas, for Jack. Jack's a bit more of a trial run about wanting to BE a hunter since he is mostly just curious. Also amused Dean has to rephrase for Jack because he actually knows he's a week old or so, and he's not going to enjoy repeating himself or explaining, while he always found it kind of funny to just say a whole string of incomprehensible pop culture at Cas without slowing for a breath.

Not funny now, is it Dean?

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Wait have they never actually fought a revenant aka, idk, it sounds like a naturally occurring zombie? They mention it from time to time but as far as I remember they've never actually called zombies revenants because they're one of the shows where they just embrace the horror movie tradition about zombies completely, so it always seemed like revenants were something slightly different, at least, in the sense that they get named like a different category. And they just lumped them in with ghosts here, as restless spirits but i guess this time *with* the body?

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Dean tells Jack to sit, like he was a dog being kept in the car.

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Unlike dogs he knows how to work the door handle.

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Jack no don't touch the blood

oh good Dean stopped him

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Aw no he's still wearing the dark henley under the tan jacket. That's awful :D

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Pfft Dean's like immediately "it's a revenant" because they know what those are really well after a billion years hunting and we've never watched them ever name anything on screen a revenant before with that vocab, and they're really sticking with not crossing them over with zombies exactly...

I mean Dean said he wasn't a revenant after he got back from hell and I think they've chattered about them before

if I check this on superwiki it's way too early for there to be a spoilery "so it's not a revenant" line from later in this episode highlighted when I hit the search :P

Oh good, I'm glad I'm right.

A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that returns to terrorize the living, usually people it knew in life. Unlike the zombie, a revenant is not under another person's control, and has returned from the grave on its own for a specific and often personal purpose. In 4.01 Lazarus Rising, Bobby accuses Dean of being a shapeshifter or a revenant. Dean proves he's neither by cutting himself with a silver knife. In 8.06 Southern Comfort Garth takes a call from a hunter asking how to deal with a revenant. Garth tells him to get a casket and some silver spikes, then nail it in and bury it. He also warns that getting bit will hurt like hell, but will not turn you into one.

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I wonder if those were revenants in 4x07 and I only ask because it was like almost exactly an anniversary to it in OUR time :P It's still May or maybe June for them in-show

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Okay Dean left Jack to dig but Sam chased after Dean rather than it being a synchronised Winchester ditching of Jack :P

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Little on the nose about "You're starting to sound like dad!" :P

"Is that a bad thing" Oh Dean, no.

Fortunately the theme of this season is fathers so I suspect you're gonna have to deal with this at some point or another

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Sam like "the drill sergent thing won't work on Jack" to the sound of Jack merrily digging in the background because Dean told him to

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I really hope that wasn't an on-set hazing that they actually left him to dig :P

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I love my smol gravedigger son

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I love how Jack did all the digging anyway because Sam's still not actually dirty and Jack's still standing in the hole

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Lol not a revenant, well there's a surprise. I'm glad I double-checked the lore anyway because I have the time to so I'm not going to spend the rest of the episode like "wait what IS the difference between them and zombies anyway and why have we never seen one?"

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I mean it's not gonna be a ghost either, we're 9 minutes in and they're salting and burning because it makes more sense to Dean to do that than not to - I guess a precaution for accidentally angering her spirit for digging her up...?? :P I mean no he still thinks she's a ghost but I mean maybe it's not a total waste of salt.

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OH NO Jack don't ask about if Kelly is a ghost, that's very painful.

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OH NO I thought he was going to ask about Cas but instead Dean said "what gets burned, stays dead" and that hurts a lot

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FORTUNATELY for me the viewer as opposed to Dean the grieving ball of angst over there, I can go check up on Cas immediately.

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He doesn't seem to be doing too good but more in an existential way since he's at least up and walking about.

I like how Jack woke him up but it's probably got to be like a baby bird has to hatch itself.

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He's using up all his "hellos" on the void. Save one for Dean.

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You know if the MotW is imitating dead loved ones I have to say I am not exactly looking forward to this :P I didn't say earlier but the cold open gave me 11x13 vibes and honestly I don't want a repeat of the stress of waiting for Cas to show up for Dean but it not happening... Okay, belatedly 10 minutes in, there's a baseline expectation for the episode that that doesn’t happen. Then again I forgot to check the names at the bottom of the screen except for being happy to see Misha's there so they could spring anyone on us

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Throw a real curveball in just like bring some random dead loved one from the first 3 seasons back :P

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Or waste Jim Beaver's season 13 appearance on it and he's never even in the AU with Mary :P

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Anyway Jack is waiting patiently in the car.

