#i think she's just fully logged off hence the get it off my desk line which i was like okay yeah

[whiskeyswifty]

I've always found the whole "queer people should listen to queer artists" conversation bizarre, especially when it comes to Taylor, because I'm sure she herself would be flattered to learn that queer people are finding some sort of comfort/solace in their interpretations of her music – especially considering how loud she's been about her allyship in the last few years. The only real problem she would have (if we can even call it that) is if people were using that to make speculations about her personal life – which she doesn't like even when people do that with the MEN in her life.

The biggest popstar in the world advocating for and welcoming gaypeople with open arms is always going to be a big deal, no matter how much people try to underplay that and make it an exclusively het space. People have to accept that other gay people can like things that YOU, personally, think is boring or too cishet or whatever the fuck. Being gay is not a monolith, and gay experiences, just like every other human experience, are diverse! Who benefits from this kind of holier than thou snobbery anyway? (Feel free to ignore this lmao, I've just always found that kind of sneering and discourse annoying and lowkey homophobic, like "oh there is one right way to be gay and you're not it bc you like XYZ!!!" Fuck off. Anything can be about eating pussy if you try hard enough lmao)

i don't think you have to wonder about how she feels about gay people finding a connection in her music. she's been inviting countless queer people, including gay couples, to secret sessions and meet and greets on her tours for years. she performed king of my heart at a gay couple's engagement party as a surprise. she performed shake it off at stonewall. she has two male dancers dance to lover on this very tour. she clearly doesn't care if gay people relate her music to their life or find gay themes in it that they interpret their own way to their own experiences, at the very least. she's always been welcoming and encouraging of gay people to be a part of her fandom and relate to her art. the idea that taylor only wants people interpreting her music through the paparazzi photos the public has seen of her boyfriends or whatever is just homophobic bullshit for no reason other than their own bigotry and desire to keep gay people away from them. (long answer again trying not to clog people's dash lol)

insofar as the speculation about her life, idk what to tell you. people are always going to gossip and speculate, they've been doing it as long as human beings had language. a long time ago now it seems, she seemed to have accepted she would always have little control over it, and she logged off pretty much for good. which seems the healthiest way for her to carry on. the lavhaze bridge refers to that and how she just no longer really engages in media coverage of herself or social media gossip about herself. the prologue just recounts how pre-1989, particularly post-red, she discovered the darker sides of that gossip she doesn't like. her feelings about that gossip still remain true i'm sure, but you're discounting what immediately follows that section in the prologue, which says "But none of that mattered then because I had a plan and I had a demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies. I had the keys to my own apartment in New York and I had new melodies bursting from my imagination. I had Max Martin and Shellback who were happy to help me explore this new sonic landscape I was enamored with. I had a new friend named Jack Antonoff who had made some cool tracks in his apartment. I had the idea that the album would be called 1989 and we would reference big 80s synths and write sky high choruses. I had sublime, inexplicable faith and I ran right toward it, in high heels and a crop top." Which, if that's not clear to anyone out there, is her saying she learned through making 1989 to ignore the gossip and that all that mattered was her music and pursuing new sounds and creative experiences. she basically is saying "yeah it sucked to be called a serial dater, but 1989 helped me learn to refocus energy away from trying to control it and towards my creative output and creative relationships." which is something she has done several times when faced with struggles with the public, and will do again post 1989 into reputation.

that's a lesson everyone must learn in life at some point. you can't control what people say or what they think about you. but also it's not a crime to gossip, nor do most people who gossip mean any harm. people on this website even haven't ceased to gossip about her and speculate about things as intimate as her and joe's sex life while they were dating, pregnancy and abortions she may or may not have had, etc etc. even currently the fanfiction swirling around her and football man is incessant (some of it literal, blatant fanfiction being published shamelessly as books which makes me so embarrassed for them). it's just something people do to pass the time because life can be monotonous and dreadful, and i don't think it makes anyone a bad person for doing it. she's a public figure, and insists on being one and seems to enjoy many aspects of it, so it's just part of the territory she has reconciled with. people will project things onto her that they want to see mainly because they seek to recognize themselves in others in search of validation, but also every now and then because they want a villain to hate. most gossip will be benign ultimately, especially if it's not true, and some will be painful, especially if it is true, but like taylor does these days, if you don't like it, just ignore it.

[1989dreamer]

Chapter 21 of Looking for a Place to Call Home

Still not editing before posting.

Still on AO3.

Thanks for reading

                                                                                                                    ~ * ~

Derek wakes up screaming.

He’d been dreaming that he was back in New York and that she—that Kate—had been torturing him again.

He can still feel the glide of her knife as it skimmed him, the skin peeling back, exposing his twitching muscles.

Without realizing it, Derek shifts into his delta form, scrambling off the bed and under it. He whines high in his throat, more human than wolf.

The lights come on almost immediately, and Laura and Cora crawl under the bed with him while Isaac tries to explain what happened to Boyd and Erica.

With his sisters by his side, Derek shifts back. “Just a nightmare,” he tells them.

Erica sits next to him and pats his back. “That’s okay. You’re okay. We won’t let anyone hurt you anymore.”

