#both are familiar with the exhaustion of being seen as beast first man tertiary Maybe

[nachtsoklein]

sigh once again thinking about the line kurt treads between man & animal, human & creature.....

because in his lowest lows & most heightened emotional states he does gravitate toward more base & primal behaviors, baring teeth & hiss-snarling when pissed, howling in anguish, hell even letting out something approaching a purr when at his most content & sated. he has a natural tendency to moving in a way that can only be described as cat-like or monkey-like, from constant perching to climbing anything & everything to using his tail as a third hand without thought, all of it owing as much to his background as an acrobat as his natural anatomy (the latter lending to the former).

thinking about how kurt studied human-passing behaviors & tried to implement them in his attempts at fitting in for over two decades, how even once amid company of xmen he still felt a need to reaffirm his humanness in spite of his undisguisable mutantness (undisguisable bar with the use of an image inducer), especially as the only one that did have to go the extra effort to appearing "normal" even among the fellow "not normal". referring to himself as a demon with some bitter irony, wanting nothing more than to just ... be seen as a person foremost, devilish appearance second or even third. proud of the way he naturally moves as it's so tightly knit with his experiences as an acrobat & trapeze artist that it never occurs to think of it as anything other than a byproduct of his professional upbringing, yet often embarrassed or even ashamed of his most natural emotion-related responses, as those are more easily compared to an animal's or a demon's, & he'd be gutted to think even his closest friends compared him to such in their mind.

over the years he's gained significant amounts of confidence & comfort in his appearance & behavior, comfortable enough to play into his creature-ness when among friends to a level he was rarely even comfortable back with the circus, emotions no longer spiking at non-human comparisons, even if annoyance or discomfort have still been there. in light of margali's curse & orchis' utilization of him, a lot of kurt's progress in confidence & assurance got torn to shreds so it's touch-&-go now, but definitely less so than when he first came to the states ; he's just more likely to snap about a poorly timed monster/demon/devil crack than before the curse.