(or, well, not so patiently.. He's starting to get an idea of how the job works, and that Dean is usually repeatedly wrong about everything as he throws spaghetti at the wall about the case...)

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Anyway, dead son, dead wife, so that's quite a neutral combination.

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Asking what they had in common probably means the grief counsellor, but Dean says that and then we go back to Cas right when I've been musing on the loved ones coming back for them thing and honestly it's like Dean's words are just summoning Cas right now.

....... 8x08 used flashbacks to summon Amelia for Sam, just saying

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I hope Cas finds Billie and hopefully a bar immediately and they can become drinking buddies.

I don't even think she's in this one?

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I like those assertive footsteps though. "I have no clue where I am, I am just going to walk in this direction like I mean it"

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Lol they're in Madison i was KIDDING about bringing back a dead loved one from like season 2 or something. Oh well, if it's her, it's her. I'm still bitter about Sarah because I only just re-watched it with my mum the other day.

I should probably stop bringing up Sam's dead or lost girlfriends because it's just bumming me out on his behalf.

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Teehee "he's not our intern"

well

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"I asked you to keep an eye on him" "I can see him"

It's amazing Dean didn't volunteer just to get away from Jack

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Sort of weird existing in a post That Declaration world where I can just canonically know Dean staring at Jack is making him think sad things about Cas without any fear whatsoever

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Oh boy killer grief counsellor probably. "Mia is promising to provide the catharsis I've been craving for so long" and then she gets ripped to shreds by her son.

I feel a little bad reading this woman's diary, but the first line is about not "getting over" it and learning to live with it. Blah blah heal and rebuild yourself, blah blah whole again but never the same

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"Shrinks... Snake oil for the mind." "Or how healthy people deal" Pfft

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Jack being baffled by the issues of customer vs hot dog guy without understanding it's an ancient war fought across the world

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Dean equates "catharsis" to "happy ending" - I can't tell if he's innuendo-ing or accidentally revealing too much and being mournful about it.

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The house has a great fence - its parts are all misaligned. Very visually uncomfortable :D

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Awww someone said "hello" to Jack and Jack was like !!!!! another person!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HELLO! :D :D :D

how can you possibly think he's bad

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Anyway I was about to type that Dean hates it because of course he feels the most vulnerable talking about his feelings all the time, either for performing Dean reasons about needing to keep up a facade of strength (LET YOURSELF CRY, MAN) or because feelings for Cas being inconvenient to him

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UHoh Dean grabbed Jack's shoulder - he did it to Mick to be threatening last year in a Glynn episode, while Mick was wearing a long tan coat. And called Jack "Spock" which is not really accurate characterisation at all. Jack's pretty much nothing but a bundle of emotions, he's just not used to using them around other people. Now CAS on the other hand.....

-

I do like that Mia decided to see them because Jack is sweet and was upfront about losing his mother and he's just adorable.

They bluff their way in by losing a collective mother, Sam once again lining them up as family and siblings.

Play it cool, man. You’ll scare Jack off.

-

I'm starting to think we haven't seen Cas between scenes for a while because Dean hasn't said anything angsty enough

-

But idk if we trust her or not. She has a lot of alcohol stashed on that shelf.

-

Jack wisely doesn't sit on the sofa with them all.

-

"Oh well Mom was great and now she's dead so what's the deal with catharsis" Dean, no.

-

Sam continues with what should be the pre-arranged plan of spill closed truths like well we don't journal but our dad did

also I am so annoyed that confirms they don't keep hunter journals??? grarghgh

Google has ruined this generation

And Dean makes fun of journaling as being for little girls, even though Sam literally just said that about John. Last year in 12x04 he said he was a 13 year old girl when trying to text Mary so he's actually regressed even further backwards at losing her again >.>

-

"I'm good with death, closure, the whole friggin bottle of Jack"

it's a shame he would never put a bumper sticker on Baby, because that...

-

Oh boy we're still having this fight. "My brother's delusional..." yeah oh dear.

Is this going to be one of those things where I basically just want to transcribe the whole thing?

