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zmediaoutlet · 2 years ago

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One line any fic! Rules: pick ten of your fics, scroll to somewhere midpoint, pick a line chunk and share it, and then tag ten (-ish) people.

Got tagged, am bored, should remember how I used to write, let's try it, why not -- picking 10 somewhat at random from each page on ao3:

the apprentice year (sam/dean, 3k, rated m)

Are you dead. The sentence forms under Sam's tongue and he swallows it. If Dean doesn't know then asking won't help, and if he is then Sam's sunk the same way he's been for the last month. Are you real is the next question, but then if he's not real then that means Sam's crazy, and Sam knows from crazy and, really, if he is, this is the best crazy he could hope for.

Dean's looking at him, not smiling at all, now. I miss you, Dean says, unexpectedly. He flickers—like he did before, a projection cutting out—but he's shaking his head hard when he resolidifies. Shit. I don't—I don't know what that is. I don't get it. You're right here and I'm missing you. How does that work?

2. buccaneer (dean/crowley, 3k, rated e)

Deanna wakes up slowly, in the early evening. Crowley's sitting at the side of the bed, waiting for her. "Mm," is the noise she makes, and he raises his eyebrows, indulgent and curious. "We should have fun, tonight."

"What sort of fun?" he says. He slips his hand over her belly, where it's slightly soft. Too many years of burgers.

"I want—" she starts, and hums, thinking. "Music. Beer."

"Done," he says, and she grins at him, and then snakes a dangerously strong hand around his wrist, squeezes. He looks down at that, and back up at her face, and says, dry, "Unless you'd like something else, first."

3. have a cigar (sam/dean, 5k, rated e)

Dean rubs a hand up his stomach, smearing his own jizz over his belly and undershirt. His amulet's swung around on his neck, laying against the pillow. "Dude, that was sick," he says, but in a way that's weirdly admiring. Sam licks his lips, the remaining afterglow twisting in his belly. Dean lets his heels slip down the bed, his legs splayed around Sam, and he's red-faced still, but maybe that's just because they're both so—out there. Exposed. Even so, Dean touches his knee against Sam's hip, the corner of his mouth turned up. "Seriously. You're like a freight train when you get going, you know that?"

4. Campaign Events (jared/jensen, 8k, rated e)

Takes a minute for him to realize that as he's watching, he's being watched. He blinks, resurfaces, and Jensen's just—there. Right there, fully present inside the car, with his eyes on Jared's in the half-dark. His lips part, like he's going to say something, but he doesn't. The backseat isn't huge; Jared can feel the heat of him, an inch of space between their knees, both of them spreading out. Jensen's hand lifts off his thigh—white flash of it in the dark—and it hangs for a moment that has Jared's lungs frozen before it curls into a fist, and then Jensen lifts it to his own face, drags over his eyes, scrubs his cheek where the stubble's started to grow in, thick with the end of the day. Jared turns his head, stares sightless at the blurred hills, the tree-shapes and fences picked darker out of the dark, presses his fingertips to his mouth. What is he doing.

5. a long hard day, a long hard night (sam/dean, 38k, rated e)

"You know," Sam says, and clears his throat. He slides the beer aside and takes the mug. Sharp boozy smell—this isn't fine spirits. Just as well, not like he'd be able to taste it. He runs his thumb around the lipstick-red pattern on the rim. "I used to think we'd end up doing something normal? I wasn't even thinking about school, or—or marriage, or anything like that. Like somehow we could… step back, a little. Get a house, maybe straight jobs. Still go hunting, when someone needed us. Just, maybe one day we wouldn't have to deal with all the crazy." He shakes his head. Dean's watching him over the rim of his mug, his eyes steady. "Somehow something always comes along."

He takes a swallow. No flavor, of course not, but the heat of it's still sharp, alcohol flowing straight down to his gut. He licks his lips and it stings, just a little, where he's been chewing them.

"Well, we got a house," Dean says. He looks around at the kitchen, bright and familiar, and then slides his eyes back to Sam's. "And I can deal with crazy."

6. incursion (abaddon/dean, 3k, rated e)

The daze of inquisition rings hollow through his soul and he isn't fighting, isn't clawing back, but there's—something. Knowledge, somewhere deep. He thinks she's not going to win. She cocks their head, shuffles back to sit on the bed, the iron springs creaking under his weight, and pushes their fingers back into mess where the tattoo was, digging in harder to the slippery wet between skin and muscle. It makes the body quiver, trying frantically to get away from itself, and she holds it trammeled in place and curves all of it into him and sinks down and sees, now: the frantic pulsing scramble to save Sam, it didn't matter how—and before, grey woods full of fear and the joy of hunting through them, of winning, cleaving through like a knife—and before, Lucifer smiling with Sam's face like every nightmare he's ever had and swallowing, pushing down the revulsion and saying, Sammy—and before, and before, and she sinks down and down and down through this life, searching, spreading him apart on the rack of himself, until she finds it.

7. a stranger (sam/dean, 2k, rated m)

Behind his eyes the woods are grey and dangerous, familiar, and he looks instead at the lush green outside the window. Humid, here. The sun’s bright. The truck’s cab is cool with the steady hiss of A/C, not the constant absence of any kind of real life. It’s eleven hours to where Benny said his bones are planted, assuming Dean can catch a ride relatively soon once he escapes from Donald. Assuming he doesn’t have to mug anyone, or hustle someone. He doesn’t know if he can, if it comes to it. He feels like he might bite a guy’s dick off, cut his throat, before he’d earn a ride, and then what.