Boyd nods his head in agreement, and Derek wonders at the contentment he smells on him.

“You’re safe here,” Erica continues. “Do you want to talk about your nightmare?”

Derek looks at his sisters. “No. Not really.”

“That’s okay too.” Erica lets Derek burrow against her side, seeking comfort. He’s glad that she’s staying behind with him and Cora while Laura, Boyd, and John go to New York.

He is also grateful for the small mercy that he isn’t going with them. He isn’t sure that he would be of any help to them. He wasn’t kept in the same compound. The hunters he ran away from are not the same ones that abused his sisters.

Erica is a solid weight beside him, her arm around his shoulder, the chemical smell of her medication as comforting as her warmth. Secretly he hopes that she and Boyd decide to keep them, even if Laura is technically old enough to be his and Cora’s guardian.

He wants the stability that will come from living in a house, from having actual meals, and if Erica has her way, school. Derek wants all those things, but above all, he wants Laura to find her daughter. He wants to put their damaged pack together, like a puzzle with missing pieces. They’ll be stronger together. Even with Peter—if Peter can escape the murder charges.

“Think you can go back to sleep now?” Erica asks. Derek realizes that everyone else has gone back to bed now. Even Isaac is tucked in, his blanket pulled over his head.

Even though he doesn’t quite feel ready, Derek nods. Erica kisses his forehead.

“I’ll check on you in a bit,” she promises. “Do you want me to leave the door open?”

There is a nightlight in the hallway. She’s offering him a source of light so that he can still see. Except she’s forgot that he is a werewolf and doesn’t need the nightlight.

He nods anyway.

Isaac is already blocking the light from the overhead. He won’t mind the nightlight.

Derek watches as Erica switches off the room’s light and leaves the door wide open as she heads back to her room. Then, he climbs off the bed and pads across the hall to his sisters’ room. Laura lifts the blanket and he crawls between them.

In the three years that Kate had him, there was nothing Derek missed as much as his family. He’s glad that he still has his sisters. And if Peter gets away with the murder he’s committed, then he’ll have Peter too.

                                                                                                                    ~ * ~

Ramirez slams her head down on the table, the third time in an hour. Kincaid startles awake from where he was leaning against the wall.

“Sorry,” she apologizes. Kincaid grunts, moving to sit next to her.

Stiles spares them a brief glance before turning back to his work.

The list they’ve been studying isn’t long—only about seventy names—but they’ve been researching each one, trying to match faces with names. So far, they’ve made it through about fifty-five names and all they have is a tree of the deceased, all Hales in some way, and a few of the arson investigators. Most of the paperwork has been signed off by either Stiles’ dad, early in the investigation, or Sheriff Lahey.

The difference is marked.

Where his dad made little tick marks and initialed on every line, Lahey only signed at the bottom of the reports.

“Deputy Stilinski, sir,” Ramirez says, and Stiles lifts his tired eyes to her. “Look at this.”

She thrusts a stack of papers under his nose. Kincaid snores gently, leaning on Ramirez, while Stiles flicks through the papers.

“This is an insurance investigation.” He checks it against the arson investigative report and then checks the signatures on both. The arson investigation has been signed by the fire chief and his dad while the insurance investigation has been signed by Lahey and a new name, Garrison Myers. “Is Myers listed anywhere else?”

Ramirez points at to his name on the manifest. Number seventy himself. “It looks like he joined late.”

Stiles finds Myers’ card tucked away in a box of evidence. “He’s an insurance fraud investigator.” There’s only a number and a slogan on the card. Stiles makes a note to call the number in the morning. For now, he knows they need to call it a night and pack it up.

“Up to driving home?” he asks Ramirez. Kincaid is definitely down for the count, slumbering still. She shakes her head. “Neither am I. We can bunk here for the night and resume the search tomorrow.”

And tomorrow, he fully plans on meeting with the Hale children to see what they know.

Stiles puts the evidence back in its boxes and shoves them onto the shelves while Ramirez gently wakes up Kincaid. They head for the bunk room, and Stiles locks the evidence room behind them.

The bunk room is barely used, many of the deputies preferring to head home after their shifts, so it’s a little musty, but Stiles doesn’t care. He crawls onto the top bunk, Kincaid face-plants on the lower one, and Ramirez flops on the only cot.

Stiles is so tired that he hopes to drift off quickly, but his mind keeps buzzing, zipping from thought to thought in a way he hasn’t had to deal with since college.

Great. Looks like no sleep. He rolls onto his side and tries, unsuccessfully, to organize his thoughts.

Myers was investigating the fire for potential insurance fraud, which makes sense since the arson investigators determined the cause to be unnatural. But, the house was supposedly abandoned, so who would be collecting insurance on it? And how did they link the burned house with the murdered Hales? Why did they think Derek, long thought to be the only survivor, had set the fire and-slash-or murdered his family?

Before his untimely passing, Lahey had implied that he had evidence that Derek was involved. Why? Was he trying to cover something up? Is that why he’d brought in Myers to look into it?

Hopefully Myers will be able to shed some light when Stiles talks to him tomorrow.

And they still need to locate Deaton.