Dean calls out Sam for not being able to even admit that Mary's gone so he hasn't even moved past denial - which to be fair, Sam IS right she's not dead and that they DO have a means of getting her back and everything... Was thinking about how last season was a "Dean is right about everything" season and this time is clearly a Sam is right about everything one... but of course both only to a certain degree, and in this case it's much blurrier about approach and how these fights are going because of course Sam's not being a perfect Saint Sammy that Dean is being unfairly awful to in the entirety of what's going on here. Sam IS struggling and resisting confronting things in his own way and adopting Jack as a pet project is definitely a form of avoidance or at least wanting to get concrete closure on Mary's death before he will fully mourn. Which makes Sam and Dean existing in the same place terrible because they're only in the same physical location

anyway Dean's about to yell  about how hard this all is for him too so I better unpause once I'm holding a stuffed toy again

"At least you had a relationship with mom" WAHEY

I mean that was awful but I'm delighted Sam yelled that because there's ALWAYS something else going on underneath Sam, and I've been waiting for more Sam and Mary angst, since I spent so much time on them last season and at least obliquely referred to this... Talked a lot about how hard Sam had it to reconnect with Mary... That Words with Friends scene from 12x07 was basically floating along waiting to come back up at some point or another, but it took Sam a long time to reach out to Mary personally, and really only in 12x14 (hi Berens, I just accept you and Glynn are brain twins these days) did he pick a side in THAT fight and picked Mary. And we said it was to get closer to Mary but he made it all about the BMoL instead of just confronting that he wanted a relationship with her, and the BMoL ended up just keeping them apart ANYWAY and tl;dr am I going to have to write the reverse version of A World Without Monsters from Sam's POV or can we just agree that my subtext in that fic was exactly what just bubbled up here? :P

-

I just spent the entire length of that paragraph trying to work out when I wrote the meta about how Sam felt about Mary and it took me until that last point to realise it was not a meta, it was a fic where I roundly abused poor Sam for the sake of making that point.

-

Dean's like hey therapy is great! *eyebrows at Jack* *snarky smile at the doc*

-

Sam is like *anger-drinks water*

*refuses to cry as well*

BLOOD

(CRY, DAMMIT, SAM.)

-

That sign was down earlier

is this the poor receptionist?

-

Or... ew, shifter gunk?

-

LOL Dean just takes a flask out of his pocket in the middle of their appointment

Mia asks him to look at Jack, which is the last thing he wants to do, but blah blah meta about 12x22 and how he needs to "see" Jack, and she's pointing out that Jack is terrified which is exactly what Dean needs to see about him

subtle

She actually points out his anger issues as well so I think Dean's getting homework whether he has to write it in a journal or not :P

-

*suddenly everyone is pointing guns*

Hey if she's a a shapeshifter why does she live in an all-white house when shifting makes bloody goo stains everywhere?

Or her assistant, I guess. They haven't had eyes on him :P

-

Ooh that explains why the guy was not surprised to see his wife. Well, kind of surprised, but not nearly horrified enough.

-

Sadly if she is telling the truth that means someone else is using her method to get their guard down to kill them for kicks...

-

Also shades of 9x13 because they had that spa where the monster would use their unique skills to help, but then of course another of their kind - a sibling - had to go and ruin it...

-

Oh hey, it's Cas! I guess the time ran out on a good transition from Dean, so we go over here on "I'm telling you the truth"

-

Lol it's another Cas... Who ever would have expected it. /Misha being the worst at spoilers

Or something with a very silly voice. "Friendly neighbourhood cosmic entity" that sounds like that and won't show its face is either someone pranking Cas or about to go very bad.

Cas is like "do I look like that" "I'm getting a new coat as soon as I'm alive again"

-

if this thing is The Empty itself it's probably kinda crazy after eons being nothing

-

Oh NO Cas's face when he says "every angel that ever died is here?" because oh boy did you put like 90% of them in here yourself. There's about 3 faces you'd be happy to see again of the entire lot. Hey, it's never too late to give Cas that guilt all over again that made him stay in Purgatory out of penance.

-

I mean among other things but it's probably worth mentioning there are a whole bunch of lil purgatory parallels here in the loosest sense of it being a hostile other realm, and the way Cas is basically Dean in Purgatory in here.

-

Cas has been back for like 5 minutes of screen time and I want to protect him and wrap him in blankets

there's no need to be mean, The Empty, just because you got woken up... I say... at nearly 4am... because I woke up when I didn't want to...

you know what, The Empty's being mean to Cas probably kind of justifiably, even if it's a dick.

-

pretty clever to use a shifter as the motw in this episode too

-

oh, poor Cas is horrified to think Sam and Dean made some sort of deal for him

he says "I don't know" which is ironically what Jack's saying all the time

like father like son

-

LEAVE HIM ALONE

-

last episode we had James keeping memories of Missouri, who he had cut out of his life, in a box. Now Mia has a box still dedicated to "Buddy" her asshole ex who hurt her, and good on her for leaving him. He's another shifter, we're halfway through the episode, so we probably need to find him now, and also have a good 10 minutes more of whatever's going on with Cas. :P

She also owns up to have done much worse things in her past with Buddy, although presumably not killing people, and probably because they were super toxic together, and she had the sense to get out and try and help people now.