8. to make the sun stand still (sam/dean, s/d/benny, 11k, rated e)

That first time. After Purgatory, Sam had programmed his own number into Benny's phone, had handed it back to him in full view of Dean, said call anytime. He owed Benny more than he could say, and he'd carried his soul in his own body, poured him free of Purgatory and brought him to life same as Dean had. Hadn't been too much longer before they got the call, Benny needing help—not blood, not a rescue from another hunter. Just—contact. Someone to talk to. They'd piled into the car and driven out into the deep hills of Kentucky, Sam trying to hide how he kept trembling and trying not to puke in the passenger seat, Dean trying to pretend like he didn't notice, and met him at the lone motel on the outskirts of Hazard. Sam had watched Dean and Benny hug, like the best of friends—but Dean immediately stepped back and put his shoulder right next to Sam's, helping to hold him upright so he could shake Benny's hand without keeling over. Benny's eyes had gone sharp, looking Sam over, and Sam remembers so clearly the concerned look that he shot to Dean—concern for him, for them both. The old useless jealousy slithered away, then. They got a motel, and while Benny was in the shower washing off the dirt of living on the road Sam pulled Dean close and kissed him, hard, hoping Dean couldn't taste the old blood at the back of his tongue—wondering if Benny could smell it—and when he'd released Dean, gasping, he'd said if you want—if you still— and Dean had blinked up at him in shock and denied it, but Sam knew his brother, knew when he was denying himself something to spare Sam feelings. He'd said it won't change anything, will it? and Dean had said no, Sammy, but—and Sam had shrugged, even if he was still uneasy, said, Zeppelin's all you need, but sometimes you want a little Styx too, right? and Dean had stood there with his mouth open, his throat and cheeks flushing dark, and finally he'd said I'm telling Benny you just compared him to Styx, but his hand was tight in Sam's, and that's how Sam knew it was okay.

9. event horizon (mary & her sons, 4k, gen)

She’s sitting at the war table. The map of the world is lit from within. There are so many places, she thinks. Places she’ll never go. John has been to a lot more, but he doesn’t like to talk about that. She doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t like to talk about the stink when a body gets burned, the way it makes her hungry and repulsed at the same time. She doesn’t talk about the way her dad’s mouth tasted. He thinks she’s overreacting whenever they get a rotten egg and she throws up in the sink. For a while, she could blame it on morning sickness.

10. In the Bleak Midwinter (sam&dean, 2k, rated t)

Sam's about to retort, but stops, lips barely parted over a shaky breath. Dean's eyes are glazed, but now they look wet, not just—

"So I'd be dead, I mean, that's okay," Dean continues, tongue still shaping the words slurry and stumbling, but he just keeps going. "And you'd—you'd go on, maybe living in the bunker, with—with Kevin, and Cas could've stayed, wouldn't have made him run away. You guys woulda been fine."

He finally stops, looks down at the bottle of rum. It's a few seconds of quiet, and Sam forces himself to look away, blinks hard at the snowed-out road outside. It's so Dean, so goddamn Dean all over, talking about him dying like it'd be easier, like everyone would be better off if he just weren't—and Sam would be pissed at the same old self-sacrificing bullshit, he'd be giving in to the very real desire he's currently feeling to punch him in his idiot face, but. He's too drunk to be trying manipulation. This is honesty. He closes his eyes and flashes right back to that warm hallway, that ridiculous house, Dean wanting him old and bald, smiling a little when he talks about a picture without him in it.

and just for fun bc this is a tumblr game without scorekeepers, going to do a #11 bc I've got 11 pages of fics and this is the first one I ever posted on AO3:

11. Indeterminacy (thor/loki, loki/various, 8k, rated m)

After the explosion comes a hail of tiny frozen shards, which when examined are revealed to be fragments of smooth, gray stone. The empty plinth at the top of the tower stands empty and though the Allfather turns his face away Thor waits atop it for a long, long time, because it was in this place that his brother never was, where Thor never looked in through the window, where he never saw his brother’s face bleed of all color until he was white and black and a faint rime of frost, and though Thor wanted to he never tried to get in, because he was assured that only a crack in the universe itself would break Loki from this prison. At last, one evening as he stands on the plinth it begins to snow, and he turns away, because if he knows anything about his little brother it is that a minor thing like altering the structure of the cosmos could never stop him.

Well that was kinda fun. Now I should tag people, so I'm tagging people, and in the way this was a blast from the past let's do that with the tagging too, why not -- @hellhoundsprey, @silver9mm, @themegalosaurus, @winchestersinthedrift, @whiskeycherrypie, @alulaspeaks, @stillwaterseas, @wetsammywinchester, @lizblogging

#writing meme #this is so long lol #but it was interesting to go back #11 years on ao3 #my style has definitely changed

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trans-axolotl · 2 months ago

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my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

#personal #actuallyintersex #intersex #actually intersex #transmisogyny tw #this post is not going to be rebloggable for now but if any intersex mutuals want to reblog it i might turn reblogs on #this just feels like an intersex conversation in a way i would prefer not to do with an audience of spectators.#also a tangent: i do understand that agab is not a body descriptor. i think that agabs are a form of curative violence perpetuated onto us #this is something i've been consistent about expressing for years. if you go back to old posts you'll see that there's many times i've said #over the years that agab is messy. that i know people who were assigned one gender at birth and another gender as a toddler #who identify as cis and trans and a million other things. i understand that and im not interested in denying their existence #so. don't take this as a universal statement from me about every single instance of “amab transman” or “afab transfem.” but rather in the #context of the current dynamic i'm seeing on tumblr of widespread transmisogynistic harassment #that i think much of the way people are talking about this is exploitative and harmful #also i've made many posts before talking about how like. many things would change and become intelligble in a less compulsorly dyadic world #but we aren't there yet. and so there are many terms that are still meaningful and relevant for us right now #and as always: i am one intersex person with one perspective i like to hear from other intersex people including intersex people #who think differently from me

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