Stiles isn’t holding his breath that the former veterinarian is still alive. Peter Hale is an efficient killer. He’s already proved it three times. What’s a fourth?

When sleep won’t come even after breathing deeply and clearing his mind, Stiles climbs down and heads to his desk. He might as well research Garrison Myers and see if he’s investigated any other cases in Beacon County.

The night shift desk officer, Myrna Walsh, a deputy even greener than Kincaid, nods at him when he drops into his seat and he nods back at her. When his computer is fully booted, he enters Myers’ name and phone number into the Sheriff Department’s search log.

Six cases come back. Four closed and two on-going. The house out in the preserve is closed with a verdict of arson. Guess when the cops find the bodies of ten people with obvious non-fire related wounds, there’s no way to call it an accident, and Myers agreed by closing the insurance fraud investigation in favor of the insurance company not paying out.

There’s a photo attached to the Hale file, and Stiles downloads it, tapping his fingers as he feels an energy spike cresting in his veins.

He opens it and freezes. It’s Lahey in his Sheriff’s uniform, talking to a man. Stiles zooms in on the other man’s face.

It’s definitely his John Doe.

And if the picture is correct, then his dead John Doe is Garrison Myers.

It’s… Stiles doesn’t actually know how to feel about it because on one hand, now he knows who Peter Hale killed, but on the other, more pressing hand, valuable information regarding the Hale murders likely died with Myers.

Stiles saves the picture, labeling the people in it for Ramirez and Kincaid to look at tomorrow. They’ll have to looking into Garrison Myers and if he’s been reported missing yet.

He scrubs at his face, tugging at his hair. “Crap.” He can’t tell if the investigation is going well or not anymore.

It doesn’t feel like it is. It actually feels like Stiles is playing with half of a deck of cards that keeps exploding every time he thinks he makes progress.

“Fuck this,” he decides out loud, muttering angrily to himself. He needs sleep desperately.

Myrna waves him over as he stumbles back to the bunkroom. “Deputy Stilinski?”

“Yeah, Myrna?”

“This came for you today.” She hands him a thick envelope encased in an evidence bag. It doesn’t have a return address, and the flap is already neatly slit.

“Been examined?” He can see where it was dusted for fingerprints. He’s not holding his breath for evidence. It’s been that kind of case.

“Yeah. Nothing useful.”

“Contents?”

“Coded letter. For your eyes only, but I’m sure whoever sent it realized that more than you would see it.”

Hence the code. “Obviously.” Stiles weighs the envelope, the kind important ‘do not bend’ documents are sent in. He shakes his head, heading for the evidence room. He puts on a pair of gloves, grabs some evidence bags, and sits down at the table, spreading out the contents of the envelope.

There are seven pages, written back and front in code, all sealed in Beacon County Sheriff’s Evidence bags and initialed by Detective Benjamin Votsky, the only California state detective who lived in Beacon Hills and operated out of the Sheriff’s Department.

There is also a bagged single sheet of notebook paper with his name on it. Stiles picks it up first.

Deputy Stilinski, it reads, I am writing to you to confess my perceived involvement in a homicide. I want to make it perfectly clear that I knew nothing of what was going to happen nor how my knowledge would be applied to this heinous crime.

It has only recently come to my attention that someone I spoke with nearly five years ago used my answers to her simply fascinating questions in order to perform that most horrible task.

I am not stupid, Deputy. I know I will likely be charged with accessory to murder even though the things we talked about were purely hypothetical—until she went and proved my hypothesis into a theory. Therefore, I have opted to 1) encode the information I am revealing and 2) not reveal myself until I can be guaranteed that I will not be charged with any crimes. The key to the code is simple, Deputy. It’s Mischief in its true form.

Stiles sets aside the page. He has a feeling he knows this person if “Mischief in its true form” is the key. Stiles assumes that the anonymous letter-sender means that the key is actually his birth name.

He finds a piece of paper and writes down in block letters his full birth name, shoving it into an evidence bag and sealing it, scribbling his initials on the seal. He then carefully puts all the pages back into the envelope in its evidence bag and carries it all back to the front desk.

He hands it to Myrna, along with the paper with his name. “Give that to Detective Votsky. That word,” Stiles points at his name, “is the key. Tell him to find me when he’s done.”

Votsky used to be a deputy under Stiles’ dad’s terms as sheriff. He’d made detective right before the shake up, so he’d managed to skirt the firing. He also has a specialty in codes, which is probably why he was given the evidence first.

“Will do. Hey, Stiles?”

Stiles pauses. “Yeah?”

Myrna looks at him kindly. “Get some rest. The case won’t get solved any faster if you’re not able to see something because you’re too tired.”

“Sure,” Stiles says. What else is he supposed to say? He knows he needs sleep. He’s just having trouble shutting off his brain. “Thanks.”

He walks away before Myrna can give him any more futile advice. He knows she means well, but there’s a reason she’s on the front desk now instead of Kincaid.

He climbs back into his chosen bed in the bunkroom, cramming his head under his pillow to block out the snores of Ramirez and Kincaid. Surprisingly, he manages to fall asleep in minutes.

                                                                                                                     ~ * ~

MP, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21