-

Jack said "I'll come with" which is adorable. He's learning to be like them :D

-

Wheeeee he's riding shotgun! Guess Dean couldn't make him stay in the back without Sam around.

-

Sam's plan's don't always work out :< Oh no, Dean, you still don't have much faith in Sam's ability to handle himself.

Fortunately this does seem to be a mostly Sam is right season, and I think of all the overwhelming reasons why you don't trust Jack, not trusting Sam to trust Jack is probably relatively low on the list underneath the Cas stuff or you'd have just yelled that at Sam the other day instead.

-

Uh, why do I feel like the shifter just phoned Sam and somewhere between here and there something went really wrong?

-

Oh god I'm going to have to watch the face peeling scene with my own two eyes at 4 in the morning, aren't I?

-

Meanwhile Mia explains why her catharsis works to Sam - I hope he doesn't sneak back at the end of the episode for a chat with "Mary" because that would be AWFUL.

-

Oh it was that other guy - wait, also, Sam was already doing this before Dean phoned? Seems like he doesn't trust Dean's methods either :P

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CAAAAAAAAAS

-

I love how Cas is so practical like, "will you pay me $200 to stop annoying you and go away?"

UHOH guess we're getting right into it. "You don't want to go back" "Sam and Dean need me" You don't want to be needed, you want to be wanted!

Wheeee text on that and also wheee over on the other side of the story last week Dean finally made the i/we distinction about Cas. Now we just need to get them alive and well and actually dealing with crap

-

oh boy I shouldn't have paused there except that i suppose for the sake of meta-ing remotely clearly it was probably a good idea not to watch straight through from that into the empty accusing Cas of having feeeeelings and "I know *what* you hate, I know *who* you love, what you fear." especially since Cas hates being needed but not wanted and uh Dean made the i/we distinction at long last over on the other side of the story so um does Cas fear something related to all that?

I mean to be fair Cas has been through this exact thing before with "he's in love... with humanity" / "all of it for one man" which was an "i/we" distinction of planetary proportions :P Of course he just mutely responded to it there because he was sad Dean was dead, and had no idea Metatron had accused him of being in love in any form, so that was Metatron's private joke to himself.

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The Empty telling Cas there's "nothing for him back there" also makes like next to no sense if you take season 12's family read at surface value and has the bonus of being, I'm pretty sure, a line Elrond tells Arwen in the movie when he's trying to make her leave Aragorn and go across the waters to the undying lands.

-

I know they're just starting with it in a long selection of terrible things that happened to Cas but starting with his grace being stolen really sucks :P

Especially when I am still daily haunted by his season 9 arc.

See above: Metatron and "in love with humanity"

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More miscommunication of the "didn't bother to call you" variety (I hope this doesn't blow up in Sam's face, although of course trying to nurture Jack is slow mo doing that, especially if he and Dean are meant to swap stances on the kid >.>)

The intern pulls Mia aside for a chat.

OH NO Jack wants to see his mom. OH NO OH NO

I will be so upset if that happens...

Oh nooooooo

he's crying.

Who can say no?

This is extremely awful.

I guess Glynn didn't want to let Kelly go like that. I'm glad if Mia was going to do this for anyone it would be for Jack and not Sam and Dean's cycles of nonsense.

I REALLY hope the bad shifter doesn't burst in here and try to/actually kill Mia right now. Jack doesn't need that in his life.

In the mean time, Mia better friggin HUG Jack even if it's technically hollow and he would know it.

Also did she do the whole disgusting skin thing or can she transform on the spot?

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HUGS FOR THE NOUGAT BOY

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They look so much alike :')

Oh no Jack you probably don't feel anything because they made you horribly depressed within 2 days. Also you have angel grace. Historically not good for helping you feel things. You're sweet and cry about your mom and feel bad about stuff in other ways so I think you have a heart no matter what, like Cas does.

Mia gets some catharsis from getting to hug Jack and reassure him that even if he's a monster and what makes him in-human isn't letting him emote how he's supposed to, he can still be good. She's got a monster soul, after all. There's a lot of good monsters out there.

-

I was about to say lol is this now Sam not on the phone because he actually is a shifter now mostly to tease past!Me but then they panned down and Dean's unconscious, which makes sense because they probably still want to show us Dean tearing his own face off at some point and honestly I'd rather just get it over and done with because if it's still to come after this D:

"that was too friggin easy" though - Dean getting overwhelmed in another fight. He's really not had a great rate of success... He only beat the wraith last episode with Patience's warnings, and other than that it's been a terrible track record even if he fights back as hard as he can when he gets jumped

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shifter!Dean2 better not go in and try and kill Jack

-

Not gonna have much luck, I just don't want to watch it :P

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MORE HUGS FOR JACK

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WAIT NO YOU CAN'T HUG HIM AND THEN HAVE HIM KNOCKED OUT IN THE SAME SCENE

I TYPE NOT LOOKING AT THE SCREEN BECAUSE DEAN'S RIPPING HIS FACE OFF

-

Shifters are gross

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Oh no don't call Cas a disappointment, The Empty, we're so proud of him!

-

He just told him to "save yourself" which is probably going to have the direct opposite result to what he wants while I'd hope Cas goes and does exactly that

"I'm already saved" blah blah Cas insults The Empty and I love him, "because somehow I'm awake, and I'll stay awake" - exactly how many times can I use "i love him" as punctuation in one sentence?

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Where is that gif of the woman banging the pots and pans about not getting any sleep so they're not getting any sleep

that's something I ought to have saved :P

Someone almost certainly has made a post already.

-

Cas is the literal embodiment of "fight me"

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This Buddy guy is a total douche. He says in this world everyone uses everyone. Which is a theme of the season I guess - Cas feeling used, Jack feeling used... He's the villain with the most negative version of the theme in his mouth right now

-

Dean's got to pep talk Jack if he wants to save the day or Jack goes and saves the daaay - I'd prefer Jack does it

Look, Mia's getting hurt and she was kind to you and in the most literal use of character mirroring in 1000 miles is an actual stand in for your mom!

-

Ooh is Jack gonna save Sam instead? Dean just pep-talked him specifically about how Sam believed in him which was having to start to admit that Sam, well, believes in Jack. Which Dean couldn't even accept last episode when he was saying that he was just using Jack

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Yay thanks Jack, kinda figured Sam wouldn't get shot :P Jack's powers are fascinating - he's definitely bending time... from Sam and Dean's perspectives last time they were caught in it they were at least sort of aware of things, but Jack pretty much works in bullet time.

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I also like how he kind of had a ridiculous "NooooO" because he's been watching Star Wars. I don't know if there's a "Nooooo" in the Clone Wars but I mean have you met a Star Wars

-

Anyway good riddance douchey ex with extra douchey powers.

-

I love the shot of them all standing together and Jack has that benign :3 face on again. He's really insufferably cute.

-

Ewww the Bunker sink is gross. I assume that's from decades of lying in disrepair and that those are stains Dean could not get out.

-

I guess Jack's getting a glass of water and Dean's midnight snacking. I have no other explanation for this encounter despite the fact it could theoretically happen at literally any point of the clock :P

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Oh gosh, is he going to give Jack a beer

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Yay, actions helped

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Aw, the other beer is for Sam. Guess this doesn't have to be midnight after all. I thought he might have a longer chat with Jack

-

oops is this the beginning of the slide in the other direction? Sam's been undermined and even though he was proven right to Dean's eyes and Dean's had to grudgingly hand Jack the win in the case and admit it to Sam, Sam's like, "I guess"

And they don't know what Jack asked for from Mia because patient confidentiality! Argh!

Oh no Sam don't start wondering if Dean is right.

AAAH they're actually talking about things really well. Dean's like "don't say that" - even if he can't believe it he doesn't want to HURT Sam and rob him of his hope... Sometimes yelling about things does make them get better in the long run once you get it out there >.>

And Dean deputises to Sam for the feelings. And admits how HE has been feeling, because he believes in nothing, because all his faith has been taken away because there was only one thing he ever ended up believing in no i didn't see the next scene transition before i hit pause what are you talking about

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Again, though, if this is Cas back in the mortal plane after annoying his way back to life (worrisome, since he's 2 episodes out of reuniting with them and where's Billie? Oh gosh is Billie back for reals too if he IS back? Whaaaat.) then that's another awfully convenient moment to transition scenes from. Dean finally using "i" instead of "we" about Cas and making it abundantly clear that he and sam didn't feel the same about that, was, whether the direct reason or just narrative karma they chose to bestow on Dean, what made Jack reach out to Cas. Now he admits out loud that he doesn't believe in anything with the implication when you look at Dean vs belief that this is about Cas, and we go over to Cas definitely at least in an improved situation.

Goddammit that's the new coat which means he didn't come back naked but wait! Lizzy's hope wasn't the same as everyone else's at all! Although that was a shallow moment of defeat :P Mwa ha ha, I was hoping Cas would come back and be gifted a whole new Cas get up and lo and behold unless he chose to manifest these clothes onto himself and there's noooo ulterior motive at all going on here (uh... probably not going to get more than 1 per show and we used it up on Mary :P) but he's confused and waking up and the last time we saw him he was in the clothes he died in... So of course if he's being sent back to earth then someone else chose the battle armour he'd be returned in. One Cas, fit for purpose.

Also, realising once he sat up more it was the new coat makes me pretty sure he is back on Earth.

Also he looks happy to be here and I think he can tell :P

Same, Cas. Same.

[elibasila]

2: everything can be transformed into something else

playing a lil dress up, characterizing through costumes or clothes

Background - 

When I was little, around the ages of toddler to 12 I was always into a good ole pretend fashion show with whoever was willing, which was usually my brothers, cousins, childhood friend and some other random kids who’d come over to our house. Any chance there was to play around with clothing in a silly and fun way was immediately taken advantage of, and I loved it. Honestly, I still love it and I wish I could partake in those times again. 

But, I feel if I did the same thing now it would be a lot more judgmental, especially if I did it with adults like myself (even young adults). Kids are usually a lot more experimental and less caring about how it actually looks, they’re a lot less judgmental (with most things) compared to adults/elders/teens. Kids don’t care about the overall composition/aesthetics, or if this goes with that, they just want to do whatever they feel like and have some fun. It feels like it would be too serious now, and people (including myself, which I’ll get to later) make the stakes really high when playing dress up nowadays. Everything in fashion/clothing has to perfect and it has to be clean, gorgeous and make sense, which is really annoying cause I feel that shouldn’t be the primary objective (or the only objective) with fashion at all. 

I’m talking specifically about playing dress up and fashion because I believe it’s important, both for adults and kids, to play with expression. Which to me was something I was discouraged to do as a kid, and even now as an adult. This aspect of how I was raised was really damaging to how I navigated myself before and now, as expression meant something deeper than it had to be. 

Expression was identity to a lot of people I was raised by, and that was subconsciously passed down to me, which has caused me a lot of grief in my life. Just to be clear, expression does not equal identity, they are two separate things (and they don’t even have to relate to one another) and I think people’s obsession with trying to find any correlation between those things hurts both trans and cis people and has consequently created a double standard. What I’ve noticed through my own experience is that trans people’s expression is a lot more scrutinized/enforced than cis people. Cis people have the inherent privilege to be able to express however they want, and still be taken seriously as a man/woman, or even be respected as gender non-conforming (most of the time, and there are exceptions/intersections). However, with trans people therein exists an odd double standard; once you transition/once you're out you should dedicate your effort to look like a man/woman. If you don’t do this you're now either faking your trans identity and/or you’re asking to get misgendered and you shouldn't get mad if people misgender cause you're not dressed like a man/woman. 

On the flip side there’s the issue of toxic masculinity and the hard boundaries of the binary both affecting trans and cis people. People within the binary I think are already pressured to adhere to it, and a good example I can think of is when cis-straight men police themselves and other cis-straight men into enforcing extremely strict, and most of the time arbitrary, ideals/standards. And the ‘consequence’ of not adhering to these rules is the person being perceived and labelled as gay/effeminate (which is inherently both homophobic and misogynistic) and treated as less than ‘a man’. 

With these relationships (between expression and identity, and how they’re used negatively) in mind while moving within this practice as a trans person who expresses ‘differently’ (or who wants to express differently) than how they identify. I want to also question if there is actually a way to express differently, what that would mean especially in relation to an identity (i.e. do they even have to relate at all, does your identity have any impact on how you express, why). How does queerness come into the equation of identity and expression, and how does that relate to trans people specifically? The correlation between sexual identities, gender identities and expression and how they interact with each other, if at all?

Practice - 

Create something resembling a human out of my own clothes, almost close to recreating myself but it’s not me I’m recreating. I want to create an entirely different person or character through clothes and my body. 

Observations Made/Notes - may include photos and/or videos

 I think my initial urge while I was choosing which clothes to put together was trying to figure out a type or arch type (like for example I couldn’t stop thinking of the Spice Girls: Baby Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice, etc), and even though it was helpful for me at the time to help me chose, I wish I was able to input my own free thought into this practice

When faced with the beginning I found it extremely hard to pick and chose as I was so indecisive that I needed to have a baseline for what I wanted to do, i think the above mentioned scenario helped me. 

I was overloaded with options so much so that it took me close to an hour of deciding of what to wear

not too far off from when I’m dressing myself in reality

yeah I definitely could’ve gone heavier on the experimentation

At first I was hoping to wear my binder underneath all this so I could flatten my chest (as thats one area where I feel strong dysphoria) but I just decided not to, and I don’t really know why

I think I didn’t because I was 1, tired 2, convinced myself that having boobs or even the appearance of boobs doesn’t make me a girl, and that I’m still a guy even when I have breasts 3, i think it was one of those apathetic days that I was having 

It did briefly however make me think of my upcoming top surgery again

What was the gender of the person I was creating, did they’re expression relate at all to their ‘personhood’: I decided that all these characters were genderless to me, but still all had extremely distinct expressions/mannerisms

Being a genderless being, being a person, how they would interact with other people and what world they resided in

how were those clothes making me act, did those clothes have an affect on my behavior while wearing them/thinking about them: yeah a little bit

[sarahmariepoet]

Internalized Phobias

I've wrote before about growing up in Baltimore City. I mentioned that I had to be careful with what I had to say. A lot of that has to do with being worried about what others might think of me.

I had to take on learned behaviors based on those around me. For example, as a child and a teenager, I did not naturally look at anyone sexually. After noticing my 'friends' looking at women's breasts, and being teased because I did not, I began to force myself to do so.

Now, this isn't to say I wasn't attracted to other people. I was and am attracted to people of all genders. For me though, it isn't about sexual attraction but rather romantic and spiritual attraction first. Of course, this isn't to say I have not found someone physically attractive but this isn't usually my natural first thought.

Now, in time I did train myself to do such 'male' behaviors as seen in this group of young teenagers that I hung out with as a kid. Now, having come out as myself, I find I need to untrain myself, as it were, of these behaviors that kept me safe and stealth as I pretended to be a guy.

This is a weird way to think of it but a lot of behaviors are learned and it is hard to unlearn those behaviors when you grew up being told to behave in a certain way. For example, I loved giving and receiving hugs but was taught from learned behavior that 'guys don't do that' and despite knowing I was and am a woman I still have moments of trying to unlearn the behaviors that told me not to do that.

This is a very real issue that needs to be addressed though. A lot of these learned behaviors can become toxic if left unchecked. For example and to my utter shame, a previous boss of my mine at a security job I used to work at, said in front of another transgender woman (paraphrasing), "Whatever their sexual organ is determines their gender, they're a guy" and I kept quiet as this fellow person was dehumanized.

I truly wish I would have spoken up and have about similar incidents since then. Unfortunately, I was so deeply in the closet and had this internalized transphobia that kept me from speaking up. I truly wish I would have spoken up but I didn't because of my own shame and my own internalized transphobia.

This internalized hatred, because that's what it is, kept me from growing as a person and speaking out against what I knew was wrong, because I was afraid of being the person that was pointed at and made fun of. I was afraid of being myself because I knew, I knew, things would change and I would be different. I would be the very person that others made fun of.

This was scary because I had seen what hatred did. I had lived it. I didn't want to be made fun of. I didn't want to live in fear. The truth was I already lived in fear. I didn't stand up for my fellow woman that day because I was afraid. I didn't stand up for myself because I was afraid.

I was afraid of being myself because I was afraid of what it would mean. If I was truly myself, what would happen? Would I be accepted? Would I accept myself? Would I be able to live without being made fun of? Would I be attacked? Would I be able to live in peace? Would I be happy? Would I be afraid?

These questions kept me up at night. Depression and anxiety were normal for me. Happiness was not. Happiness was scary. My own fear kept me from growing. My fears kept me from speaking out. My own fears kept me from protecting those who I knew needed protection. Not because they were weak but because I knew what they were feeling because I feel the same.

This is important. I'm not some man pretending to be a woman. I'm a woman who has always been a woman. I feel the same as any other woman, but I am my own person. I am not some weird person who doesn't know who they are. I've always known who I am but due to pressure from those 'friends', my then boss, and others before and since, I was afraid and prevented myself from being myself.

It's not so much odd now that I look back on it, but replacing the image of this 'guy' that everyone else saw with a woman puts things into more perspective. I was overlooked for promotions, while guys who were unqualified and knew much less were promoted over me. I was ignored in crowds and talked over as if I wasn't there.

This isn't to say that I didn't do things I knew were wrong. I 'had' to emulate guy behavior to 'fit in' and be accepted as a 'man'. The funny thing, at least to me, is I never truly did fit in as a guy and I think people around me, in some way, picked up on that -- whether subconsciously or not.

Now that I am out as myself, I can also see how people treat me now compared to before. People either treat me as a human being, or as if I'm made of glass, or they are completely rude. Some of this is suprising and some of it is not.

I've still had people talk about me as if I'm not there. I've still had people treat me rudely and I've still had moments where I have to question why I did something. I've realized that being yourself doesn't automagically [get it?] make everything perfect either. There will be times when you say or do something that makes you question why you said that.

There will also be times when you feel indestructible and on top of the world. The key here is that I've felt better much more and longer now then I ever did in the past. Don't get me wrong, experiencing emotions is much different now that I have begun to allow myself to experience them again -- now that I've truly begun to open myself up and allowed myself to experience them.

I've had moments where I've cried over something so small that it makes no sense that I'm crying over it (and bathroom trips to do just that) but I've also experienced more joy over small things (and not so small things) then I ever truly have. I've allowed myself to grow and learn (and relearn) new behaviors, or rather natural behaviors that I had to hide as a child, (and unlearn previously learned negative behaviors) as I realize I can finally be myself.

I've had to remind myself that it's okay to smile and act silly because I don't have to hide it. I don't have to pretend to be a guy because people already know I'm a woman. I don't have to pretend not to like a dress over pants. I can wear makeup -- and a guy could like these things too -- but I don't have to pretend to not like these things 'to fit in' because of some outdated and stupid view of manliness. Because, despite knowing I was never a man, I still had to train myself to behave as one -- or rather as men were seen when I was growing up.

This toxic masculinity, which is what it was, permeated into my behaviors and made me question myself. These questions affected who I am and how I behaved. This is what lead me to behaving as I did. This is what prevented me from being myself. These learned behaviors are what led me to being suicidal, because I couldn't be myself.

This is why it is so important that we speak up for ourselves and others. I wonder what happened to the other woman I saw that day. I may never know but, if you ever read this, I'm truly sorry I didn't speak up. I should have. For you. For me. For all of us. This is why I can't be afraid anymore. I need to speak up so our voices are no longer silenced.

The sad truth is that transgender people are at a higher risk of suicide and murder. We are often hunted for being different. This makes it hard for us to not be afraid of being ourselves and living our lives. People have asked why so many of us seem to be 'more common' now but I don't think there are more transgender people now, I think it's that we aren't 'going stealth' (that is to seem cisgender for protection or otherwise) as much and a lot of us are choosing to have our voices heard.

Going stealth isn't wrong though. Many transgender people have perfectly valid reasons to do so. My choice of openly coming out has many risks. There are negatives to this. I have to fear going out or even using the bathroom. I am sure anyone reading this has heard of transgender people, usually transgender women (that is people assigned male at birth -- AMAB) being attacked or killed for simply using the bathroom.

Many people fear that which they don't understand. Part of this is accusing people who are different then them of crimes or perceived crimes. Many states and places around the world don't recognize transgender people as even being people. There are some places I can't go to without being dehumanized, treated as a criminal, or even murdered. When you take a plane, for example, the person at that counter presses a button based on what gender they think you are and that lights up certain areas for heat detection. If they guess wrong, you're pulled aside and questioned.

These are all things I may experience one day and things that other transgender people have experienced. Relatively speaking, I'm still rather young in my transition and still experiencing new things every day. Wearing a seat belt now, for example, was an adjustment. How do I position it, etc. Wearing a dress was different but I like it. Wearing fingernail polish was nervewracking but I did it. Coming out was nervewracking but I did it. Telling my boss was really nervewracking but I did it.

Going out being myself is nervewracking too but not as much as it was to live a lie. This is what makes this so important. As kids we are told not to lie, but then when those of us who are LGBTQIA+ admit who we are we are often told to keep quiet and tell no one. To lie. To lie about who we are and to tell no one -- otherwise we may embarrass or upset others.

This leads to the internalized hatred, the internalized phobia, and in my case the internalized transphobia that can lead to depression, anxiety, self destructive behaviors, and eventual suicide that we see in so many of our community. This is why it is important we bring up that this isn't some trend. We aren't pretending and we aren't going away.

The inconvenient truth is that we are human and we deserve the same love, respect, and rights as anyone else. We do not deserve to be treated different simply based off of who we are. We certainly don't deserve to be told we should hate ourselves, whether by words, learned behaviors, or actions.